Ideas for Britain

Hugh Salmon

Description

Recognised and respected throughout the advertising industry for blowing the whistle on fraud at a publicly quoted advertising agency of which he was managing director, Hugh Salmon's career was further affected by complications of a broken back caused by a rugby injury. He witnessed the suffering that disabled people are forced to endure and realised that the understanding of human behav-iour and the creative talent in advertising agencies could be applied to improving society as a whole - particularly the poor, the underprivileged and the disabled. After standing as an independent MP in the 2010 general election, Hugh's challenging observations on life and human behaviour featured in his blog 'A Different Hat' on the marketing website Brand Republic and Huffington Post. Ideas for Britain is a compilation of some of these blog posts from 2009-2015. From Theresa May's ignorance of the most basic law of advertising to a call for the role of government to be redefined in a changing world; from the simple belief that every child has a talent at something to innovative proposals for the education system; from the realities of living as a disabled person to a radical new future for the NHS (including a call to separate care from cure and the launch of a new National Care Service); from the failure of immigration policy to the underlying tensions of an increasingly divided society (since evidenced by the 2016 EU referendum), Ideas for Britain takes an adman's innate understanding of human behaviour and challenges the political classes to seek more creative solutions to the core issues facing Britain today.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 janvier 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785897870
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2016 Hugh Salmon

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


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ISBN 978 1785897 870

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd



T o the memory of my father


Contents
Introduction

1 ADVERTISING AND MARKETING MATTERS
1.1 How the UK Government ignored the most basic law of advertising
1.2 Branding: understanding the importance of trust
1.3 It may be right. It may be good. But is it interesting?
1.4 How an advertising agency could help defeat Islamic State

2 BRITAIN MATTERS
2.1 Catch-22 of a rotten political system
2.2 Do we face the apocalypse: or are we in it?
2.3 Olympic success defines a new Britain for the 21 st Century
2.4 Why the Scots would be mad to vote for independence (not that I care)
2.5 The London Airport non-decision fiasco

3 GOVERNMENT MATTERS
3.1 Convergence and Divergence
3.2 The Conservatives may be doing the right thing, but in the wrong way
3.3 ‘Role of Government’ in a capitalist society
3.4 Why don’t Labour launch an ‘Unemployed Union’ and a ‘Disabled Union’?

4 HEALTH MATTERS
4.1 NHS reform: can your doctor be trusted or not?
4.2 NHS – a ‘sick’ future
4.3 How the Banks can save the NHS
4.4 NHS – government engages with strategic marketing at last

5 HOW TO SOLVE THE NHS PROBLEM
5.1 Isolate ‘care’ from ‘cure’
5.2 Wholesale engagement with charity sector
5.3 Give is better than take
5.4 Everybody cares, every day

6 WELFARE MATTERS
6.1 Disability Living Allowance (DLA) disgrace
6.2 Employment Support Allowance (ESA) disgrace
6.3 Benefit cuts: a call to mobilise the disabled
6.4 A more creative approach to welfare reform could have saved lives

7 EDUCATION MATTERS
7.1 Education: every child has a talent at something
7.2 Tuition fees: evidence of an unkind system
7.3 How date of birth affects exam results
7.4 Why do schools (and Parliament) have such long holidays?

8 HOUSING MATTERS
8.1 How zero VAT on building trade would stimulate UK economy
8.2 Household energy: what gas and electricity suppliers must learn from the oil companies
8.3 Property values divide the nation

9 IMMIGRATION MATTERS
9.1 The lesson of the Hoover free flights fiasco
9.2 Cameron wrong even if he’s right (again)

10 MONEY MATTERS
10.1 Bankers’ bonuses need re-branding as dividends
10.2 A creative insight into the Banking crisis
10.3 A creative insight into the Euro crisis
10.4 National debt: who do we owe?

11 WORLD MATTERS
11.1 Man’s inhumanity to man
11.2 Gaddafi, Imran Khan and Behavioural Insights
11.3 David Cameron, Eton and George Orwell
11.4 Barack Obama makes Martin Luther King’s dream come true
11.5 When a human right is a human wrong
11.6 US Gun Laws: Could Twitter and Facebook be forces for good?

