Britain enters the contest to be second best

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Britain’s Conservative Party, masters of social media that they are, have done it again. They posted one of history’s stranger political ads on Twitter–or at least on the site that used to be Twitter. It opened by saying, “Don’t let the doomsters and naysayers trick you into talking down our country. The UK is as strong as ever.” 

And how did it follow that up? By bragging that Britain’s the second most powerful country in the world and illustrating it with

  • A US fighter jet
  • A Canadian-owned car
  • A football team whose photo was taken just before it lost a game to Brazil
  • King Charles, looking overwhelmed by an outsized crown, although the royals aren’t supposed to be dragged into politics
  • A second fighter plane, this one developed by a European consortium back when the UK was in the European Union
  • And Rishi Sunak, who is, in fact, Britain’s prime minister

I’d link to the ad but it’s been taken down.

If anyone tells you politics are no fun, they’re following the wrong stories.

Irrelevant photo: I have no idea what this is but I am certain it grew in the right country. Whether that’s where it originated is a whole ‘nother can of worms.

 

So is Britain really the second most powerful country?

It depends who you ask and on how you define power. Also on how you go about measuring something that’s not as easy to measure as you might think, but I’ll give the Conservatives this: they didn’t make up the claim. It comes from a report by BrandFinance that ranked the UK second in something it called the Global Soft Power Index.

The what? 

It measures–or at least tries to measure–countries’ “ability to influence the preferences and behaviours of various actors in the international arena (states, corporations, communities, publics, etc.) through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. Each nation is scored across 55 different metrics to arrive at an overall score out of 100 and ranked in order from 1st to 193rd.”

Did everyone survive that barrage of corporate-speak? Good. We’ll stagger onward.

“The report has found that at a time of global uncertainty and instability, economic credentials are increasingly important contributors to a nation’s soft power. Nation brand attributes such as ‘strong and stable economy’ and ‘products and brands the world loves’ emerge as key drivers of influence and reputation on the global stage.”

In my official capacity as a non-expert on just about all topics, I wouldn’t have said Britain’s economy was in great shape. We’ve been living with inflation and a cost-of-living crisis for long enough that the government’s started to brag when inflation slows down a bit. The cost-of-living crisis is present enough that it’s part of real people’s conversations–not to mention real people’s lives. We’re post-Brexit, post-Covid, post-14 years on Conservative government and the view from my couch doesn’t show me a country in great shape. But hey, what do I know?

Besides, in some tellings soft power is partially about a thriving cultural scene, and the ad did include a picture of the director Christopher Nolan, which gives me an excuse to mention that the Conservatives just cut arts funding. 

I’m telling you, the Tories–in case you live in a country that isn’t Britain and need a translation, that’s another word for the Conservatives–are an underappreciated party.  I admit that they’re despicable, they’ve wrecked the country’s infrastructure, and they do horrible things, but they’re so transparently bad at just about everything that they’ve become an art form. 

 

How are they doing in the polls, then?

According to a recent poll, only four out of ten people who voted Conservative in the last election plan to vote for them this time around, and Rishi Sunak–the Tory leader, remember–has a personal approval rating of -33%.

Labour’s leader, Kier Starmer, on the other hand, has a personal approval rating of -3%, which is roughly what mine was in high school, or to put that another way, nothing to brag about. 

How can someone have a minus approval rating? I tried to find out how they’re calculated but got nowhere, so I’ve randomly decided that–well, an explanation threatens to fall off the edge of the English language, so I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re a politician in a country with 100 voters and have an approval rating of -10%. Surely that means 110 of those 100 voters hate you. Or else  100 of the current voters plus 10 of the ones who’ve died hate you. The dead traditionally vote in Chicago, and the US has been in the business of exporting democracy for as long as I can remember, so I don’t see a problem with that.

 

Let’s switch to some non-political news 

This is brought to you by the Emperor’s New Clothes Department:

The company formerly known as Standard Life Aberdeen decided it was a good idea to rebrand itself after it sold off some pieces of the business, and that probably made sense, since one of the pieces was Standard Life. So they gave an unknown amount of money–I wish I knew how much but nobody’s saying–to a branding agency, which came up with a reinvention.

Hands up anyone who knew branding agencies existed. 

No, me neither.

Anyway, in return for that unspecified but presumably large amount of money, the agency came up with a new name: Abrdn. And the company said, Yeah, that’s great. We love it. Because if they called themselves Aberdeen, they couldn’t claim intellectual property rights on the name–the entire, rude city of Aberdeen got there first. 

The nerve of these people.

Cue all the predictable jokes in the media (“rlly stpd,” etc.) and at least one unpredictable one about “irritable vowel syndrome.”  Recently, the company’s chief investment officer’s accused the press of “corporate bullying.” 

