July 29, 2009
Letting the Tories Win
According to The Guardian, Gordon Brown was using the Norwich North by-election to road-test the strategy of emphasising Tory spending cuts to voters. That strategy failed. Disastrously.
The irony, however, is that emphasising Tory plans to slash spending could and should be a vote-winner – provided it’s done in the right way. And the right way is certainly not Brown’s way.
So far, Labour strategy has been – at least, if Brown himself is anything to go by – to drone out the words “10% Tory cuts, 10% Tory cuts” like some ear-achingly painful stuck record. The idea (one presumes) is to scare the electorate into not voting Conservative, on the grounds that public services will suffer too much if they get elected.
If Norwich North is anything to go by, the voters aren’t scared. Whether this is because whatever comes out of Labour mouths is now automatically deemed utterly unbelievable by a sceptical electorate, or because of a clever Conservative strategy of turning the issue on its head by emphasising national debt (and hence, the alleged need for cuts), I’ll leave others to decide.
For what it’s worth, I suspect it’s a doomed-to-fail strategy simply because most voters cannot actually visualise what 10% cuts to public spending entails, in terms of effects on public spending and quality of life alone. After all, it’s a long time since the last recession (at least 15 years). People under 33 have no adult experience of constrained government spending during a recession. People over that age have had 15 years for the memory of the pain such constraints bring to fade.
“10% cuts” is therefore a pretty abstract notion to the average voter (I include myself). Sure, it sounds kind of scary. But without recent, fresh or direct experience of the impact of government spending cuts during a recession, the gap between something sounding scary and it actually being sufficiently fear-inducing to provoke a person to action remains wide. Hence, droning on about “10% cuts” won’t scare people into not voting Tory, because it’s simply too abstract a threat.
Yet all this shows is that attempting to induce fear is the wrong way to attack the Tories on cuts. (I will leave aside justified qualms about the rightness of attempting to win an election through fear-mongering). It does not show that attacking the Tories on cuts is necessarily a flawed electoral strategy.
A better strategy would be to argue that Tory cuts will make the recession worse. This, as it happens, is stock Keynesian thinking and is (finally) starting to get an airing (and here, and here) against the Conservative mantra that huge cuts are needed because of national debt (whilst making statements that “you don’t spend what you ain’t got”, despite the outright macroeconomic stupidity of such sound-bites).
Yet to explain why big Tory cuts will make the recession worse requires something which is apparently alien to Gordon Brown and the New Labour project: treating the electorate like thinking, intelligent adults.
Rather than trying to scare the electorate into not voting Tory, why doesn’t Brown try to argue them into rejecting policies which would prolong recession, increase unemployment and delay recovery? Why doesn’t he present a set of explanations about how national economies work, and why, in turn, cutting spending during a recession is a terrible idea? This would expose the Tories as economically illiterate as well as dangerous, without pursuing the low-politics of fear which isn’t working anyway.
The explanation isn’t hard to find. New Labour has consistently treated voters as contemptible idiots, to be manipulated through the pages of the tabloid press; to be lied to and ignored when they disagree with the dictates of the leadership. No wonder Brown’s response to Tory popularity has simply been to try and terrify the electorate. No wonder that engaging with voters as intelligent beings able to assess arguments on their actual merits has not even been tried.
Such is the irony of New Labour’s last year in power. An electoral strategy that could save it requires the one thing it is singularly incapable of: treating voters as beings able to think and choose, rather than as a herd to be frightened and manipulated.
H/T to Giroscope for the post that got me thinking.
