Attacks that work, attacks that don’t

Here’s something we don’t hear often enough: Labour are doing ok in the polls. Consistently polling in the late 30s is not bad at all. Under different circumstances, it could win us an election.

No, the problem is not that Labour are doing badly, it’s that the Tories are not.

Politics is – in the end – a zero sum game. For us to win, they must lose. At the moment, we’re expending a lot of time and energy trying to make ourselves look and feel like winners. Good. That’s essential. But we simply mustn’t neglect the other side of the coin. We have to make the Tories look like losers.

On paper, this shouldn’t be too hard. They’re a Party whose vested interests are currently deeply unpopular, who are led by a group of people with no concept of what the insecurity plaguing the rest of us feels like, and who haven’t won an election for 20 years.

In the papers, it’s a tougher proposition. The press seem to be divided between the compliantly sycophantic and the terrified.

The presence of their human shield doesn’t help either. The Lib Dems have pretty much accepted their doomed fate as far as I can tell. Danny Alexander must be run ragged from covering when Osborne doesn’t fancy scrutiny. (I used to believe the Libs did this because of the enjoyment they achieved from the belief people were taking them seriously. Now that belief has passed, I can’t help but wonder if Danny’s just trying to get well known enough to go on I’m A Celebrity… when he loses his seat.)

So Labour are going to have to work much, much harder on getting our attack lines adopted into the national conversation. That means getting them right and honing them well. We know that this has worked. The public may not yet trust us on the economy, but polls show they have adopted the phrase “too far, too fast” as their own.

So what will work?

Well the “out of touch” line is a powerful one, as we are seeing in London. But it needs skilful deployment.

Boris was always seen as other-worldly, it was part of his charm, so it’s not a huge change to make that into a negative as times got tough.

Cameron, on the other hand, has carefully cultivated his “bloke like you” persona. Despite his being related to the Queen, most people think he comes across as someone who can relate to them and their lives.

This bubble needs to be pricked by Labour constantly but carefully. As we learned in Crewe and Nantwich, just calling someone a toff has little resonance with the public. It’s not about Cameron’s money or schooling. It’s about his inability to connect with the lives of ordinary struggling people.

Ed’s recent foray into consumer rights could be used as fertile attack ground here. Those of us who know what it’s like to run out of money before you run out of month understand the value of consumer rights. Those who’ve never had to shop around don’t. Putting Cameron on the back foot on the sharp end of the sharp practices of predators both regains and maintains our – now universally popular – agenda, while also further exposing whose side Cameron is really on.

Just as attacking Cameron for being a toff doesn’t work, so too attacking him and his party for being Tories won’t work either. The word itself doesn’t have magical powers of evil. While the Tories were out of Government, they managed a moderately effective detoxification. Ok, they couldn’t quite breeze across the finish line, but they limped over well ahead of us.

They may not have convinced a majority of the country, but they did win a lot of cheerleaders. From civil rights campaigners to environmentalists, from the Guardian to the Sun, enough of political Britain were convinced by Cameron’s snake oil even when the public were not. These groups have been slow to react to the change in Government. The hope Cameron instilled in them is only slowly dissipating, despite the speed with which the Tories are taking a wrecking ball to our society. The anger at the last Labour government is equally slow to dissipate, leaving the attacks lingering on, despite the pointlessness of them.

Labour must woo these proxies better. For the moment, until we are closer to an election and closer to the possibility of power, they have a greater voice than we do and are more trusted with the message. We need them. Their commentary on the damage this government is doing is what will redefine and detoxify the word Tory without it being a party political act.

Finally, back to the 80s doesn’t really work. Not because – as Paul Richards was arguing – it was all so much fun, but because it was too long ago. The 80s is a proxy attack. When we say back to the 80s, we’re trying to use it as shorthand for the worst of the troubles that Thatcherism caused. We’re trying to conflate all the things we think are going wrong again – a country with stark divisions, the disregard at best and abuse at worst of the poor and vulnerable, the unemployment and the writing off of people and communities, the insecurity, the hopelessness and the despair, the damage that did to the whole country, the whole economy – into a pithy shorthand. But we should be focusing on these issue by issue – not trying to shoehorn them into a singular clunky proxy. We should be using them to build a wall between the Tories and the country, brick by brick.

Attacking the Tories isn’t the whole of Labour’s job, but it is and must remain a big part of it. We’ve dealt with the Lib Dems now. We’re at a decent place in the polls and the country have seen the chaos the Tories first legislative programme has and continues to cause. As we build ourselves up we must tear them down. It ain’t pretty, it ain’t “New politics” but it is absolutely essential.