Answer: Euphemism.

Topography of Terror – Niederkirchnerstrasse, Berlin

Just back from Berlin and the Topography of Terror project, which catalogues the horrors of the Nazi era through images and texts. The building is located on the site previously occupied by the headquarters of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office – RSHO). Photographs of the SS staff enjoying away-days from the camps, and children subjected to medical experiments speak for themselves, but the extent to which language was used to intimidate, manipulate and subjugate still shocks. The revelation is that so many people who committed such unspeakable acts really believed they were simply ‘doing their duty’.

Auschwitz staff away day

The purpose of a political euphemism is to manage perception. Orwell called it ‘The defence of the indefensible. Language designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable. To give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ The Nazis weren’t the first and they won’t be the last, but they excelled in using language to alter people’s morality.

The RSHO centralised scientific research, intelligence gathering, monitoring opinion, indoctrination, criminal investigation and overseeing foreigners within a single super agency. It became the ideological engine of radicalisation, and developed a sophisticated understanding of misinformation and managing emotions. Experts with degrees in philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology, economics and law transformed Hitler’s slogans into processes, directives and assignments. Staff were implicated in atrocities by constant rotation from desk jobs to ‘practical pursuits’. The Gestapo was not a fixed entity, but a ‘…constantly evolving organism’ that disseminated ‘…uncertainty and confusion to breed anxiety and conjecture’.

Death to Lies

One of the justifications for the Reich’s expansionism was Lebensraum or ‘living space’, which it needed to fulfil the 1000-year vision of world domination. Central Europe was regarded as ‘German cultural soil’ and anyone who threatened this had to be dealt with. The term ‘protective custody’ was introduced after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 to weed out ‘rogue elements’ that would obstruct the establishment of a totalitarian regime. The phrase had nothing to do with protecting the individual, but protecting the State from the individual. The language-driven paranoia that the Fatherland was ‘under attack’ from ‘subversive forces’ justified any means. The language was a societal anaesthetic, shrewdly administered to make ‘the unthinkable acceptable’. Every neighbourhood in Berlin had SA ‘club houses’ where suspects were ‘purged’ or ‘neutralised’. Nazi philosophy declared that ‘All Men Are Not Equal’, and anyone who questioned this was suspect. You proved your loyalty by reporting on friends, family, neighbours and colleagues who might be expressing ‘un-German’ tendencies. Opponents of the ‘Volk Community’ were ‘racial enemies’. They were invited to ‘assist the Gestapo with their enquiries’ and ultimately ‘excluded’ from the community without defence, trial or appeal.

Chart describing the Nuremberg Laws, 1935.

By 1938, occupational bans and revoked trade licences excluded Jews and Romas from employment, making them dependent on charity and the State. This ostracism generated public hostility, and accusations of being ‘work shy leeches’ justified forcing them into slave labour. Many companies such as VW, BMW, Daimler Benz, Siemens and Krupp who were already profiting from Germany’s rearmament benefited. Labour camps exploiting ‘racial inferiors’ from conquered territories were an integral part of city life. Definitions of ‘deviancy’ became increasingly bizarre and could range from a love of jazz to an appreciation of abstract art; anything that was deemed to be anti-Aryan. Once labelled and documented, stigmatised victims were dispatched to camps with Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you Free) emblazoned over the entrance. Presented as ‘re-education centres’, they were queuing systems for the gas chambers. The barracks were given names such as TRUTHFULNESS, SELF SACRIFICE and FREEDOM which referred to a speech Himmler made to all prisoners held by the Reich: ‘There is a path to freedom. Its milestones are obedience, endeavour, honesty, order, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, a sense of self sacrifice and love of the Fatherland.’

Excerpt of Himmler’s speech on the Dachau service building

Graphic identities have been used by the military for centuries but the Nazi’s bought the coordinated visual language of insignia, colour, typography and hierarchy into the public domain. Individuals in the camps were identified by badges: Work-Shy Reich, Work-Shy Municipalities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavic Sub-Human, Female Race Defilers, Poles and Czechs. Homosexuals were forced to wear a pink triangles, and Jews – marked by a yellow star – were the lowest category of all. Every aspect of the brand was tightly controlled through the precise language in the guidelines: ‘The Jewish star consists of a palm-size six point star outlined in black on yellow cloth with the word JEW in black. It is to be worn visibly, sewn over the left breast of the garment.’

Prisoner identity badges

Articles in popular magazines and cinema newsreels whitewashed the camps. Gushing editorials emphasised the ‘benevolent protection’ provided for the Jews, and described Dachau as a ‘…picture of cleanliness, order, light and air.’ The ‘…guests worked gladly and willingly with good food and a roof over their heads’. Photo features showed prisoners ‘…enjoying making things in the carpentry shop’ and ‘…returning from work singing’. A documentary about the Theresienstadt Ghetto called ‘The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews’ celebrated its ‘…rich cultural life’, and featured children staging theatrical productions. As soon as the film was completed, the director, cast and crew were despatched to Auschwitz.

Theresienstadt Ghetto children’s theatre

The ‘Solution to the Jewish Situation’ was underwritten by Hitler’s statement that anyone who was ‘flawed’ led a ‘life unworthy of life’. The ‘Euthanasia Programme’ (merciful death) was rubber stamped at the Wannsee Conference when planners began to calculate the numbers of people to be exterminated and the logistics to achieve the targets. The Reich was a bureaucratic behemoth recording data in obsessive detail. They used the detached language of lists, statistics, graphs and diagrams to distance themselves from the brutal truth. Directives were saturated in ‘amtssprache’ (officialese), but the language developed to obfuscate the genocide was called ‘sprachregelung’. The sick and disabled were transported from hospitals to ‘rehabilitation centres’ in ‘charitable ambulances’ as part of the eugenics cull. Those who were not compelled by the ‘Hereditary Health Courts’ to be compulsorily sterilised were ‘resettled’, then ‘specially treated’ and finally ‘cleansed’.

Wannsee Conference list of Jewish populations

The Nazis also understood that humiliating carefully targeted people with damning words and phrases can provoke hysterical hatred across benign communities. People accused of ‘transgressions’ were paraded through the streets with hand-written boards round their necks declaring ‘I am a blood sucker’ or ‘I forbade pupils to say Heil Hitler!’ or ‘I shopped in a Jewish store’. Romantic relationships between Jews and Aryans were a crime against the ‘people’s community’. Juda Rosenberg and Elisabeth Makowiak were forced to wear placards bearing the inscriptions: ‘I am a race defiler’ and ‘I, a blonde angel, slept with this Jewboy’.

