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Globalisation and Local Consumption: The Labour Party's Attempts to Sell British Media

Des Freedman

International Studies Association

March 1998

Paper presented to the International Studies Association Annual Convention: Minneapolis, USA, March 17-21, 1998

Introduction

It seems a curious paradox that at a time when the discourse surrounding globalisation is increasingly popular, we have a political leader in Tony Blair whose project is to restore the self-confidence of the British nation. Elected with an overwhelming majority, the Labour government has set itself the task of modernising British institutions to cope with the demands of a world dominated by transnational exchanges and a proliferating number of economic powers. "We can never be the biggest" admitted Blair in his first speech to Labour's conference as Prime Minister. "We may never again be the mightiest. But we can be the best. The best place to live. The best place to bring up children, the best place to lead a fulfilled life, the best place to grow old" (Blair, 1997).

Media and communication technologies have an important role to play in this regeneration. Labour's policy is to establish Britain as a cultural powerhouse whose television programmes, records, set-top boxes, films and general creativity triumphantly saturate world markets, while simultaneously engendering the sort of conviction inside Britain that disappeared with the withering away of its manufacturing industries. This is the vision of 'cool Britannia': "to be nothing less than the model 21st century nation, a beacon to the world" (ibid.).

This paper will examine this strategy in the light of claims made by globalisation theorists, including those inside the Labour Party, that the effectiveness of determined state intervention into the worlds of business and leisure has been undermined by the global organisation of capital together with technological developments which challenge the coherence of national boundaries. The paper will also discuss the inter-relationship at a policy level between global communicative flows and the role of media in a national context. To what extent is Labour's proposed British media sector shaped by international commercial imperatives or more domestic requirements in constructing and sustaining notions of 'British-ness' for British consumers? Is globalisation in the field of communications an unwelcome trend foisted onto a reluctant government or does it offer a convenient commercial and ideological excuse for policy manoeuvres in re-regulating public service media? Although my examples are drawn from Britain, I hope that the conclusions will be relevant to other media markets and governments.

Globalisation: supporters and critics

Although globalisation itself is a contested term, containing within it an unholy alliance of trends, assumptions and speculations drawn from the spheres of politics, philosophy and economics, it is necessary to pin down the ways in which 'primary definers' use it. According to the OECD, "globalisation is manifested in a shift from a world of distinct national economies to a global economy in which production is internationalised and financial capital flows freely and instantly between countries" (OECD, 1995). The arguments of the 'globalisers' rest on a number of notions: that new centres of production are emerging outside the heart of the advanced west, that imports and exports play an ever-increasing role in the lives of national markets and that capital is so mobile that both workers and governments are limited in their ability to resist. Tony Blair argues that globalisation "is changing the nature of the nation-state as power becomes more diffuse and borders become more porous. Technological change is reducing the power and capacity of government to control its domestic economy free from external influence" (Blair, 1996: 204).

Developments in communications are central to these developments. Firstly, globalisation is seen partly as a product of technological development.

Globalisation is both a cause and a consequence of the information revolution. It is driven by dramatic improvements in telecommunications, exponential increases in computing power coupled with lower costs, and the developments of electronic communications and information networks such as the Internet (OECD, 1995).

Satellite communication, telecommunications networks, IT and global media flows, it is argued, have crushed barriers of time and space and allowed for either the possibility of physical relocation of operations to lower-cost areas or, more frequently, the growing penetration of goods and services into new markets. Ian Angell of the London School of Economics claims that the pending electronic superhighways will allow the global companies of the future to "relocate (physically or electronically) to where profit is the greatest and regulation least" (Angell, 1995: 10).

But there is another way in which communicative processes are said to have an impact on globalisation in the sense that symbolic exchanges are 'instinctively' global. Distinguishing between the national basis of economic activity and the wider arena of creative practices, John Maynard Keynes argued that:

I sympathise with those who would minimise, rather than those who would maximise economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonable and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national" quoted in Elliott, 1997).

Keynes' comments have been updated in the notion, popularised by academics influenced by postmodernism, that communications and culture, far from being secondary actors, are instead primary agents in constituting globalisation. "Culture", according to Stuart Hall, "increasingly regulates globalisation" because it teaches capital how to behave in unfamiliar parts of the world. "Capital has to indigenise itself throughout the world…That means coming to terms with different cultures, social forms, philosophical attitudes, with different forms of the family, simply to sell its goods" (quoted in Hall and Jacques, 1997: 35/6). Television and advertising are not simply global industries but ambassadors in naturalising multinational capital across the globe.

