I was raised in Elm Park, having been born in nearby Romford. Elm Park was and remains almost exclusively white, lower working class. It is perhaps the most chav chav-town in chavdom.

The Times gets a warm welcome at the Elm Park Pub from the BNP

Built in the late 1930s, Elm Park was designed to attract young working class families seeking to escape the worst of London’s smog. Its housing consists of well-built three-bedroomed semi-detached properties with back and front gardens. Its streets are tree-lined. There’s a healthy mixture of council houses and privately owned homes in an urban setting on the edge of London’s greenbelt, wedged between Dagenham and Hornchurch. There are parks nearby and a very good swimming pool. It has much going for it.

My parents arrived and met in Elm Park just before the Second World War. They lived next door to each other. My dad’s a Hackney boy and my mum’s from East Ham. They went to school across the road from Hornchurch airdrome, which played a major part in the Battle of Britain.

My father pays homage every year to an American airman who crash-landed his plane into the playground wall rather than risk smashing into their classroom by attempting to fly over it. The class saw the plane dip away from them and explode. They were covered in glass. The boy next to my father was injured for life. And ever since, the old boys meet annually at the pilot’s grave to say thanks to the Yank. Yes, there’s a good heart in Elm Park.

There was plenty of work in the early days. There was a massive Ford factory in Dagenham, as well as the pharmaceutical company May & Baker. There was Roneo Vickers, then Britain’s largest manufacturer of office machinery. And, not least, there were London’s East End docks working at full capacity.

My dad worked on the buses as a conductor. My mother worked at May & Baker. My grandmothers worked at Roneo Vickers. One grandfather was a leading communist shop steward at Ford’s (he left the party in 1956 in protest against the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet Union) the other was a self-employed Tory-voting builder.

But something went wrong in Elm Park. Part of the problem was the run-down, then closure, of both Ford’s plant and London’s docks. But seeing as we were connected to the rest of London by the tube, I don’t buy that explanation for my town’s decline.

Elm Park began its big slide from working class respectability to chavdom in the early 1970s. Elm Park somehow came to embody all that was worst about Britain’s loss of direction at that time. The kids got out of control. We glorified in football hooliganism and ignorance. Our low-grade local schools told us we were there to be trained as manual workers. We said “stuff that”, we don’ want to be like our parents.

For many the rebellion meant giving up on education and ambition. For a few, like me, it meant going up the ladder.

Since the 1970s, the Elm Park pub has been the haunt of gangsters, druggies and football hooligans. I learned to drink and to fight there. The room in which the BNP met was where I practiced karate. Its adjacent bar was where I had many a-run-in with local toughs. As 16-year-olds we got drunk and watched the strippers there on Sunday lunch-times (imagine a mob of 150 baying adrenaline-driven yobs screaming at the girls to get their kit off). The police tried many times to have the pub shut.

Today, the town has a run-down early 1960s feel that’s more “up north” than “down south”. There’s boarded up shops, cheap clothes and food, a very bad cafe and an Indian restaurant which serves abusive racists once the pub shuts. Gangs of young kids roam the streets – it’s an intimidating place to be.

Yet, still, I remember that my gang of West Ham United thugs was a mixture of black and white. Some of us used to leave the footie on Saturdays to help the Socialist Workers’ Party beat up National Fronters, some of whom were our school mates.

I can’t put my finger on Elm Park’s decline. I also don’t want to go blind to the good that remains (hey, that’s my home and I’ve friends still there) or to sell its decent residents short. Any quick tour of my town’s back streets will reveal the pride many still take in their homes and gardens. Most people avoid the Elm Park pub. They take the train or bus to Upminster or Hornchurch instead. There’s many hard-working people living there.

As I sit in my villa by Zurich’s lakeside, I’m still inspired by the best things in the Elm Park I knew. I’ll be forever grateful to many of its old folk (including my parents and a couple of cops who once roughed me up and then lectured me) who set me straight and told me to get a life, get organised, clean up my act, get educated, and get out of town, when I was kid. But part of me regrets ever leaving its streets. Yesterday I wish I’d been there to tell the BNP to f-off.

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Last week the BBC’s flagship investigative news programme Panorama hilariously shot itself in the foot when it tried to apply a corporate social responsibility critique to Ryanair. Rather than trash the company’s reputation The Times reports Panorama had the opposite effect.

A Times Online Travel poll at the start of the show found that 88 per cent of respondents were on the hate spectrum of the love/hate Ryanair relationship (although 63 per cent of people fly with the carrier anyway), while only 12 per cent attested to “loving” the airline.

A second poll at the end of the show found Ryanair’s fortunes had reversed, with the BBC considered the “baddie”. Ho ho.

