Twelfth Night has come and gone and the season of goodwill is well and truly over. Or at least it is in politics.
With only 120 days to go till polling day, all the parties have started their election campaigns and it looks as if we’re in for four unedifying months of mudslinging, name-calling and the peddling of half-truths that will serve only to turn the voters off. So if we are not to become even more alienated from democratic politics than we already are, how should politicians try to win our votes?
The election will be the first to have been conducted in the new era of fixed-term parliaments. So we have known for nearly five years that our next chance to elect a government would be on Thursday, 7 May 2015. With that new certainty, the political parties have been campaigning for months. But the New Year has seen them up the pace.
Both the main parties started the year with a poster campaign highlighting what each of them wanted the election to be about. There were no surprises. The Conservatives want to talk about the economy about which opinion polls show they enjoy a significant lead over Labour. Labour wants to focus on the NHS which has traditionally been seen as the Tories’ Achilles heel. But neither party has exactly covered itself in glory in the way it has tried to press its advantage.
The Conservative poster launched by the Prime Minister last week is of a long, straight road leading through gentle countryside off into the horizon. The slogan is: “Let’s Stay on the Road to a Stronger Economy”. The implied message is that the Conservatives are taking us down a road that will lead to the sunny uplands, while Labour will steer us into the ditch.
Perhaps the least of the Tories’ problems with this new campaign is that the photograph they have chosen was apparently taken somewhere near Weimar in Germany. That may be passed off as poetic licence. But the actual claims they have made both about their own record and what they say Labour would do have provoked immediate challenge.
Among their boasts was that the government had halved the deficit. Yet one of their own traditional supporters, the Spectator magazine, described this as a ‘porky’. Although the proportion of national income the government borrows has come down from just over 10% of national income to around 5%, in cash terms (what the government has to raise from lenders in actual readies) has fallen only by a third, even though George Osborne’s original promise was that he would have eliminated this sort of borrowing altogether by now.
As for its claims that a Labour government would lead us into ‘chaos’, it has been accused of wildly overstating the threat from Labour’s spending plans. On Monday, the Tories produced a dossier in which they claimed Treasury officials had calculated that in its very first year a Labour government was committed to spending an extra £20bn for which it had not specified how it would raise the revenue, meaning that there would be an extra £1,200 of government borrowing loaded on to every working household in the country.
Labour immediately cried foul. Ed Miliband said the claims were ‘completely false’ and Ed Balls said: ‘This Tory dossier is riddled with untruths and errors on every page’. What’s more, it was wrong to get Treasury officials doing sums for purely party political purposes, they said. George Osborne retorted that Labour had done the very same thing when it was in power and that it was perfectly reasonable to put together all the statements Labour spokespeople had made about different spending ideas they wanted voters to think they favoured and then cost them. So the mud went on being chucked from one side to the other.
Meanwhile, what about Labour’s attacks on the Tories? They claim that they want to cut public spending to the levels of the 1930s when, their poster pointed out, ‘there was no NHS’. In the other words, the implication was that the Tories intend to return us to the conditions of the 1930s, to a ‘back-to-the-future’ in which there would be no NHS.
When I challenged Labour’s health spokesman, Andy Burnham, on the grounds that this was scare-mongering of the worst sort, he denied Labour was claiming the Tories would abolish the NHS. Rather, the NHS would ‘change out of all recognition’ if David Cameron was given five more years in charge of it A rather different claim you might think. As for the comparison with 1930s public spending, Labour defended itself by saying that the comparison had been made by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility.
But as others have been quick to point out, the government’s target for the proportion of national income devoted to public spending (on which this comparison is based) is only slightly lower than the figure back in 2000 when Labour was in power. And most importantly of all, that simple statistic overlooks the fact that national income is hugely bigger than it was in the 1930s so it is hardly going to seem like the 1930s if governments spend roughly the same proportion of it on public spending.
Confused? Or just browned off with politicians who slag each other off? The real question is why politicians bother to engage in this sort of abusive point-scoring when it only annoys the voters. One answer is that it rallies a party’s core vote when its leaders bang the familiar drum of abuse against its opponents – the Tory drum that warns Labour will wreck the economy and the Labour drum that threatens the destruction of the NHS under the Tories. In the coming election the two main parties need to rally their core votes because they are threatened by other parties, notably UKIP, the SNP and the Greens.
Yet the election won’t ultimately be decided by the core voters but by the increasing army of floating voters and the evidence suggests that the campaigning antics we have seen this week from both main parties alienates them. So how should the parties woo those voters?
YouGov’s own Peter Kellner says that what sways these voters most is not the slanging match about policies but what he calls ‘valence’ issues, that’s to say the impression voters pick up about leaders’ characters, values and ability to do the job. The mud-slinging and name-calling serves only to undermine these impressions and yet, on current evidence at least, our political leaders don’t seem to have found a way to wean themselves off the traditional, abusive ways of campaigning.
Perhaps they need some guidance. How would you like politicians to conduct themselves in the coming campaign? What advice would you given them about how to secure your own vote? Please let us know. If they pay attention to what you say, you’ll maybe raise the tone of the whole campaign and save us all a lot of grief over the next four months.