The importance of culture is repeatedly echoed by postmodern theorists like Waters (1995) for whom globalisation is evidence of the constitutive power of the symbolic. However, this argument is also made in more surprising quarters. The OECD, not normally associated with an interest in culture, emphasises how global television and the Internet are creating new methods of political organisation which supersede national interests and are therefore assuming new levels of both political and symbolic significance in the globalised environment. "The global news media is another important international influence. It increasingly defines international issues and events, which consequently demand immediate responses from government" (OECD, 1995). Tony Blair, as ever, is not far behind. "I also believe that the internationalisation of culture has played a significant part [in globalisation]. In Tokyo and London, increasingly, we are sharing the same rock music, the same designer clothes, the same films and surely, over time, the same attitude and tastes" (Blair, 1996: 118/9).

Blair's comments perfectly captures one of the key consequences of globalisation in the media arena: the notion of a global culture. This refers to the idea that the proliferation of international media stars and flows has flattened out previously distinctive national cultural habits. We are left with a "homogeneous global culture which means that a good night out in Singapore or Salford could mean the same thing: a Hollywood movie, a Big Mac and a bop to 2 Become 1 [by the Spice Girls] in a club" (Elliott and Ryle, 1997).

The conception of a uniform, state-less culture provided by giant media corporations and devoured by faceless consumers has been subject to extensive criticism by writers with very different agendas. Those broadly associated with the model of cultural imperialism, such as Schiller (1996) and Herman and McChesney (1997), largely accept the fact of globalisation but see it as the means by which mainly U.S. multinationals extend their domination of world trade in communications and continue to impose a 'map of meaning' on the rest of the world which squares with the values of corporate America. Furthermore, they argue, much of the world's population is simply excluded from these developments by virtue of their poverty and lack of access to mass media.

John Tomlinson, however, refutes this notion of a 'monolithic' global culture and challenges the exponents of cultural imperialism for embracing linearity at a time when communicative flows are increasingly 'de-centred' following new centres of cultural production in places like Brazil and Mexico and active forms of reception (Tomlinson, 1997: 180-188). Hamid Mowlana (1997) stresses the multi-directional and dimensional flows of globalisation while Chris Barker asserts that the "globalization of television has contributed to the construction of a postmodern collage of images from different times and places" (Barker, 1997: 208). Together with the perceived heterogeneity of media flows, critics talk of a new global/local dialectic where local cultures are 'valorized' by global media (Tehranian and Tehranian, 1997: 148) and where "global communications industries also study ways of customizing or innovating product that is suitable for mass marketing within geo-cultural regions while at the local level media producers increasingly draw on the codes and conventions…of the global popular" (Boyd-Barrett, 1997: 15/16).

While these notions of customisation, indigenisation and multi-polarity undermine the image of a homogeneous global culture, the alleged weakening of the nation-state under globalisation is also said to be de-territorialising communications. This is particularly the case in telecommunications where Jill Hills argues that "[d]eregulation shifts power away from sovereign governments to private capital in whatever market it takes place" (Hills, 1986: 203). As Frederick Wasser explains in his analysis of Hollywood's export strategy, the media too are becoming disembedded from their homes in individual nation-states.

Mass media hegemony, once a matter of one national culture dominating another, can no longer explain the national character of the institutions of mass media. Instead, deracinated transnational media now dominate all national audiences" (Wasser, 1995: 423).

There may be disagreements as to the outcomes of and flows within globalisation, but there remains a high degree of consensus among these writers that rootless concentrations of capital are scouring the globe for investment opportunities, shackled less by government regulation, national boundaries or technological capacity than ever before. This, therefore, represents a fundamentally new type of social, political and economic order in which old theories and forms of organisation - particularly centred around class – are of marginal importance in defending democracy than more reflexive, either broad-based or extremely localised, social movements. Globalisation, in this scenario, with its emphasis on capital mobility, is the gravedigger of class-based movements and state-based reformist projects.

However, there now exists an increasing body of work which tackles the extent to which globalisation theory is either a new or an adequate way of explaining the world today. In particular, there are a number of critiques of globalisation focusing on its economic claims, including Fox Piven (1995), Weiss (1997), Harman (1996), Gordon (1988) and Hirst and Thompson (1996). Whilst these writers range from social democratic reformism to the revolutionary left, they agree that globalisation theory reflects the increasingly crucial international dimension of capitalist trade but that it is not a break from previous economic patterns. Far from being inevitable, "so-called 'globalization' must be seen as a politically rather than a technologically induced phenomenon" (Weiss, 1997: 23).

Fox Piven argues that globalisation is the conscious application of laissez-faire politics, presented by politicians and economists as inevitable given the invincibility of multinational capital, but designed to advance the interests of corporate elites. The ideology of globalisation, according to Harman, "has encouraged the idea that multinationals are too powerful to be hit by 'old-fashioned' forms of workers'struggle and the abandonment of these forms of struggle has handed victory to the multinationals" (Harman, 1996: 28). These writers present evidence that contradicts both the extent to which globalisation has taken hold and the ensuing helplessness of national governments. They point to the resilience of national bases of production, the fact that investment is overwhelmingly confined to the most advanced countries, the growing importance of regional (not global) trade as contained within the EU, NAFTA and ASEAN countries and the continuing links between states and private capital. As Hirst and Thompson conclude, there is a significant difference between a "fully globalized economy and an open international economy that is still fundamentally characterised by exchange between relatively distinct national economies" (1996: 7).

