In his book The Conservative Heart, Arthur Brooks writes that those politicians win who 'scramble the categories'. What he meant is that political parties are perceived to be strong or weak in certain policy areas. To set out to reiterate their strengths is unlikely to add any new converts to their cause.
Conservatives are thought to be competent in running the economy and reducing a budget deficit. Labour politicians may be seen to be compassionate and concerned with social justice. The trick to win elections is not to focus on your strengths, Brooks argues, but to stray onto your opponent's field and steal their arguments.
The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is moving further from this advice by the day. Whilst under Blair the party consciously placed their tanks on the lawn of the Conservative Party, under the present leader the party is withdrawing rapidly into its comfort zone. Part of this started under Miliband already. But Corbyn and his comrades are going even further. They are not just deliberately negating any policy aspirations in traditional Conservative areas such as the economy, but Corbyn also pushes issues that are of little importance to the wider public.
Political scientists call this the low salience trap. Members of all political parties are animated by certain issues that have symbolic significance for them and sustain their mobilisation strategies as the elections get close. The Conservatives have Europe, the left wing of Labour has Trident and NATO membership. The problem is that none of these issues have much currency amongst the wider public. Whilst they agitate a small minority of party members, the issues have so-called low salience amongst the electorate as a whole. Winning elections is predicated on reaching out from their own narrow party membership base to non-typical supporters and rehearsing topics that fail to captivate the wider electorate's imagination is unlikely to achieve that.
In essence, effective party leaders do not cultivate issues that have totemic meaning within the narrow membership base but actively seek out to neutralise these topics. Corbyn may currently enjoy the support of most of this members. But staying within the comfort zone of left wing activism is unlikely to produce electoral success.
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 January 2016
Tuesday, 22 September 2015
The banality of JC's ideology
After about a week of revelations about sympathies with terrorist groups and motorbike rides in East Germany we know a lot more about the new leader of the Labour Party. Looking over the evidence assembled before us the depressing thought emerges that there is not much to know in the first place. It seems that JC, as he is fondly called by his supporters, has lived the 'normal' life of an eternal back bencher in Parliament, nurturing his pet dislikes and cultivating the image of himself as the moral, if slightly ineffectual, conscience of the party.
If this public image of the new leader appears to be rather two dimensional, what about his policies? So far, we know that JC and his team want to build Jerusalem by introducing socialism to the green and pleasant land. The details of how this is to be achieved are still sketchy but some policies have come to light. There is the re-nationalisation of the railways (until 2030) and the opening of the coal mines. Nationalising the banks also appears to be somewhere at the top of the list, although it may have escaped their notice that two of the banks were de facto nationalised already, so hardly a radical tool in the socialist arsenal.
Apparently, making the Bank of England independent of political influence is also something the Jeremy Corbyn team deeply resents, depriving the British government of the convenience to print money when things do not work out as planned (no pun intended). Bringing the Bank of England back into the control of the all knowing treasury officials should take care of the evil scourge of low inflation and low interest rates. Never mind that most British people may take a different view on that.
Looking at the list of early policy announcement one is struck by how little of what is so close to the heart of the new leader actually matters to people's lives. How does the re-opening of the coal mines help with providing better child care? What does the re-nationalisation of the railways mean for the crisis of social care and how to provide good quality dementia care in the communities?
The vacuity of JC's 'policies' does not lie in their left leaning drift but their shocking ignorance of the issues that matter to people up and down the country. It's the banality of his ideological positions in the context of modern society that reinforces the impression of a man who appears to have fought hard to protect his own little bubble from any undue influence of reality. And now he is in a position to make his party just as irrelevant as he has been for more than three decades in parliament. Three cheers to that!
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| Love under the Red Flag - Dianne Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn in happier times Image: The Times |
If this public image of the new leader appears to be rather two dimensional, what about his policies? So far, we know that JC and his team want to build Jerusalem by introducing socialism to the green and pleasant land. The details of how this is to be achieved are still sketchy but some policies have come to light. There is the re-nationalisation of the railways (until 2030) and the opening of the coal mines. Nationalising the banks also appears to be somewhere at the top of the list, although it may have escaped their notice that two of the banks were de facto nationalised already, so hardly a radical tool in the socialist arsenal.
Apparently, making the Bank of England independent of political influence is also something the Jeremy Corbyn team deeply resents, depriving the British government of the convenience to print money when things do not work out as planned (no pun intended). Bringing the Bank of England back into the control of the all knowing treasury officials should take care of the evil scourge of low inflation and low interest rates. Never mind that most British people may take a different view on that.
Looking at the list of early policy announcement one is struck by how little of what is so close to the heart of the new leader actually matters to people's lives. How does the re-opening of the coal mines help with providing better child care? What does the re-nationalisation of the railways mean for the crisis of social care and how to provide good quality dementia care in the communities?
The vacuity of JC's 'policies' does not lie in their left leaning drift but their shocking ignorance of the issues that matter to people up and down the country. It's the banality of his ideological positions in the context of modern society that reinforces the impression of a man who appears to have fought hard to protect his own little bubble from any undue influence of reality. And now he is in a position to make his party just as irrelevant as he has been for more than three decades in parliament. Three cheers to that!
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