Letters | 19 April 2008

Ad libs

Sir: Rory Sutherland provides at least one reason why admen shouldn’t be allowed to run the show (‘Mad Men are taking over the world’, 12 April): they believe too strongly that all behaviour boils down to choice and not constraint. They work in contexts where the choices of people are flexible, trivial and differ little in terms of personal cost, such as buying a bag of oven chips. This is not the norm in policy questions. Most people cannot choose the time they go to work or drop their children off at school, so trying to persuade them to drive an hour later is rather naive. Economists are better at recognising that people make choices under constraints, so perhaps there is a role for them yet in policy-making.

Helen Jackson
Cambridge

Sir: Rory Sutherland recommends solving contemporary social problems by paying a few hundred thousand pounds to various ad agencies at regular intervals instead of spending vast amounts on personnel and infrastructure to actually do the job. He’s a bit late off the mark.

The Home Office long ago gave up on the notion of providing a police force that matched in any way the current volume of crime and petty disorder, the emergence of domestic terrorism, the decline in citizen participation in controlling bad behaviour in public places, and its own insatiable demands for statistics that devour police time with forms and with special departments to process them. Its Statutory Performance Indicators are heavily skewed in the direction of the public perception of the police, of confidence in the police, of satisfying the perceptions of minority groups of one kind or another, and of controlling the fear of crime, all to be monitored and processed at the expense of combating crime itself. ‘The percentage of police officer time spent on front-line duties’ gets a one-line mention and the actual number of constables no mention at all. Even the Home Office was a bit late in hitting upon this wonderful substitute for effective problem-solving in the public domain, though George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth was on to it 60 years ago.

Norman Dennis
Director of Community Studies, Civitas
London SW1

Sir: Rory Sutherland argues that the government should hand the task of changing unwholesome behaviour over to advertising agencies. Well he might; yet government efforts to change behaviour through communications are notoriously and predictably hopeless, right around the world. There are many reasons for this failure, but one alone can account for most of it: the well attested ‘boomerang effect’ — overt attempts to change us simply compound our existing behaviour.

Two respected advertising thinkers recently won a prize for an honest paper called ‘Fifty years of the wrong model’, prompting one big-spending client to ask if the advertisers could expect a refund. There are ways to change behaviour; but do the Mad Men know them?

John Bunyard
The Newcomen Group, London EC2 Nothing sacred

Sir: How depressing — an attempt by the BBC to give sacred choral music a significant airing on television, torn to shreds by one of the country’s leading choral directors (Arts, 12 April). What I found most intriguing was Peter Phillips’s proposition that ‘the ideal television history of classical music will be expensive, and it will have to include a lot of straight talking about technical musical matters’. ‘Ideal’ for whom, one wonders?

Sacred Music may not have had a lasting effect on Mr Phillips, but fortunately he does not speak for many other viewers who, in my experience at least, are very happy to see such a programme making an appearance at last — even with its flaws.

Tim Ranford
Oxford
Justice for Mosley

Sir: Taki is undoubtedly the master at throwing, metaphorically, one bone to a number of dogs and then seemingly unconcerned at the outcome, moving on. I refer to the little bone in his column about Sir Oswald Mosley, (High Life, 12 April). Mosley and his wife were of course interned, not imprisoned as he states — quite a difference. Then he adds ‘unfairly’. I lived through this time. The man was a distinct threat. A declared fascist in Nazi-style uniform, his wife’s sisters both friends of Adolf Hitler, conducting hostile demonstrations and up to the war staging a campaign of vilification and abuse aimed at the Jews. Even after the war he did not leave the scene, calling for an end to non-white immigration in 1959. I ‘tasted the bone’ Taki and didn’t like it. Internment was quite justified and in no way unfair.

Eric Watson
Via email

T5 fiasco

Sir: I read with disbelief the profile by Judi Bevan of BAA chairman Sir Nigel Rudd (‘Facing the flak at Terminal 5’, 12 April). How can he say of Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways, and I quote, that he has nothing but praise for him. ‘I really admired the way Willie took responsibility for the problems and showed true leadership.’

To lavish this kind of praise on someone who admits responsibility for the incompetent fiasco that was the opening of Terminal 5, the full effects of which are yet to be felt, shows a breathtaking naivety. Where does Sir Nigel think the buck really stops?

Alan Irvine
London NW8

Life as we know it

Sir: I read The Spectator from cover to cover and enjoy it very much. However, the only thing I identify with is the Low Life column. So what on earth are you doing sending Jeremy Clarke to Guyana? And now I read that he has a car with three lights in it and they all apparently work. This isn’t Low Life as I know it and my world is falling apart.

Olga Danes-Volkov
Via email