Abiola Olanipekun recently finished her internship at the British Library. In this blog post, number three in a series about the ‘iPod generation’, she reflects on the last two reports by Refrom in their own series which were published in 2007 and 2008. The full reports by Reform can be found on the Management and Business Studies Portal.

As my cherished audience, you all be aware by now that I am writing a blog post series which examines reports about the ‘iPod Generation’. These reports are currently available on the Management & Business portal and should you need to view the last blog post that I wrote then please click here.

This blog post focus on the final two reports: ‘Class of 2007: Inaction sinks the IPOD generation’ and ‘Money’s too tight to mention: will the IPOD generation ever trust financial services?’ which were published in 2007 and 2008 respectively. They are the final reports on the iPod generation published by Reform as part of their series which focusses on 18-34 year olds in the UK – a generation who according to Reform are Insecure, Pressurised, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden.

The reports examine the UK cohort in the context of the global debates about generational differences and increasing economic insecurity, as set out in the previous reports on the classes of 2005 and 2006. There is significant focus on the issue of an ageing population and the impact of the ‘baby boomer’ generation now reaching retirement age. Reform outline how organisations such as the OECD bring together issues of global economic insecurity and the need for structural reform around pensions and healthcare (e.g. in their Economic Outlook reports), to highlight the considerable concern around the different burdens and financial situations for different generational groups.

If you have read my previous blog posts, you will know that I have found these reports to resonate with my own experiences and also to not be entirely positive about the future for my generation! Nonetheless, the most recent of the reports was published 5 years ago and I have tried to bear this in mind when reading them. When in a positive mood I tell myself that perhaps current policy and ideology may resolve (or already have resolved) some of the issues highlighted…different solutions may have been proposed. I start to think that we should avoid being consumed by the sombre message and take it all with a precautionary pinch of salt. Yet, the almost universal view among people I know seems to be that the generation of young people are trapped in financial doom and gloom.

The full reports are available on the Management and Business Studies portal at the British Library. If you have read my previous posts, and are interested in young people in the UK and their prospects, you might want to read them and build your own view.

Overall, I am trying to maintain the hope that the economy may change for the better, policies may be directed differently and the outlook for my generation may begin to look better than these reports have predicted. The reports are definitely helpful in understanding the economic situation of the 18-34 generation during the period 2005 – 2008, but they have to be read within the current context and with a critical eye.

Over 350 conversations between friends and family members from people across the UK have been made available this week on the British Library Sounds website. These conversations were recorded as part of the Listening Project, a partnership between the British Library and the BBC, and cover all kinds of topics relating to family relationships, friendship, personal memories, triumphs, tragedies and intimate and everyday life. They offer a unique insight into the lives of people across the country and will be preserved for future generations at the Library. Importantly, they can be listened to by anyone via the website.

Holly Gilbert, who works on the project at the British Library has written a more detailed blog post about the collection here. She describes how the conversations detail narratives of different people's lives which range from 'coming out' stories, to experiences of war, to life in unusual careers such as that of a polar explorer.

A full press release about the project can be found here on our press and policy pages.

The final event in our long-running and successful series of social science debates ‘Myths and Realities’ (in partnership with the Academy of Social Sciences) takes place on the evening of 15^th October. It will be a bit of a celebration of the series (with a drink included in the ticket price) as well as a chance to address the broad question of why we (members of the general public as well as our politicians!) often believe the various social ‘myths’, rhetoric and narratives that we do, despite evidence to the contrary which is often available for public access.

For example, government figures suggest that benefit fraud costs the nation around £1.6 billion last year whilst tax fraud costs around £14 billion. So why then is the cost of benefit fraud to the nation seen as far higher in the public imagination? This is just one example of the kind of gap between widely held views about society and the evidence about social and economic reality that this series has explored. Other examples include the social reality of immigration, addiction, work-life ‘balance’, crime and punishment, educational standards (not as good as my day!) and health and food (is the modern diet really as bad as all that?) and social class (are we really all middle-class now?). We’ve had some great speakers from the academic realm and from policy and practice across the series, and many of our podcasts are on the British Library’s website as well as on SoundCloud.

