Manufacturing Concern
nick cowen, 2 May 2007
Last week, Alcohol Concern, ‘the National Agency on Alcohol Misuse’, managed to generate a significant amount of media coverage with its recommendation to ‘make it illegal to provide alcohol to anyone under the age of 15.’ The reasoning behind this was that since unsupervised consumption of alcohol is spiralling, along with associated anti-social behaviour, among young people, the natural solution is to imprison parents who offer a thimble of wine to their child at the dinner table.
When faced with that as a consequence of their proposal on the BBC’s Today programme, Alcohol Concern’s spokesperson argued that the change in the law was still necessary in order to ‘send a message’. I am not sure what sort of message about this society would be sent out if Jewish Passover services (where every family member is encouraged to drink a traditional sweet red wine throughout the evening) were raided by the police, but I doubt the delinquents in town centres will see the relevance to them. The alternative ‘message’, that such laws won’t be enforced to the letter so best to work out one’s own interpretation of justice would be the likely unintended consequence.
While most people imagine that the best way to send a message is with a phone, an email, or an advertising billboard, a few organisations seem to think the best way is by passing new laws. What sort of organisations? State-funded ones, of course! While Alcohol Concern is a charitable company, it receives a core grant from the Department of Health. It also has a consultancy wing with a variety of clients: Barnet PCT, Camden & Islington Substance Misuse Joint Commissioning Group, County Durham Drug and Alcohol Action Team… the list goes on although it could almost without exception be reduced to ‘the taxpayer’. As with several other ‘national agencies’, different levels of government allow the taxpayer to act as both investor and client so that while the organisation retains charitable status, it has no real independence from government, a situation equivalent to the education quango ‘ContinYou’ examined in one of our Civitas reviews.
Capitalism’s critics, such as Noam Chomsky in his ‘Manufacturing Consent’ model, have always tried to draw a direct line of comparison between the propaganda bureaucracies of the mass media in authoritarian states and the ideology conveyed by private media in nominally free states. According to them, the differences between the tyranny of the state and this alleged tyranny of the market is that the market is superior at pretending to offer free speech and accurate news coverage. But what would this model make of an apparently free society where many of the major media actors seem to be branches of the state? The state-licensed BBC interviewed the state-funded Alcohol Concern’s spokesperson alongside Caroline Flint for the government’s view.
Of course, the two interviewees didn’t agree with all of the radical proposals and some might argue that this means that despite Alcohol Concern’s funding streams, it actually retains its own independent voice. But in fact, Alcohol Concern provides an even more valuable service to the Government than mere affirmation of its view. In comparison to their extreme position that wishes to ignore the liberties of families to educate their children, whatever the government offers will seem measured, practical and part of the consensus. New Labour have often used the ‘triangulation’ technique (where a superior middle way is sought through defeating two opposing views) to great success, but the tactic can work even better when you can choose where to position one of the opposing views! If you can do that, the middle view can be positioned wherever you like.
This is by no means an exceptional case and Nick Seddon in his recent book, Who Cares, explains how political debate has changed through the use of state-funded ‘charitable’ activism. This is the issue with which we should be concerned.