SCRATCHING OUR NAILS DOWN THE BLACKBOARD

During the 2005 General Election we heard a lot about “dog whistle” politics as employed by the Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby. Simply put, the Conservative campaign was about making sure die-hard Conservatives were motivated to turn out by focussing on specific issues that agitate them.

Dog whistle politics works for political partisans. But it also works just as keenly for ordinary, unaligned voters who aren’t tribal and will vote for the party that they believe best represents their interests at each election.

But just as significant as dog-whistle politics are what you might call “nails on blackboard” politics - signals that drive ordinary swing voters screaming from a party. At the last election Labour was scraping its nails down a lot of blackboards: far too many people identified Labour as being on the side of those who expect a hand-out rather than a hand up; too concerned with promoting a rights agenda that lacked any corresponding emphasis on the responsibilities that accompany them. This perception is even more damaging than the view that we are deficit-deniers.

And right now some in Labour are reinforcing that disastrous impression. Dale Farm is a classic example.

Richard Howitt MEP is a decent and hardworking MEP. He’s well liked and respected (including by this author) in the Eastern region, which he has represented since 1999. Like many in our party he has a long and distinguished track record of working hard for the people who elected him. But when he suggests that “it could be that it is those who would evict [Basildon Council], that it is they who are the lawbreakers”, he’s scraping his nails down the blackboard in a big way. Meanwhile, the law-abiding residents of Basildon know full well that if they had attempted to construct, say a conservatory, without planning permission the council would have been down on them like a ton of bricks.

Sadly, on this Richard’s not alone. Basildon’s Labour councillors have been high profile and persistent in their support of the Dale Farm Travellers – long before Vanessa Redgrave and Workers Liberty descended on the site. I don’t doubt that the Travellers will have been the subject of some pretty despicable and racist abuse. But if Labour’s leader on Basildon Council really aspires to becoming the leader of the council, then she might care to reflect on whether it’s entirely sensible to tell her voters that she’s ashamed to live there. Locked inside our political comfort zone wearing our liberal instincts firmly our sleeves, we seem to prefer to blame the voters for their views rather than ourselves for our inability to persuade them they’re wrong (and of course it doesn’t occur to us that we may be the ones who are wrong).

It’s not as if the party doesn’t know where the mainstream majority is: Ed Miliband clearly understood where the live rail was in the aftermath of the August riots, for example. And he was speaking from the right side of the barricades on this issue when he spoke in favour of the evictions, saying that "the law does have to be upheld right across the country whatever background people are from, wherever people are."

But in Essex Labour has decided to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the law breakers. I haven’t been able to find a single Labour figure who has publicly supported the Ed Miliband/law-abiding majority line on this admittedly emotive issue.

After Labour’s 2010 electoral rout Deborah Mattinson found that (in the South especially), voters identify Labour more closely with the “have not’s” than the “haves”. Labour is seen as the party that speaks up for immigrants, benefit claimants, and the Trade Unions, but doesn’t speak for the mainstream majority.

Let’s be clear: Labour must always stand for the disadvantaged and the dispossessed just as the Conservatives will always stand for those seeking to entrench their wealth and advantage. But we must also want – passionately, actively want – to speak for the majority who don’t see tolerance of lawbreaking and criminality as in any way desirable. It’s not enough just to expect voters to come back grudgingly because the Conservatives have let them down…again.

Yet some in the party seem to take pleasure in pursuing their support of the underdog – any underdog - without a consideration for the huge damage this does us among “ordinary” voters. Labour wore the straightjacket of discipline for eleven long and uncomfortable years, so perhaps some of us are still enjoying the freedom of no longer being in government. But each and every day spent on the wrong side of the debate condemns Labour to a longer and longer period of opposition.

Stuart King