Our final event will build and draw on the questions and points raised across the series to examine the role of the press in producing and maintaining some of these social ‘myths’. We will look at how we, as members of the public, access evidence about the society we live in (and whether we are interested in doing so?), the responsibility and role of our politicians in revealing social ‘truths’  and what social scientists could be doing to bring about greater clarity for all.

The event will be chaired by Professor Dame Janet Finch who was awarded her CBE for services to Social Science in 1999, she is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Morgan Centre at the University of Manchester and was Vice Chancellor of Keele University.

Above: Professor Dame Janet Finch. By Mholland [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Our speakers will be:

Professor Ivor Gaber, Professor of Journalism at City University. As well as having worked as a senior editor for major news organisations such as the BBC and Channel Four, he has published widely on political communications and has also worked as a media consultant for various organisations and governments.

Professor John Holmwood, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. He is the President of the British Sociological Association and co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University. His current research addresses issues of pragmatism and public sociology.

Please join us for an evening of discussion and debate, as well as a glass of wine to celebrate the end of the series! Tickets are available via the British Library events pages and box office.

p.s. In 2014 we will be launching a new series of social science events for the public. Watch this space...

Languages and the First World War

The British Library & University of Antwerp

International Conference, 18-19-20 June 2014

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War coincides with the fading of direct memory of the period. Few can remember the linguistic experience of wartime in the speech of those directly or indirectly involved, but the linguistic traces of combat and civilian life, in and out of war zones, remain.

The term ‘no man’s land’, for instance, came into general use in English during the First World War, referring to inhabitable areas that saw the fiercest of the fighting between the two sides of the conflict; the use of the term, many centuries earlier referring to an isolated patch of land outside the City of London, is indicative of a pattern of language-change produced by the war – by 1920 ‘Niemandsland’ was a widely used term in German. In the varied theatres of war, the home fronts, training camps, war offices, hospitals and supply trains, language shifts happened, in which the dialects and languages of the various parties involved influenced one another, and in which new language and new language use emerged through new technologies of destruction and communication.

The idea for a conference on the linguistic experience and legacy of the war arose from research into the sociolinguistics of the war (especially the Western Front) and the immediate post-war period in the UK, particularly with reference to how terms had crossed linguistic boundaries, including between hostile linguistic groups.  The conference aims to be truly international and interdisciplinary.

The conference will take place on 18, 19 & 20 June 2014.

The University of Antwerp will host the first day, and the British Library will host the third. The interim day will be for travel between the two sites, with a possible visit to In Flanders Fields Museum at Ypres arranged for the morning of 19 June. There will be a book launch and public lecture at the British Library on the evening of 19 June. Eurostar travel between the two Brussels and London only takes two hours.

Abstracts of 300 words need to be sent to [email protected] by 1 December 2013, 4pm.

Notification of acceptance will be sent on 20 th January 2014.

Papers may be given in languages other than English, with synopses available in English.

Call for Papers PDF

International Conference, 18-19-20 June 2014

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War coincides with the fading of direct memory of the period. Few can remember the linguistic experience of wartime in the speech of those directly or indirectly involved, but the linguistic traces of combat and civilian life, in and out of war zones, remain.

The term ‘no man’s land’, for instance, came into general use in English during the First World War, referring to inhabitable areas that saw the fiercest of the fighting between the two sides of the conflict; the use of the term, many centuries earlier referring to an isolated patch of land outside the City of London, is indicative of a pattern of language-change produced by the war – by 1920 ‘Niemandsland’ was a widely used term in German. In the varied theatres of war, the home fronts, training camps, war offices, hospitals and supply trains, language shifts happened, in which the dialects and languages of the various parties involved influenced one another, and in which new language and new language use emerged through new technologies of destruction and communication.

