Battle for the sunshine

Elections generally take place in Spring. Now it may not feel like it much today (it’s grey and drizzling as I type this) but as the days get longer and the sun makes more regular appearance, our mood tends to change. Our psyches are hard wired to be more optimistic at this time of year, to feel just a touch more up beat. It isn’t true of everyone, but it is true of people on the whole.

Why does this matter politically? Well I think we don’t take nearly enough account of he weather in the way we campaign. And maybe we should.

Gather more than one Labour activist together and ask them about the weather and they’ll tell you that rain on polling day hurts us because it depresses turn out. The difficulty of canvassing on dark autumn nights played a small part in the decision not to hold what became known as the election that never was when Gordon Brown first came to power.

These are both true and sensible reflections of how we think about weather when planning election, but we need to take this thinking one step further.

Labour are focused on the cost of living crisis, and that is a very real experience for people. But as a narrative, it’s strength will ebb and flow throughout the year. My sense is that it will be felt most strongly at the very beginning of the year. In January and February as the bills for Christmas combine with the highest heating bills, that will be when that narrative is at it’s strongest. It is also when it feels like the short days are never ending and the warmth of the sun is a distant memory.

Psychologically that is the time to drill home to people the effect the coalition has had on their standard of living, on their security, on their families.

The same is true of campaigns targeted around key public services – particularly the NHS. The government were very lucky that we didn’t have a poor winter this year, so the NHS was not put under as much strain as it might have been. Will they be so lucky this year? There is a growing sense that a crisis is coming, and this winter might be when it hits. We know year round that you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS, but this winter may well be the time voters are most open to that message. This should be factored in to our campaign planning.

By now, it’s pretty clear that the Tories and their press supporters have a very simple two pronged approach to winning the next election. They plan to attack Labour pretty viciously – especially Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

But they also plan to run a campaign of tentative optimism based on economic recovery. They will talk of growth and try to instil a sense of optimism in the voters for their vision of Britain.

Derailing this is what the cost of living crisis narrative is all about. Highlighting the fact that most people are not benefitting from this recovery. That the proceeds of it are being shut out of the pockets and lives of ordinary people. That will be vital to neutralising the Tories narrative. It has the added value of being true.

But as the sun starts to shine next spring, just as voters start to pay attention to the general election about to take place, we will need a positive vision of our own. We need to take our focus on what is going wrong under the Tories and turn it into a vision of what will change under Labour. We need to have a credible way of telling a positive story about a Labour future.

We need to fight the Tories not just over the gloom they have inflicted, but also on the sunshine to come.