Colin Sparks (forthcoming) applies this critical framework to the media in particular when he interrogates the notion whether there is a 'global public sphere'. In terms of satellite channels, often seen as the harbinger of global media through stations like Sky, Star TV and MTV, Sparks argues that there is little reason to believe that these are genuinely global forms. Pay-TV tends to stay close to national audiences in terms of content, regulation and its subscriber-management system – despite popular belief, it is simply not true that satellite channels can avoid state-based regulation. Those channels which are seen to be truly 'global' like MTV and CNN command insignificant audiences compared to national terrestrial media in the UK like Top of the Pops and network news programmes of the BBC and ITN. The same is true for 'global' newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times which reach a very small, elite, group of English-language readers. He argues that the Internet, which has more global possibilities than other forms, is reproducing existing patterns of domination by business and U.S. interests and that "we have a picture of the distribution of communicative resources that in general maps very closely on to the well-known contours of economic and political power" (Sparks, forthcoming: 18). To the extent that there is a global media, it is very small, exclusive and shows none of the signs of a rational, inclusive and critical public sphere.

There are, therefore, conflicting accounts of the economic and communicative status of contemporary society. One the one hand, there is the analysis from the OECD and Tony Blair that global social relations have been transformed by communication technology and constraints placed upon the interventionist capacity of the nation-state. Theorists have further analysed the impact of global processes upon the media and have pointed either to the increasing uniformity of global culture or to the heterogeneity and multi-dimensionality of global media flows. On the other hand, there is a group of critics who reject the idea that globalisation represents a qualitative break from previous patterns of economic organisation and that, instead, it embodies the will of neo-liberal political and economic actors. Economic and communicative activities are subject to the same degree of geographical and class inequalities, therefore ruling out the possibility of democratic global media.

New Labour and globalisation

Globalisation is accepted by the Labour leadership as a fact which presents challenges but, in general, creates opportunities. With a commitment to market forces, a liberalised telecommunications network and a zealous export strategy based around high-tech 'knowledge' and creative industries, the government is optimistic about the new international order. Tony Blair is especially happy. "Most of us, as consumers, welcome the developments globalisation have brought. We like the idea of choosing between a Japanese, British or German car, of buying Italian as well as British clothes, or choosing as soon we will in Britain, from 30, 40 or 100 TV channels not four" (Blair, 1996: 120). Despite the fact that most British people will confront global forces in terms of pressure on wages and job cuts and not whether to shop in Emporio Armani or Mr. Byrite, globalisation for Blair represents the simple expansion of trade and consumer choice.

Although not all of the government shares the prime minister's enthusiasm, Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, best expresses the Labour government's position in his statement that "the global economy makes redistribution impossible" (quoted in Hattersley, 1997). Globalisation provides a key justification for New Labour's priorities of reforming the welfare state (by cutting welfare payments), maintaining the restrictions on trade union organisation (to make wages more 'competitive' and 'flexible') and re-orientating trade towards the creative and high-tech areas outlined above (without dealing with the structural causes of unemployment).

Far from being trapped by anonymous global economic forces, the state itself uses globalisation as a weapon in its strategy to increase the competitiveness of capital. The media industries comprise one of the areas where the Labour government is trying to stimulate economic activity both nationally and internationally while recognising the cultural role of the media for British audiences. Far from accepting the reduction of its power, the government is consciously using the discourse of globalisation to launch these industries onto the international stage. Just as Edward Comor (1996) described the American state's 'mediating' capacity in placing American capital at the centre of information infrastructure developments, the British state is certainly an 'activist' state in promoting globalisation. As Linda Weiss puts it:

Rather than counterposing nation-state and global market as antinomies, in certain respects we find that 'globalization' is often the by-products of states promoting the internationalization strategies of their corporations, and sometimes in the process internationalizing state capacity' (Weiss, 1997: 4).

However the British state is not solely interested in export markets. As Colin Sparks argues, the state is also interested in policing the symbolic activities of its population. Writing under a Conservative government, he found that "there is no sign that state intervention [into broadcasting] is being reduced", either in terms of appointments to broadcasting bodies, political attacks on broadcasters or plans for legislation (Sparks, 1995: 152-154). There is presently no reason to think that this degree of intervention has changed under the Labour government. Final decisions about broadcasting appointments continue to rest with the secretary of state for media, culture and sport; the BBC has come in for sustained attack from Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, Blair's press secretary, for criticising the government; and a new Broadcasting Bill, regulating content and structures in the age of convergence, is planned for 1999/2000. We will, therefore, now consider New Labour's strategies in relation to the British media's economic role and how this impinges on their cultural importance at the level of the nation-state.

