Bollitics: VT General Election Poll #4 - Leaders Debate one

[thetrees]

Nick Griffin working class hero?

Well being as he's neither working class or a hero I'd say he fails majorly on both counts. More of a Middle Class Racist Arsehole I'd have thought

Isn't everyone outside of the super-rich, so-called, 'upper class', middle class?

[bickster]

Nick Griffin working class hero?

Well being as he's neither working class or a hero I'd say he fails majorly on both counts. More of a Middle Class Racist Arsehole I'd have thought

Isn't everyone outside of the super-rich, so-called, 'upper class', middle class?

Well in griffins case I was basing his class on the fact he doesn't actually work for a living ;-) I'm not a particular lover of using the "class" thing as it happens, it's largely meaningless but I just might hate Nick Griffin enough to use it against him all the same

[Gringo]

Nick Griffin working class hero?

Well being as he's neither working class or a hero I'd say he fails majorly on both counts. More of a Middle Class Racist Arsehole I'd have thought

Isn't everyone outside of the super-rich, so-called, 'upper class', middle class?

No

[mjmooney]

What about the underclass? Massively underrepresented in parliament....

[The_Steve]

If anyone could please spare no more than 5 minutes to complete this brief survey on the election you'll be helping my University coursework. Thanks.

link

[mjmooney]

Dunne.

[mykeyb]

Interesting to have a play with the Election Seat Calculator.

Libdems on the Yougov Poll results have 33% of the vote compared to Labours 26% and yet would have only 134 seats compared to Labours 241.

PR will make one hell of a difference to the political landscape and if it is the No1 issue that either of the 2 main parties must agree to to form a coaltion government it will make the Libdems the King makers at pretty much every election from hereon.

Is that a good thing?

[rjw63]

If anyone could please spare no more than 5 minutes to complete this brief survey on the election you'll be helping my University coursework. Thanks.

link

Bah, stupid survey made me pick a newspaper that I read, when I don't read any. Also needed a "dont know yet" on the party to vote for

[Awol]

Good article in The Times today which (imo) neatly sums up the campaign so far:

Message to parties: the slogan isn’t working

So far not one catchphrase has stuck in this campaign. The electorate is too cynical to swallow empty phrases

On the first day of the campaign, David Cameron loudly vowed to go into battle on behalf of “the Great Ignored”, the large, vague mass of people who apparently feel they are not paid enough attention; in other words, everyone.

Veteran political hacks nodded sagely. Here, then, was the catchphrase that would define the Cameron campaign. How often, we wondered, would we hear that slogan in the course of the next four weeks?

The answer, surprisingly, was never. I have listened to several dozen Cameron speeches since then, and “the Great Ignored” have never reappeared. “Big Society” is still there in Tory campaign rhetoric, along with “Modern Conservatism” and “Vote for Change”. But the Great Ignored have been, well, ignored.

It was a clunky formulation anyway, unfortunately reminiscent of the Great Unwashed, a phrase invented to describe the hoi polloi by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton — himself a one-man cliché factory who left us such imperishables as “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “it was a dark and stormy night . . .”

Somewhere in Conservative campaign headquarters it was decided that “the Great Ignored” was failing to inspire the Great Ignored, and it was junked, along with “we can’t go on like this”, the slogan that accompanied the early Tory posters of Mr Cameron’s large, white face.

The Tories are not alone in struggling to find an effective motto. Labour’s offering, “a Future Fair For All” sounds rather too close to A Future Free-For-All. The Liberal Democrats came up with the longest slogan in British history, which tried to blend elements of both the other parties — “Change that works for you. Building a fairer Britain” — wordy, worthy and instantly forgettable.

In this election, the sloganeering is falling flat. Every attempt to manufacture a defining tag has failed. The advertising has backfired. The electorate is simply too savvy, too sick of spin, too cynical to adopt the neat mottos handed down by the parties. To adapt a familiar political catchphrase: the Slogan Isn’t Working.

George Orwell famously dismissed political language as “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind”. The effective slogan is a sort of haiku written in this simplistic language, the distillation of an idea into a few, pithy words.

