Pressure groups become a political force

Date: 11/06/1998

Industry lobbyists could take a leaf out of the public relations book of environmental bodies like Greenpeace and World-Wide Fund for Nature. Simon Coss reports

EMMA Bonino likes to be lobbied. The colourful European Commissioner for humanitarian aid, fisheries policy and consumer affairs says that, as far as she is concerned, the more people who express their opinions on European policy issues, the better any legislation which results is likely to be.

"I believe that where we are really in trouble is where people simply don't care about the institutions. Then a vacuum is created in which the dialectic doesn't work any more," she insisted at a conference on Pressure Politics held in Brussels last week.

The conference, organised by public relations group Entente International Communication in association with European Voice, brought together representatives from firms and lobby groups to discuss the emergence of pressure groups as a major political force in their own right, their impact on policy-making and how companies are responding to the challenge this presents.

As a former women's rights activist in her native Italy and a senior member of the Italian Radical Party, which has been campaigning for many years on controversial issues such as the decriminalisation of cannabis, Bonino is perhaps better placed than many of her Commission colleagues to comment on the effectiveness of 'pressure politics'.

"I'm a citizen. I've been part of many pressure groups," she explained. "I've lost my fights many, many, many times. I never give up, and some fights that we lost years ago are now on the top-priority agenda in the international field. So if there is something I would like to say to consumer groups or other pressure groups which feel weakened, it is simply 'don't give up'."

According to Bonino, the thousands of industrial lobby groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and public relations companies which have set up shop in Brussels with the express aim of influencing the way the Union's laws are made play a vital role in Europe's democratic process.

She argues that while, at the end of the day, it is the lawmakers who must actually take decisions, there can be no harm in presenting them with as many points of view on a given issue as possible.

"I think that politicians have an exact responsibility to make a choice at a certain point. We are not always perfect, far from that, and we can be mistaken. It is simply sometimes we don't like to say so," said the consumer affairs supremo.

But while Bonino openly supports the principle of enabling all those who could be affected by proposed new laws to put their points of view to the lawmakers, she stresses that 'openness' must cut both ways. Interest groups, NGOs or public relations experts which lobby the Commission should be honest and open about who their real paymasters are.

"My name is Emma Bonino, and I am the European Commissioner for fisheries, consumer affairs and humanitarian aid," she said. "I would expect others to say to me 'my name is such and such, I represent Greenpeace', etc, or 'my name is such and such and I represent such and such an industry'."

But this, argues the Commissioner, does not always happen. Referring to the recent controversy over whether to ban babies' toys made from soft polyvinyl chloride (PVC) because of unacceptably high levels of toxic substances known as pthlalates, Bonino said: "I discovered that the real problem was not the toy industry. It was the oil industry, and that was an enormous lobby, but it was not so transparent."

It is not just big business and the public relations community, however, which come in for criticism for being less than open about their motives.

Many in industry complain that NGOs and pressure groups often misrepresent issues in order to get a 'sexy' story into European newspapers. They accuse pressure groups of pandering to the media's appetite for sensationalism and hyping issues to capture the headlines.

Nowhere is this practice more apparent, they claim, than on the environmental issues.

Of all of the non-industry pressure groups operating in Brussels, the green lobby is probably one of the best organised.

Bodies such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World-Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) have managed to coordinate their activities in such a way that a journalist contacting one organisation will be referred to another if the issue in question is more within its area.

Whether this façade of cooperation works as well behind the scenes as it does in public is another issue but, on the face of it, the environmentalists appear able to avoid the sort of factional in-fighting which often cripples other sections of the NGO community.

Industry complains, however, that the green groups' smoothly functioning media machine sometimes pumps out misleading stories.

The most often cited example is the campaign by Greenpeace to stop the Shell oil company dumping its decommissioned Brent Spar drilling platform at sea.

After a concerted media campaign by environmentalists, the company was forced to get the structure dismantled onshore. However, subsequent evidence found that it would indeed probably have been more eco-friendly to sink the rig as originally planned.

Whether or not those targeted by such groups agree with their tactics, all concede that they have become highly influential. With the advent of new forms of cheap mass communication such as the Internet, that influence can only increase.

Whatever Shell felt about the Brent Spar episode at the time, it was embarrassed by the bad publicity it generated. This, along with another public relation disaster only a few months before - caused by the firm's apparent unwillingness to act to stop Nigeria's military dictatorship executing playwright and environmental campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa, who opposed its activities in Ogoniland - led to a radical rethink of its communications strategy.

Shell's website, launched in early 1996, actively encourages dialogue between the company and the public, and even provides hot lines to the sites of major environmental organisations.

"If it weren't for Brent Spar, I probably wouldn't have a job," said Shell's group Internet manager Simon May. "It made the company wake up to the Internet."

May added that the website was not targeted at the firm's competitors, but rather at winning the public relations war with the pressure groups.

"We are fighting for the attention of people who would otherwise be going to Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. We are not fighting for their money, but for their attention," he said.

A recent survey of more than 100 pressure groups by Entente confirmed that they tended to be very heavy users of the Internet as a way of appealing directly to the public, alongside their media campaigns.

A second survey examining the business community's attitude towards pressure groups found that, while many companies regarded them as one of the crucial factors in determining the business environment, many had failed to develop a well-thought-out strategy for countering their influence.

The report concluded that the challenge for industry in the future would be to accept that pressure groups were not going to go away and learn to work with them.

"Confrontation between companies and pressure groups persists despite the recognition that dialogue is preferable," it warned.

"Pressure groups have become a political force in their own right and are here to stay."

Major report on Entente International Communication/European Voice conference 'Pressure politics', June 1998.