I noted this report in the Guardian this morning:
Advertising giant WPP has unveiled a £2bn savings plan to shore up its balance sheet in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
WPP is the world's second-largest advertising company, with more than 107,000 staff around the world. It said it was implementing the measures after revenues in China slumped by 23% in the first two months this year.
Advertising is, of course, the only industry dedicated to the promotion of unhappiness, discontent, and ill-feeling. Its activities are premised on the creation of a sense of inadequacy. Unsurprisingly as a consequence I am not too troubled by a downturn in its fortunes at present.
I cannot help wondering, however, about what all those advertising executives might be doing right now. The suspicion that they might be working hard with their clients to justify the bailouts that they will receive, and to fight back against any potential conditions that might be attached to them is very strong.
Corporations around the world know that they are the subject of considerable disquiet right now. The reasonable question as to why they were so ill-equipped to face a downturn in trade will be asked, and they have no answers, barring the stripping of their balance sheets of every penny of worth that they could find within them for the sake of supposed shareholder reward, which is something they are hardly going to admit to. In that case the corporate PR machines are going to be going flat out sometime very soon, seeking to tilt the post-coronavirus consensus in their favour. We all need to be aware of it.
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I’ll repeat my long standing position on advertising expenses:
Advertising spending should not be tax deductible as a trading cost above a fixed maximum amount.
——
This does not mean that companies couldn’t spend more than that – but it would be part of their taxable profit!
It does mean that all small companies, self employed and traders would not be affected.
But endless mindless advertising for gambling, cars ,holidays and dumb entertainment and other such propaganda, would soon reduce to sensible levels.
And the likes of WPP and their ilk (the odious Bell Pottinger) would not become so insanely rich from their mesmerism act.
I argued against tax dedutability in The Joy of Tax and The Courageous State
We need to build up the resolve of “never again” that Europeans expressed after the last war. That is the only valid comparison with, and lesson of, that era.
And it will be hard work.
For example in Ireland, Official Ireland and its media mouthpieces are ramping up the pressure on FF and FG who were rejected by over 60% of the voters in February’s election to form a coalition to secure a return to the status quo ante once this crisis subsides.
We must fight might and main against any return to BAU.
It’s certainly an intereting question. So far the public at large seems to have been prepared to accept things like risky supply chains, outsourced call centres and the like. I suspect that will be less tenable politically in future.
The question perhaps is what conditions can be put on the support and how to police it.
Duncan,
I suspect most folk are focused on just surviving on two fronts just now: avoiding catching the virus and making the money last. The real anger and difficult questions will/should/must arise once the crisis has passed. I won’t use the phrase “and we return to normality” as the post-crisis normal will be different from the previous normal.
If we are to learn anything from the crisis it must be that the virus didn’t cause the economic crisis on its own: the underlying political and economic weaknesses, which would have confronted us sooner or later, created a perfect storm when the virus struck. In an ideal post-virus world, all nations should address their societal, political and economic structures to ensure greater resilience, but, while it might happen in some more enlightened countries, I won’t hold my breath about radical change in the UK or USA, where wealth inequalities are so deeply embedded.
I have a nasty feeling that Johnson will emerge, Teflon-coated as ever, as “the PM who saw us through”. The whole sorry saga will be seen as
1 – “terrible thing that came out of the blue and attacked us all”
2 – We stood firm, and (eventually) did what the government told us what to do (eventually).
3 – Things went a bit pear-shaped, now and then, but hey you know what it was a crisis no one could have foreseen, and look at what happened in other places!
4 – And we came through it all, relatively unscathed.
Johnson wins, because he was in charge at the time, and the person speaking is still alive. Indeed most people are still alive.
Lies here and there? We have seen how these count at election time, apparently, in this country. They are discounted,
We are caught in the familiar bind. If we wish for the worst outcome we are truly brazenly immoral, putting political impact above human impact, and if we wish (and, in the case of NHS and other key workers, act) for the best outcome then we go along with Johnson suffering no political damage.
Leaving that conundrum to one side, it would have to be a truly terrible death toll for this not to end up as a plus for this government.
Discuss.
PS
One useful exercise might be to look at my chain of 1,2,3,4 above and see how each could be undermined in the public’s mind, starting now. At the end of the outbreak is too late, the narratives are being fashioned now. e.g. “We will test, we must test, more and quickly” (or words to that effect) Gove today = in x months time – “the government did all it could to roll out testing as fast as it possibly could” Etc.