Rob Blackhurst

Contributions to Dazed and Confused's "Guide to Political Enlightenment" for the 2005 General Election

Dazed and Confused

Spring 2005

---

The Right Angle. Dazed's 90-point plan to political enlightenment.

This Time It's Personal:

The 2005 General Election will sink to levels of trivia unseen in British politics. In 1997 the Labour party famously won its landslide by importing the techniques of American campaigning – the rapid rebuttal of their opponent's arguments, the rallies full of balloons and banalities, and the messianic leadership cult around Blair. This time, another slice of Americana will be adopted: Go Negative. Taking lessons from Bush's smear campaign against John Kerry's war record, The Tories and Liberals think that repeating the mantra "He lied" will be enough to grind down the Labour vote. Add in Labour's "Poll Tax" jibes at Michael Howard and it could well be most mind-numbing, soul-crushing contest in British election history.

Fear:

The conventional wisdom is the art of politics is the successful marketing of hope. Reagan offered America a goofy sense of hope after a 1970s full of sleaze and oil crises; Clinton banged about his town of birth – fortuitously located in a "a place called hope". And George Bush's monotonous tub-thumping about transforming the Arab world won the day over John Kerry's gloomy predictions of apocalypse. British politicians have for the first time tried to sell fear. The scare campaigns of the tabloids now dominate the political agenda. Just as the Daily Mail's original proprietor, Lord Rothermore, promised his readers a "daily dose of poison" so both main parties have created a toxic brew out of immigration, TB, terrorism, and anti-social behavior. The lines between them is deliberately blurred. The theory is that these "phone-in" issues morality motivate voters left cold by questions of tax and spending. The message never varies: our way of life is under threat – and only a government crackdown can save us. Don't believe it.

Immigration:

For the first time since Enoch Powell fretted over the menace of "wide-grinning piccaninnies" thirty years ago, immigration has become a mainstream political issue. In previous elections, politicians have tip-toed round it through coded references to the asylum system. This time, Michael Howard has targeted migration – all-migration – head-on. "We can't take everyone" say the Tory billboards, straining to sound like table talk in the Queen Vic. Now the economic migrants sucked into Britain by an economic boom are also being presented as a problem. Frightened by Howard's populism, the Government is busy erecting barriers to make it ever harder for migrants to bring their families with them and preventing them from ever gaining citizenship. This machismo contest is apparently what we want - 74% of people believe that too many migrants in this country. But it's hard to make the case that immigration really is out of control. Asylum-seekers have fallen by 60% in the last three years. Sure, there has been an increase in economic migrants, but they've added £2.5 billion to the economy and filled huge skills shortages. With an ageing population, we have too little, not too much migration. Not that the politicians will mention it.

What happened to the youth vote?

When Michael Howard describes a British dystopia in which "woman are intimidated from hooded youths as they walk home at night; couples stay in rather than run the gauntlet of binge drinkers" we can safely assume he's not pitching for the student union vote. Politicians pay lip service to "engaging young people" but the priorities of the young constantly lose out to their elders. Politicians are terrified of offending anyone over fifty – witness the backlash on the 50p rise in pensions a couple of years ago - but blithely renege on promises to the young. (Labour texted millions of under twenty-fives before the 2001 election to promise that licensing laws would be liberalized – but are still agonizing about whether it should go ahead). The reason? Electoral maths. One in three voters are pensioners, and over half of over fifty, and they're far more likely to bother voting than their children. As long as twenty somethings struggle to find a polling station, they'll carry on being clobbered by unfair taxes and draconian drug laws.

The implosion of Political Rhetoric:

Ok, so we don't expect a Socratic dialogue between our politicians, but 2004 plumbs new depths. Roy Jenkins had a test to see if a politician was talking nonsense. If no sane person would say the opposite, then their utterances were meaningless. Both Michael Howard and Tony Blair would fail the Jenkins test. The Tories say they believe in "health, wealth and happiness" (rather than sickness, penury and misery, presumably) and Labour trades under the inspired phrase "Forward not back". Blair appears on podiums emblazoned with "Your family Better Off" and "Your Community Safer" – verbless sentence that, in a typical New Labour semantic fudge, seem to both straddle past and future tenses. The blandness is, of course, entirely deliberate – both parties are trying not to scare the tiny percentage of floating voters in marginal constituencies who haven't yet made up their minds.