Juda Rosenberg and Elisabeth Makowiak

The Nazis didn’t just celebrate language, they destroyed it as well. ‘Ideologically unsound’ writers were shipped off to the camps and their work was publically incinerated. Bebelplatz, Berlin was a favourite location for book burnings and in 1933 (six years before the war) Joseph Goebbels prepared students for their glorious fate. ‘The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. As young people, you already have the courage to face the fear of death, and this is the task for your generation. This is a great and symbolic deed, and from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.’

Book burning – Bebelplatz, Berlin

Euphemisms are alive and well and a thriving form of flimflam. We don’t bat and eyelid at ‘collateral damage’, ‘pacification’, ‘anti-personnel device’, ‘economy with the truth’, ‘friendly fire’. ‘Extraordinary rendition’ has been elevated to ‘air cargo’ thanks to the fax from the MI6 Head of Counter Terrorism found in the abandoned offices of Moussa Koussa – General Gadhafi’s ‘Chief of Intelligence’.

MI6 fax sent to Moussa Koussa

But I give the last words to the paradoxical Captain Beatty from Fahrenheit 451, who is the most literate and articulate book burner in fiction. ‘What is there about fire that is so lovely? Its perpetual motion, the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Fire is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules but they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.’

Most of the fundraising projects I work on are with destitute human rights foundations struggling for survival. Exterior events always seem to take place in the doldrums of winter on the streets of London, New York, Paris, Madrid or Den Haag which may sound glamorous but involves dripping tents, mobile blind spots, failing generators, obstreperous hecklers, scalding coffee and buckets of damp banknotes. Slightly more civilised are charity auctions (the rubber chicken circuit) in the Worshipful Guild of Cordwainers, or the Athenaeum Club, or the House of Lords where rich people happily gobble all the bubbly and trifle but fail to bid for anything. A nice change of pace then to be elevated to the Premier League and work with the University of Oxford helping them to beg for £1 billion plus. The Oxford Thinking campaign has been running for several years and broadcasts its success stories (establishing research projects, new college buildings, guaranteeing fellowships, founding scholarships and so on) to attract new donors. What really impresses is the University’s strategy of challenging experts from different disciplines to find counterintuitive solutions to intractable problems. Colliding different points of view interrupts habitual trains of thought and produces genuinely original solutions. I interviewed an amazing diversity of wizards in many Harry Potterish colleges (geologists, physicists, musicologists, sociologists, behaviourists, archivists and even performance artists), but the common objective to all is to develop practical applications that will make life a better place to live.

One of the most impressive projects is based in the Warneford Hospital, Headington where the Craniofacial Team of clinicians, scientists and psychologists is researching how parents relate to children born with cleft lips and palates. The condition varies in severity but causes difficulties with feeding, speaking, hearing and socialisation. Part of the process at Warneford is to show parents images of children with disfigurements and using sophisticated real-time digital imaging figure out how the neural patterns correlate with emotional reactions. Face to face contact and particularly the smile is the baby’s biggest communication with the parent, but many mums and dads can’t see past the problem. If you can break through the disappointment of giving birth to a baby with a cleft, parents can come to terms with it intellectually. Counsellors at the centre help parents understand what their baby is trying to communicate by guiding them – almost communicating on behalf of their baby – so the parent moves away from the internal preoccupation and looks for clues. Early and intensive intervention is absolutely essential. It can make an enormous difference, not just in the first few years but long into later life. Dr Tim Goodacre is the craniofacial surgeon on the team. “Understanding the neural side relieves the pressure to operate. The surgery isn’t the thing. It’s about what’s going on in the parent / child interaction, and how can we change that. What do we see when we look at a child with a facial abnormality? Our innate response is to stare. Our learned response is to turn away. We are interested in how these responses interfere with the baby’s development and how families deal with them. These early experiences exert a huge influence over the bond between parent and child. We work closely with families on many levels, but ultimately it’s about helping the children to help themselves.”

I discovered that curating a show like WORDSTOCK requires a kind of pragmatic theatricality. Communication is all about conveying information but the way you tell it must be dramatic. People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. 26 is packed with extraordinary people who have broad terms of reference. Once the word was out, offers to facilitate events poured in and the WORDSTOCK programme began to firm up: A writing workshop exploring the crossover between words and music; A discussion around linguistic analysis, metaphor and brands; Two best selling authors on the dynamics of agents, editors and publishing; A group therapy session for timorous Tweeters; The launch of a new 26 project inspired by litter; A case study of 26 Flavours – a Cornish festival of food and language; Advice on how to keep the inspiration bubbling faced with looming deadlines; A smorgasbord of activities investigating music festival nomenclature, song lyrics and memories provoked by golden oldies; A performance around verbal seduction and how to make yourself a more attractive proposition to potential partners – business and pleasure.

Come the big day, the halls were decked with weeping willows, mountain ash, ivy clad pergolas and autumn leaves. I have never experienced such drive from a group of people so determined to make something extraordinary happen. I’m increasingly convinced that authentic change is not achieved by grandiose schemes, but by incremental interventions that gather momentum through sticky enthusiasm: Conjure up a loose framework that bristles with opportunities, stand back and watch the sparks.

So here are my 12 Top Tips for designing and running a fruitful festival.

1. CONSTRUCT & DECONSTRUCT. Create an ambience of heightened awareness around a fixed timetable allowing plenty of room for idiosyncrasy.

2. FOCUS & CONTEXTUALISE. Create themed centres of attention with a few signature landmarks, and set the scene with inveigling temptations.

3. INVITE & ENGAGE. Begin with a chaotic icebreaker that inspires participants make their own marks and establish terr

4. FASCINATE & PROVOKE. Provide concurrent choices of speakers and events offering challenging content and thoughtful interaction.

5. STROKE & EVOKE. Provide counterintuitive encounters that inspire people to turn abstract meanderings into tangible experiences.

7. REFLECT & ABSORB. Give participants the time and space to explore themselves and bring back even richer gifts back to the table

8. OUT & ABOUT. Break the day with a blast of fresh air and an ambulatory workshop to trigger pollination and serendipity.

