I don’t often find myself in agreement with Alex Salmond but listening to the SNP manifesto launch I had to chuckle as he described the three main leaders as Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dee, and Tweedle Dem. And who could blame me for agreeing with Salmond’s sentiment that politics is now so mired by the need to appeal to everyone that there is seemingly little difference between the three horses we are expected to back.
We are of course wrong in our assumptions. It is wrong to assert that there is no difference. It is wrong to assert that it doesn’t matter who you vote for because ‘they’re all the same’. People are fundamentally either left or right in their principles and thinking. But the timidity of politicians in wrapping their messages in language acceptable to all is clouding the debate.
The triangulation of politics means Cameron can escape the charge of mass public sector outsourcing into softly softly language of ‘Big Society’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/18/david-cameron-my-big-society
What he really means is ‘Small State’ but he is afraid to use the old Tory language for fear of this being seen for what it is: An attack on universal state provision in health, education, local government services, police – and all by the back door. Cameron doesn’t talk as Tebbitt did about ‘get on your bike’ he instead says he is driven by a belief in the ‘transformative power of social responsibility’. He means the same as Tebbitt of course but the language is ‘right-lite’ designed to appeal to those who would be embarrassed otherwise to admit that they would vote Tory.
What is really galling however is the abject failure of Brown and his ministers to grasp the issues and talk in language that people understand. We need to challenge Cameron on the real turf of left or right beliefs.
If the Labour Party is still committed to the ideals of a state, that can intervene to make peoples lives better, then they have to challenge the language and within that the assumptions of the other political parties.
We constantly hear in general parlance the phrase ‘broken society’. A spin by Cameron to impale images of a debt-ridden Britain, scrawled in graffiti with broken hospitals, leaking schools and crime ridden streets, but now accepted almost as a definition by media commentators. But we see no effective challenge. Cameron is accusing us all of being plebs and insulting the country he wants to govern and yet Brown never challenged him on that point within the TV debacle.
Cameron continually attacks the UK debt problem but the timidity of the response by Labour is always enshrined in the ‘urgent need to get debt under control’ defending stretching out public sector cuts as some form of alternative policy, for fear of upsetting the Daily Mail readers who are not going to vote Labour anyway. We risk continuing to alienate the core support that might be persuaded to turn out on the 6 May by our palpable failure to defend the need for state provision.
We have allowed the term ‘nanny state’ to be intertwined with necessary state intervention that we shouldn’t be shy of defending. The spectre of Tory driven mass unemployment (once described by Thatcher as ‘necessary collateral damage’ for the imposition of monetarist policies) is a gainful way to remind those who would object to a ‘nanny’ or ‘big state’ response that it is the ‘big state’ pulling the economic levers that has managed to avoid a return to 3 million unemployed and mass repossessions. Do people want state intervention or do they want mass unemployment? It is a left/right question.
We can’t afford to get sucked into defending left territory on right-lite language.
Anna Rose
