Council propaganda and the Labour vote
Like Bill Dornan over at Foolish Interruption, I think that the nonsense written about the Evening Standard and the mayoral election is an expression of sour grapes.
…can we please lay to bed the idea that the Evening Standard swung the election? – it’ll only encourage them. A tawdry rag it may be, a great former of opinion it is not. The idea It’s the Standard Wot Won It seems particularly strong in the Guardian’s own little world. The Standard’s “poisonous” campaign has been blamed by a few more Ken fans (all links just from the Graun, I can’t face digging out all the lip quivering stuff I’ve read). The irony, of course, is that the Guardian itself ran a string of vigorous, if somewhat hysterical articles (only vulgar rags like the Standard run actual campaigns you see) against Boris: the effete and frivilous Tory, the racist, the evil, baby-eating Tory bigot etc.
Bill’s absolutely right. What pretentions either paper may have of influencing voters, the fact remains that most people in London read neither of them.
What most people in London do read - or, at the very least, receive - is the propaganda freesheet that is shoved through their letterboxes by their local council. On that basis, I felt that these were the publications that had the power to influence the largest number of voters.
So I hunted out some statistics that would help me uncover whether there was any connection between the amount spent on these publications, or the frequency with which they were circulated, and the way in which voters in London boroughs voted in the last set of local elections (ie 2006). I found them here in a report about Ken Livingstone’s budget proposals for 2005-2006. In an appendix I found a chart that was chock-full of details relating to “London Borough publications funded by ratepayers”.
The idea was, of course, to prove that at a cost to Londoners of £3,300,000 per annum, Livingstone’s own propaganda sheet The Londoner was good value for money. It wasn’t: new mayor Boris Johnson scrapped it within days of taking office.
However, the information about the borough publications is fascinating. The table below is the data as presented by the GLA, minus the details about The Londoner and those for the Corporation of London’s thrice-yearly Cityview (which is anomalous in the sense of both audience and the fact that the Corporation isn’t controlled by a political party). I have added to that data details of the party that won the council in the previous local elections (ie 2002).
At first glance, these figures don’t seem too bad. If you look down the grey column headed CPCPH (Cost Per Copy Per Household), you’ll see that there’s no real pattern between spending and which party controls a borough. The Lib Dems and Labour are more likely to spend more per individual copy, but the Labour Party is also likely to get a better deal for the taxpayer - a competitive 6p per copy per household in Hackney, and no cost at all in Labour-controlled Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow (the freesheets were paid for by advertising). That said, it needs to be borne in mind that there were no figures available for Waltham Forest (then No Overall Control), Tower Hamlets, Brent (both Labour) or Islington (then Lib Dem).
However, by multiplying Cost per Copy per Household, by circulation, and then multiplying the new figure by the number of editions produced in a year, it is possible to work out how much each borough council was spending on freesheets. Here you will begin to spot a very clear trend:
Labour councils spent the largest sums of taxpayers’ money annually on freesheets. What’s more, those high spending boroughs retained control of their boroughs in the subsequent council elections in 2006. Only one Labour council spending £165,000 or less on propaganda - Barking and Dagenham - retained control. All the others lost overall control or fell to the Tories.
Of course, one could argue that this is slightly unfair. Some of those councils have much larger populations, so have to spend more money to reach all their voters residents. So, breaking down the figures to show the annual taxpayer cost per household, you get the following:
There’s a similar pattern. Only those Labour councils spending over £1.50 or more on freesheets managed to retain control. All the others were swept out of power in 2006 (though there is the anomaly of Lambeth, where Labour gained control from a hung council). It also emerges that the Tory controlled Barnet, whilst spending a relatively large £152,880 on freesheets, spent a reasonable 72p per head - far divorced from the outrageous £6.50 Greenwich was expecting its residents to cough up each year.
Even these figures only tell part of the story. There also seems to be a connection between how frequently council freesheets are circulated, and whether the ruling party keeps control after the 2006 elections.