9. IMAGINE & INTUIT. Draw upon rich veins of subliminal memories and amplify them in Technicolor.

10. HARMONISE & BOND: Create magnetic attractions that dissolve inhibitions.

11. LIBERATE & ANIMATE. Peel away years of socialisation and encourage all that visceral stuff to emerge.

12. ASSERT & EXPRESS. Fuse the new empowerments into triumphant expressions of lusty joy.

Tom

Lise’s assignment took her back to Afghanistan for first time since the 1970s – before the Russians invaded. In those days to most westerners Afghanistan was a destination on the hippy trail. Afghan coats were bohemian chic in the Kings Road Chelsea, and Afghan Gold was the caviar of cannabis resin. Despite Britain’s commitment to establish democracy in Afghanistan through Operation Enduring Freedom (10^th anniversary this year, over 400 service personnel killed, £18 billion spent), most of us know precious little about one of the most fought over countries in the world. Human communities were being formed here 50,000 years ago and sophisticated urban cultures were well established by 3000 BC. This unforgiving territory has been subjugated by the Grec-Bactrians, Kushans, Indo-Sassanids, Kabul Shahi, Saffaruds, Samanids, Ghaznavidfs, Ghurids, Kartis, Timurids, Muhagls, Hotakis and Durranis who used it as a strategic springboard. In the Victorian era, Afghanistan became a buffer zone for the British Empire to prevent Russia invading India (the jewel in the crown), and by the late 1800s much of it was carved up and ceded to the United Kingdom. Land locked by socially entrenched neighbours (Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China) and impeded by reactionary warlords who supply 92% of the world’s opiates, Afghanistan has been trapped in a schism of chaos ever since. The 10-year occupation of the Soviet Union left 600,000 dead and 6 million refugees fled abroad. To counteract Soviet incursions, the USA spent $40 billion recruiting, financing and arming Mujahideen fighters to form Islamic resistance groups and thus begat Al-Qaeda.

When the heart and soul of a country is so brutalised over so many generations is it any wonder that dysfunction and violence become endemic. How do its displaced and disorientated citizens sustain any sense of national identity? History is littered with the wreckage of predatory interventions where alien ideologies were forced on reluctant populations. However, intervention is not just about rolling tanks and ethnic cleansing. We are all complicit interveners in many foreign lands. By exploiting cheap labour, consuming finite resources, funding charities and NGOs, investing in commodities, cherry-picking essential workers and exporting divisive culture we exert sinuous influence. I write this shortly after the savage four-hour assault on the British Council in Kabul whose remit is to help Afghans learn English, acquire governance skills and build relationships with the outside world. 12 Afghan police officers, security guards, street cleaners and a special forces soldier from New Zealand were killed. On the face of it, the Taliban were fighting against British cultural imperialism but the motivation is far more convoluted according to the Guardian journalist Nushin Arbabzadah. In her article ‘Twisting tales behind Afghanistan’s British Council attack’ she reports that atrocities are frequently justified by byzantine claims and counter-claims that defy comprehension in this bewildering theatre of war. No one has any idea what is cause and what is effect. In a culture where corruption, nepotism, tribal loyalty and religious fanaticism influences every twitch of the body politic, where 15 year old suicide bombers are duped into sacrificing themselves for acts carried out by 12^th century Crusaders, and where every birth, death, thought and deed is predestined by Allah, common sense doesn’t stand a chance. But such is the glory of human nature, that even when mired in pathological depravity brave people do small things to keep hope alive. Here’s Lise’s article.

Afghanistan’s gentle fury

By Lise Thorsen

Movie star, director and model. Former Miss San Francisco. Leena Alam, 32 years old could have a carefree existence in the USA. Instead she has returned to her native Afghanistan to help her fellow sisters live a better life. She dominates the room the moment she enters and occupies the scene with sweetness and charisma. She is beautiful and she knows it. But she is also down to earth, dressed in a plain traditional Afghan dress without a scarf. Leena is a superstar in Afghanistan. She rebels on behalf of women and never wears a burka. This is an exceptional sight in Afghanistan, where women are obliged cover their heads and faces away from home. “I receive threats and yes, sometimes I am afraid. On one occasion I even had a phone call from a Member of Parliament complaining that I – being a role model – didn’t wear a scarf. But of course that’s precisely why I don’t do it. I have the opportunity of being a role model for young girls, and I want to show them that we need to make our own decisions. The girls here are commodities. They may be given away in marriage as early as nine years old. At first they are the property of their family, and then they become the property of their in-laws.” A recent inquiry by CARE, concluded that Afghanistan is the most problematic country to be a woman. According to a law passed two years ago, a man has the right to rape his wife, and a woman must obtain permission from her husband or father to work or receive education. Nine out of ten women have been exposed to violence in their own home. And it is still common practice that if a man kills another man, the family of the deceased can demand to have the sister of the killer handed over as revenge. Beating, abuse and death are the grim reality for most Afghan women and many are driven to suicide. “How do we move on? It is so hard to cut through. It’s so frustratingly difficult to get someone to listen. Only a small percentage of Afghan women know that birth control exists. So the majority have a lot of children and many mouths to feed in a poor country. That’s if they don’t die in childbirth.” Leena had a somewhat different youth to all this. Her family fled to the USA in 1989 and she grew up as an American teenager. After high school she began a career as a model and was elected Miss San Francisco. Then she developed her acting and directing, but in 2007 she returned to Afghanistan and decided to stay. “Older people are tired after many years of war. They just want food to eat and clothes to wear. They are exhausted. But the young are eager. They want to watch movies, the more colourful and grander the better, and they aspire to the Hollywood-films on Afghanistan’s countless TV channels.” Leena says that the girls in the theatre groups were not used to performing, to exposing themselves and stating opinions, so they had to be nursed. “We showed a great deal of consideration for the girls who participated. But it became a real success for them. They built self-confidence and learned how to express their feelings. I had a lot of hugs along the way. It will take generations before we get equal rights. If it ever happens. I am telling everyone that we must act NOW! Now that we have the whole world’s attention and goodwill. But not many people listen. And even less dare to do something about it.” Leena also experiences the pressures of tradition. She hasn’t married because she hasn’t met the right man. But even her own family – who are otherwise very liberal – have started asking when. “Maybe one day I will marry. But I will never give up my professional life. Never. And I keep telling the girls here, that there is no hurry to find a husband.” We say goodbye and agree to meet again on Facebook. With her long hair flowing in Kabul’s hot and dusty wind, she disappears behind the high wall and barbed-wire protecting her house.