Now here’s why I love Ryanair’s messaging:

1. Ryanair’s no-frills offer is cheap and authentic but not chic, more like chav.

2. Ryanair does not negotiate with campaigners, enter into dialogue with them even, or pretend to care what they think (tough luck for Plane Stupid).

3. Liberals – including I guess liberal PRs – hate Ryanair’s audacity, not least because it runs against the grain of what the latter advise most of their clients to behave like .

4. Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary does not do Mr Nice Guy. He pulls no punches:

“We will double our emissions in the next five years because we are doubling our traffic. But if preserving the environment means stopping poor people flying so only the rich can fly, then screw it.”

That may not be a nice, intelligent, constructive or savvy remark. It may not even be in Mr O’Leary’s interests to make it. But it is what he thinks and its authenticity is worth a shed-load of focus-group tested schmoozing.

5. Ryanair knows what makes British and Irish culture tick: “binge-flying” and binge-drinking (though it won’t tolerate drunks onboard its flights and quite right too)

6. Ryanair stands up for the poor – slags, lads and chavs out on the razz – who want to see the world but can’t afford to fly British Airways. It is very much in the spirit of Thomas Cook and the railways that brought the seaside to the masses, and yobs to Southwold, back in the 19th and early 20th century.

7. Ryanair does not pretend to love its staff the way British Airways once famously did when it put cabin crew at the centre of its PR. The unions cleverly twisted the slogan and held the company’s reputation to ransom when the staff went on strike and slagged off the airline big time (ho ho for corporate slime)

8. Ryanair is contemptuous of interfering moralistic regulators who think they are the defenders of the public interest.

Michael O’Leary once famously denounced the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Britain’s regulator of advertising and marketing, for being a “bunch of unelected, self-appointed dimwits”. (See #4.)

9. Ryanair puts profit and customers – as in cheap no frills flights – unashamedly at the center of everything it does. Ryanair is unashamedly capitalist. It makes money where it can and not always attractively (as in charging for credit card payment by customer not transaction). It’s almost a challenge. Tacitly, Ryanair is saying: “We’ve weighed up who and what we’ll lose by this charging system, and we’ll take the hit. Got a better idea? Get over yourself.” (See 11)

10. Ryanair is not on the Web to do dialogue and have a chat (what tosh about it’s all about conversation now) it is there to do business, and it will punish you hard if you don’t book and book-in online.

11. Here’s the cavil. Ryanair isn’t quite as bold as it ought to be. Its communication director has defended its charge for credit card payment (which is levied per passenger and flight, not per transaction) on the basis that it is possible (just possible, he might have added) to circumvent it. Why not say: “Come on guys, we’ve got to make money somewhere and we reckon this hacks people off less than any other similar ramp”?

Conclusion
So the bliss of the thing is that Ryanair is not just no-frills, it is anti-frills. It rips veils, conceits, devices, cons, prettinesses and even decencies away. It is a pretty competent airline in the sense that it’s pretty reliable. It’s mouthy and quite grasping. You have to be on your toes when you deal with it. I wouldn’t buy a holiday home based on its route map.  All that said, why bother to hate it? It has distinctly lovable dimensions.

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PR Week reports that up to 100 Lib Dems are set to convene at the end of this month to figure out ways in which the party can improve its internet communications. It seems the Lib Dems want to obtain a louder voice on the web than their Labour rival Derek Draper and Tory Iain Dale. But it is the racist BNP which is eclipsing them all online.

BNP is currently the number one political hit on the web in the UK. They’re followed by Guido Fawkes’ blog which ranks as 84,182 most hit website worldwide, and by Iain Dale who has a traffic ranking of 100,289. Neither blog matches the BNP’s “UK political-chart-topping” position of 48,382, according to traffic ratings agency Alexa.

Britain’s mainstream political parties lag further still behind the BNP in terms of popularity online (see graphics below). The supposition is that the internet has been neglected by the official party machines. They might have created websites, but they never attracted an audience with which to interact.

The dirty little truth here may be that the web is not crucial to mainstream retail politics. After all, the successful “Conservative” sites are unofficial to a degree. They appeal to a Private Eye sort of market (the “Wannabe Insider”) and the obsessive pol rather than to the routine undecided marginal voter. They are not a model for the mainstream, “official” parties.

Moreover, as Rachel Sylvester has hilariously pointed out in The Times, some of the recent interventions on the web by the mainstream political establishment have been embarrassing. For instance, Derek Draper has just been suspended from Twitter for inappropriate usage. (There’s an amusing report on this from Iain Dale here.) And was John Prescott really the right person to lead Labour’s charge on the mainly teenage Facebook; or was it that he was the only senior figure willing to give it a go? Politicians do need a measure of gravitas, and that peculiar beast may leak away online.

Confronting the BNP online’s presence may be very difficult. But this is because the BNP can resort to dog-whistles and nudges-and-winks and general dissembling in a way which can’t be matched by mainstream parties.

