Politician in sex denial shock

I watched the last of the prime ministerial debates with a group of lively postgraduate politics students in a hotel in Leuven, the beautiful medieval town twenty miles from Brussels. No-one showed much interest until David Cameron turned to the subject of inheritance, when he delivered this gem: “passing your family home on to your children” is “the most natural human instinct of all”.

This unrepresentative sample of the British electorate could think instantaneously of at least three human instincts that were by any measure more natural than passing on the family home, at least one of which was also much more fun.

Gordon Brown made much in the debate of the Conservatives’ proposals on inheritance tax as a millionaire’s charter. But none of the mainstream parties can claim to have promised to do very much on the question of inheritance.

As they huffed and puffed to make much of the fag-paper’s breadth that divides them on this as on many other issues, it was clear that no-one in the political mainstream will seriously address this question of the transmission of privilege (and disadvantage).

In fact, and at least for three or four years after 2000, Labour’s record on the reduction of (especially child) poverty was not at all bad (though it has slipped back since then, as the recent Joseph Rowntree Trust report made clear.

In its early years, it introduced Sure Start and the Child Trust Fund. But these were overwhelmed by the traffic carrying income inequality in the opposite direction. On social mobility, the record is one of grim under-achievement; made to look tolerable only by the still worse record of the Tories who preceded them. For just the latest depressing round of evidence, see the Marmot Review.

Inheritance is not natural. Some of the keenest defenders of private property throughout history have scorned the idea that we have a right to that which our parents earned (or stole or themselves inherited).

Seneca and St. John of Chrysostom provide two classical sources. A thoroughly modern liberal like John Stuart Mill was a severe critic of inheritance. It was once regarded as in the mainstream to argue that the increment in land values that adjacent development brought belonged not to the lucky landowner but to the community at large.

But such a view now seems to be off-limits, at least to politicians; though, by contrast, see Phillipe Legrain’s recent article in the Financial Times.

And yet more, much more of a radical stance on questions of property is required of us if we are even to pretend to takes seriously the issues of environmental change and is social consequences which stand before us as an inconvenient (if still, for some, an unproven) truth.

But we have almost certainly lost the capacity to think this big. We don’t want to address questions of social mobility because we hope to be able to transmit such advantages as we now have to our own children in what looks like a very uncertain world, one in which we have largely lost faith in our capacity to forge effective collective solutions.

When we hold up our politicians for ridicule for their small-mindedness and unwillingness to think of the long-term and the big picture we should remember this. If there was a real popular will to address these things, there’d be a politician to stand for it. When we see our politicians, we are not just viewing a screen or a gazing up at a podium, we are looking in a mirror. Who is to blame if we don’t like what we see?

Professor Chris Pierson

Why is no one criticising Nick Clegg’s Vietnam War record?

"The Daily Mail trumpeted the Conservatives’ success in raising £1.5 million in the first week of the campaign, but Obama could raise that between sneezing and blowing his nose..."

For those of us who treat elections as a spectator sport, the general election campaign is bubbling up nicely. But for a politics-as-sports fan like me, it lacks something in comparison with presidential campaigns in the United States. Sure, we’ve got our own ‘Yes we can’ (albeit ‘probably not’) dynamic going on. And the debates have been fun. But unlike the US, we don’t get to enjoy candidates’ paid-for advertising campaigns.
In particular, we’re missing out on juicy attack ads—30 seconds of dramatic narration enumerating an opponent’s real, implied and imagined transgressions, character flaws, voting record etc.

There are Party Election Broadcasts of course, but PEBs don’t give the same thrill as the 30 second spot. In the heat of battle where is David Cameron’s soft-on-crime Willie Horton? Where is the shady support group ready to step up and challenge Nick Clegg’s Vietnam War record?

Consider too, the people who are rendered redundant by the absence of paid ads in our election culture: the undergraduates, pensioners and other would-be focus group types; the political scientists and grad students with papers to write; the ad-watch and fact-check bloggers. Think of the atrophying creativity of our best advertising people.

And spare a thought for the wasted youth of our frustrated YouTube parody-makers. How do you parody a PEB?

What would this general election campaign look like if candidates ran paid ads? With other 4000 candidates, if every single one ran ad campaigns on TV it would be chaotic and unbearably parochial, but at the party level, with three competitive candidates, a trailing incumbent and two parties emphasizing a break with the current administration but also less likely to form a coalition with each other, conditions are ripe for a fantastically negative campaign.

And given the brevity of the UK campaign, the concentration of attacks would be spectacular. It is interesting to imagine what British campaign ads would look like. Would we see Daisy girl reinvented to remind us of the dangers of European integration? Would Gordon Brown emphasize his superiority over Nick Clegg in taking care of business at 3am? Or would ads be more inimitably British? Picture Gordon Brown as Stevens from Remains of the Day—surely a creative advertising type could take that idea and run with it?



More importantly, would campaign ads be good for the UK? And especially, would it make more people vote? Negative campaigning gets a bad press, but recent research in the US suggests that exposure to attack ads can sometimes mobilize voters to turn out and is often a source of substantive and documented information.

Negative messages stimulate stronger affective responses, are more memorable and signal to people that something important is at stake. They also help voters to differentiate between candidates—an important issue for less sophisticated citizens who say the candidates are all the same and therefore don’t vote.

