Advertising’s false picture

An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an ‘imbalanced power dynamic’. The poster showed a white prison guard (or ‘screw’ as I believe they are known) and a black prisoner. The ASA concluded that the advert was ‘likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race, by reinforcing negative stereotypes about black men’. It would have been OK if the prisoner had been white. I am not sure what the views of the ASA would have been if both men had been black. The fact that both of the people in the ad were men also negatively reinforces a stereotype – that men tend to commit the most crime. This is the problem: men do commit the most crime, overwhelmingly so, but there is no political desire to hide that fact.

Of course, black men commit only a small minority of crime in the UK and are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime (almost half of Londoners stabbed to death are black). But the statistics put the black population of the UK at about 3.5 per cent, while the percentage of prisoners in English and Welsh jails who are black is just over 12 per cent. I’m sure this is solely the consequence of the institutional and structural racism we have in this country: some black people, driven to despair by the iniquities of life sometimes, understandably enough, resort to shooting or stabbing other black people. Perhaps one way out of this advertising conundrum is to show a black prisoner but to make it clear he is doing a three-year stretch for embezzlement, a white-collar and largely white crime. That would challenge the stereotype. You thought he was in for a spot of stabbing? Racist!

Stereotypes are very useful things. Psychologists will tell you that they are invaluable shortcuts which we use while navigating our way through life, enabling us to spare our brains lots of processing time. They are also broadly accurate or at least contain a modicum of truth. The problem we have at the moment is that in denying this modicum of truth we replace it with a vision of society which is wholly untrue. We lie to ourselves in order to perpetuate myths which are crucial to the liberal agenda.

Do you remember the BBC programme Crimewatch? Viewers of this show, presented for a long while by Nick Ross, were invited to help catch a whole bunch of crooks the police had failed to apprehend. Some of the crimes were mocked up on film, but there was also a rogues’ gallery each week of sullen miscreants we were enjoined to look out for.

In a blog for The Spectator 12 years ago, I wrote the following about this section of one edition I had seen: ‘Of the ten faces on this rogues’ gallery, accused largely of violent crimes, eight were non-white. It is the same every time this programme is broadcast, a deliberate attempt to suggest that non-white Britons are overwhelmingly more likely to commit crime than the whites. Clearly, this cannot be true. The real proportion of non-white rogues in the gallery should be about 10 per cent, i.e. equivalent to the population of non-white Britons. And yet week after week, it’s about 80 per cent instead. How can they get away with this? Who is editing Crimewatch these days, Nick Griffin, or Julius Streicher?’

I was being a little arch and tongue in cheek – but it did not surprise me enormously when the programme was taken off air, supposedly due to falling viewing figures (although that doesn’t bother the BBC unduly most of the time). Every month or so the general public saw a picture of who committed violent crime in this country, and this did not sit easily with the corporation, I suspect.

It is interesting to note that since then our attitudes towards immigration have changed markedly. According to the opinion polls, we have become much more kindly disposed towards taking people in and do not complain about any inconveniences occasioned by their arrival. Perhaps this is because we have become nicer, gentler people. Perhaps it is also because the ‘reinforcing of negative stereotypes’ or, as some might put it, ‘telling the truth’ has become something to be stamped out by the programme-makers, the opinion-formers, the ASA and so on.

Just for the record, in May this year the government produced a bunch of stats on arrests and ethnicity. White folk were arrested at the rate of nine per thousand, Pakistani people at the rate of 14 per thousand and black people at the rate of 29 per thousand. There was another category – ‘black other’ – who had an arrest rate of a hard-to-beat 61 per thousand. I’m not sure who they are, but they are clearly full of vim. If the prison service really wanted to challenge stereotypes, it should probably show individuals from ethnic groups who commit hardly any crime as prisoners in their posters – such as Indians (six arrests per 1,000) or Chinese (three).

It is not just crime where the imperative is to present a false picture of life in our country. You are no longer likely to see, in your television adverts, a woman holding a vacuum cleaner or a mop or shoving clothes into a washing machine and adding some unguent in order to make the clothes smell like a quiet walk in the forest, or something.

This is not because women do not do these things, it is because the Advertising Standards Authority would bash the advertisers over the head for reinforcing negative stereotypes: henceforth it is blokes who do all the cleaning. It is women who use power drills and play football. I’m sure there are some families where this division of labour pertains – but is it the majority, or anywhere near the majority? Is the official view of women who do vacuum the front room from time to time that they are throwback dupes to be excised from our world?