It’s certainly a real problem. One fallout from the recession is that more and more unemployed people have time on their hands and access to the internet. Sections of this constituency, including Chav-town Dagenham-man (employed as well as unemployed), feels that the “traditional” white working class has been bypassed. It should be no surprise that the BNP has tried to pander to such sentiments.

One of the major concerns of this audience is immigration.

Thank goodness, the mainstream debate is now free of racism. Policy itself is daring to be slightly less permissive. Where that “tightening up” will end up, and whether it will leave a big rump of angry refuseniks is important, of course. Will the mainstream leave a large pond for the BNP to fish in?

The good news is that though the party is as unpleasant as ever, most casual BNP supporters are not hardline racist bigots any more than are the rest of Britain’s population. Most of them are not racist at all: rather, they are angry about their recent experience.They could probably be brought back into the mainstream.

But the mainstream policy shifts which might achieve this probably won’t need a specially online approach. Remember, the online world has an element of the Samizdat about it: it is somehow slightly forbidden. That mood inherently appeals to the BNP because for good reasons and bad, its messages aren’t much heard on the mainstream media but are always faintly and deliberately paranoid.

So in this most important case, the mainstream parties can win this and other battles out in the open – and the BNP can’t easily win the battle, however well it uses the web for which it is so well suited.

I am of course very keen that the mainstream use the internet as best they can. But they ought to use the web in a good, richly informative way. Success online, just as it is offline, is about communicating the right messages in the right format in the right place to the audiences which inhabit the online space. For more on this I recommend Stuart Bruce’s PR blog here, on which he usefully challenges the blogging glitterati’s obsession with social media netiquette.

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Today’s Jade Goody story in the Sun is very touching. The PR trade needs to get over its aversion to Max Clifford and his brilliant manipulation of a story at once luminiously modern and as old as time. He’s on the side of the angels.

Two things stand out about Jade. She’s doing all she can to leave a legacy for her kids. She’s campaigning for improvements in screening of young women for cervical cancer. In the process, she’s roused a nation’s passions for her and her causes. And, with Max Clifford, she is using the modern media to tell an old story.

There’s certainly been drama in her life. And it’s been made public by Big Brother, which shines a compelling light on the minutiae of modern life. In The House, she became a part of our family – somebody we felt we knew. She went on to embody the nation’s Chav side.

But her life in the spotlight has really been about her flight from Chavdom – or at least an aspiration that her children escape from it.

That’s the point about Chavs. Theirs is a shout from the unreconstructed unrespectable working class, but it often disguises quite a strong desire to better oneself. Victoria Beckham as Posh Spice is a heroine to that world for a bunch of contradictory reasons.

So’s Jade. Sure, she appalled us with her playground bullying of Shilpa Shetty. But the outrage was much overblown. We never really considered her to be racist – any more than we really think Prince Harry is anything other than a loose-mouthed and inconsiderate twit.

She’s been wonderfully described by Julie Burchill in the Sun as being, “born to Dickensian deprivation — junkie dad who hid guns under her cot, abusive one-armed mum for whom she was the principle carer ever since childhood. She had very little education and has spent her life trying to make something of herself against all odds.”

It’s an extreme version of a common story. Millions of families hold very dear the mantra of giving kids “the start in life I never had”. They often get it wrong and way too many Brits think it’s about money rather than spelling. But Jade’s ahead here: she’s framing her ambition for her kids in educational terms. She wants them to rise above the ignorance that made her famous.

We should acknowledge that too many others with her start in life wallow “happily” without ambition in their own mess. They invest in failure, and Jade doesn’t.

And she can thank goodness she’s got Max Clifford in her corner. Talking of Clifford’s role in the Jade Goody affair, CIPR President Kevin Taylor has commented:

Of course I, and many others, would dispute that Clifford works in PR at all – he certainly doesn’t work in the same PR land that I inhabit.  To my mind, Clifford is a publicist and that is very different.

Well, to my mind Max Clifford is the ultimate PR man’s PR. Sure, he seemingly inhabits the lower end of the market. But so what?

Edward Bernays in his 1952 classic book Public Relations loving describes our industry’s modern origins in the hands of circus promoters such as Phineas T Barnum. His favorourite saying was “there’s a sucker born every minute”. A fact he backed by promoting an old Negro “slave” by the name of Joice Heth. Her claim to fame – said Barnum – was to have nursed George Washington one hundred years before (making her around 160 years old). He also promoted Tom Thumb, the dwarf, and Jenny Lind “The Swedish Nightingale” and a Cardiff Giant. That was the Greatest Show on Earth back in 1871.

The show goes on today. We all play a part – so please cut the snobbery. After all, two of the more “respectable” leaders of the UK’s PR industry are themselves former tabloid editors – Tony Hall and David Yelland. We all fish in the same pond of life.

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