The idea for a conference on the linguistic experience and legacy of the war arose from research into the sociolinguistics of the war (especially the Western Front) and the immediate post-war period in the UK, particularly with reference to how terms had crossed linguistic boundaries, including between hostile linguistic groups.  The conference aims to be truly international and interdisciplinary.

The conference will take place on 18, 19 & 20 June 2014.

The University of Antwerp will host the first day, and the British Library will host the third. The interim day will be for travel between the two sites, with a possible visit to In Flanders Fields Museum at Ypres arranged for the morning of 19 June. There will be a book launch and public lecture at the British Library on the evening of 19 June. Eurostar travel between the two Brussels and London only takes two hours.

Abstracts of 300 words need to be sent to [email protected] by 1 December 2013, 4pm.

Notification of acceptance will be sent on 20 th January 2014.

Papers may be given in languages other than English, with synopses available in English.

Call for Papers PDF

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Sociolinguistics, writes a lovely jubbly post about the enormous diversity in the way English is spoken in our capital city. Read the full post here.

Katy Barrett, a final year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, writes about the problem of measuring longitude in the eighteenth century and how researching this led her to the British Libary's pamphlet and patent collections.

Blog readers of a certain age will remember well one of my favourite lines from Nick Park's animation Wallace and Gromit. As the villainous robotic dog Preston operates a replica of his Wash-o-matic, Wallace yells ‘That’s My Machine! I've got patent pending on that!’ This simple phrase sets Wallace up as the archetypal nutty inventor, who tinkers about with bizarre machines in his garage and then attempts to sell them to a naive public. I have kept thinking back to Wallace recently as I have worked on proposals for a scheme seen as similarly ‘nutty’ in the eighteenth century.

This was the problem of measuring longitude at sea. By the early 1700s, Europeans had, of course, been ploughing the oceans for centuries, but it was in this period that expansion of colonial trade and international naval warfare made it crucial to be able to get from A to B safely and in a predictable amount of time. To navigate effectively you need to know your place on the globe in relationship to two points: latitude and longitude. Latitude is fairly easy to measure by celestial observations as it is linked to the fixed points of the poles and the line of the equator. But, longitude has no such stable markers (even the 0 meridian at Greenwich was not agreed until an international conference in 1884), and required the development of accurate instruments and complex mathematics. The British government therefore passed an Act in 1714 to encourage proposals of new methods to measure longitude at sea. The Act established a Board of Commissioners to judge proposals, with staggered reward money for any successful ones. Proposals could win ten, fifteen or twenty thousand pounds for finding longitude to within sixty, forty and thirty geographical miles respectively.¹

This represented a very large amount of money in the eighteenth century, and so attracted proposals on a broad spectrum from serious inventors, to fortune hunters, to charlatans. 'The twenty thousand pounds' became a hopeful reference equivalent to winning one of the popular contemporary lotteries. This meant that all proposals rapidly became tarred with the same brush in the public imagination, in press reports, and even used by contributors to discredit their competitors. In August 1752, the editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine, John Nichols, found it necessary to publish a notice ‘To the Gentlemen who have sent us Proposals on the Longitude’, advertising that ‘many schemes have been sent us, which to publish would do no honour to their authors nor service to the community…some for effecting utter impossibility…The authors of all such will not, ‘tis hoped, blame us for suppressing their papers.’²

Likewise, pamphlets featured criticisms of each other's proposals. 'They're all trying to con you but me' became a standard argument in published longitude pamphlets. William Whiston was a particular target of criticism and satire for his 1714 proposal of using rockets sent up from ships moored at specific longitudes.³ A pamphlet by Jeremy Thacker commented of Whiston and his collaborator Humphrey Ditton, that they had ‘sprung the Twenty Thousand Pounds, and as I hope to get it, I ought to be civil to them...poor Mr. W-----n has been so often handled as a Longitudinarian, and a Latitudinarian…that it would be as barbarous as ungrateful for me to Insult over him.' This was the satirical background to the figure solving longitude that William Hogarth included in his 1735 engraving of Bedlam, the contemporary madhouse, in his A Rake's Progress.