If you go down to the Southbank today you’re in for a big surprise. The huge wedge of the embankment between Waterloo and Hungerford bridges has been transformed into a celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain and asks the question: Who does Britain think it is in 2011? The four-month summer fete is the vision of Jude Kelly (Artistic Director of the Southbank) who has done so much to integrate this jumble of cultural bunkers and open it up to the public.

I was commissioned to help the festival find its voice by Shân Maclennan (Creative Director, Learning and Participation) who coordinated and focused the designers, curators and consultants. The brief was to honour 1951 and explore contemporary British-ness through installations, environments and exhibitions. At first, no one was sure what role the words would play other than delivering a narrative. But as our understanding of the scope evolved, the language became a fundamental element.

The festival is loosely structured around four ‘LANDS’ borrowed from 1951: PEOPLE OF BRITAIN, POWER & PRODUCTION, THE LAND and SEASIDE. After meeting the other participants, I put together a presentation reflecting Jude’s thinking, Festival of Britain literature, documentaries and press reports. Then I added observations from British writers, artists and musicians on the struggle for creative identity (William Blake, Ray Davies, Tracy Emin, Tony Harrison, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Christopher Reid), and these perspectives began to suggest possible routes.

I proposed that we should use rhyme and rhythm, symbolism and allegory. The language should be evangelical, heroic, and encourage visitors to become part of the drama. We should echo the happenstance that occurs when millions of people converge on a public space, and we must amplify the creative spirit of the Southbank. These criteria triggered discussions around 21^st century vernacular. Could feral language such as texting and Tweeting, lyrics and slogans, sound bites and catch phrases help us reach audiences who never use the Southbank?

Festival of Britain 1951: The Way To Go Round

The 1951 festival recommended visitors follow a proscribed route – ‘The Way To Go Round’. But today’s Southbank is so porous on so many levels we decided the narrative should be deconstructed. It would run like a ribbon throughout the site, signalling the contents of each LAND and prompting visitors to tell us their own stories. I emailed batches of texts to the designers and they bubbled with responses for look and feel and substrates. We needed high visibility vertical beacons that would act as landmarks and carry the graphic identity, map and streams of information. But we also required lateral sequences of words to define and contain the Southbank canyons. Budgets were extremely tight so options were limited, but eventually we decided on zinc plated spiral tubes for the beacons, and printed fabric for the horizontal wraps.

To see the words writ large and knitted into the architectural infrastructure is thrilling, but the big buzz is watching people interact with them. In The Marketplace, lovers pose to be photographed by phrases that say something about them: BRAVE HEARTS / SERIOUS FUN / FIND YOURSELF. The behaviours of families on the Thames Beach are subtly influenced by messages tied to the railings: BUCKET AND SPADE / WISH YOU WERE HERE.

Words trigger emotional reactions

Groups of friends gazing out from the Riverside Terrace have no idea they are underlined by emotive phrases: MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN / ARE WE THERE YET? Picknickers sitting amid the flowering shrubs on the Container Staircase debate whether they have ANALOGUE OR DIGITAL personalities. Every visit reveals another performance. It’s a theatre of collisions. A word close by lines up with a word far away and they merge into an unholy alliance. It’s an encapsulation of the creative process: when ideas are let loose they develop a life of their own.

A theatre of collisions

Words had to travel beyond the Southbank site and sell tickets for Ray Davies’ MELTDOWN, Tracey Emin’s LOVE IS WHAT YOU WANT at the Hayward Gallery, Lang Lang’s piano workshops, and events from April to September.

Spreads from the Southbank monthly diary

The factual stuff can speak for itself, but the festival needed a linguistic framework to leave an indelible impression on websites and posters. It had to tickle people’s curiosity, and carry a wide range of emotive references. I played around with the FESTIVAL-OF-BRITAIN structure and found that using the ‘OF’ as the link, I could generate unlimited couplets that conjured up different aspects of British-ness and the exhilaration of creativity: HEARTS OF OAK. BAGS OF ENTHUSIASM. LEAPS OF IMAGINATION. LEG OF LAMB. FLURRY OF KISSES. LOADS OF MONEY. TEARS OF JOY. ALL OF YOU. LOTS OF LOVE. CUP OF TEA. Accessible ideas with strong rationales allow other contributors to express themselves, and Southbank staff dreamed up wonderful variations for different communications. The solution was not to create rigid language guidelines that had to be complied with, but a series of springboards everyone else could leap off.

Words provoke curiosity: Buds of May - RIP

The stream of consciousness below is one of many texts that emerged from countless conversations, and helped us all articulate the festival content.

PROPAGANDA OF THE IMAGINATION

The Festival of Britain emerged from the ashes of a tempest. World War 2 had blown everything apart; physically and psychologically, emotionally and sensually. But despite the sorrow and trauma, the people of Britain found the strength to envisage a future where freedom of expression, free healthcare and education would be an inalienable human right. The jamboree was dreamed up by the Labour government, hungry for a cultural awakening. It was to acknowledge Britain’s contribution to the arts, sciences and technology. After so much suffering, the British needed a party and they declared it ‘A Tonic To The Nation’. Bright young things demobbed from the services were hired to design the future on a bombed out bend of the River Thames. Its mission was to reach out to the shiny shopping precincts, frothy-coffee bars, community centres and model council estates of the burgeoning welfare state.

Throughout the summer of 1951, eight million people clicked through the Southbank turnstiles. Millions more experienced local events across Britain. Four Festival of Britain Routemaster buses kitted out with displays and information desks toured Scandinavia and Europe. The festival ship – HMS Campania – chugged around the coast visiting Southampton, Dundee, Newcastle, Plymouth, Cardiff, Belfast, Birkenhead and Glasgow. The idea that humanity could unite for good – as opposed to ill – was a cause for rejoicing. This was such a huge shift of emphasis – from the aggressive masculinity of war towards warmth, playfulness and inclusiveness – the organisers dubbed it ‘Propaganda of the Imagination’.

Explaining the educational choices of the Welfare State

The Festival of Britain opened to storm of media hyperbole. It was a “flight of surrealist fantasy and a mirage of hope”. All 22 acres bristled with “zig-zag patterns, jazzy murals, café society and foreign food in exotic restaurants”. You could “dance through hanging gardens to salsa combos in the shade of the Dome of Discovery”. The illustrator Beresford Egan hated it:

“Husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and lovers were still being slaughtered in Korea which struck a discordant note in the symphony of jubilation. It must have been enormous fun wasting money on ineffectual frivolity. It suggested a skeleton wrapped in a Joseph coat of many colours, banging a tamborine with Salvation Army zeal.”

