Lord Bell, possibly the most well known public relations practitioner in the UK, weighed into the debate over the ethics of country branding in a very short interview in PR week on August 13th (see our views on country branding at the end of this posting).
It is his view on the wider moral question of the right to representation of anyone, no matter what their status in life, (or indeed of any organisation) that is of most interest here.
He repeated a view that he has consistently held over many decades and which represents a particularly conservative and English establishment approach to ethics in general.
In effect, Lord Bell takes a position that might be said to compare the higher level of PR with the advocate in law – just as the barrister represents his case, even for the most vile of criminal, on the basis that every defendant has the right to a representation of his case in an adversarial system so any individual, country or corporation has the right to make their case in the court of public opinion.
The Lord Bell is consistent but he has judgement – there are lines he will not cross because he ‘knows which side his bread is buttered’ within the British commercial and political establishment. A more radical advocate, such as the controversial Jacques Verges, might well be prepared to go over that line and represent terrorists, war criminals, holocaust deniers and heads of state who have been accused of crimes against their own people.
Does Lord Bell’s position give ‘carte blanche’ for Verges? Of course it does because ‘free speech is the one absolute view [he has]‘, according to the interview headline.
For Lord Bell, morality is an individual matter. This is the idea that a man must sleep at night and that there are only so many meals he can eat so doing bad things is something for him to decide upon himself in the context of his own peace of mind and level of greed.
It presupposes either a very strong belief in judgement in the next world (or karma) or an existentialist or virtuous pagan code of conduct unknowable to all but the individual concerned. It is definitely not going to be the default position of the socialist or social liberal or indeed the Christian who does not have a strong sense of fire and brimstone.
Implicitly, Lord Bell suggests that a conscience clause in PR is perfectly reasonable and one of our Directors indeed negotiated such a clause in relation to certain matters in a previous life with no difficulty – moral people often lack courage to ask at the job interview for something surprisingly easy to grant …
But the corollary to this moral individualism is that the corporation, which has its prime duty in law to shareholders and must work within the law of the land, has no intrinsic morality because it can have no moral status in itself.
If society does not want rapacious East India Companies, then it must either boycott such companies in their capacity as individuals or expect the State to impose a shared and equal public morality on corporations through some statutory obligation.
We are about to see such an obligation in the 2010 Bribery Act which will force hundreds of executives into a moral stance that previously depended solely on the personal moral position of individuals and on the judgement of Boards legislating for their own practice.
Lord Bell’s view is a difficult one for many activists and liberals to understand. The imbalance of power between states, corporations and wealthy men on the one hand and the atomised nature of the individuals subject to their power means that weight of capital can buy the likes of Lord Bell and their exceptional access to editors and politicians. Bell can help ’crush’ the complaints and objections in the street – whether by charm or through injunction.
Activist liberals will also have an absolute view of morality that goes beyond free speech and rights of representation. Across Europe, the opinions of holocaust deniers are suppressed by liberals (albeit through the law of the lands concerned) because they are deemed ‘beyond the pale’ while some progressives find no difficulty in manipulating the truth and seeking to exclude uncomfortable and dissenting opinions if they do not accord with their campaign objectives.
Whatever you may think of the BNP (we dislike what they represent intensely), there was a concerted and probably unnecessary and occasionally violent attempt to suppress their ability to communicate on absolute moral grounds that conflict with Lord Bell’s equally absolute moral commitment to free speech.
There is merit in both sides of the argument here. Lord Bell is right that everyone has an equal right to free speech and that debate expressed through capable advocates is going to come up with much better solutions to the resolution of difficult issues than the sclerotic command culture of any ideology.
The progressive critics are right that, though this be true, the individual with few resources does not have the access to skills and power that the person with significant resources can have (our country branding posts – see below – look at this from a sovereign perspective). Imbalances of power in being represented are a moral issue if you accept, as Lord Bell appears to do, that all persons have certain equal rights to free speech.
Unfortunately for the progressives, their argument has been vitiated somewhat by the rise of the NGO and campaigning group that does not respect the truth and which uses propaganda in preference to public relations.
Self-appointed representatives of the ‘victim’ have filled the gap in power but where Lord Bell represents for a fee on a capitalist basis, the NGO represents the ‘victim’ on an ideological basis in which the ‘victim’, in fact, has very little say in how the argument is conducted or whether his actual interest is being considered.
Whether the proponents on both sides are taken up by the Democrat Left or Republican Right, the New Labour Left or the High Tory Right, many of the apparently private reputational battles that we see now are little more than extensions of politics by other means.
The actual individual wealthy person and the actual weak victim of power are increasingly becoming caught up in political struggles where injustices are perpetrated against the former and the latter are used as pawns in games designed to change policy in faraway countries.
It has become a sport for the endocrine systems of particular personality types in which reason and truth (such as it is) have been thrown to the four winds.
In seeking to ‘do justice’ to the masses based on absolute values that go beyond the liberal as an ideological commitment, NGOs and activists can themselves become perpetrators of grave injustices in regard to the personal reputation of the wealthy and the powerful.
The habit of manipulation and lying (even fraud in the presentation of data) can degrade the underlying message of such activists – that imbalances of wealth and lack of consultation, democracy, scrutiny and transparency require major change.
A few over-eager activists and campaigners who lack the judgement of the type of their ‘enemy’ (Lord Bell) are undermining the general cause of political reform and transformation through their impatience and their determination to assert that their absolute moral standards and ideology trump all other liberal considerations.
Such considerations include the right of a man to personal privacy (where public interest is not involved) and to a true representation of themselves and of their dealings no matter how wealthy or powerful they may be.
In other words, a wealthy man is not necessarily evil because he is wealthy and it is an injustice to treat him in that way.
This Blog posting on the ethics of PR representation follows two others elsewhere that are more concerned with the debate over country branding.
The first, in the East African Ratio Magazine, argues that country branding is of little value unless it is professionally managed administratively by the political staffs that commission it.
The second looked at the broader issue of developing country administrative capability and draws the conclusion that combining sovereignties in regional groupings to build administrative experience and muscle is probably the only alternative to colonial dependency or internal one party rule.
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