“Would you do that with an individual?” he said in an interview. “How would you look at a person who makes fun of your name day in, day out? It’s probably not ethical to do it. But apparently with companies it is different.”

Well, um, yes. For one thing, they’re not individuals. And the company not only chose their name, they spent a lot of money to choose it. 

The media is filled with remorse. The Financial Times posted, “Lv Abrdn aln,” and City AM put “Abrdn: an apology” on the front page. It read, “sry we kp tkng th pss ot of yr mssng vwls.”

*

If that last item was about things that have gone missing, this next piece is about extras:

A guy who worked at a German art museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, smuggled a painting of his own into an exhibition and hung it in a hallway. It lasted eight hours before the gallery spotted it and took it down, gave it back, fired him, and in case it hadn’t made itself clear, banned him from the gallery. 

It doesn’t always work out that way, though. A woman smuggled a piece of her work into a different German art gallery and no one spotted it until they took the the exhibit down and found an extra painting. They put up a post on the site that used to be Twitter and now has a silly name: “We think it’s funny and we want to get to know the artist. So get in touch! There’s no trouble. Word of honour.”

The artist, Danai Emmanouilidis, said she’d always wanted to get one of her paintings into an exhibition and “smuggled it in with a giant hoodie over my leggings.”

The gallery auctioned it off and the money went to an art charity called ArtAsyl in Cologne. I don’t know how much it sold for, but I’ll bet a cinnamon bun that it was less than Abrdn paid for its new name.

37 thoughts on “Britain enters the contest to be second best”

  1. Standard Life has been Abrdn for ages, so I’m surprised the press are making a fuss of it now. Maybe there’s nothing else happening at the moment.

    I almost understood the Global Soft Power Index stuff, but I’d like to know what the other metrics are. I suspect they don’t have much to do with who’s in government, how many fighter planes you have and whether or not you can put on a decent coronation. In retrospect, though, that last might just be something that is included.

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    • I think the Abrdn uproar came out of a recent interview, but underneath that I wonder if assorted corporate and media types that their higher-ups rub elbows with just haven’t been willing to let go of the joke. I have no idea why it surfaced now, but it did make me laugh–especially when I thought about how much money they must’ve spent to make themselves a target for those jokes.

      I expected soft power to be about things like the draw a country’s universities have for foreign students, the impact of its culture abroad, the status of its performers, writers, and artists–that sort of thing. But I haven’t seen the metrics and I have a hunch that as soon as you have to measure something you have to boil it down to things that can be measured, which imposes some rigidity on it all and edges out the elements that are harder to measure.

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      • I had a quick look at the metrics page and I have no idea how they can measure them all. Some of the items are: Food the world loves; Politically stable and well-governed; Products and brands the world loves; Invests in green energy and techniques; Internationally admired leaders; and Easy to do business in and with. Then there’s lots of corporate fluff to get you to pay for the report. Nation brands is a weird concept.

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        • Very weird. As is the whole business of making something vague measurable. I can see how you’d figure out what products the world loves–how much of them do they buy?–but internationally admired leaders? You’re going to get into some hazy territory there. Things that may seem obvious (people in an Irish pub passing Obama their babies to hold, for example) will be hard to measure.

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          • Unless I’m missing something, a negative approval rating of -10% means that, of 100 people x% disapprove of you, and x-10% approve. Which could be 45% for and 55% against, or (more likely with this lot) 20% for, 30% against, and 50% don’t know/don’t care.

            As it happens, some of my savings are with Standard Life (abrdn). I did wonder if they’d been taken over by New Zealanders (whose accent tends to be sh’rt’v vow’ls).

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          • Unless I’m missing something, a negative approval rating of -10% means that, of 100 people x% disapprove of you, and x-10% approve. Which could be 45% for and 55% against, or (more likely with this lot) 20% for, 30% against, and 50% don’t know/don’t care.

            As it happens, some of my savings are with Standard Life (abrdn). I did wonder if they’d been taken over by New Zealanders (whose accent tends to be sh’rt’v vow’ls).

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            • I almost understand your explanation of negative approval ratings, but somewhere along the line all the numbers merged and my eyes crossed and I needed a drink. Sadly, I don’t drink anymore, but never mind that, I settled for tea. Anyway, it almost makes sense–more people don’t like you than do. Still matches my popularity rating in high school. I will argue, though about the Kiwi accents. I hear vowels of predictable length but the different sounds than I’m used to. Their “peg” sounds like my “pig” and their “yes” like my “yiss.”

              Okay, maybe that is a shorter vowel. Oh, hell, I had a good argument going there for a while.

