People aren't stupid. Honest.

The Queen is an unelected monarch and, whether you of royalist persuasion or not, she is essentially without political power. However, annually, she is used by the government to make a speech laying out the following parliamentary session’s key political objectives.

This year, David Cameron (before the speech actually took place) said it would be “shamelessly self-serving”…eh, yeah ‘Dave’, of course, and if you had wrote the speech it would be shamelessly self-serving for the Conservatives. That is the point! Even Lord Mandelson was upfront about the fact that the speech would 'lay out the battle lines for the forthcoming General Election and set out a clear choice between the two parties'.

I feel my intelligence is being insulted by Cameron's assessment of my intellectual capabilities – I am aware that this traditionalist pomp and ceremony barely masks the political objectives beneath. Is anyone under the illusion that the Queen herself wrote her speech? All the media coverage is quite plain that this is indeed Gordon Brown’s speech, but instead of dressing up in a fancy robe and sparkling crown and seating himself beside the Duke of Edinburgh, he got the Queen to read it out.

This brings me to my point - people who practice public relations should constantly remind themselves that other people are not stupid. Granted, it is an easy pitfall to trip into in the current Britain’s-Got-Big Brother-X-factor-Get-Me-Out-Of-Here climate and apparently silly people grace our screens and airwaves daily. I, myself, am a cynical sort of person and have been known to denounce the whole general public as ridiculously idiotic. What I really mean is that they don’t agree with me (when I am, naturally, right) and therefore must be stupid.

The truth is, that as soon as our brains are capable of processing information we become active recipients of such information. I would argue, in terms of PR, there are no such things as ‘inactive publics’ because, even if the public involved ignores the information we have tried to communicate to them, they have actually made a choice to ignore that information and have subsequently made a decision. Ignoring can be action. In advertising and marketing it seems common practice to assume their audience is stupid. For example, we are presumed to be duped into believing that something which is 99p is significantly cheaper than something costing £1.

All in all, I am trying to make the argument that, in theory, people in general are not stupid, and in our PR campaigns we should bear this in mind. David Cameron can harp on about the obvious if he likes, but all I can say of it is that he seems shamelessly self-serving – is he running for election or something?