We’re going to get hammered on June 4th – and videos like these don’t help

By Hadleigh Roberts

I am absolutely furious at the disgraceful PPB released last week. There was no mention of Europe for the European Parliament Elections, there was no mention of councils for the Local Elections, and there was barely any mention of Labour either.

The broadcast was 2:40 of pure negative embarrassment. It is an obviously testing time for many Labour activists and with every punch the man in the video laid on that punch bag, it felt like one more blow to my self-respect as a Labour member. David Cameron would do X, David Cameron would do Y. Well what are we going to do? Yes, the broadcast may have been factual; yes, these things need to be said, but Labour comes across as a bully, scaremongering the electorate into voting for it. Maybe I’m a romantic, but I would prefer to ask people to vote out of support for us rather than fear of the opposition.

Before I go on to talk about the Party at large, I want to talk more specifically about this broadcast. Not only was it a more despicable campaign than the one in Crewe & Nantwich, it was also poorly executed. The people who made this video need hurling into the boardroom for a right ticking off from Sir Alan. Given a camera and a tenner, I would have produced a better PPB, and made a tenner. I’m no spin doctor, but I know that the first 30 seconds of a PPB should not be some mystery bloke walking up to a punch bag, and it shouldn’t continue for a cumulative minute throughout. “Where’s yer bloody product?”

Contrast this with, say, the Green Party broadcast: It was interesting, simple, and coherent, struck the right tone, dealt with
misconceptions while also promoting their policy, with a decent dose of humour too. Contrast our broadcast with that of the Welsh Labour Party too, which was all-in-all a good PPB because it used the platform to promote the program. Rhodri Morgan talking about people “not getting paid to sit at home, but getting paid to train three days a week and work the other two” is exactly the kind of message we as Labourites should be sending all across the country. He even mentioned the word “Europe”.

“Europe” brings me neatly to the Conservative Broadcast. Too bad for us, it was a stroke of genius and Cameron killed two birds with one stone. He realised that nobody really cares about the European Elections, which is symptomatic of how little priority all the parties have given their MEPs, none of whom feature in our broadcast to talk about what they’ve been up to. He realised that voters want to sort out MPs’ expenses. Cameron confronted this immediately, and on top of that, he managed to avoid alienating half of his party by steering well clear of Europe. (UKIP’s PPB, while giving the impression of a daytime TV accident helpline advert, at least stated their case).

Controversially, offence is the best form of defence. We don’t need to focus on defending record in government which should speak for itself; we do need to show a way for the future. This is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but there is now a Blairite Generation of first-time voters (myself included) who don’t remember first hand how bad the Tories were, and there are even more (myself not included) who don’t even care.

Negative campaigning is both necessary and effective, but it won’t work for us in this situation. Labour is deeply unpopular in itself,
so it’s up to us to sort it out, though when I say “us” here, I mean of course “them”, the people like “Gordon”, “Harriet” and “Ed” who keep emailing me to tell me everything is fine and that we’re actually 20 points ahead, it’s just that the newspapers (boo hiss) are bitter, and the PM is actually brilliant, oh and it’s America’s fault too.

There’s an argument I’ve heard around the Internet that “you just can’t attack Cameron” because he is genuinely liked. You’re much better off attacking the run-of-the-mill moat-owning Tory. This is true for the moment, but I believe it may be more effective to paint Cameron neither as a “shallow salesman” nor as “chief economic adviser to the Treasury on Black” when he was apparently little more than an intern. It’s my understanding that he was Michael Howard’s right hand man and chief speechwriter. He’s the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who wrote some of the worst kind of Tory anti-immigration scaremongering. You need a mix of positive and negative stuff.

I do blame Brown for the weakness of the Cabinet and of the Party. For a decade, the government was distracted by his ego, as he as his “Brownites” crushed and pushed any potential rival out of the way and blocked reform at any opportunity. It is for this reason Tony Blair hesitated to promote David Miliband, as much as we say “Brown’s Budget” instead of Alastair Darling’s. It’s also why Alan Milburn was sent to the back, and why Blunkett and Clarke had their trigger fingers ready. Dominated by Brown’s “flawed” personality, the legislative program has come to a complete halt.

Unfortunately, Labour’s interests are currently no longer compatible with those of the nation. Of course it is in the interest of the country to have a Labour government (not matter how bad Brown is, I can’t believe that Cameron will be better), but it is not in the Party’s interests to be in government. We need to finish modernising; there will be former Labour activists who left because of Blair and Iraq and so forth, who have been waiting on the sidelines with their watches out waiting to pronounce the time-of-death of New Labour. This is no time to “go back” to Old Labour, as we so desperately need to go forward. The Old/New Labour divide remains a scar on the party that has to be overcome the PLP has to get over labels, whether they be Blairites, Brownites, Brownies, Harmen, or Milibandistas.

We’re going to get hammered on June 4th (though I’ll still be working faithfully in Regional Office up to polling day). By coincidence, so will our friends in the French Parti Socialiste, who have also had their fair share of leadership issues. They, however, have the advantage of Opposition. It is lamentable that when the world needs a credible centre-left ideology in the wake of an unprecedented economic crisis, Social Democrats across Europe have been caught unawares, despite the relative success of Zapatero’s PSOE; we have heard strangely little from him.

The impression I get from various people is that we are somehow repeating history. We might be in for a circa 1997 landslide, it might be a new Thatcher ’83. High-up Labour figures suggest that we’re actually back in 1992. None of these seem very appealing to me, for if by some miracle we were to win the next General Election, without a battle plan in “the fight for Britain’s future” it might be better to cut our losses before it gets so bad we’re out for another 18 years. We have to reunite, rethink and be ready to return in four years time.

Article after article on LabourList, I see saccharin phrases like “if we get rid of Brown, that’s just what the Tories want” as if the Tories don’t want a worn out Labour leader who is politically inept, nationally despised and who can’t flash a decent smile. There will be people who will call me a “defeatist” or a “fatalist”; in return I’ll call them “complacent” and “foolish”. I can’t remember where I read it, either LabourList or LabourHome, but the fact we’ve fallen below 30% (20% on some polls) means that even the ‘core vote’ is deserting us. There is no hope that, unlike what the emails tell us, the Tories will come unstuck over policy, because they are not going to face any scrutiny while everyone watches Labour stumble behind from disaster to disaster. The party is at its lowest rating ever and ministers need to get their act together.