Missing the days when PR meant proportional representation
Maurice O'Brien • Published 5 Aug 2010 20:30
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EVERY day of my working life I’m engulfed in an avalanche of drivel and verbiage served up by regiments of PR men and women.
Some of their press releases are comical for the right reasons, most aren’t, a lot are irrelevant, many are inaccurate or geographically off-target, largely glib and poorly composed, and the spelling and grammar are rotten. But they all have one thing in common. Each contains what someone thinks we want to hear. Now that’s something you come to expect after suffering more than four decades of public relations waffle.
But surely we can do without it from yet another Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, Dave’s never had a proper job, having wet his working feet in public relations, so he sees nothing wrong in insulting the Jews one day, Muslims the next and calling it diplomacy.
In Washington, his memory failed him over the United States’ tardy participation in World War Two, but can you blame him when he’s already forgotten what Tory voters thought he’d pledged barely three months back? Last week his long-held ambition to be the new Blair appeared to have come to pass when he blared naively about letting Turkey join the EU, accusing any dissenters of “protectionism, nationalism or prejudice”. Questioning whether the corrupt and spendthrift EU is capable of absorbing a country with a predicted 85million population doesn’t make you a bigot, Dave.
However, one might well question someone who welcomes Turkey now, when in April he was defending his plans for capping immigration numbers during a point-scoring televised playground bundle with his soon-to-be coalition buddy. Meanwhile, his over-the-top rhetoric against Pakistan was clearly what Dave thought the Indians wanted to hear.
But then Pakistan, knowing that Dave and Barack have already decided they’re out of there as soon as possible, can hardly be blamed if they have decided to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in the interests of self-preservation.
Yet when it comes to the “export of terror”, a few nations could point the finger in this direction for the way successive British governments, for one reason or another, have given Islamic extremists safe haven to prosper and plot murderous havoc on their own and other peoples.
Whether it’s holding referendums on everything except the one we were promised on the Lisbon Constitreaty, or Theresa May meekly giving EU police officers precedence over our legal system without even a sniff of a vote, the message is increasingly clear. Smooth-talking politicians deserve nothing but our contempt.
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