Dylan Thomas recorded his impressions in Quite Early One Morning:

“Here they will find no braying pageantry, no taxidermal museum of Culture, no cold and echoing inhuman hygienic barracks of technical information, no shoddily cajoling emporium of tasteless Empire wares, but something very odd indeed, magical and parochial: a parish pump made from flying glass and thistledown gauze-thin steel, a roly-poly pudding full of luminous, melodious bells, wheels, coils, engines and organs, alembics and jorums in a palace of thunderland sizzling with scientific witches’ brews, a place of trains, bones, planes, sheep, shapes, snipe, mobiles, marbles, brass bands, and cheese.”

The festival dazzled the populace steeped in rationed clothing, brown paint, fuzzy grey television and black & white movies. The installations were bursting with novel applications for light, glass, water, metals and plastics. Synthetic colours pierced the gloom of pea-souper London bringing puce pyjamas, day-glo laminates, purple loafers, saffron nylons, peroxide bee-hives and sky blue pink wallpaper.

60 years on, and the Southbank believes that the imagination is a powerful driver for building the future. Out of the rubble of memories, it has proved that art is a safe place to talk about dangerous things. Our 2011 festival is an opportunity to ponder what the next epoch might look like. If we had to fight for something about our culture – what would it be? The enduring symbol of the Festival of Britain is The Skylon, and this quote from 1951 says that no matter how much you talk about the purpose of art and culture, there is something beyond the idea of words; beyond anything practical: That by understanding what something isn’t…we discover what it is.

‘The Skylon has no purpose. It’s not functional in any way. It does not light the Festival, it burns with its own inner light. It’s not even a phallic symbol. Or a totem pole. It has no social significance. It does not stand for democracy, or future happiness. It does not stand at all. It could stand on the ground but it doesn’t.”

By understanding what something isn't, we can discover what it is

People of Britain

Riverside Terrace by the Queen Elizabeth Hall

We want this 2011 festival to become a hall of mirrors through which we can look at ourselves and each other. The arts speak a universal language that encourages people to cross cultural divides. When we are moved by a creative experience, it becomes a part of us and we pass that heightened awareness onto others.

The pavilion that portrayed British-ness in 1951 was called The Lion and The Unicorn. The lion symbolised bravery, the unicorn represented imagination, and

together they embodied liberty. Of course the lion is not indigenous to Britain and the unicorn never existed, but that was the whole point. Great Britain is a myth. Our hybrid identity has always been a hotchpotch of fairytales and contradictions. My red, white and blue blooded, Union Jack toting, Eastenders addicted, Arsenal devoted neighbours originate from Vietnam, Iraq, Chechnya, Serbia, China, Turkey, Somalia and the Caribbean. The British Museum is a cornucopia of stolen goods. Our Royal Family is a smörgåsbord of mongrels. British Airways, British Gas and British Telecom are owned by multinational pension funds.

English is a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up wonder

The English language is a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up wonder and the great leveller we all have in common. It’s a rogue virus that morphs into esoteric strains and thrives on idiosyncrasy, slang, tribalism and humour. We bend it, warp it, stretch it, mash it and stick our fingers up at it. But because of this it can condense lofty concepts into spiky axioms. Take these terms of endearment we use to describe each other: champagne socialists, feckless misanthropes, cowardy custards, chinless wonders, suburban guerrillas, stuffed shirts, love rats, moaning minnies and national treasures. Simply colliding two elemental words can unleash an explosion of expression.

The Land

Royal Wedding diaspora

For many city dwellers rural Britain is a theme park. Sunday drivers clog country lanes hankering after the perfect cream tea in the quintessential gingerbread cottage. Highways Agency road signs point us towards Health & Safety approved beauty spots where we devour Excalibur Cornish Pasties washed down with Old Speckled Hen. But back home in our semi-detached realities we feel mildly cheated, so slump in front of celebrity hosted nature programmes and get goose bumps over CCTV footage of gambolling badger cubs, oblivious to the urban foxes rooting through our dustbins.

New kid on the block

The snow flecked peaks and dappled dales on our kitchen calendars were never begat by Mother Nature. They have been manufactured over centuries by vested interests. Nothing is natural. The British rural landscape is as much a construct as Blake’s Satanic Mills. The shimmering copse where the cuckoo sucks was formed by an iron age smelting plant. The blasted heath where fallow deer frolic was once an oak forest that built the fleet that defeated the Armada. The quaint parish churches were instruments of repression. The Lords of the Manor were despots. The women and children were serfs. The young men were cannon fodder. Beneath the joyful harvest festivals and blithe spirits rumbled bitterly contested territories.

Everything worth something has to be defended

But the ploughing, tilling, furrowing and reaping invested our rural communities with an entrenched authenticity. Extended families survived poverty and famine through mutual support. These rooted places came to represent the cycle of life according to the seasons and the geological particularity. The customs and indigenous knowledge sprang from a direct response to the land. Animal husbandry, crop rotation and woodland management were passed down the generations; the lay of a dry stone wall indicates the characteristics of the mason – as well as the rock below. Everything worth something has to be defended. Traditions kept alive. Folk songs sung. Rights of way campaigned for. It’s up to us to decide what we want our children to inherit.

Power & Production

WW2 triggered an orgy of industry bent on destruction. The Festival of Britain demonstrated what the new production methods and materials could create. The welfare state directed massive investment into schools, hospitals and public housing. Peacetime invention went into overdrive, and designers, engineers and architects competed to build the brave new world.

Despite the horrors of Hiroshima, nuclear fission became a symbol of hope. Atomic motifs appeared on tea towels, curtains, coffee tables and lampshades. This Promethean method of generating energy promised clean and affordable power. But 25 years after Chernobyl, we are still in denial about the safety, cost and disposal of nuclear waste. Climate change is happening but still divides opinion. Industry is reluctant to act because reducing energy consumption to cut carbon emissions threatens profits. The power hungry countries of the BRIC economies feel that NOW their time has come. But we have to start working with the planet – not against it. Sustainable power and production does not have to be a ball and chain. Gobal energy consumption of fossil fuels could be cut by 75% without any loss of productivity or mobility if used more intelligently. Equatorial countries investing in extensive solar farms will become major power suppliers.

