David Cameron’s pitch to Labour voters is worth studying – it may teach us something for our own campaigns

By Diana Smith / @MulberryBush

I was alerted to the new David Cameron video “Never voted Tory before…?” via a Tweet by @David_Scameron, who said: “Check out my new blog cast pod. I’ve gone for the cool, no tie look and I borrowed an unkempt working class back garden.”

@David _Scameron is wrong of course. The back garden may or may not be working class, but it is certainly not unkempt. This is the garden of someone who is working hard on an ordinary estate, somewhere, anywhere, in Britain. It is a garden that I would associate with many people I have talked to on the doorstep; people who are not rich, have may have nothing at all to gain from a Conservative government and who have a great deal to lose.

The estates are the front line. The first job I did in the late 1970s and ’80s was as a housing officer dealing with neighbour complaints. A substantial number of these were always “clash of lifestyle” complaints. Our estates are always a huge mixture of different people with different strengths and different problems. Their defining characteristic is that they bring people close together, often too close for comfort.

When I meet working class Conservatives on the estates my normal feeling is that this is not a logical position. These are not people that the Conservatives are for, I think, though the Conservatives do clearly find them useful voting fodder.

In many cases, as an activist you are dealing with people who are voting the way they do because of family loyalties; or because they wish to preserve a distinction between themselves and their neighbours.

So I think it is important to see what David Cameron has to say. He is using this campaign to target Labour Party core votes. He is using it to say why “Labour has failed”. He is praising our “good intentions”, but saying how he will carry these forward, just “doing it differently”.

His argument here is that we have nothing more to offer. The hopes that we raised in 1997 were not met – and he is the man with the answers. It’s a well researched, well shot and well targeted little video, and it’s worth studying.

But it is also worth countering, and it is worth producing well-focused, clear, short statements of our own. I hope that we do.

If anyone is suffering, though, in the meantime there is a light-hearted antidote:

Related posts:

1. Public services: how should Labour pitch it in 2010?
2. It is important that voters know the clear dividing lines between Labour and Tory MEPs
3. Labour Values voters
4. Teach a man to fish…
5. Rage: this campaign can teach us something