A London nightclub is launching a campaign to jolt the young into political awareness, writes Stephen Armstrong
THE first ad is probably the most shocking. A huge, muscle-bound Eastender is shouting at the camera. ”This country isn’t ours any more!” he bellows, launching into a tirade that ends with ”I want this country run by white people!”
There’s another where a cabbie says young girls should think before dropping their drawers because he doesn’t want to pay for single mothers to get new carpets on the council. There’s yet another where a gardener says that homosexuals are against nature and they should be placed in special centres. At the end of each film, the screen goes blank before filling with the words: ”Use Your Vote. You Know He’ll Use His.”
This is the latest in a series of attempts to jolt young people in Britain into exercising their right to vote. These commercials will run in cinemas around youth-oriented films and in the British music and style press. They are profoundly disturbing commercials, as each one features people who appear to be the genuine article – racist, sexist, homophobic, and more besides.
They are also strange, for two reasons. First, because they are encouraging young people to vote out of fear of what might happen if they don’t – rather than voting because some celebrity says it is important. Second, because they have all been paid for by the Ministry of Sound.
The Ministry of Sound is a London nightclub. It’s big, it’s noisy, and it’s full of young people getting up to all sorts of nonsense, just like nightclubs have always been. What nightclubs have never, ever been is the political conscience of the young. So what’s going on?
Mark Rodol, managing director of the Ministry, says: ”Forty-three percent of 18- to-24-year-olds didn’t vote at the last election. That’s 2,5-million young people who didn’t choose to exercise their right to determine their government. We are simply asking anyone who is complacent about voting to consider the content of these films and think again.”
Surely these ads are nothing but a marketing gimmick?
Rodol laughs at this. ”The Ministry of Sound probably doesn’t need to market itself any more,” he says. ”This is a message that, as a responsible organisation of 50 young people, we felt we should put out.”
The Ministry of Sound is seeking partners to help carry the cost of the campaign. Already the International Fund for Animal Welfare is helping pay for the anti-hunting films, and other lobbying groups are in discussion with the club.
The campaign will run as long as the funds last, but Rodol hopes to keep enough cash aside to run the ads in cinemas in marginal wards before and during the general election. He says he wants to show Westminster what a difference a few thousand clubbers can make to the state of the nation.
A group of people aged from 18 to 25 were shown the cinema and press ads – and the effect was all the Ministry of Sound could have hoped for.
One woman, Jo (aged 20), was a convert. Before the ads, she had never voted and described herself as completely apolitical. After watching the reel, she said she planned to exercise her franchise this spring just so she could stop those people.
Some were slightly more cynical. Toby (24) thought the ads were pro-Labour and anti- Tory. He respected the attacks on racism, sexism and homophobia, but thought some of the people lampooned were effectively making party political statements, and that the ads were therefore encouraging people not to vote Tory. He wanted to see an extreme leftwinger in there, bemoaning the loss of union power, just for a bit of balance.
According to Rodol, this subject wasn’t in the ads because it would have had absolutely no effect whatsoever.
The Ministry of Sound’s campaign is an attempt to detonate a renewed interest in politics. As the first generation of clubbers move in to retirement, or at least semi-retirement, perhaps the club’s timing is right.