'Picking Winners': Labour's global media strategy

Back in 1994, Mo Mowlam, then Labour's media spokesperson, succinctly summarised the problems facing policymakers in the changing media world.

We are, therefore, faced with two conflicting requirements: the need on the one hand for our media industries to be internationally competitive – audio-visual industries are an important sector for growth in the British economy, which means jobs – and, on the other, the need for diversity and pluralism that is crucial in a democracy (Mowlam, 1994: 24).

Mowlam spoke of the need to balance international and domestic objectives without compromising either. The question is whether the peculiar factors which produced a rich media environment in Britain are relevant to international markets and whether the pursuit of a more global strategy will jeopardise domestic media. Today's ministers and policy advisers are much more circumspect than Mowlam about these problems. Chris Smith, the secretary of state for media, talks of securing "good quality and diversity" while simultaneously "doing what we can to promote its competitiveness in the global marketplace" (Smith, 1997a: 11). According to Harry Reeves, head of general broadcasting policy at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), global television presents opportunities far more than dilemmas.

It [global television] is very high on the list of policy objectives. We're in one of those situations where it's move on or die…There is a widespread perception that there is a conflict between the cultural objectives and the economic objectives and to a degree there is. But I don't think that it has ever been demonstrated that the kind of quality and variety that is placed on broadcasters necessarily impairs their competitiveness in international markets (Reeves, 1997).

Labour is enthusiastic about applying this strategy of 'going global' to the BBC who were pushed by the previous Conservative government to develop a more commercial, outward-looking perspective, encapsulated in its 1994 White Paper entitled The future of the BBC: Serving the nation, competing world-wide (Department of National Heritage, 1994). Labour has no plans to change this emphasis. Paul Heron, head of the public service broadcasting branch at the DCMS, argues that "there are great opportunities, great markets…extra revenue for the BBC which goes into quality public service broadcasting. The government would certainly not want to curtail the BBC's commercial activities…I don't see any contradiction [between public service and commercial activities]" (Heron, 1997).

The BBC has therefore recently launched four commercial channels for cable and satellite in a partnership with Flextech, part of the giant US-based TCI cable group and provides a number of channels across the world through its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. Perhaps more controversially, the BBC is negotiating with the Discovery Channel to provide programming for the US market in a deal in which, it is argued, the BBC risks losing some of its independence by being twinned with a company whose main responsibility is to its shareholders and not viewers. "It's like being a lobster in a pot", claimed one BBC insider. "The water was cool when we got in, but the temperature has been turned up and we haven't yet realised that we are being boiled alive" (quoted in Anonymous, 1998).

To what extent has the BBC's global strategy, backed by Labour, paid off? Turnover of commercial activities outside has Britain has risen from £44m in 1990 to £140m in 1997 but still provides an almost insignificant proportion of the BBC's total turnover, up from 3% of all external income in 1990 to just 6% in 1997 (see BBC 1990 and 1997). The remaining 94% of income continues to derive from either licence-fee or commercial revenue from inside Britain. State-based audiences are not only the financial cornerstone of the BBC but "the attempt to direct resources into programming that has an appeal to an audience wider than that of the state diverts from attempts to satisfy the plurality of the population of the state itself" (Sparks, 1995: 156).

New Labour has been even more supportive of efforts by commercial media companies in Britain to rise onto the global stage. Historically, the key barrier to this has been legal restrictions on cross-media ownership which were supported by both main parties up until fairly recently. Intense lobbying by both newspaper and ITV companies paid off with the easing of cross-media ownership laws in the 1996 Broadcasting Act. One of the most eager advocates of reform is the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, chair of the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport. During the passage of the Bill, Kaufman made an impassioned plea on behalf of Britain's aspiring media moguls to further loosen the proposals:

I do not know whether to laugh at the sheer fatuity of the legislation or to cry at the expenditure of time by highly-paid civil servants…Such demented provisions are aimed at limiting what needs to be expanded. We need more cross-media ownership, not less. In the United States, cross-media alliances are powerful enough to dominate the world, but in Britain the future of communications will be crabbed and stunted" (Kaufman, 1996: 566).

While Kaufman expressed himself perhaps more energetically than other Labour members, he was not at all out of sync with the leadership's desire to curry favour with British media owners in the year before a general election. Labour consistently argued for more generous cross-media rules to the extent that it was left to the Conservative minister Iain Sproat to defend ownership restrictions in the media, an industry where "we're not talking about baked beans" (quoted in Lewis, 1996).

Labour's manoeuvres have been welcomed by the managing directors of aspiring international players such as Carlton, Granada and Pearson. Greg Dyke, the chief executive of Pearson TV, is a long-standing Labour supporter and is closely associated with the New Labour project. He argues that "in every industry the globalisation concept is happening…The trick is can you globalise programming and make it local? You own a load of formats, you make them in different countries, you take them from one to another…" (quoted in Baker, 1997: 16). The consequence of 'globalisation' is that Pearson now has three versions of Family Feud on the air in Indonesia and owns the rights to Neighbours across the world. Is this what Chris Smith means when he states that "I want to see the whole industry exploring ways of working together to ensure British programming is in the best possible position to find overseas markets" (Smith, 1997a: 12)? Concepts of quality and plurality, used so frequently by politicians with regard to British audiences, are absent when applied to international markets. Instead, as a report by advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather put it, "'picking winners' appears to be Labour's approach to promoting international competitiveness" (quoted in Carter, 1996).