All politicians profess to disdain the trite catchphrase. Mr Cameron himself has lambasted new Labour for peddling “empty slogans that try to say everything, but end up meaning nothing”. Yet every politician knows that a resounding slogan can catch a mood and swing an election.

Sometimes these are the expensive formulations of advertising agencies: “Britain Deserves Better” (Labour, 1997); “Labour Isn’t Working” (Conservative, 1979). Often they encapsulate a moment in history: “Don’t Swap Horses in Midstream” (Abraham Lincoln, 1864); “I propose a New Deal” (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932).

In 1997, Labour declared, ungrammatically: “Britain Forward Not Back.” The Simpsons took this idea a step further, with an episode in which a Bill Clinton character proclaims: “We must move forwards, not backwards, upwards not forwards, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”

Some of the best slogans are accidental, bubbling up organically out of the heat of a campaign. “It’s the economy, stupid” was an impromptu exhortation scrawled by James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist, in 1992, combining the demotic with the obvious in a way that politicians have been trying to replicate ever since.

The Barack Obama campaign evolved a slogan that was both uniquely powerful and exquisitely meaningless. Shored up by promises of a better world (“Vote for Change” and “Change We Can Believe In”) it simply stated “Yes we can”, thereby answering the question in the affirmative before it had even been asked.

The competing campaigns in this election have produced more slogans than ever before, but none has stuck. We hear Gordon Brown declaring “We are in the future business”, and remember the immediate Labour past. We hear Cameron talk of “People Power” and think of Citizen Smith demanding “Power to the People!”, and snigger.

Nick Clegg won the first debate, not because he said anything startlingly new, but because he used straightforward language, not the processed verbal pabulum that we have come to associate with politics. Mr Brown even gifted Mr Clegg the new unofficial Lib Dem slogan, by using the same phrase seven times: “I agree with Nick.”

The failure of sloganeering in this election is a direct reaction to the spin-soaked years that preceded it, when political language was so thoroughly debased and manipulated. Tony Blair and his advisers devised an entirely new political vocabulary of abstract nouns, happy-sounding euphemisms and elaborate catchphrases: “performance indicators”, “choice advisers”, “communities”, core values”, “dynamic learning curves” and “empowerment”.

Studies of the language of Blairism found the same cloudy slogans and empty locutions cropping up repeatedly, peppered with words like “reform”, “renew”, “dynamism”, “enterprise” and “respect”. Ministers simply jumped from slogan to slogan, catchword to catchword, like stepping stones, to avoid falling into a discussion that might contain meaning.

As Mr Clegg remarked at the weekend: “After the Blair phenomenon, you can never again kid the British people. Because of him there is now a permanent layer of cynicism.”

When voters hear a prepacked phrase, they brace for a lie; when they hear a slogan, they assume insincerity. The branding is not working because the entire product is contaminated. In this election, whenever the politicians have tried to chivvy voters with manufactured maxims, they have been met with mockery.

The public’s refusal to fall for the sloganeering is a small, but significant rebellion, for as Orwell himself remarked: “From time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase into the dustbin, where it belongs.”

The only slogan to have caught on during this election comes not from the advertising gurus, the spin-doctors or the politicians. It comes not from the manifestos, the speeches or the debates. It comes instead from the electorate, and I have heard it repeatedly over the last fortnight as I travelled around the country with the Tory campaign.

It is the anti-slogan slogan, uttered whenever a politician is at hand, and repeated like a mantra: “They are all the same.”

[mjmooney]

Here's a suggestion:

Ban political parties.

All parliamentary candidates stand as independents and have to publish a manifesto to a standard template, outlining their stance on major issues - economy, defence, law & order, etc.

Once the parliamentary election is complete, the MPs have a second, internal election for the PM and cabinet posts, along similar lines.

Of course, informal "party" allegiances would develop, but there should be no whips, and a free vote on every issue.

[villa4europe]

A guy on newsnight summed it up for me last night, clegg will drum up all kinds of support but when you come to tick the box of the local leftie it just wont happen, not that it makes a difference to me as taylor has won kiddy again no doubt, saving the hospital apparently, shows the power of independants locally, then complete lack od power nationally, the guy has been saving the hospital for 3 elections

[tonyh29]

All parliamentary candidates stand as independents and have to publish a manifesto to a standard template, outlining their stance on major issues - economy, defence, law & order, etc.