Yet, inventors were also trying to make serious proposals. In 1735 Caleb Smith and William Ward proposed a new type of quadrant, and in their preface bemoaned how proposals were so universally ridiculed, saying 'The various Idle Schemes and Chimerical Projects that have been offered as Discoveries of the Longitude, have so much prejudiced Men’s Minds against all Propositions of this sort, and brought so much Disgrace on the Projectors, that every Attempt to solve this valuable Problem, is now ridiculed as the effect of a weak, or a distempered Brain.'⁵ For, the point was, partly, that a trial and monetary reward from the Board of Longitude provided not only the finances to develop an invention but also a means of establishing priority and ownership in the ideas behind it in the days in which the concept of intellectual property was still in its infancy.

Above: the first page of Christopher Irwin's patent specification of 1758.

The vast majority of these longitude pamphlets (as well as those that satirise them) are now in the British Library, and therefore also available on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). What struck me as I worked on these sources is how many longitude proposals came to the BL through the Patent Office Library^*.  The Patent Office was established in 1852, its creation made possible by the passing of the Patent Law Amendment Act in July of that year, long after the Board of Longitude was disbanded in 1828. The Act demanded ‘true copies of all specifications to be open to the inspection of the public at the office of the Commissioners’ and from this requirement developed the Patent Office Library which opened on 5 March 1855⁶.

The longitude pamphlets may well have come from the private collections of Bennet Woodcroft or Richard Prosser which together formed the nucleus of the new library.  As Assistant to the Commissioners of Patents, Woodcroft was responsible for the identification, collation, printing, abstracting and indexing of early British patent specifications⁷ and was first Superintendent of Specifications.  Prosser was an engineer and patent reform campaigner.  Both men recognised the importance of providing a reliable reference collection of previous specifications and inventions and we know that Prosser’s collection of around seven hundred volumes included a large number of items published before 1800.  

Whatever their source, despite contemporary satire longitude pamphlets entered the Patent Office Library as reference works.  This was the result of changes in attitudes to inventing that such pamphlets slowly helped to foster. For the eighteenth century was the period in which patents were beginning to resemble their modern descendants: the same decades in which the authors of longitude pamphlets were attempting to attract backers for their inventions. These pamphlets attempted to describe their inventions in a convincing way, and often to include an engraved image to give their idea more credibility. Thus, longitude pamphlets developed along the lines of patent specifications, as the rubric of these specs was itself brought to fruition⁸. In fact, some of the same people who proposed longitude solutions also sought patents for their inventions, as different avenues to the same goal of financial and intellectual security. The 2000 film Longitude, based on the book by Dava Sobel, represents Christopher Irwin, inventor of the marine chair, as a bumbling fool, but he was sufficiently clued up to apply for a patent for his chair in 1758⁹ (GB731 of 1758).

The fact, however, that it is not just patent applications, but a broader group of longitude pamphlets, that came together in the Patent Office Library, nicely tells the story of how the library developed precisely from the concerns over the status of invention that led eighteenth-century commentators to ridicule such pamphlets. The joke against Wallace over 100 years later, shows that the ridicule was harder to shake.

^*The Patent Office Library (subsequently the National Reference Library for Science and Invention) was one of the institutions brought together in 1972 to create the British Library.

References

(1)  The traditional story of the longitude problem and the Board of Longitude can be found in William Andrewes' (ed.), The Quest for Longitude: The proceedings of the Longitude Symposium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 4-6 1993 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996) [British Library, Document Supply q97/00766]. The papers of the Board of Longitude are now available through the Cambridge University Digital Library 

(2)  The Gentleman’s Magazine and historical chronicle, vol.22 (August 1752), p.359 [British Library, General Reference Collection 249.c.22]

(3)  William Whiston,  A new method for discovering the longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed to the consideration of the publick (London, 1714) [British Library, General Reference Collection 533.e.24.(7.)]

