The Paradox of Parliamentary Propaganda: Parliamentarians' Individual Media Tactics versus Parliament's Institutional Media Strategy

Parliament's internal divisions make it difficult to communicate to the public with a single voice. Institutions usually strategise about their tactics internally; parliament has been unique in that its media strategy has focused on mediating those tactical discussions publicly. Scholarship has described how parliaments did – or deliberately did not – engage with media but leaves unresolved the puzzle of parliamentarians’ underlying media strategies and tactics. This chapter focuses on these media strategies and tactics by analysing two levels of parliamentary practice: parliamentarians’ media policies and their debates on these policies. It interprets the interplay between the overall media strategy of the British Parliament and the specific media tactics of subgroups of members of parliament (MPs) by analysing parliamentary debates in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The chapter argues that parliament and its parliamentarians dialectically reconciled an institutional media strategy with individual media tactics. A media strategies-tactics interplay occurred on two layers: (1) bottom-up media tactics of comparatively powerless parliamentarians combated the top-down media strategy of the powerful government and (2) the higher level media strategy of the institution of parliament interacted with the lower level media tactics of individual parliamentarians, minority MPs similarly using tactics to subvert the majority strategy. The first layer is explored by focusing on opposition and backbench MPs, and the second layer by concentrating on MPs representing the minority parties and constituent countries of the United Kingdom (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).