The debate over the Labour Party’s recent adverts demonstrates there is often a knee-jerk reaction against the role that negative campaigning can play in politics.
The ludicrous suggestion that the adverts are anti-Semitic just shows we have entered a period of heightened political sensitivity in the run-up to an election.
Seeing negative campaigning purely as personality-based, as Robin Cook suggests (I see no landslide – voters are fed up with all of us, 31 January), is a rather one-dimensional view, when it can highlight non-delivery of promises or changes of position on important issues. Was the “Labour isn’t working” poster, complete with snaking dole queue, of the 1979 election a piece of negative campaigning by the Conservatives or a reflection of the Callaghan government’s inability to deal with the economy. Employed properly, negative campaigning could help prove the demand for the new politics Cook is searching for. Particularly when turn-out is low, it can mobilise people to get out and vote.
Robin Cook writes about the need to motivate the core traditional voters of the Labour Party to help maintain the party’s majority. What better way to do this than devising some real Tory-bashing adverts? Political parties should be prepared to look at all the forms of campaigning open to them.
Evening Standard, 2 February 2005