As you say it would remove party Whips and allow a free vote so in that regard it would be a good thing ,but couldn't you end up with too many ideas and never any agreement on which ones would work ?

Wouldn't independent candidates favour the wealthy though?

Also look at the money spent in the US elections , if you want to be president you need to get bankrolled to the tune of Millions .. and I'm guessing when Esso or whoever give money to an independent MP in a green belt area with oil underneath it they kinda expect something in return

I'm not sure how close it will be but doesn't Barking stand a real chance of electing Nick Griffen ... It may be that a party vote will manifest itself and stop him ... but imagine if loads of like minded individuals stood as independents around the country and then came together once elected .. they could then shape future policy through the back door .. conspiracy nutjob time I know but it could be possible , couldn't it ?

[Richard]

What does it say, you think, when a ruling party who apparently have done so much good are now getting poll ratings putting them third ? Do you think things have got better? I mean in 1997 they could only get better, have they?

[mjmooney]

All parliamentary candidates stand as independents and have to publish a manifesto to a standard template, outlining their stance on major issues - economy, defence, law & order, etc.

As you say it would remove party Whips and allow a free vote so in that regard it would be a good thing ,but couldn't you end up with too many ideas and never any agreement on which ones would work ?

Wouldn't independent candidates favour the wealthy though?

Also look at the money spent in the US elections , if you want to be president you need to get bankrolled to the tune of Millions .. and I'm guessing when Esso or whoever give money to an independent MP in a green belt area with oil underneath it they kinda expect something in return

I'm not sure how close it will be but doesn't Barking stand a real chance of electing Nick Griffen ... It may be that a party vote will manifest itself and stop him ... but imagine if loads of like minded individuals stood as independents around the country and then came together once elected .. they could then shape future policy through the back door .. conspiracy nutjob time I know but it could be possible , couldn't it ?

Yes, all that is true.

I wasn't suggesting I'd had a genius idea, it was just something to kick around.

But I think it would get us away from the rather knee-jerk emotional ties (and antipathies) to parties that many of us clearly have. People seem to support (and hate) parties like they support (and hate) football teams, yet the Tories of today are not the Tories of Thatcher, or Macmillan, or Churchill; and the Labour Party of today are not the Labour Party of Kinnock or Attlee or Ramsay MacDonald.

We end up voting for a label, or a colour, and kidding ourselves we are voting for a "principle", rather than voting for a local representative (which is the way it is "supposed" to work).

[mjmooney]

What does it say, you think, when a ruling party who apparently have done so much good are not getting poll ratings putting them third ? Do you think things have got better? I mean in 1997 they could only get better, have they?

General rule of history - some things get better, some things get worse.

[tonyh29]

I wasn't suggesting I'd had a genius idea,

wasn't rubbishing the idea , it could work , was just kicking around reasons as well

I see Mandy has made the first approach to the Lid Dems today offering electoral reform .

How deluded are Labour though in that they are trying to spin being knocked into third place as some form of minor victory for them ..Mandy saying " have looked at David Cameron’s Tories and baulked at them becoming the government.” .. not half as much as the public seem to have baulked at another term of labour .....

I'm also curious .. if the woollies now have 33% of the vote and the biggest % ..and yet they would still come third .. What % of the vote would they actually need to get to come first ?

[wiganvillain]

I suspect Tony, they'd actually need to be leading in the polls to end up second and would basically need somewher over 80% to come first.

Stupid and ridiculous, but then again it's UK politics

[tonyh29]

need somewhere over 80% to come first.

meh .. they should require at least 146% of the vote to come first

[mjmooney]

need somewhere over 80% to come first.

meh .. they should require at least 146% of the vote to come first

I don't see why that's so difficult, Mugabe managed it.

[tonyh29]

need somewhere over 80% to come first.

meh .. they should require at least 146% of the vote to come first

I don't see why that's so difficult, Mugabe managed it.