The white heat of technology

Over the last half-century, advances in technology, software and logistics have changed the way we produce. In the 1950s, just down the River Thames at Ford’s Dagenham plant virtually all the components for every Zephyr and Zodiac were made in-house. In 2011 a car is conceived and designed in Britain but the parts are fabricated in Taiwan, Korea, India and Brazil, then aggregated in China for assembly. Superstores like ASDA use containers as warehousing and have more muscle than manufacturers. Just-in-time-production enables companies to minimise costs by following the skill base. Container ships come to the UK bulging with cargo and leave full of fresh air.

The idea of ascension has always been at the heart of power and production – from raising standards of living to exploring space. The dizzying potential for power and production is so beyond our comprehension, it dangles the possibility that nothing is impossible.

Seaside

Are we there yet? Well we all like to be beside the seaside, but why? Escapism? Regression? The Big Blue Yonder? A rogue gene kicks in. Alter egos go bonkers. Sod the daily slog. Swap sensible for silly. Wrestling billowing windbreaks we morph into suburban Bedouins. Or snug as bugs in beach huts we snooze on wheezing Li-Los, our names spliced together in salty bliss: Will & Kate’s Love Nest. Pete n’ Jordan’s Shag Shack. Chez Nick & Dave.

But the seaside is not just KISS ME KWIK and candyfloss. Our ports once fuelled the British economy. In 1951, 70,000 registered dockers handled millions of tonnes of freight. Cruise liners, destroyers and aircraft carriers slid down the slipways of Tyne, Wear, Tees, Mersey, Forth and Belfast. Fleets of trawlers regurgitated mountains of fish for the metropolitan markets. The working classes boarded trains and flocked to the seaside during factory fortnight. But now the cash cows are the giant sea container-dromes, the nuclear power plants, and refineries converting oil into petrochemical miracles.

Vikings, Saxons, Romans, Normans, Frenchies and Spaniards couldn’t keep their hands off our coast. You can still see the Martello Towers that put the wind up Napoleon staring across the Channel. When the Nazi war machine licked its lips in the Pas de Calais, our beaches were blockaded with pill boxes and anti-tank spikes. Our resorts were press-ganged into the Defence of the Realm. Elegant hotels that hosted palm court tea dances became frontline hospitals putting soldiers back together. Even the saucy seaside postcard was recruited. But instead of wenches blushing at embarrassing bulges came steamy temptresses carrying the warning: Keep Mum She’s Not So Dumb – Careless Talk Costs Lives.

Our seasides are also places of solace and contemplation. We come to find and lose ourselves. Dunes and shingle bristle with lovage, santolina, hore hound and spiky marram grass. Every salt marsh bred seafaring folk who made ends meet through oyster rearing, winkle picking and samphire harvesting. Their descendents are the arcade proprietors, mobile home operators and B&B owners struggling to stay afloat. Paradise & chips. Utopia on toast. Shangri-La in a basket.

The Festival of Britain ran for five months. It was loved by most, loathed by a few. It was lambasted for squandering public money and diverting precious resources when Britain was crippled with post-war debt. After winning the 1952 election, the new Conservative government sent in the bulldozers. The Skylon – which represented everything Churchill despised – was hung, drawn and quartered, and dispatched to the corners of the earth. But the festival gave licence to an iconoclastic generation who changed the face of fashion, music, dance, poetry, painting, performance, sculpture, architecture, theatre, film, writing, graphics and product design in the 1960s.

And that energy still burns bright in the Southbank today. One of the biggest problems I have as a freelance consultant is persuading clients to be more courageous; to do what they dare not do. When clients reject the generic and take enlightened risks, the branding, campaign or identity still sparkles years down the line. Everyone I met at Southbank seemed to be driven by a fearless sense of collective creativity. There were no egos quashing rival initiatives or insecurities determining the outcome. Everyone just gave for the good the whole and the effortless integrity shines through.

Big thanks to Jude Kelly, Shân Maclennan, Alan Bishop, Steve Smith, Jon Norton, Colette Bailey, Clare Cumberlidge, Michael Marriott, Andrew Lock, Miranda Melville, Laura Pace, Natalie Highwood, Richard Parry, Roger Nelson, Cathy Mager, Laura Hough, Deborah Moreton, Susie Hopkinson, Bea Colley and Rachel Harris.

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/

Tom

So many different protest groups, so many different messages. By the time we had sat through a few speeches in the park it felt more like the search for an alternative rather than a coalescing of dissenters. Just one orator, speaking at a side event, managed to bring thoughts back to more fundamental questions – what power do opposition groups have, what can be done to make that power tell, and what next? He suggested that those unions and others who wanted to make a difference should go forward with a 24-hour General Strike, and that was probably the most powerful moment of communication: a call to unite on something tangible and weighty. It reminded me of a huge banner in Trafalgar Square – ‘Strike Like An Egyptian’.

Across town, masked anarchists were attacking banks and tea shops, an exercise in instant impact without long-term political consequences. Of course, stick-wielding youths with spray cans gave many in the media the content they were hoping for. Much better to paint a simplistic picture of angry young people breaking up property than discuss deeper issues about power and politics. The idea of TINA – There is No Alternative to market capitalism – is a corrosive rut that keeps many people from thinking things can or will ever be different. But as one elegant Trades Union banner reminded us: ‘Another World is Possible’. The festival of different perspectives that was March 26th has added a spring to the step of dissent, but it also showed how difficult it is to create momentum behind a true alternative. The next few weeks will be fascinating.

Tim

Trust Me I’m a Doctor

“Holloway Prison became a place of horror and torment. Sickening scenes of violence took place almost every hour of the day, as doctors went from cell to cell performing their hideous office.”

In 1974, Michael Gaughan died in Parkhurst Prison after 64 days on hunger strike. He was one of many IRA volunteers in British jails demanding political status and repatriation. The pathologist who performed the autopsy declared pneumonia to be the cause of death, but Gaughan’s family claimed the fatal wounding occurred when doctors punctured his lung with a feeding tube. Gaughan’s death triggered contentious debate about the ethics of interrogation; that some forms of medical assistance could be seen as collusion, or even assault if applied against the patient’s will. The US Army force-feeds inmates in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and displays photographs of the ergonomically designed chairs with straps and restraints on the Defense Department website.

