Facing a potentially perilous referendum on the proposed new European Union Constitution, Britain’s government has hired a commercial PR company to extol the document’s virtues to the people, a report said on Thursday.
London-based Geronimo PR had been hired as part of an ”extensive communications campaign” on the Constitution, the Financial Times
reported, citing a British Foreign Office memo.
The public relations firm had been handed a 40 000 pound (75 500 euro) budget to increase awareness about the ”benefits” of EU membership and the ”facts” about the Constitution.
Although the Foreign Office memo stressed that the aim was to inform the public rather than ”persuade”, it reeled off a list of the Constitution’s merits, calling it a ”success for Britain”, the report said.
Losing a referendum, which would be most likely to take place in 2006, would ”jeopardise our position in the EU” and ”marginalise and isolate us”, the memo added.
In a major U-turn in April last year, Prime Minister Tony Blair promised to call a referendum on the EU Constitution, which must be ratified by all EU member states before it can come into force.
This would only take place if Blair’s Labour Party, as expected, wins a general election likely to take place in May.
Blair had faced a furious newspaper campaign for a referendum by vehemently eurosceptic sections of Britain’s press, such as the big-selling Sun and Daily Mail tabloid titles.
Opinion polls show a great degree of scepticism about the planned Constitution, and some government ministers have complained that too much British newspaper coverage about the EU is either unbalanced or plain false. – Sapa-AFP