(4)  Jeremy Thacker, The longitudes examin'd. Beginning with a short epistle to the longitudinarians, and ending with the description of a smart, pretty machine of my own, which I am (almost) sure will do for the longitude, and procure me the twenty thousand pounds (London, 1714), p.2 [British Library, General Reference Collection 533.f.22.(1.)]

(5)  William Ward, The description and use of a new astronomical instrument, for taking altitudes of the sun and stars at sea, without an horizon; together with an easy and sure method of observing the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites, or any other phoenomenon of the like kind, on ship-board; In order to determine the Difference of Meridians at Sea (London, 1735), p.4 [British Library, General Reference Collection 117.d.12.]

(6)  The history of the library is told in John Hewish, Rooms near Chancery Lane: the Patent Office under the Commissioners, 1852-1883 (London, c.2000) [British Library, Document Supply m00/37854, Science, Technology & Business (B) BF 46]

(7)  Bennet Woodcroft, Alphabetical index of patentees of inventions from March 2, 1617 to October 1, 1852 (London, 1969) [British Library, Science, Technology & Business RES (B) BF 482 Law, Document Supply Wq2/2317]

(8)  More on patents can be read in Christine Macleod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: the English patent system, 1660-1800 (Cambridge, 1988) [British Library, Document Supply 89/02218, General Reference Collection YH.1989.b.101]

(9)  This is based on Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time (London, 1995) [British Library, Document Supply 96/06254, General Reference Collection YA.1995.a.27311]. Irwin published his invention in A summary of the principles and scope of a method, humbly proposed, for finding the longitude at sea (London, 1760) [British Library, General Reference Collection C.194.b.349].

A note on the author: Katy Barrett is a final year PhD Student on the AHRC-funded project 'The Board of Longitude 1714-1828: Science, Innovation and Empire in the Georgian World' jointly hosted by the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Royal Museums Greenwich. She works on the cultural history of the longitude problem, about which you can hear more in a 'PhDCast' done with CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) at Cambridge. Katy blogs and tweets as @SpoonsonTrays.

Toby Austin Locke, a member of the Social Sciences department at the British Library, writes about the dangers of forms of propaganda which promote non-action and acceptance.

We tend to think of propaganda as something fairly active; a message or instruction to act or think in a certain way, a persuasive force. The images that spring to mind when we speak of propaganda, the quasi-mythological Uncle Sam, the deified images of noble Soviet workers, or even the seductive images that flit across our television screens and line the walls of the underground stations, all appear to encourage us to act or think in a certain way, to stand by our country, to honour the workers, to use the right aftershave in order to achieve absolute sexual virility. But the current exhibition here at the British Library has made me start thinking about another form of what could be considered propaganda, a form that is potentially far more pervasive and powerful. Propaganda that rather than persuading us to think or act in a certain way,  encourages us not to think or act at all, to keep our heads down, to maintain our apathy.

Above: Soviet Women c.1920 by Unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons. Copyright statement and download here. [Public domain]

There is a famous piece of propaganda which illustrates this particularly well, one which has recently seen resurgence in the popular imagination and has transformed from an old, forgotten piece of state propaganda to a potent commercial image, practically a brand in its own right. I’m thinking of the famous Ministry of Information poster ‘Keep Calm and Carry On.’ This image was never used for its intended purpose. It was originally designed to be distributed should Nazi forces have invaded England.

The sentiment behind this message is open to questioning. Would the British public really be encouraged to ‘keep calm and carry on’ had Hitler’s forces reached England? Would we really want to ‘keep calm and carry on’ as fascism took hold of Europe?

Above: Keep Calm and Carry On. By original poster by UK Government, enhancements, conversion to PNG by oaktree_b, via Wikimedia Commons. Copyright and download here. [Public domain]

To my mind at least the answer is no. When atrocities are occurring all around you, when ethics are no longer a matter of concern, when peoples lives and existence are at stake, the last thing I would like to see happen is for everyone to ‘keep calm and carry on’. Surely if there are ever times for people to rise up and take action, it would be under such conditions.