In many ways the information environment available to voters during UK campaigns is very good. However, there is one area where politics is yet to fully penetrate: the commercial break. This is a niche that campaign ads were literally born to fill and might be able to reach less politically engaged voters who, even now, may be surprised to learn that there is an election coming up.

Rather than confining politicians to the news and shopping centres, why not unleash them on people waiting for Desperate Housewives or Masterchef to come back on? Since we can now access our preferred entertainment so efficiently, people who choose to avoid information about the election can do so with little effort. Running ads on Dave or E4 might just get more fans of Friends repeats informed and engaged in the electoral process.

It wouldn’t be cheap. Airtime at commercial rates isn’t cheap. At 2008 prices, a 30 second spot run nationally on ITV during Coronation Street would cost £75K. With the Electoral Commission’s limit of £20 million on campaign spending this is probably not a cost effective use of resources, especially given that there is no systematic evidence that negative advertising actually works electorally: small dents in an opponent’s support are offset by diminution of support for the sponsor of an attack.

Yet this doesn’t deter candidates and parties around the world, who continue to run negative ads in hope of striking it lucky. Lyndon Johnson’s Daisy Girl, the most famous and perhaps successful ad of all time, ran just once, albeit in the pre-multi-channel, pre-internet era when audiences were effectively captive.

Reaching audiences in our current fractured media environment is expensive and difficult—which is why we see such enthusiasm for experimentation with internet communication tools. Cost effectiveness is clearly an issue for parties in the UK, where raising campaign funds is more difficult than in the States: The Daily Mail trumpeted the Conservatives’ success in raising £1.5 million in the first week of the campaign, but Obama could raise that between sneezing and blowing his nose.

Dr Jon Sullivan

Put your clothes on Dave!

The Conservatives’ new poster has been launched with the words “our new poster underlines our positive agenda on welfare reform”.

Yet the Tory manifesto is not nearly so hard hitting as represented here; the formation of local work clubs and those on job seekers allowance carrying out community work, might even have once been described as paternalistic. Moreover, while the policy to which the poster refers is in the manifesto, it is a policy of last resort.

And it is last resort to which the Tory leader would have appeared to have returned, a sop to a wing of the party who would probably have voted for him anyway. More importantly given the changing nature of the electorate it is a move that Tim Bale argued against two months ago.

The poster’s combination of image and text is also an odd one. Posters are at their most successful when image and text combine, one supporting the other in harmony. It is perhaps the Conservatives who have been best at this in the recent past, as with Labour’s Tax Bombshell (1992), which successfully combined slogan and text in 1992, to visualise an internal fear that many voters had:

The new Conservative poster makes no attempt to join image and word. We have the image of go-getting Cameron and a seemingly unrelated slogan, and while the two don’t contrast they also seem to have little rapport. The poster may prove to be successful, but as a piece of political marketing it is banal.


And then there’s Cameron’s wardrobe or indeed lack of it. Firstly we had Cameron in no tie, relaxed and informal he was the man we could trust. We now have him with no tie and no jacket, go-getting and eager to get on with the job.

How many clothes will he mislay before the election is out?

Christopher Burgess

Clegg is Cripps not Churchill shock

"Nick Clegg will have to show that he is more than that if he really is going to rival Churchill...."

The Sunday Times quotes a YouGov poll that says Nick Clegg is nearly as popular as Winston Churchill.

Wonderful stuff for those responsible for the story, the justification for which is that in 1945 Churchill had an approval rating of 83% while Clegg’s is currently 72%. The only sting in this particular tale – for Clegg anyway - is that Churchill went on to lose the general election - rather badly I seem to recall - a few months later.

Actually the best historical figure with whom to compare Clegg is not Churchill but Sir Stafford Cripps. Stafford Who you may ask? Those with some history behind them might know that he was Clement Attlee’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man of severe moral rectitude, a teetotaller and vegetarian.

That however did not stop his Conservative opponents referring to this paragon as ‘Sir Stifford Crapps’ after a BBC radio announcer committed one of the funniest political spoonerisms, ever.

Crapps – sorry, Cripps – is less well known for something else. In 1942 he was nearly as popular as Churchill. I wrote about this a while ago but it is worth retelling the tale.

At the start of 1942 Britain was in trouble militarily and Churchill had his back against the wall. There was a popular mood that castigated all parties as to blame for the country’s troubles. Along comes Sir Stafford. Having been expelled from the Labour party before the war he was not attached to either of the two main ‘old’ (as Clegg might put it) parties.

Returning home in January after ending his stint as Ambassador to Moscow he gave a BBC radio speech. This struck a loud, clanging chord with a disenchanted British public – half of whom heard the speech and 93% of those approved of its message, which when boiled down was just an appeal for greater individual effort to win the war.

Almost as vacuous as Clegg’s contribution to the leadership debates, you might think. Even so, this one speech catapulted Cripps to the front rank of politics: at the peak of his popularity 34% of people wanted him to replace Churchill at Number 10.

So, what happened? I don’t recall Cripps becoming Prime Minister. Reality happened. Churchill brought him into government where he promptly got lost in administration while El Alamein helped restore faith in his government.

History teaches no lessons but it does show in this case that radio (and television) might create political stars who shoot across the firmament but they need more than that if they are to stay there. Cripps was merely a temporary repository for a public narked off with all politicians: Nick Clegg will have to show that he is more than that if he really is going to rival Churchill.

Professor Steven Fielding