Yes, you guessed it. All the Labour councils that retained control of their boroughs in 2006 were issuing between 11 and 26 freesheets to every household. No council issuing 10 or fewer managed to cling on.
So what can we conclude?
I’m not a statistician, but there are some facts we can deduce from the data.
1. Labour boroughs spent an average on £1.77 on council propaganda. Tory boroughs spent an average of 70p.
2. The Labour boroughs that spent most on council propaganda were likely to have retained control after the 2006 elections (though whether there is a causal link is unproven).
3. The Labour boroughs that spent least on council propaganda were likely to have ceded control after the 2006 elections (though whether there is a causal link is unproven).
4. Over £3.5million was wasted on propaganda that could have been more usefully spent on actually improving people’s lives, instead of convincing them their lives had already improved. If you include Livingstone’s The Londoner this figure leaps to near the £7million mark, and would doubtless cross it if we had the figures for the freesheets issued by Tower Hamlets, Islington, Brent and Waltham Forest.
5. Hammersmith & Fulham, Hounslow and Harrow all proved councils can issue as much stuff as they like, at no cost to the taxpayer, if it is funded by advertising.
My personal view is that, in scrapping The Londoner, Boris Johnson has shown that in these belt-tightening times, there are better things to spend taxpayers’ money on than freesheets. I also think there’s scope for a campaign to abolish them or, at the very least, bring their expense down to the absolute minimum. That said, even if it were funded by advertising, who would relish this sort of thing landing on their doormat?
I’d also like to see some more work - using bang-up-to-date figures - to examine the link between Labour councils’ high freesheet expenditure and local election success. But until someone does that, my response to those who say “It was the Standard wot won it” for Boris will be that “It was Hackney Today (described by one local councillor as a cross between Pravda and Heat) wot won it” for our own elected mayor, Jules Pipe.
(Note: if you want a copy of my spreadsheet, you can download it here.)
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It does, as you say, depend upon how many people actually read these things; surely it can’t be that many. I read a copy of the Londoner once - mind-numbing stuff.
That said I was briefly tempted when I saw an advert for a production ‘journalist’ to work on the Londoner (I bet that ad was in for appearances’ sake, though). It was something like £33-36K a year for, what is it?, a few pages of anodyne stuff four (or was it six?) times a year. Unbelievably cushy (especially compared with the pay and workload of even the lowliest hack.
Comment by bill — 11th May, 2008 @ 1:09 pm
The Londoner was, according to the document I found, issued 10 times per year. Though I tended to see about 2 copies per year, maximum. No doubt a useless distribution system.
Comment by Ben — 11th May, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
The council-distributed freesheets are not all bad. The Londoner was a waste of pretty much everything involved in its production, but I actually quite enjoy my Haringey people, and don’t resent the £2.20 my household unwittingly spends on it per year.
It’s fairly light on the propaganda, and tells me about a bunch of local events and things that I want to know about, but wouldn’t have known I wanted to know about until I read it.
Comment by Simon — 12th May, 2008 @ 10:48 am
I see your point, Simon, but £220,000 is a lot of money for information that is freely available elsewhere, and which could be used - for example - to help sort out Haringey’s patchy social care services.
I also note you say the paper is “fairly light on propaganda”, rather than suggest it doesn’t actually contain propaganda. Should taxpayers really have to subsidise council backslapping when services are desperately in need of improvement?
Comment by Ben — 12th May, 2008 @ 11:34 am
The ‘propaganda’ tends to be of a this-is-what-we’ve-done-in-the-last-month kind of ilk, so yes it’s there, but at the same time I find I know a little more of where my council tax goes. It’s not totally without advantage, even if all these papers (all parties included) are patting themselves on the back a bit. I don’t get any other borough’s mags through the door, so I don’t know the balance of content in these freebies.
I would venture that - to me at least - the net value of such a publication is worth it’s cost, and it would be pretty unfair to write it off and condemn it completely.
Comment by Simon — 12th May, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
… a hybrid of Heat and Pravda eh ?
I wonder if his description caused subscription levels to rise?
Comment by Dysthymiac — 12th May, 2008 @ 4:48 pm