The question I’m trying to raise here, perhaps a little clumsily, is regarding the role of non-action, of ignoring, of not knowing in certain power relations. In a short video snippet, Bruno Latour briefly mentions two possible areas of study: the geography of not knowing and the history of ignorance. He points out the work-like elements of knowing, the labour involved in knowledge, that may often make not-knowing or ignoring the easier option. Facing up to painful truths is certainly not easy, but does ignoring the ethical consequences of such truths seem like the best alternative? It comes back to J.S. Mill’s statement “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” (2010 :46) Would we rather know and act to attain ethical outcomes and perhaps be dissatisfied, or remain in ignorance and contentment?

It could be suggested that such a message is found articulated in political discourse today through the current UK Government’s mantra regarding people who want to ‘work hard and get on’ and the pan-European political insistence of the necessity of austerity. Supporters of the welfare state across the country are coming out in protest against the ‘bedroom tax’ and wider austerity measures, but the mantra of Government, particularly regarding those who want to ‘get on’, offers them no support – it is here to support those who keep their head down and keep going. Whilst there are equally arguments to be heard in favour of the Government’s approach, a supporter of welfare provision could certainly make a case for this mantra being a reincarnation of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ approach to propaganda, encouraging people to look the other way, and not think too hard about the wider consequences of what is going on around them. Of course, the ethical implications of such an approach are open to debate, and are certainly not about to be resolved here.

Toby Austin Locke currently works on the Social Welfare Portal at the British Library. The views represented here are his own and do not reflect those of the organisation. You can follow him on twitter @BLSocialWelfare (in a professional capacity) and his personal twitter account is @TobyaLocke.

Toby Austin Locke is currently working in the British Library social sciences team on the Social Welfare Portal and is due to start working towards his doctorate in October 2013 at Goldsmiths College, University of London. You can contact him on twitter @tobyalocke or read more of his blog-posts at - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/socialscience/2013/02/encounters-between-art-and-science.html#sthash.U42T6ySO.dpuf

The following article was prepared by Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society, to open the discussion on our second of four public debates to accompany our exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion. The debate was held on Tuesday 3 September. It has also been published on the website of Speakers Corner Trust, our partner for the debate programme.

Stamps produced by the Tufty Club. The Tufty Club was set up in 1961 by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents to encourage better road safety amongst children Copyright Statement

What do Joseph Goebbels and Tufty the Squirrel have in common? Not much at first glance. Goebbels advanced the Nazi cause for over a decade, and Tufty taught millions of school children a ‘quasi-military kerb drill’ to safely cross the road. But in fact they embody the two poles of the propaganda spectrum – sinister and sympathetic, malignant and benign. And each, in their own way, influenced millions of people to change their attitudes and behaviour.

Propaganda is a word loaded with negative connotations – brainwashing, deception, lies, half-truths and hoodwinking – and is often associated with times of war. But strip the term of a particular context provided by time and place and propaganda – good and bad – is all around us. The Goebbels-Tufty comparison may be facetious, but the extraordinary extent of the difference serves to underline an important point: we have to think about the intent and if we think only of the sinister and not the sympathetic we fail to truly understand why and how hearts and minds are won. For stripped to its core, propaganda is no more and no less than the dissemination of ideas designed to convince the public to think and act in a certain way and for a particular purpose. And influencing beliefs and behaviours need not always be a bad thing.

llustration from the Medical Officer journal to promote better public health. At the time, flies were held responsible for contaminating food and spreading diseases such as tuberculosis.

Propaganda by those in authority can be motivated by genuine concern for the public interest such as the health and safety of citizens. For every war that has been shaped by propaganda, so too a disease has been tackled by a mass public information campaign designed to eradicate health threats posed by killers such as tuberculosis and polio. The first national public health campaign urged mothers to ‘kill the fly and save the child’ here in Britain in 1910. In the 1960s every parent knew that ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases’, and by the late 1980s fewer citizens were likely to be ignorant about AIDS following the government’s 1987 tombstone campaign.