Other 'winning' media that New Labour is determined to exploit are the British film and music industries. The government has launched a policy review group for each of these areas in order to maximise the economic opportunities of cultural exports. The film policy review group, set up immediately after the election, is co-chaired by the minister for film, Tom Clarke, and Stewart Till of Polygram Filmed Entertainment. In case there are any doubts as to the commercial basis of the group, Tom Clarke himself stresses that the "group's objective is to encourage the British film industry as a whole to achieve lasting success and to be competitive in the world marketplace" (Clarke, 1997: 612). The government wants to capitalise on the success of films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bean, The Full Monty and Trainspotting by creating a supportive environment for domestic filmmaking with international potential.

Accordingly, Gordon Brown in his first budget as Chancellor granted new tax relief measures for film production in the UK. The incentive allows investors to write off all production and acquisition costs of British films with a total budget of under £15m. The move was welcomed by film producers, the film technicians' union as well as investors who have started to pour money into British production. The number of films fully financed by British companies increased by 30% in 1997, from 56 to 72 (Tutt, 1997). Together with the £96m provided by the National Lottery to three consortiums to produce films over a period of six years British filmmaking, at least on the surface, appears to be in a healthy state.

The government set up the music policy review group in January 1998 with the same aims of taking advantage of the undoubted export possibilities of the British music industry which, as Chris Smith pointed out in his Labour conference speech, "earns more in exports than steel" (Smith, 1997b). Tony Blair has consistently associated himself with pop stars, both during the election campaign and even more so in office. On the night that his government was cutting benefits for single parents, Blair was entertaining a number of stars from the entertainment world in Downing Street. He is fully aware of the electoral opportunities of being photographed with members of Oasis as well as the under-realised economic potential of the music industry.

The music policy review group contains figures such as Mick Hucknall from Simply Red and Rob Dickens, the chairman of Warner Music and will be examining issues such as piracy and the question of copyright in the new distribution systems of the Internet and digital broadcasting. The group will also be discussing how to build on the international success of bands like the Spice Girls, Prodigy, and Oasis and how to nurture the new talent needed to contribute to the UK's balance of trade.

Just as globalisation theory emphasises the increased role of both exports and imports in world trade, the government's strategy of building a thriving cultural repertoire for export markets complements its desire to attract inward investment into British media industries. The new tax break for film investors was aimed not only at British but also North American and European capital, hoping to lure films with budgets nearer the £15m ceiling than the typical £2m budget of a wholly British financed picture. One of the film policy review group's specific briefs is to maximise inward investment possibilities, a difficult task given that the most decisive factor in choosing to shoot in Britain is not availability of technical skills, infrastructure or the weather, but the exchange rate. The American films produced in Britain in 1997, including works by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, took advantage of a favourable sterling/dollar exchange rate. A rising pound means that, according to Screen International, "[a]part from Lucas' second Star Wars prequel, no major US films are confirmed to shoot in the UK next year" (Tutt, 1997), despite the government's incentives.

Labour's firm backing for digital broadcasting is also related to both export and inward investment flows. Chris Smith and the DCMS are committed to the launch of digital terrestrial television in late 1998 to increase viewer choice and the production of set-top boxes in which Britain leads the world. However, a liberalised television market also offers the possibility of greater returns on investment and therefore an incentive for non-British companies to compete in British television. Indeed, Lewis Moonie, Labour's broadcasting spokesperson during the passage of the 1996 Broadcasting Act, specifically defended the right of foreign companies to own the new digital channels. There is no room in the Labour party for xenophobia when it comes to market forces: "Jobs are already being created here by foreign companies which is something we should encourage. Are we going to tell the Japanese to take away their car plants? The same rules should apply to broadcasting" (quoted in Lewis, 1996). This should be enough to placate the North American companies who were invited in by the Conservatives in the early 1990s to transform Britain's cable infrastructure and who, until very recently, hardly figured in Labour's plans for the information superhighway. All in all, Laobur's list of corporate 'winners' in the media field is set to be substantial.

Re-branding Britain: connecting the local to the global

The Labour government's public pronouncements on the media focus less on export plans and inward investment than on the central symbolic role that media play in sustaining local or national identity. As yet, the Prime Minister has not announced that a central policy objective of his government is to sell Eastenders or Coronation Street around the world. This is partly to connect with popular debate which is more likely to spring up around the amount of swearing and sex in prime-time programmes or the coverage of the funeral of the Princess of Wales than around tax breaks and export figures. But it also reflects the fact that the media industry is not the same as the baked beans industry, a point reinforced by media secretary Chris Smith.

