You have to feel for the non-Westminster Village public at the moment. In the run-up to the AV referendum, we have seen a great deal of the very worst kind of political campaigning on both sides of the issue, the kind of stuff that treats the public like barely sentient idiots and communicates very little about the issues at stake: we’ve witnessed silly slogans (the Yes campaign’s “Wipe the smile off their faces”, the No campaign’s “Say No to President Clegg” ), sillier partisan posturing (Huhne and his threat of legal action) and absolutely filthy tactics (Mandelson’s advocacy of voting the way that will cause the Coalition government the most problems).
One truly ridiculous phrase was used by Ed Miliband at the launch of the ‘Yes’ campaign when he described the AV referendum as a “choice coming down to hope versus fear”: clearly his speechwriters have been reading ‘The Audacity of Hope’ again. This phrase has no relevance to the argument at hand (though I may have got it wrong and in fact each Election Day in the UK sees municipal buildings filled with people angrily waving their voting slips and demanding AV so that they can stop cowering with fear under the evil yoke of FPTP). It is out of all proportion to the issue under discussion.
As well as irritating the occasional Platform 10 contributor, this kind of overblown and meaningless rhetoric has some more worrying consequences of which British politicians in all parties need to become more aware if they do not want the public to become increasingly disenchanted with the political classes.
Firstly, soaring rhetoric set expectations so high that reality is bound to disappoint – just look at what has happened to Barack Obama. No matter what he has achieved so far on issues like health reform he was always bound to disappoint simply because his speeches were filled with the kind of inspirational phrases and words that Ed Miliband’s speechwriting team is clearly jealous of. Obama’s team appear to have woken up to this just before he took office in 2009, with Obama saying: “I want to be realistic here… Not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on [sic] the pace that we had hoped.”
It can also lead a cynical public not just ignore but actually discount any actual accomplishments as mere fabrication. One of the most widely criticised aspects of the later years of Blair’s government was the tendency of Number 10 and the Cabinet to spin what were often only minor achievements into glorious triumphs. New Labour’s obsession with headlines obscured the very real progress that had been made on, for instance, education reform, the minimum wage or the Northern Ireland Peace process.
Similarly, the various rapturous and high-flown speeches that Gordon Brown made as Prime Minister to try to re-energise his leadership were met with widespread derision, as were similar rhetorical efforts to kick-start an “economic recovery”; quite sensibly, the UK decided not to place their trust in a man who had, despite his talk of being “Not flash – just Gordon”, been so in thrall to headlines, pollsters and spin, that he fluffed the question of the 2007 election, made misguided attempts to talk about the Arctic Monkeys and tried to hedge his bets, media-wise, by arriving late at the signing of the Lisbon Treaty.
What the public actually wants is not highfalutin yet ultimately meaningless speeches, but honest and straightforward communication from a political class that doesn’t treat them like children yet respects the need for clear explanations. So far, Cameron’s government has generally avoided the Ed Miliband “hope not fear” trap, perhaps having recognised that no matter how much you irritate the electorate by telling them hard times are ahead, you’ll irritate them a great deal more if you try too hard to dress it up with pretty words.
However, in terms of communication – as fellow Platform 10-er Fiona Melville has pointed out here before – the Coalition Government’s record has been less than exemplary. Cameron and his Cabinet either appear unable to properly explain and lay the PR groundwork for complex ideas like health reform or the Forestry issue, or they sound like a bunch of policy wonks stuck in their ivory tower and completely disconnected from the public – like Letwin and his comments on the holiday habits of Sheffield residents, or Willetts and his easy-to-misconstrue remarks about feminism and social mobility, or indeed this morning’s outing for allowing universities to open up more places to people who pay for them privately. We need a senior MP or Minister who can go from media outlet to media outlet and explain complex ideas in workmanlike language. Margaret Thatcher had her Norman Tebbitt. Tony Blair had his John Reid. Cameron currently has no-one – despite the high hopes for Eric Pickles when he was Party Chairman. Now that he is Secretary of State at Communities, he has been very good at picking fights with councils, but less good at explaining why the localism agenda should matter to “the man on the street”.
This flaw is exacerbated by another long-running Conservative problem: no vision. In the run-up to the 2010 election, the public remained unaware of what the party stood for. We had dozens of policies and programmes, but no overarching narrative to communicate to the electorate, one that tied together all these individual policies into a coherent whole that they could really get to grips with. Very little has changed since then. Cameron has tried to create a storyline from his “Big Society” idea, but although there are some good policies here, it seems so far to have mainly consisted of empty sloganeering. They have not yet managed to defuse voters’ suspicion that the Big Society is nothing but a cover for ideological cuts.
Rhetoric is not communication. A glut of disparate policies is not a vision. Cameron has so far avoided the pitfalls of the rhetorical strategies of Obama, Blair and Miliband by using workmanlike language, keeping expectations low and maintaining a space where future Government achievements can be recognised and absorbed by the public. Communicating well with the public shouldn’t involve an appeal to the lowest common denominator or treating them like idiots, as has happened in the AV campaign. We should instead trust the electorate to respond like adults to adult arguments and balanced rhetoric, delivered by someone who sounds like they have some empathy with the average UK citizen. And if the Conservatives are able to join this to a gripping narrative, then we place ourselves in an excellent position for the next general election, regardless of the outcome in Thursday’s referendum.
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