12 May 2016
Fright Night
by J.R.Thomas
As any hard bitten fast talking cigar chomping PR man will tell you, the great danger with publicity comes when you start to believe your own. It’s time that somebody from Mr Cameron’s close knit team of supporters nervously spoke up from the back and warned him of that.
The legend of the victory for the Union side in the Scottish Referendum, now two years ago, is that it was all done by fright. The way this legend goes, when the electors north of the putative border had it pointed out to them that a free and independent Scotland would no longer be able to dip its fingers into the never emptying honey jar of the English Treasury whenever needed, they overwhelmingly decided to vote for the continuing union. “Overwhelmingly”, in the Conservative Central Office dictionary of “Words and their Meanings”, being 55% to 45%. It was the fright wot did it, guvnor. Not just that prospect of the honey jar having its lid screwed back on tight, but also the erosion of jobs as they leached southwards across the border, the closure of the defence bases on the west coast with the loss of all that spending, the collapse of the desperately underfunded Scottish NHS, Scotland having to apply for renewed membership of the EC on appalling terms, endless queues at the border as the newly poverty stricken population tried to flee south. You get the picture. Frighten the electors enough and they will cling to nanny.
There is no particular proof that this was in fact true. Scots were traditionally great proponents of the union of the two Kingdoms, and, although that has lessened over the last sixty years or so, the rise of the Scottish National Party is surely more a protest against the combination of Thatcherite-southern-England-centric-Toryism (as it rightly or wrongly is seen) and the long domination of Scottish urban politics by a Labour Party regarded as out of touch and self-serving. The result of the Referendum broadly reflected that long standing position.
But maybe alas for Mr Cameron, the wrong lesson was learnt. And now it is being re-applied on an industrial scale. Fright is what to give the electorate. Behind the Labour woodshed something very nasty lurks. Vote for the bearded, shuffling, allotment digging, Mr Corbyn and black collectivist chaos will follow. Vote for the apparently clean cut energetic family man Sadiq Khan and you have elected a terrorist hugger, a keeper of bad company. Vote to leave the European Community and World War Three will instantly break out, Britain’s trade will be blocked in her decaying ports, and famine will stalk the land. Even Mr Obama, on his recent visit to the UK, was persuaded to board the flaming terror wagon, saying that should Britain leave the EU she would be at the back of the queue for any help she might need from the USA, and as for the Special Alliance, forget it.
But, a moment’s reflection suggests that frightening the electorate does not really convert them to whatever cause Mr Cameron is trying to promote. The farrago of attacks on Mr Khan in the recent London Mayoral election stressing his links with nasty Islamic terrorists, and indeed with Mr Corbyn, seemed to have the opposite effect. In the last few days of the campaign this line of attack was pursued by Zak Goldsmith – but looking so uncomfortable about it that one suspects the terror was coming from a man from Conservative Central Office close behind him with a knitting needle. The result was Mr Khan surging further ahead in the polls and the highest turnout in any London Mayoral election, prompted, one suspects, by Khan supporters and moderate Moslems becoming outraged by the Conservative campaign.
So how did the frightening do in the local council elections? Ah, well. Here we had a firm rejection of the leftish takeover of the Labour Party and the semi-Marxist agenda of its dangerously red leader. In a staggering reaction against this reversion to Stalinism, voters across England showed their support of the politics of moderation and the centre-right. From over 2,000 contested council seats, Labour lost a staggering 24 seats and one council (Dudley), compared to the Conservatives gains of…er…minus 35 seats and the gain of one council (Peterborough). Yes, in spite of what you might think from the press headlines, the Conservatives did worse than Labour, and in fact the gainer was the LibDems, in their first flicker of resurgent life since the 2015 general election, who ended 39 seats up. The suspicion lingers that Labour was damaged far more by Ken Livingstone’s strange remarks about anti-Semitism and Adolf Hitler, than by the Tory attempts to make the electorate’s flesh creep. (Nor did this work in Wales, where the Tories lost 3 seats and UKIP won 7.)
In Scotland though, there was success for the Conservatives. Here out of 129 seats the blues gained 16, whilst the SNP lost 6 and Labour 13. That makes the Conservatives the second largest party north of the border, and removes the SNP’s majority. But the trouble here for the Fear arm of the Tory Party is that the Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson, fought a generally positive, modern campaign, pro-Union, but emphasising the benefits of less regulation, and lighter touch, more competent, government. In other words, she was reasonably positive and hopeful. Nor did Ms Davidson seek the help of her colleagues from south of the border – Mr Cameron did not make a single appearance in the Scottish campaign and was infrequently referenced in her speeches.
That frightening people makes them vote your way seems, on the evidence, to be a dubious strategy for winning elections and referenda. The evidence would seem, as you might expect (except perhaps in time of war), that people do not like to be affeared; they prefer positive thoughts, jolly human politicians, hope, and new ideas to make a better world. Try and put the frighteners up them and the chance are they will just get cross and vote the other way, even turning out in greater numbers to show their independence and resoluteness.
Mr Obama’s intervention in the Referendum campaign seems to have been particularly ill-advised. Intervening in another nations affairs can go down badly at the best of times, and when couched in negative ways it often, as here, just seems to irritate the host people. The opinion polls went several points towards Leave after the President’s remarks.
In the aftermath of the Mayoral election, Mr Goldsmith appeared on a platform with his sister, Jemima Khan, who, a fact which seems to have escaped the notice of Conservative strategists, is a Muslim. Mr Goldsmith never appeared very comfortable with running a negative campaign and personal attacks on his leading opponent, and fought in a strangely subdued way. One can’t help feeling that with his sister next to him he was making a pointed if silent rebuke to Conservative high command, which Mr Osborne, with a lack of both sensitivity and guile, greeted with the observation that it was Zak’s Brexit stance (Leave) that had lost him the Mayoralty. He would not get any ministerial preferment now. Zak is not known to have any such desires, but this frightening people thing gets a grip on you.
Finally, let us turn from fright, to peace and love. A West Country Shaw Sheet reader has complained that we missed one key candidate from our London Mayoral candidates review last week. We must plead guilty as charged. – we omitted Lee Harris, the Cannabis is Safer Than Alcohol Party candidate. The reason for this was primarily that Mr Harris did not trouble the electorate with any manifesto or leafletting, feeling his views to be self-evident. Such discipline and brevity is to be applauded and was properly rewarded by him obtaining 20,537 votes in the first round. Well done Mr Harris. We also omitted Ankit Love of the One Love Party, also a man of few words, who procured 4,491 votes. Well done to him too.
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