The communications media are far more than a market; certainly far more than a utility. There will remain a need for plurality of voice in a healthy democracy. More widely, the media play a key role in reflecting the totality of a society's culture and reinforcing its diverse identities" (Smith, 1997a: 11).

Despite Labour's fiscal priorities, it makes little sense to conceptualise broadcasting in purely economic terms. At the same time as stressing the international dimension of the media, Smith has championed the public service structures of British broadcasting, defending the licence fee and opposing the privatisation of Channel Four. "I certainly regard television as a key element – if not the key element – in our national culture" (quoted in Brown, 1997).

There is a kind of negative dialectic between the national and the international in Labour's argument. Given the fact of globalisation, the media in Britain have no choice but to commercialise and seek international markets if they are to continue to exist and therefore play a central cultural role in the lives of British people. The result is that market-driven, international priorities start to drive media systems that we have already argued are primarily national in content and audience. The state's desired target of uniting audiences around a notion of 'British' television and a national culture then becomes increasingly problematic.

A key way in which Labour has attempted to resolve the contradiction between global and local imperatives is through the re-branding of Britain, the re-signification of the country to embrace both nation and globe. This is what is at the heart of 'Cool Britannia', a creative, dynamic, forward-looking country which is built on a strong heritage but is ready to face the world. Tony Blair described this transformation in a speech to Labour's conference, typically using media-related metaphors.

"Change is in the blood and bones of the British – we are by our nature and tradition innovators, adventurers, pioneers…Britain today is an exciting, inspiring place to be. And it can be much more. If we face the challenge of a world with its finger on the fast forward button; where every part of the picture of our life changing" (Blair, 1997).

The re-branding of Britain to meet the challenges of a world literally opened up by global forces has been mainly down to the creative industries. The hype around Britain's thriving music scene, vigorous club culture, blossoming culinary skills and cutting-edge creative talents has been consolidated in the launch by the government of the Creative Industries Task Force. In a clear example of the activism of the government in responding to the perception of globalisation, Tony Blair has brought together ministers and officials from most government departments together with representatives of the British Council (the ambassador of British culture), the No. 10 Policy Unit and leading entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, Lord Puttnam, Alan McGee (the man behind Oasis), the fashion designer Paul Smith and Waheed Ali from the independent television company Planet 24.

Of course, re-branding is essentially a marketing ploy to draw more tourists to Britain just as the main aim of the Task Force is to improve the economic performance of the creative industries, estimated to be worth £50bn to the British economy. However, the Task Force also serves a symbolic purpose: to remind those inside Britain of the quality, the depth, the originality and the resourcefulness of the British. It is partly an attempt to re-define what it means to be British to meet the demands of the requirements of globalisation. For New Labour, the initiative of a small clothes designer, the hustling skills of an independent film producer or the entrepreneurial talents of a club promoter all reflect contemporary 'British-ness' more than welfare supporters and trade unionists whose fingers are on the rewind button. The creative industries are central to constructing the new image of a bustling Britain, occupied on a world stage but concerned about its own cultural heritage.

Contained within this project of re-branding Britain in a more outward-looking perspective, however, are some familiar difficulties for the media. In order to compete on an international scale, the framework for production in a national context needs to be guaranteed at a particular level. To the extent that particular media like films, music and, to a lesser extent, television are vulnerable to increasingly international flows, national media may need to be protected. This is especially true given the volume of products from the USA which has the largest domestic market and can therefore offload audio-visual material at temptingly low prices across the world. As a result, we have seen the phenomenon of cultural protectionism as a response to 'globalisation': the introduction of quotas of French music on their domestic radio stations or the European Union's Television Without Frontiers directive which restricts non-EU produced material to 49% of airtime.

Labour has also turned to quotas in its desire to stimulate an expansive British media sector despite the apparent contradiction with its global outlook. Chris Smith has publicly supported the TWF directive since taking office, although Labour is more likely to back investment quotas rather than fixed transmission quotas, reflecting the views of the influential IPPR think-tank. Labour's Film Policy Review Group aims to raise the domestic share of British films from 10% to 20% while Carole Tongue, a Labour MEP and broadcasting spokesperson, is pressing for a 12% investment quota in original UK television programming by all channels over three years old (Tongue, 1997). Chris Smith has made it clear that he wishes to see more home-made programmes on television and pressed for Channel Four to increase its proportion of original programming from 53% to 70% in peak-time as part of the revisions to its licence.

One of the issues that arises from the use of quotas to protect national culture concerns the definition of what, in this case, can be classified as British. At the end of 1997, film minister Tom Clarke proudly announced that one of the central aims of his policy group – to double the domestic box office of British films – had been met. The problem was that his figures included films shot in Britain but produced by foreign companies such as Bean and The Full Monty. One British filmmaker responded by saying that "[w]e are kidding ourselves if we think of these films as British…It is dangerous to jump on the self-congratulatory bandwagon, while profits for these films go overseas"(quoted in Minns, 1997). The minister's definition demonstrates the arbitrary nature of 'British culture' which has moved on from village cricket and Yorkshire puddings and must now include Toyota cars and Macdonald's hamburgers, indeed any product of inward investment. Furthermore, we have already noted that overseas investment in the British film industry is dependent on favourable exchange rates, revealing the potential fragility of the revival.

Equally worrying is the problem of distribution, as yet not addressed by the Clarke's review group. A substantial number of British films continue to fail to get a distribution deal and even those which do are not guaranteed adequate exhibition space, a problem that hampered the popularity of Ken Loach's award-winning Land and Freedom. The film critic Derek Malcolm recalls that:

I had lunch during Cannes with Chris Smith, the Heritage Secretary, and bent his ear about the difficulty of creating more funds more production while doing damn all about distribution and exhibition. Fortunately, he was very sympathetic, if only because he much admires Loach and found it rather more difficult to see his films than he expected. Something must be done, and pretty quickly, if the problem is to be solved. If the multiplexes were forced to show only five per cent of non-American product, the situation would change radically overnight" (Malcolm, 1997).

Stepping on the toes of powerful media conglomerates is not Labour's preferred approach, which suggests that this appears to be a quota too far.

However, in one area in particular, Labour has indicated that it is willing to intervene in the media market, even if this upsets a figure like Rupert Murdoch. This concerns the issue of sports coverage. One of the difficulties raised by Labour's adherence to global market forces in the current media environment is that the market does not appear to provide for an inclusive structure of consumption. As Chris Smith's stated aim is to "enhance the cultural life of the nation, for the many, not the few" (Smith, 1997b), the monopoly of sports rights by the pay-TV broadcaster BSkyB presents something of a problem. Partly because of the hefty subscription charges demanded by BSkyB, some 75% of households do not currently have access to pay-TV. They are therefore excluded from sporting events which, according to Smith, are an essential part of our 'national culture' and should be available free to all who wanted to watch them (see Boshoff, 1997).

Smith has set up a review body to examine the list of sporting events, fixed by legislation in the 1996 Broadcasting Act, that should be reserved for free terrestrial consumption. In order for an event to be 'listed', Smith has indicated that it would have to have "a special national resonance" and not simply significance for those particular fans (quoted in ibid.). Given the tremendous importance of sports rights for pay-TV's viability, Rupert Murdoch would not take kindly to losing high-profile sporting events, just as Tony Blair and Chris Smith would not welcome losing Murdoch as an ally. Curiously enough, the brief of the advisory group is simply to review the list which means that, in the words of the senior civil servant involved, "we could have events taken off [the list], we could have events added and we could have events redefined. All those things are open" (Reeves, 1997 – my emphasis). The need to regulate market forces may not yet necessarily conflict with those commercial interests.

Throughout Labour's plans to stimulate a British media sector in a global market, we find references to the increasing importance of film, television and music in championing a 'national culture'. The policy review groups, the international awards regularly won by British television and even the popularity of the UK as a tourist destination, all demonstrate the vigour and confidence of British cultural production and the central role that the media play in structuring a sense of 'British-ness' for consumers. While Labour's proposed cultural sector has one eye on the world market, the party remains firmly committed to modernising what it means to be British. Labour policies in the areas of culture, defence and immigration play on a rhetoric of nationalism that sits uneasily with its global economic outlook.

This is not supposed to be the outmoded nationalism of the previous Conservative government but part of the search for a modern identity. As Tony Blair put it in his speech to Labour conference:

There is huge interest in Britain now. Because people know that this is a country changing for the better. A go-ahead place. The gates of xenophobia falling down. This Government can be the Government of enlightened patriotism (Blair, 1997).

News that the government intends to pursue a more 'enlightened' form of patriotism will come as a surprise to Bangladeshi, Kurdish and Romany refugees locked up in British detention centres having found the 'gates of xenophobia' more than ajar. Blair is prepared to use nationalism to 'fix' the identity of Britain in an era of 'globalisation' and multi-culturalism. Indeed, his first speech as Prime Minister to the 1997 Labour Conference contained the word Britain 32 times, British 19 times and nation 11 times, compared to the use of global only once (and that in the phrase global warming). Far from breaking from the past, "Blair stands in a long tradition of political leaders – Mrs. Thatcher was the most recent exponent – to identify modernity with national purpose and character" (Leadbetter, 1997: 22). New Labour's attempt to modernise Britain involves the media both consolidating the strength of the 'British character' and providing a source of economic growth in the world market.

Conclusion

Labour has used the 're-branding' of Britain and emphasised the importance of the British creative industries, notably the media, for both economic and symbolic reasons. Media provide a link between the construction and preservation of national cultural habits and the ideological purposes of nationalism – to erase class differences and champion social partnership. Labour then stresses the aspects of 'British-ness' which are most relevant to competing on a global scale: dynamism, entrepreneurial skills, initiative and plain hard work. Those people that focus on the re-distribution of wealth, collective agreements or the preservation of social welfare systems are denounced as parochial, out-of-date and oppositional.

Blair and other Labour figures have adopted the elements of globalisation theory which preach the need for accommodating to market forces and the impossibility of the independent state co-ordination of the economy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the media which, it is argued, are particularly susceptible to global flows and multinational domination. The state's responsibility, in this scenario, is to create the most favourable environment for investment and trade in the media while preserving (or if necessary modernising) those national characteristics which are seen as crucial elements of the infrastructure of the British media. Talk of planning, subsidy and diversity is replaced by an exhortation to be creative, innovative, ambitious and yet compassionate – as if these latter features are incompatible with non-market structures. And despite the apparent difficulties of legislating along national lines, the Labour government continues to press for regulation aimed at opening media structures up to the global market.

The point we wish to make is not that Labour should restrict itself to a national perspective, perpetuating an idealised notion of the regulated market/public service broadcasting sector, which existed in Britain up to the 1980s. Nor do we believe that international media flows are intrinsically backward like the anti-American views of many cultural imperialism theorists. We fully support the ideal of an international media order in which media flows are democratically produced and exchanged across fixed national boundaries. The problem is that the 'globalisation' of the media in current conditions creates both privatised international flows based exclusively on the market and domestic media that continue to construct notions of a spontaneous 'national' culture. The danger is that, in terms of the media, we are seeing the worst of all possible worlds.

A democratic media policy would avoid pandering to those global media forces which as Colin Sparks argues are "less concerned with the public than the state based media…are more exclusive than the state based media [and]…constitute an elite that has definite patterns of inclusion and exclusion" (Sparks, forthcoming: 23/24). It would not identify itself with media moguls like Greg Dyke, a figure closely connected to Labour, who conceive of global television as "a financial buy. You do it for money. This is a business not a cultural pursuit" (quoted in Baker, 1997: 16).

However just as CNN is a defective model of 'global television', British public service broadcasting is also an imperfect model of a pluralistic, truly independent national media system. A democratic media policy would seek to guarantee diversity at a national level, restricting cross media ownership and concerning itself more with access to production and distribution than imposing new technologies in the guise of increased choice for consumers. The government could easily demonstrate its commitment to press diversity and challenge Murdoch's control of national newspaper circulation by outlawing price-cutting as anti-competitive. Labour could also stick to its promise, made in opposition, of creating more local television channels by insisting that cable companies make facilities available to groups in their local areas or that digital terrestrial channels provide more local content. Labour appears to have ignored the warning, accurately summarised by Graham Allen, its then shadow spokesperson for broadcasting, when he complained, "I am afraid that that [local television] was sacrificed at the altar of commercial television" (Allen, 1995).

The threat of the globalisation of the media has allowed Labour to pursue a deformed dialectical approach in which market forces link the global and the local to the detriment of both. Labour has acted precisely like an 'activist' state in promoting the ideology of globalisation in order to further its desired economic and cultural aims. This degree of interventionism contradicts the views of those globalisation critics like Hirst and Thompson who argue that because the extent of globalisation has been exaggerated, there is still space for democratic reform at a national level. Peter Humphreys similarly stresses the centrality of political will, rather than economic imperatives, in explaining developments in media systems and concludes that "a strong case can be made for more vigorous public interventionism to support…Europe's cultural industries" (Humphreys, 1996: 297). Such optimism in national cultural policies is misplaced. Labour's initiatives demonstrate only that national states are actively complicit in re-regulating the media along market lines, not that they are capable of substantial democratic reform. Labour's activity shows that the opportunity for even small-scale reforms like the ones suggested above is hampered by the growing importance of multinational capital. This remains true in the field of media, where consumption remains structured along national lines, as much as other more internationalised areas because governments are more reluctant than ever to antagonise capital whether out of conviction or necessity.

The source of optimism, therefore, lies not in individual states pursuing rational economic, political or cultural strategies but in the possibility of the resistance to market forces assuming an international dimension. Whilst the notion of a uniform global culture remains either an idealist or an elitist fantasy under capitalist relations, the increasingly interdependent organisation of market forces is connecting both capital to capital and worker to worker. As David Gordon concludes in his critique of globalisation:

The TNCs are neither all-powerful nor fully equipped to shape a new world economy all by themselves. They require workers and they require consumers. Workers and consumers helped shape the structure of the postwar system, and we are once again in a position to bargain over institutional transformation. The global economy is up for grabs, not locked into some new and immutable order. The opportunity for enhanced popular power remains ripe (Gordon, 1988: 64).

Such a struggle will lay the basis for a culture produced and consumed not at the bequest of anonymous market forces but out of the desires of workers and consumers and for their own benefit.

References