The Final Victory of Spin

So the hills (possibly – can anyone on the ground advise?) of Crewe are alive with Labour’s death rattle. Llamas, top hats and the discarded husks of activist consciences litter the landscape.

Those responsible for the various Class Hatred for Dummies-style japes (“You’d better ask the experts about that,” says the local Labour leader) are claiming the tactics have worked inasmuch as they have successfully moved the debate on from the 10p fudge. And there are plenty of hard heads in the Lib Dem campaigning teams, I’m sure, who would nod approvingly at this.

 

People: so how stupid are they exactly?

Once upon a moon I wrote scathingly of the twat-in-blue-shirt voter we have lost to flimsy Tory tax “policy”, and was quite rightly corrected by Rob Knight to the tune that it might actually be (whisper it) not entirely twat-in-blue-shirt’s fault that he doesn’t know what our tax policy is. It’s the old story: we’ve got the policy, we just don’t got da message.

I recall blogging sunnily on the subject of message back in the primaeval early history of the People’s Republic, and then I stuck the whole subject of communications in the huge box room in my head with the sign on the door saying “More reading required”. More reading is generally the answer to everything in the People’s Republic (except the easy, obvious, boring stuff like earning a living, forming functional relationships with other human beings and all that other window-dressing jazz). Well, I haven’t done any more reading, but I have done some more talking. Specifically, on the comments thread following Nick Clegg’s Guardian piece yesterday. The exchange, shorn of interspersing madness, was as follows. I appear in the guise of a blue porcupine:

RyanBerks November 22, 2007 12:01 PM

Okay little dose of honesty..
1.Ming was a catastrophe!
2.Stop being bland!
3.Be a real Liberal! Right now if I had to think of one thing to differentiate the liberal dems, the only thing I could think of is that they want to tax us more, in a stealthy way of course… bizarre for a supposedly Liberal party!   

blueporcupine November 22, 2007 2:23 PM

Ryanberks – can I just correct you on Lib Dem tax policy? We would cut the basic rate, currently 20p (covering people earning up to 50k) by 4p, and get rid of the starter rate, currently 10p (covering people earning between about 6k and 10k) altogether, replacing it with a zero rate, with a longer term view of making the minimum wage completely guaranteed tax free. The upper rate of 40p would remain the same. This would be paid for by increases in taxes on asset wealth and green taxes.This mind-shift from taxing your paypacket (which you have worked hard for) to taxing accumulated wealth and polluting activity is simply not offered by the other two main parties.  

RyanBerks November 22, 2007 6:17 PM

blueporcupine – If and only if, what you’ve mentioned moves forward I would applaud the move on reducing taxes on those that pay the starting and basic rate of tax (as it will benefit all of us).My only hope is that Nick stay’s well away from the toxic labour party and perhaps on key issues (i.e. ID cards) votes along side the conservative party. To ensure there is some level of opposition in Parliment to Brown’s regime.  

blueporcupine November 22, 2007 8:36 PM

Ryan – that tax outline is party policy, as approved by the membership at conference in September. The policy documents (if you’ve got the stomach for it!) are on the party website. It’s moved as far forward as it’s ever going to move without y’all vote for us

I don’t know of any Liberal Democrat not implacably and vocally opposed to ID cards. Nick Clegg has said that if it comes to it he’ll personally refuse to register and go to court if necessary.

I didn’t get the final ringing endorsement I was after. I’d like to think that RyanBerks has withdrawn to some mountain retreat with a year’s supply of rice and a copy of Fairer, Simpler, Greener to reflect on his political allegiance, but actually I’m sure he has just been distracted by a thing. Howsobeit, a tiny, shuffling millimetre of progress was clearly made. Winning hearts and minds, one blood vessel and nerve cell at a time, style of thing (hey, it’s as good as any other slogan). 

And all this gives me pause for thought, because there are always a goodly proportion of comments attached to these broad spectrum appeal pieces that make a similar plea to RyanBerks’ “stop being so bland”. Rather than trying to evolve one single, simple message for allcomers (which a prospective party leader writing on Comment is Free must perforce do), we should be true to our localist nature and evolve different versions of the same message to answer the questions posed by difference audiences. My uber-rational, dry exposition clearly had some impact in this case, but wouldn’t in all.

Of course, you can’t manufacture a range of these messages easily without an agreed central repository of message-fodder, and therefore I commend you with renewed enthusiasm to the Lib Dem Voice Wiki project, and shall even be commending myself to it just as soon as I understand what it is.