ABSTRACT
First and foremost, this is a book about political communications, but one that approaches the subject from an unusual angle. Rather than study party politics, the focus here is on how one particular social movement – the anti-war movement in the UK – engaged with the media as part of their campaigning against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Contrary to some strands of opinion, the anti-war movement in the
UK, matters. An argument can be made (in fact it has been) for saying that the pressure from the movement played a significant role in dissuading the British Parliament from authorising military intervention in Syria in 2013,1 although the case is hard to prove. Moreover, even when dealing with their campaign against the Iraq War, which at one level quite obviously failed to prevent the invasion and prolonged occupation of that country, the movement still made a difference. No retrospective documentary or television news report on the Iraq crisis is complete without at least some archive footage of one of the larger anti-war demonstrations from the time. This material functions as an indexical signifier pointing to the high levels of opposition to the war. At the time though, the fact that such a large proportion of the public opposed military action and were prepared to demonstrate that through public protests mattered for two reasons. First of all, the campaign did much to widen the scope of pre-war
debates over military action. In late 2002, when the crisis first rose to the top of the news agenda, ‘most political debate and news coverage was restricted to questions about the progress or otherwise’ that the UN weapons inspections team inside Iraq were said to be making, yet by ‘the time the war began on 20 March 2003, the legitimacy of US foreign policy was at stake’ and ‘debates about imperialism were on the agenda for the first time in a generation’ (Taylor 2013: 33). The other major reason why opposition to the war mattered, was because
it may well have come a lot closer to derailing Britain’s participation in the
war than many people have been inclined to give it credit for. On the eve of the largest demonstration against the war, on 15 February 2003, the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications, Alistair Campbell, lamented how ‘every part’ of their strategy for war ‘was in tatters – re the EU, re the UN, re the party, re the country which was about to march against us’ (Campbell 2012: 460 emphasis added). A few weeks later, Tony Blair himself feared he was close to his ‘last days in office’ (Blair 2010: 429) due to the widespread opposition to his stance on Iraq. Any balanced assessment of the anti-war movement ought to acknowl-
edge these points while raising questions as to why the movement fell short of its ultimate objectives. Such a study would be hugely ambitious, by taking on questions of movement organisation, of lobbying, of the comparative efficacy of mass demonstrations and other forms of protest, in addition to tackling questions about media relations among other matters. Yet it would invariably be intellectually limited for revolving around such an instrumentalist set of questions while also being rather speculative for trading in a ‘what if ’ version of recent history. By contrast, the book that you see before you is more empirically grounded and aspires to be more intellectually sophisticated. Empirically, the enquiries here have been pitched at the local level, in
that the book aims to understand how the locally based anti-war groups that could be found the length and breadth of the country at the height of the crisis in 2003 (and which in diminished numbers can still be found) engaged with their local press. It also examines how those groups were reported on by the local press in their respective areas. This is then, a matter of studying both the media relations of the local anti-war groups and the coverage they received. With respect to media relations, the key questions are:
What reasons did the locally based anti-war groups have for engaging with the local press? That is, what purposes did they believe media coverage could serve for them?