12 BUSINESS MATTERS
12.1 Why can’t companies have ‘social’ as well as ‘limited’ liability?
12.2 How a Formula One racing car designer could help repel the floods
12.3 The Post Office – putting things in boxes

13 RULE OF LAW MATTERS
13.1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
13.2 Security
13.3 Debt collection

14 MEDIA MATTERS
14.1 The perverse cult of celebrity
14.2 Gagging clauses: what every business must learn from the BBC
14.3 How the Beeb blew it
14.4 Open letter to Rupert Murdoch concerning The Times paywall
14.5 How creativity can save you money

15 SOCIAL MEDIA MATTERS
15.1 Twitter Wars
15.2 The spontaneity of Twitter
15.3 The evil of social media
15.4 Could Twitter be deliberately exploited to promote evil?
15.5 Beware, in this digital age, of the wrath of the people

16 SOCIAL MEDIA LEGACY 2010
16.1 Connectivity and Isolation
16.2 Privacy and Transparency
16.3 Work and Play

17 PARTY POLITICS MATTER (NOT)
17.1 Coalition Government? They’re all over the place!
17.2 ‘YES to AV’ Fiasco
17.3 Liberal Democrats a compromised brand
17.4 Labour a confused brand
17.5 Conservatives a careless brand
17.6 Can ‘conservative’ be ‘radical’
17.7 Tomorrow never comes (unless you’re Green)

18 POLITICIANS MATTER (NOT)
18.1 The curse of David Cameron
18.2 What makes a snob?
18.3 Tony Blair – no more excuses on Iraq
18.4 Unfair Gordon Brown
18.5 Iain Duncan Smith The brand
18.6 If You Have a politician in your family, be careful!
18.7 Caroline Spelman a metaphor for tumbling Coalition

19 APPENDIX I – Battersea needs Hugh!
19.1 What is wrong with UK politics
19.2 Why did I do it?
19.3 What was it like?
19.4 Was it worth it?
19.5 What’s in a name?
19.6 ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ on YouTube

20 APPENDIX II – BLOWING THE WHISTLE
20.1 Whistleblowers – Brave Heroes or Social Outcasts?
20.2 The whistleblower’s dilemma – what would you do?
20.3 Whistleblowing – a call for new legislation

A tribute to my father

Acknowledgements


Introduction
9 January 2015
In my day, if you wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge, you had to stay at school for an extra term - and do a hell of a lot more work. My trouble was that the extra term was the rugby term. Whether this is an excuse for my failure, the fact is I failed.
I was puzzled by this. I hadn’t failed at anything else, so how could Oxbridge not want me now? After all, as well as the rugby, I had been captain of the school cricket team and, although the grades weren’t great, I had achieved five A levels. And my school must have thought I was clever enough as they put my name down in the first place. Surely there had been a mistake? Sadly not.
My father told me I didn’t take my studies seriously enough. He questioned my academic commitment wherever I went to university. If anything, he thought I would work even less hard as sex and drinking would be allowed, and drugs available.
I agreed with my Dad so, from the ages of 18-22, I lived the life in London. I was a car cleaner, a car dealer, a delivery driver and an accountant. I spent the summer of 1979 teaching water-skiing in Corfu.
Then I got lucky.
By the same age as my contemporaries who had taken the academic high road, I knew I wanted to be an adman. I had friends at Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) and Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB). Both offered me jobs as a graduate trainee. I chose O&M.
Two years later, I told my boss about my idea for a music magazine on cassette tape. He loved the idea and asked me if he could help. I said I needed offices, so SFX was launched just along the corridor.
SFX was a great ride but, sadly, we ran out of money and I returned to advertising, as an Account Director at FCB and a Board Director at Kirkwoods. Then, in 1988, when I was 31, Ogilvy got me back to manage the Thailand office, their fourth largest in the world (and possibly their best). After that, and having got married and had our first child, Ogilvy transferred me back to London to oversee the Unilever account.
Then I got unlucky.
The American I was to replace in Ogilvy London announced she would not be going back to New York after all. The job Ogilvy had transferred me back to London to do wasn’t there any more. Instead, they wanted me to manage the Middle East region out of Bahrain. But my wife and I did not want to live in Bahrain. And, by this time, I had been approached by Lintas, another Unilever agency, to manage CM:Lintas, with a promise this would lead to my heading up all the Lintas operations in London.
Soon after arriving at CM:Lintas in 1992, I found the Chairman was defrauding the company by diverting money into a personal account elsewhere. He was a crook. I tried to persuade him to stop. He tried to fire me. I reported him to head office. They did fire me. Worse, to cover up the fraud, they told lies about me which I felt affected my reputation in the advertising industry.
This led to a five year litigation in which I wanted to clear my name. I had no idea it would take so long. In 1997, I won the case in ‘spectacular’ fashion. An executive of Interpublic Group, holding company of Lintas Worldwide, and quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, flew over to London on Concorde, issued a public statement effectively admitting the fraud, made a fulsome apology and paid me £475,000 damages.
In taking on this litigation, I feared I may never work in a multinational advertising agency again and this turned out to be the case. After two years as Managing Director of a small London advertising agency, I established The Salmon Agency in 1999. Soon after this, I began to suffer chronic back pain from an old rugby injury and in time, after four operations, found the act