In place of smear

By Ed Mayne

The way the Damian McBride affair has been reported, you’d think smearing was a new political trick. Far from it. Sadly I believe this whole episode was an accident waiting to happen. Politics in the last few years has got personal. It was only a matter of time before someone went too far. And with the nature of new media as it currently is, it could happen again and it could get worse.

This whole incident comes less than a year after the Tories did some smearing of their own. Last June they published a dossier that outlined how Gordon Brown shouted abuse at secretaries, kicked his desk in rage, threw mobile phones and made his former close aide Spencer Livermore break down in tears. The Sunday Mirror alleged that all this was done with David Cameron’s approval. Downing Street naturally denied the allegations.

And yet even this was nothing new. Why was it that Simon Hughes, when standing as a leadership candidate for the Lib Dems, felt compelled to justify his marital status? Why was it that during his political ascendancy Gordon Brown had to put up with whispering campaigns about his unmarried state?

The answer to these questions is quite simple. Politics in the UK has become Presidential rather than party political. The leader of the party is arguably now more important than the party itself. Thatcher, Blair and Brown have all played their part in this transition. And now Cameron and Clegg are doing their bit, using their parties as a vehicle for themselves in much the same way as Tony Blair did with New Labour.

Presidential politics is personal politics. And with this comes personal attacks. The Americans have been doing this for years. Remember Whitewater with Bill Clinton and “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” – the Vietnam veterans group that attacked the war record of John Kerry. When politics gets personal, politicians words, policies and qualifications are quickly forgotten.

Whether this change of political style is a good or a bad thing, or whether it was inevitable, is another debate. What makes it dangerous in this context is the current culture of new media.

In past decades, when people couldn’t meet face to face, we used to communicate through phone calls and well thought-out letters. These are now being replaced by emails, text messages and blogs – which consist of unemotional and often thoughtless memo-style prose written on the spur of the moment.

This new media is changing the way we do politics. Blogs are dominated by people who feel they have something to say – and sadly this is currently a small minority of us. As the emotion and sentiment behind the text is often impossible to gauge, the comments that follow inevitably degenerate into abuse rather than constructive debate.

The question for the spin doctors of this new world is how low do you go? Do you join in the abuse or rise above it? And how will the electorate respond to either course of action? In trying to work this out, McBride went much too far. He paid the price. But if he hadn’t done it, someone else would have got there eventually. It’s up to all of us now to stop this happening again.

Some people tell me that blogging is the future of politics. If this is the case, I very much hope it gets more mature with its increasing importance. At the moment it brings out the very worst in us. Often anonymous comments descend into mudslinging, entertaining to read but not always so much fun if you’re the victim. At the moment the participation rate in blogging is so low and the culture is so cut throat that if blogging of this kind is the future it risks making politicians even more remote from voters, the people who matter most.

We can all agree that censorship is not the route to go down. Therefore all political parties and all press and media outlets have a responsibility to regulate themselves so that with this new Presidential style of politics, attacks of a personal nature do not get out of hand.