On really!

After the avalanche of coverage about Damian McBride and whether or not there is a culture of lying and smear at the heart of New Labour, I think there is actually a far more revealing, although apparently mundane, example of the way that Gordon Brown treats people with contempt in today’s Herald.

In a signed article on p6 to co-incide with the visit of the UK Cabinet to Scotland, the Prime Minister writes:

“Today, we are meeting in Glasgow, for a very different reason – to discuss how we can work to bring Scotland and the rest of Britain through these difficult economic times as soon as possible, emerging stronger and fairer than before.”

Is that right?  Everyone knows that the Glasgow visit is part of a UK wide PR exercise to generate pictures and stories in the local media by bringing the Cabinet to different areas.  There’s actually nothing wrong with that – it’s the government trying to sell its message – but please don’t insult us by claiming that there is going to be some serious discussion about the economy around the Cabinet table.

Are Jim Murphy or Harriet Harman going to bring some new discussion point to Cabinet on the economy to which Brown is going to reply: ”Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I hadn’t thought of that before – now let’s have a round-table debate?” Clearly not.

mirror, mirror on the wall…

Sometimes it’s not good for your health – or other people’s – to listen to the radio while driving.

This morning my blood pressure was suffering as I listened to Labour MP, John McFall (who is sometimes treated as if he is some sort of apolitical commentator rather than a party politician), slamming the management of the Dunfermline Building Society for their “reckless” decisions and “folly”. 

Speaking on Good Morning Scotland, Mr McFall also had a needless dig at Alex Salmond, failing to disguise the political capital the Labour Party has been trying to make out of the difficulties faced by Scottish financial institutions.

Of course the Dunfermline has clearly made some poor decisions. But this was all in the context of Gordon Brown’s abolition of boom and bust. Mr Brown, and no doubt Mr McFall, told us constantly that the UK economy was in great shape, record employment, low inflation, with a lot of it due to the financial deregulation engineered by the great leader.

Not only that but Mr Brown had abolished the economic cycle and was rubbishing anyone who suggested that the credit bill was unsustainable.

On top of that the Dunfermline had to compete against Northern Rock and others who were gorging themselves on the lax regime created by Mr Brown’s financial brilliance.

In those circumstances, is it all that surprising that the Dunfermline got involved in commercial property and other areas of business it might regret?

So, Mr McFall might stop to consider who was truly reckless and guilty of folly here – was it the Dunfermline or was it the Labour Party (member – John McFall) who created this massive credit bubble in the first place?

anti-Scottish ranting – why?

Gordon Brown and Jeremy Clarkson actually have a fair bit in common – they both for their own purposes like to wrap themselves firmly in the Union Jack.

Brown’s motivation is clearly political – a rather lame attempt to disguise his, well, Scottishness, and Clarkson’s is presumably commercial – there’s a market apparently in having a go at the French,  Germans etc.

I don’t know if Clarkson is the kind of person the Prime Minister has in mind when he talks about the “British genius” but I’m guessing after today probably not.

On their own,  I can’t actually take the The Top Gear’s latest moronic comments seriously - citing Brown’s disability and nationality and branding him an idiot (when no matter what you think of him he clearly is not) is just not worth bothering about.

But it’s interesting that it’s now ok to use Scottish and Scotland as terms of abuse. Read some of the comments on the above link and that’s clear.

Simon Heffer, in the Telegraph,  has recently essentially compared Scots in public life to dogs that need training. We used  know how to behave apparently, but sadly not now.  I should let this kind of stuff go, but a serious newspaper should be ashamed to allow this bile to appear in print.

The remarkable thing of course is that no TV presenter in Scotland or serious political commentator here would ever describe the English in these terms. (If they did we would be subjected to acres of newspaper coverage beating ourselves up over our dreadful anti-Englishness.)

But the reality is that such ingorant prejudice  just wouldn’t take place.

Policies – when they really don’t matter

Another day, another disastrous poll for Labour, this time in The Guardian (which today also includes a fascinating article on Gordon Brown’s style of government). It’s not that the Westminster government is embroiled in John Major-style chaos, it’s just that most voters are giving a “Yea, whatever” response whenever Mr Brown or any of his ministers say anything. That’s why the Prime Minister is in such deep trouble. Global initiatives to bring down the price of oil, locking up terrorist suspects, action to tackle struggling schools, increasing social mobility are all surely popular, but the government is not engaging people, because basically they want Labour out.

As a senior strategist for a struggling party (the SNP in the run up to the 2003 Scottish Parliament elections) this is all quite familiar to me. I remember the BBC conducting a poll at the start of the 2003 campaign asking voters to rank policies in terms of importance. Voters were not told which policies came from which party. In the event, our key pledges – such as class sizes, nurses pay, halting private involvement in public services – came top. But ultimately  that didn’t matter. The voters may have liked our policies but at that stage they didn’t much like us – and didn’t (yet) want us in government. 

Sometimes parties just have to accept something that goes against the political DNA – there are occasions when the public mood is such that there is not much a single party or leader can do. Parties usually overestimate their ability to shape change and need to come to terms with that reality.

But, as the SNP showed in 2007, circumstances can change relatively quickly.  What this means is that parties need to put themselves in a position where they can take advantage of those changed circumstances. In the SNP’s case this meant focusing almost always on the positive,  having a popular leader and  devising messages that resonated. Interestingly the SNP did not  talk explicitly  about change in 2007 – the slogan was ”It’s time”, not “It’s time for change.” This allowed the party to add positive messages to the end of the slogan  – It’s time to: cut class sizes, axe the council tax, bring our troops home from Iraq etc.

So for Labour what this means is: elect a new leader, stop short-term positioning and try to find a positive reason to vote for you.  But remember – don’t assume any of this will do the trick.