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              • Accents are fun … one thing I noticed, among many, a while after I arrived here in Canada from OZ, was that Canadians, in general, emphasise the first half of a word, and Australians the last half.

                It amused me no end that my friends and family here had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned this fun fact to them. :D

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                • That is interesting–and I’ve noticed a similar US/UK difference on words like SKELetal (US) and skelEEEEEtal (UK). It seems to hit medical words particularly.

                  I can’t help wondering if all languages are as strange. Sadly, English is the only one I know in any depth. I do know that in Maori when you look for the definition of a word it depends on the context. Everything depends on the context.

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  2. Just as U.S. politics confound most people outside the U.S., your politics are sometimes confusing to us, too. I was scratching my head over the negative approval rating thing, but then I thought … wait … doesn’t that just mean that more people disapprove than approve? So, to use your example of a country with 100 voters, maybe 30 approve of politician ‘A’ and 60 disapprove (there are always those 10% who have no clue who ‘A’ even is). That would give ‘A’ a negative approval rating of 30, or -30 … yes?

    And thanks for clarifying that the ‘Conservative Party’ is the Tory Party … I’ve always been confused about that. So … your Tories are like our Republicans, and your Labour Party is like our Democrats? 

    I did enjoy the humour bits, especially the one about the smuggled ‘art’! 

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    • The parallel to the Republicans and Democrats isn’t exact but it’s close enough to let you fake your way through most news articles. And your guesswork on the negative approval rating sounds convincing. Not a ringing endorsement of either candidate, is it?

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      • No, it wouldn’t be exact for we have different sets of issues than you guys, but in terms of overall ideology, perhaps they’re close. No, definitely not a ringing endorsement! If I were either of them, I’d be cutting my losses right about now and going back to my day job!

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        • A lot of people in Britain will say that the country follows the US into all sorts of things–and it’s generally not said about hopeful moves. But I do think there’s some difference in ideology. The Republicans have been taken over by Trump followers, evangelicals and all. The Conservatives are following a hard-line neo-conservative economic agenda–cut taxes, shrink government, privatize, privatize, privatize. It’s created a hell of a mess.

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          • Interestingly, in an email conversation with one of my Welsh friends, he made this comment just last night: “… what American idiots do today, British idiots will adopt tomorrow.” I think the Brits could surely find a better role model than the U.S.!!! And to your point, yes, the ‘Conservatives’ in the U.S. have gone off the rails and in my view have completely discarded the platform of actual conservatism in favour of fascism. The ‘plan’ they have drawn up for next year if Trump should win the presidency is downright scary.

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  4. Second? I wonder what China or the USA have to say about that (assuming one of them is 1st). I did enjoy the artist/gallery technican putting his own painting in the exhibition. Good for him. I hope it boosts his career as he’s lost his job and his banned for three years (although I am not sure where he’s banned from, exactly).

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    • He’s banned from that museum, although whether he’d want to go back is anyone’s guess. I expect he took a good portion of hard feelings with him when he left.

      I can’t explain the soft power rankings, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the difficulty of the Chinese language (at least to those of us who didn’t grow up with it) would come into the discussion somewhere. But let’s face it, I’m making this up as I go along.

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      • The Chinese have a lot of involvement in funding African projects but I suspect it a way of endebting those countries to China. Mind you the “West” has been lending money to developing countries for development since forever. I am not sure there is any difference.

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        • No difference whatsoever–except, of course, that if a country we don’t like does it, it looks kind of sinister. I mean, don’t you think they’re up to something? A good example of soft power, though, as are high-minded cultural connections countries encourage.

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            • I’ve never listened to BBC’s World Service, but I expect it’s good–Radio 4 certainly is, as is a lot of what BBC does. (We won’t discuss the Archers, okay?) But sure, it’s part of soft power as surely as the US’s Radio Free Europe was or–oh, hell, what’s the TV station Russia funds? Some I’d trust and some I wouldn’t, but they’re all doing very much the same thing in their different ways.

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  6. Your story about Aberdeen made me think of the time that worked as a vendor to General Motors. At the time, they were apparently concerned about the amount of ink that was being used in their benefits material. They insisted that we spell employee “employe” to save the time/ink used in printing the extra e.

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      • There were a few words like that. I’m sure they did some kind of study, but it had been in place for years by the late 1980’s. And it was a real pain to change everything back a few years later when they realized that computers made the whole thing a non-issue. GM had way too many people in management back then.

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        • And every last one of them had to find something to do with themselves, and then a way to trumpet their accomplishments.

          What a batty damn world we live in. I’m grateful to you for that story. It’s a gem.

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