Media and cultural policy as public policy

Abstract

The British Labour government's media and cultural policies since 1997 are analysed as aspects of public policy. This allows assessment of the media and cultural policies of a supposedly centre‐left government in a conjuncture marked by neo‐liberalism, globalisation and the continuing growth of the cultural industries. An outline of guiding assumptions about public policy is provided, including the importance of the balance between social forces and structured inequality, but also the assumption that public policy operates with a certain amount of autonomy. Labour's project is discussed as a particular hybrid of neo‐liberalism, conservatism and social democracy, distinctive from the New Right neo‐liberalism of the 1980s. An important element of this political hybrid is Labour's profound ambivalence about the public domain. Developments in media and cultural policy are then analysed in these terms, in particular the performance of the new communications regulator Ofcom (Office of Communications) and its use of the concept of “citizen‐consumer”. Reference is made to Labour's strategic alliances with key social institutions, including key cultural‐industry businesses. A final section examines how we might understand centre‐left public policy in the era of neo‐liberalism, and a variety of positions are offered about Labour's record in government and the constraints it has faced. While such fundamental political dilemmas are not resolved here, conclusions are drawn regarding the lessons of Labour's policies for the analysis of media and cultural policy, and of public policy.

Keywords:

• neo‐liberalism
• cultural industries
• public domain
• public service broadcasting
• Ofcom
• citizen‐consumer
• Labour

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the following people for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article: Patrick Costello, Abigail Gilmore, Jonathan Hardy, Mike Kenny and Don Redding.

Notes

Some analysts treat media policy as a sub‐division of communications policy. It is certainly true that a necessary consideration for the analysis of media policy is the broader context of telecommunications policy (the regulation of the airwaves, the provision of infrastructure, etc.); but media policy has its own specific dynamics, many of them bound up in prevailing understandings of the social functions of the press, broadcasting, artistic expression, and so on. In what follows, I focus on media and cultural policy, but refer throughout to this broader context of (tele)communications.

It is probably worth noting here that I avoid terms such as “New Labour” and “the Blair government”, not because I think that Tony Blair as an individual is unimportant, nor because the idea of “New Labour” is insignificant, but because the association of public policy with Blair as an individual and with “New Labour” as a project is simplifying and misleading.

There are welcome exceptions: Horwitz (1989) analyses telecommunications regulation as part of a theory of regulation; Volkerling (1996) more briefly analyses the formation of cultural policy.

Such alliances between party and business take place at a structural level, and this should not be confused with the question of negotiations and struggles between the Labour Party and individuals or institutions, though of course some individuals and institutions, such as Rupert Murdoch and his News International company, are very important.

This was granted in March 2002, seven years after the announcement of Labour's deal with British Telecom. In the same year, the government announced that all schools would be connected to broadband by 2006 – nine years after coming to power (see Ridey 2002).

See http://www.bss.org/publicvoice/.

This was published as Graham and Davies (1997), but was mainly written by academic economist Graham, formerly economic adviser to John Smith, who led the Labour Party from 1992 until his death in 1994.