Today, across the globe governments promote the ‘5 A Day’ campaign to encourage citizens to eat five daily portions of fruit and vegetables following a recommendation by the World Health Organisation. For some this is the nanny state in action. Of course the government wants to encourage people to eat more nutritious food but they also want to change behaviour in order to conserve resources and reduce the cost to the public purse posed by health problems like diabetes and obesity. Is that a bad thing?

Propaganda is also used to create a sense of identity and belonging and not always by the state. Historically, governments have utilised images and items – the national anthem, coins, flags, stamps, buildings or monuments – to promote a sense of national identity and patriotism. But so too have anti-establishment campaigns: the wearing of suffragette colours, or anti-apartheid and CND badges was a clear statement of a person’s views and an encouragement to others to join them in common cause. These iconic images portray meaning and belonging in the same way as the Swastika or the Hammer and Sickle, or an Oak Tree or Red Rose. Some are malevolent some are not; but all, in their own way, are instruments of manipulation targeted at hearts and minds.

Patriotic symbolism need not be jingoistic or even solely targeted at domestic citizens. The London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony on the theme ‘Isles of Wonder’ was described as a ‘love letter to Britain’. The organisers may not have intended it to be propaganda, but in showcasing the cultural, economic and social achievements and prestige of Britain it was explicitly designed to influence people’s emotional response at home and abroad, bathing the country in a positive light even before the sport had begun. It was soft propaganda for ‘Brand Britain’.

One of the most effective propagandists of recent years has been Her Majesty the Queen. Following her ‘annus horribilis’ in 1992 and the death of Diana in 1997 the Royal Family embarked on a concerted effort to change public attitudes towards them. The propaganda toolbox was cracked open in a carefully choreographed effort to win back public support. The power of symbols and ceremony and a nod to modernity and accessibility through the embrace of social media were all harnessed in the effort, buttressed by the propagandists’ clever use of humour culminating in the iconic James Bond moment during the Olympic opening ceremony. As the country marked the Diamond Jubilee, royal popularity hit a fifteen year high and the Queen herself has personal ratings that politicians can only dream of. But is this twenty-year public relations effort necessarily a bad thing? Only if you’re a republican perhaps.

Liberty provided a symbol that would be understood anywhere in the United States. The theme of “freedom imperilled” deflected from discussion of the rationale for joining the war. National War Savings Committee. Paper bags with war savings messages. c.1916. Copyright Statement

Even in wartime, some forms of propaganda can be a good thing. If the country has to go to war, better to win than lose; but to do so recruits, money and supplies are needed. So it’s in the national interest for the Parliamentary Recruitment Committee to promote a ‘Your country needs YOU’ campaign, encourage the population to ‘lend a hand’ through war savings, and remind everyone that ‘careless talk costs lives’. And, particularly as an island nation facing the disruption of international transport links, it’s vital that food and energy supplies – so essential to morale – are maintained. So propaganda efforts to promote rationing and the conservation of coal supplies are all beneficial for the national cause. In World War Two, as food imports fell by a third, an additional six million acres of land was cultivated largely as a result of the Dig for Victory campaign which informed the public how to grow vegetables in their gardens and on public land. Without this public information propaganda to change citizens’ behaviour the country might have been starved to surrender.

So there are times when we can say ‘thank goodness’ for propaganda.  Ultimately it is the intention of propaganda that should determine our view of its merits. The society in which we now live, with a watchful media and powerful social media platforms, means British citizens are less likely than in years past to have the wool pulled over their eyes and the government to escape challenge. That’s not to say it can’t happen; merely that it’s more difficult than before for malevolent propaganda to prevail, at least in peacetime. And as social media democratises access to powerful channels of communication we could all be propagandists in the future.