Torturers don’t want to kill their victims; they want to infantilise them. They use fear to control them and destroy their autonomy, and the methods get ever more sophisticated: enforced nakedness incapacitates, helplessness increases dependency, induced incontinence crushes self-esteem, drug regimes loosen tongues, mind games bewilder, darkness disorientates, sexual degradation humiliates, threats against families terrorise, de-humanisation scars people for life.

The CIA Interrogation Manuals produced in the 1960s and 70s became the benchmark for aspiring torturers around the world. A sophisticated understanding of physiology and psychology is a distinct advantage when trying to break someone. The manuals bask in zen-speak that fetishises the perversity of torture; that nothing is what it seems; that torturer and victim build an interdependent bond; that the threat of the next torture session can be more terrifying than any inflicted violence. Forcing a person into excruciating contortions for hours on end can deliver remarkable psychological insights:

‘The pain which is inflicted upon the detainee from outside of himself may actually intensify his will to resist. But the pain which he feels he inflicts upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance.’

Gourevitch & Morris’s book ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ paints a lurid picture of rudderless US military police in Abu Ghraib prison. These innocents abroad were overwhelmed by the pressures of guarding hundreds of Iraqi detainees in squalid conditions under daily mortar bombardment from passing insurgents. Most of the internees were innocent bystanders swept up in mass arrests, and many of the worst tortured were mistaken for other people. The top US brass abrogated responsibility for the prison and the catastrophic breakdown in discipline hemorrhaged in the snap-shots of physical, psychological and sexual abuse that swarmed around the internet. Medical orderlies patched torture victims up for the next session, and attached intravenous drips to bodies of prisoners who had been beaten to death to imply they died of medical complications. At one point the dysfunction becomes so chronic, a hysterical doctor sticks a loaded revolver in the mouth of a prisoner who he accuses of ‘malingering’, only later to discover he is suffering from terminal cancer. Occasional inspections of Abu Ghraib by US generals were a charade. The military police simply put on a ‘dog & pony show’. All privileges (mattresses, clothes, showers) were restored…and then withdrawn once the VIP entourage had moved on. A Red Cross delegation observed that conditions on the maximum security block for high-value prisoners constituted ‘ …gross and systemic violations of the Geneva Conventions tantamount to torture’. But Red Cross reports are bound by confidentiality and can only be issued to the authority under investigation, so even this health care driven organization failed the detainees. Prisoners continued to be denied sleep, chained in stress positions and isolated in blacked-out cells. Most were incoherent and many became suicidal due to extreme psychological trauma.

And who is to say that faced with the invasion of our country, or the rages of a volatile dictator, or the excesses of a corrupt police force, or to save our family from persecution…we might not do the same? In conjunction with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for war crimes, the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram designed an experiment to investigate whether Nazis involved in the Holocaust shared a mutual sense of morality. To explore levels of obedience to authority figures, volunteer ‘teachers’ were easily persuaded to abandon their humanity and give ‘electric shocks’ to volunteer ‘learners’ to make them obey instructions.

Torture does not just happen in the torture chamber. Three million girls between four and ten years old undergo genital mutilation across Africa, the Middle East and Asia every year. The cutting is done with knives, scissors, scalpels, pieces of glass and razor blades by tribal elders, midwives and doctors who seldom use anesthetics and antiseptics. The long-term implications include damage to the reproductive organs, complications in childbirth and psycho-sexual trauma. Children are easy prey to torturers who are respected member of communities and use their status to abuse their ‘duty of care’. Torture is rife in enclosed societies, and educational, religious and welfare institutions close ranks to protect their own. Throughout the 1970s, adolescent patients at the Lake Alice Hospital in New Zealand were routinely punished for ‘misbehaving’ with electroconvulsive therapy and chemical sedation. In 2010 a grand jury indicted a Delaware paediatrician with 471 counts of sexual abuse against 103 children. Parents who made their suspicions known to the local medical council were disregarded because he was such a charismatic consultant. One of the most difficult issues for people abused by authority figures is the betrayal of trust. The trauma for children – and subsequently adults – results in a wide range of mental health issues including depression, substance abuse, self-harming and eating disorders. Torturers control their victims with a cocktail of dependency and rejection, reward and punishment. Abused people live in fear that it will happen again – the knock on the door, the chance meeting in the street – and that they will become abusers too. Cruelty is a symptom of the breakdown in relationships – in families, communities and countries. Many vulnerable people in care homes for the elderly are abused by inadequately trained, overworked, poorly paid staff who are vilified by the media but labour under immense pressures in chronically under-resourced circumstances.

Democracies that sign conventions against torture subcontract their dirty work to countries happy to oblige for favours and rewards. The Blair administration flatly denied knowledge of Binyam Mohamed’s extraordinary rendition to be tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan. After his arrest by the CIA in Pakistan, Binyam maintains that he was flown to Rabat for 18 months and subjected to regular beatings by Moroccan interrogators who asked questions on behalf of the British government. At one of many sessions, a guard sliced Binyam’s genitals with a scalpel, and suggested that cutting off his penis would prevent him breeding any more terrorists. Binyam recorded in his diary that doctors were on hand to check he was okay:

“Doctor No 1 carried a briefcase. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? But I’m going to say a prayer for you.’ Doctor No 2 gave me an Alka-Seltzer for the pain and asked how it happened. I told him. He looked at my penis as if I was just another patient. ‘Put this cream on it two times a day. Morning and night.’”

In 2009, almost seven years after Binyam’s arrest, the Americans dropped all charges and he returned to the UK. In 2010, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that he had been subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities, and ordered the British government to reveal details of MI5 complicity.

In 2010 the Nobel Prize winning watchdog, Physicians for Human Rights published a white paper entitled ‘Experiments in Torture’ charting the involvement of medical personnel in the ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques of the Bush administration; the euphemism for its post-911 torture programme. Employees of the CIA Office of Medical Services were directed to monitor interrogations of detainees being held in Iraq and collate data that could improve the efficiency and efficacy of information gathering. They studied waterboarding sessions and the susceptibility of subjects to severe pain and the effects of sleep deprivation. In this excerpt from the CIA guidelines on waterboarding, medical personnel are explicitly directed to record:

‘…how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was applied (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.’