Crime:

Something strange has happened to British crime figures. Burglary rates, muggings and shoplifting have been plummeting – all as a direct result of Government action. You'd think this would be imprinted on a pledge card or mentioned in every speech by Tony Blair as proof that they are cracking down on crime. But no one dare mention it, because it's not police raids or prison that's working – it's the decidedly liberal policy of prescribing methadone and heroine to addicts. Methadone prescriptions have risen to cover 25 per cent of addicts and the programme of heroine prescriptions has been quietly expanded. Since the Home Office estimates that half of crime is drug-related, this is having a major effect. In Switzerland, where heroine is prescribed to anyone who needs it, burglary has fallen by 70%. If politicians are brave enough to ride the "junkies paid for by the state" headlines – we could have the same results here. Here there are big difference between the parties- Lib Dems want more prescription, Labour will do it on the sly, the Tories will abolish it.

Chain Reaction:

There's a good chance that by the time the next election comes around, the Government will be drawing up plans for more nuclear power stations. And, weirdly, it might just have half the environmental movement onside. Nuclear still has deadly PR potential – ever since Cumbrian sheep chewed on grass radiated by winds from Chernobyl during the eighties. The sadistic laugh of the Simpson's Mr Burns sums up public suspicions that the industry is greedy, ruthless and full of dark secrets. But it's ace card is that – as a carbon free fuel – it could dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions overnight. Atoms remain far too hot to handle in election time – the question of what do with the nuclear waste still hasn't been solved. Labour and the Conservatives are privately in favour of nuclear whereas the Lib Dems remains opposed. Expect a Trappist vow from politicians until at least 2006.

Anti-Social Behaviour:

A decade ago, anti-social behaviour wasn't a big issue in British politics – the low level nuisance of graffiti, blasted music, vandalized bus shelters was not high on police priorities. But since the creation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in 1997, yobbery has become political gold dust. Now ASBOs allow anyone – from 10 years old onwards – to be barred from entering neighbourhoods, knocking on doors, using a mobile phone, getting on a bus, and even swearing. If offenders break these terms then they can be summarily jailed for up to four years. The public likes them, but they are dangerously illiberal. As they require a lower standard of evidence, they are now being used when police suspect criminality, but don't have enough to prosecute. They give a carte blanche to the prejudices of neighbours and allow the eccentric to be persecuted. One man was recently imprisoned for four months for "howling like a werewolf". Labour and Tories love them. The Lib Dems are worried.

Euro-Trashed

With a big Labour majority almost certain, this election could be a dry run for the real political contest – next spring's referendum on the European Constitution –, which is far more likely to cost Blair his job. Currently the "No" camp look very hard to beat, though most people say they could still change their mind on the issue. Whatever the lawyers say, the political consequences of a No vote will be deep: we could be heading for the EU exit door – and all those rights that we've taken for granted to live and work anywhere in the EU could be up for grabs. There's a silver lining for Pro-Europeans though – when pollsters trialled the actual question that will be asked, they were only two points behind.

Press, release?

Though newspaper sales are falling, 35 million people still read a Daily or Sunday newspaper, and the population watches, on average, 28 hours of television a week. No other country compares. But politics and the media are locked in a loveless marriage whose endless sniping is turning off the electorate in droves. The immense competition between all newspapers – broadsheet and tabloid – leads to news reported, in the words of a Cabinet Minister, purely "through a prism of sensation, scandal and confrontation". The politicians, in turn, desperately court their destructive attention – responding to the tabloids tune on everything from crime to migration like never before. How will they get out of this deadly dance? If 2005 marks, as predicted, a record low-turn out in a British election – and the tabloid agenda of migration and crime leaves voters cold – there might be a rethink.

Party's over

It has become a truism that the young like "issue-based politics" rather than party politics. They're happy to campaign to stop the war or save the rainforests but they hate the grey compromises of party politics. Admittedly, May Day marches are more fun, but isn't this infantile? After all, politics is about the language of priorities - about trade offs between resources. Taking politics issue by issue is an utterly unrealistic way to run a political system. In California, where all major issues are decided by referenda, politicians are left shaking their fists at the electorate as they are delivered inconsistent signals. They regularly have a majority voting to reduce taxes followed by another referendum result to increase spending on Education. Someone has to make the choice between those two positions. And usually it's a politician. Ignoring party politics is a cop-out.

Political Issues That Have Gone Away:

Homelessness:

To raise the spirits in this bleak contest, it's worth revisiting the issues that politicians managed to solve over the last decade. Remember cardboard city? Since Labour came into power the number of rough sleepers has been cut by two thirds. Since they've already slipped through every institution, each individual is assigned a personal worker who helps them get accommodation and deal with their drug habit. The Government are now turning their attention to the 400 000 "sofa surfers" who are one step away from the streets through an expansion in social housing.

Youth Unemployment:

Discussions about unemployment now belong to the eighties along with sweatbands and the miner's strike. This is a huge political achievement – even in previous unemployment black spots in the North unemployment is at its lowest level for twenty years. No just 2.7% of the Labour force or 834 000 are registered are unemployed – which most analysts think amounts to "full employment"