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Professoriate Lecture Series
EM Forster meets the Lambrini Girls
Prof Gerard Hastings OBE

This event took place on 20th October 2009

Michael Young Building Meeting Rooms


Social change campaigns can learn a great deal from business: concepts like customer orientation, branding and strategic planning can be applied as successfully to smoking cessation and recycling as they can to tobacco promotion and car purchase. However, this learning should be tempered by critical analysis. Business brings to bear a single mindedness of purpose that is impressive and alarming in equal measure: impressive because it results in a dedication and determination that greatly increase the chances of success; alarming because, in the corporate sector at least, the focus is on shareholder value to the exclusion of all other concerns.

This makes corporations constitutionally incapable of following Forster’s injunction ‘only connect’. They will always deny or down play the links between their activities and negative outcomes (whether for health or the environment), at least until admitting them makes commercial sense. In the mean time they will distract us with social responsibility campaigns. Forster goes on to see this as an inevitable precursor to “the inner darkness in high places that comes with a commercial age”. I would prefer to think that there is no inevitable fall into darkness provided public health and environmental champions assert their authority and demand proper independent regulation.

In particular the tobacco, alcohol and food industries need to be controlled by statutory agencies that will put public health at the top of their agenda. Strategic aims are needed: for tobacco it should be to reduce tobacco use to zero and eliminate the tobacco industry; for alcohol to reduce per capita consumption to safe levels; and for food to rebalance our diets away from HFSS foods. These aims should be pursued with the dedication and determination of a corporation. In this way we can begin “to adjust the lopsidedness of the world” which Forster warned against.

Click below to play the event (84 minutes)