Thanks to their expert recommendations, potable saline solution is now used instead of tap water because it reduces the risk of contracting pneumonia or hyponatremia, which can lead to brain edema, coma and death. A specially designed gurney enables rapid upright movement of a detainee in case of choking, and a blood oximeter measures vital signs of life. Prior to interrogation, detainees are placed on a liquid diet to soften their vomit, thus reducing the possibility of asphyxiation. A tracheotomy kit is always available in case an airway has to be surgically opened to prevent drowning. One CIA detainee – Khalid Sheik Mohammed – was waterboarded at least 183 times. Sometimes doctors are not directly involved in abuse but turn a blind eye or provide administrative smoke screens. In 2010, nine senior Turkish police officials were convicted of beating a human rights activist to death, and the prison doctor was prosecuted for falsifying medical reports. While we were filming Trust Me I’m A Doctor, a Saudi judge was shopping around for surgeons willing to sever the spinal cord of a prisoner convicted of paralyzing a man in a brawl.

Victims of extreme torture become convinced that their body has betrayed them, and encouraging them to take possession of themselves again is central to recovery. Ironically, our therapists at the Helen Bamber Foundation ask the same questions as the interrogators: “How are you feeling today? Is there something you’d like to tell me?” They have to ‘deconstruct the bad doctor’ and ‘reconstruct the good doctor’, and create a place of safety before survivors will even begin to trust them.

Big thanks to an amazing team who worked on this project with me, and to Radley Yeldar for their unflinching support. You can see the full credits at the end of the video.

Tom

It doesn’t help that the writing is so confused: ‘Dole Model: Protect your family’ has no clear connection to the rest of the mockvert. I suppose ‘Hair from India’ is a reference to Cheryl’s alleged use of ‘organic’ hair extensions, and I assume ‘auto tune’ is referring to a piece of paraphernalia from a recording studio rather than something you might find in one of the many garages off the Bethnal Green Road. Fair enough, but the line ‘publicity by Satan’ is a lame dig at Simon Cowell. He deserves better.

Perhaps the worst bit is the failure to develop the overall theme of ‘Real’. The ‘Noreal Parts’ headline might have been the start of something powerful, but the idea is lost along the way. By the sign-off it has become ‘Because you’re worth it. Real’. So what’s the message? What’s the purpose? Is this the most profound thing the artist has to say about atomisation and vacuous celebrity/consumer branding?

The best anti-marketing posters you see around these parts rework the language of advertising in such a skilful way that it accentuates the power of their parody. This artist has produced something with no message, little wit and simply awful typography. What’s the point – we already have plenty of ad agencies who can do that.

Tim

PS The artist behind this work, Dr D, has done some other pieces that are more interesting, particularly some political work that uses the Foundry in Old Street as a backdrop: www.drd.nu/

I have to admit, my next observation was both pedantic and, as it turned out, wrong. I thought they’d made a simple mistake in representing ninety-nine percent as a fraction. In other words, 9/9 = 100%, so why are they using 9/9 to represent 99%?

99% Campaign logo by Harry Barlow

I mulled  for a few seconds, and then it struck me that the designer had got it dead right, and had in fact managed to create a brilliant and meaningful level of compressed double meaning. While the 9/9 shouts out 99, seen as a fraction it points to the 1% who have been involved in serious youth violence. Working with that one is an important part of what the campaign does, along with telling people about the many. And the ultimate goal of the campaign is to end violence, so we all become one. Or as they capture it on their website:

‘Help us tell the story of the 99% who are not involved in committing Serious Youth Violence and show how the 1% can also be challenged and changed to be positive members of their communities.’

It’s very difficult to get a logo to start telling the story of a brand or campaign, but I think the people behind this communication have cracked it. I’ve looked at the 99% Campaign website in some detail and it continues the narrative in a clear and interesting way, making good use of Local Government Association (*), Metropolitan Police (**) and Greater London Authority (***) figures:

‘ “There is a tendency for the public to overestimate the scale of youth crime, the numbers of young offenders, the proportion of overall crimes committed by young people, and the seriousness (especially in terms of violence) of youth crime”*

In London, the total number of people under 20 accused of Serious Youth Violence in 2009 was 1336**. The under 20 London population in 2009 was 1, 868 457***, this means an actual percentage of 0.07%.’

So the 99% name is a memorable counterblast to contemporary scaremongering and crippling community anxiety around young people. Of course serious crime and anti-social behaviour happen in London, but too often members of the public and journalists lump all young people into the mad, bad and dangerous to encounter category. You could even read the / of the logo as suggesting a big, bold barrier between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

Having said that, it’s difficult to see which individuals or organisations are behind this campaign – a failing of ‘transparency’, in modern-speak. My guess is that it’s a friendly front for a coalition of public agencies. The term ‘challenged and changed’ sounds civil service-slick, for example. Indeed, much of the vocabulary in the website body copy is too smoothly correct in theory and tone to have come from a group of young people or concerned citizens, unless they’re doing a good job of impersonating public sector jargon (which is possible). Here’s an example:

‘The ‘We back the 99 per cent’ Pledge initiative aims to bring together organisations and groups to celebrate the 99 per cent of young people who are making a real and positive contribution to London and its diverse communities.’

99% Campaign website

‘Celebrate’; ‘initiative’; ‘positive contribution’; ‘diverse communities’; it’s soft, contemporary bureaucrat-speak. The giveaway is ‘real’, the use of which speaks volumes about a separation between writer and subject. Copywriters reach for ‘real’ when they’ve failed to penetrate to the specific quality of something. But such a ‘real’ lacks substance because it has nothing to push against. What would an ‘unreal’ contribution be like?

Of course, there really are lots of questions that need to be answered as the campaign unfolds into action. Exactly how will young offenders be challenged and changed, for example? What’s going to be different? Are there practical resources being put in place to support this work? How will the politics of austerity affect youth violence? Can the justice system be improved to help disrupt the cyclical process of marginalisation, crime, imprisonment and marginalisation? Why does marginalisation happen at all, and what can we do about it?

Putting concerns around politics, methods and vocabulary aside for one moment, the campaign seems sound, with a clear rationale and an optimistic agenda. While most government and quango-led campaigns try to scare us into adjusting our thinking and behaviour, with a nudge-nudge here and a heavy shove there, The 99% Campaign is attempting to counterbalance fear and loathing. Good idea, good design, good website; I hope the methods employed to address the issues match the sophistication of the logo.

Tim

PS While we’re talking crime, I can’t resist adding this snap, taken today. Looks like police have got to the bottom of this matter: