Unless you've just come off a really apocalyptic bender and need to buy a paper to work out where you are, I can't see any good reason to have the word 'London' in the masthead. I don't know about you but I find the London branding round here pretty omnipresent. Why not hang a big sign off Nelson's Column that says 'London', just to make it really fucking emphatic. Does Lebedev just want his Russian friends to be in no doubt that he hasn't bought the Manchester Evening Standard? If there was 'Only Fools and Horses but with Oligarchs' would he be Rodneyvich? That's got to be the question on everyone's lips right now.
Apart from a few cosmetic changes the main difference between this new Evening Standard and the old one seems to be the advertising, of which there is an awful lot more, and is now comprised of a uniquely oligarchical mixture of very high-end luggage and arms dealers.
I really love this advert.
As regular readers of Prison Suicide Supplement will know, I think patriotism in advertising is always (I mean always) fraudulent in the extreme. Of course, this isn't an advert as such, they're not trying to sell you anything that you haven't already bought. BAE Systems doesn't have to advertise, as it mainly sells arms to the Saudis under the auspices of the Defence Export Services Organisation (or DESO) a branch of the MoD paid for by you and me dear reader.
A friend of mine spent a year working for DESO, which I found took the heat off me somewhat, profession-justification-wise, at parties.
What this ad fails to mention is that, unless they've radically overhauled their product line, the £2.4 billion BAE contributed to the economy were profits from the sales of things like missiles and warplanes and therefore exactly proportionate to the need for arms in the increasingly unstable world we live in – something we can all be proud of.
In fact the whole military industrial loop is blackly comic and was described to me by this same insider thus:
1. Britain must have an arms industry in order that it can maintain the capability to defend itself in times of war.
2. In order to maintain an arms industry there must be war.
3. Britain must be at war somewhere all the time.
4. -> 1.
Does anyone know who wrote the copy on this ad? It doesn't look in-house. The visual says Euros to me.
Did you write it?
5 comments:
I didn't write it.
Your 4-point argument is essentially George Orwell's 1984. Not only does war sustain the arms industry, it also keeps people worried about stuff far removed from their 'real' lives (scares like Swine Flu also do this).
It wasn't me!
"increasingly" unstable - things were a bit jumpy during a few decades of Cold War. Gulf Wars, Balkans, etc have been comparatively a bit less hairy than total assured annihilation with some to spare for the after-show party.
Apart from when John Prescott called them Balklands.
And the Catch 22 war logic stuff - everyone's got the T-shirt with that on, surely. Only playing devil's advocate here, but isn't there plenty of war to go round for everyone, with a side-order of heavy ordnance export salad, just with other people's troubles in far-off lands? We make money fine, without needing to be at war ourselves - it's the British way.
And Saudi Arabia haven't been at war with anyone for a long time.
I thought you were going to go into the psychology of BAE's need to advertise - how dare you disappoint me??
Love the blog! And bacon.
PS Same thing with the Jesus stuff in the other post, isn't the point that uncertainty is canceled out by faith? Like, it wouldn't be faith if it was something you could prove?
PPS Disclaimer: I'm an agnostic pinko miserable moral pedant who doesn't like nasty things like war either.
This ad is almost as dispicable as those horrific Shell ads purporting to be all cuddly and green. Every time I see ads like this I get a little more infuriated inside.
Post a Comment