The Cedar Lounge Revolution

I was intrigued, and perhaps a little surprised, by the latest slogan to appear from the Labour Party. It’s of a piece with their cod-existentialist “But, are you happy?” slogan released earlier in this seemingly never ending campaign. And not just me, David Cochrane of politics.ie had much the same thoughts as myself yesterday.

This time out we’re presented with “It’s time for change. Are you with us?”

Let’s consider the good points, for there are indeed good points to this approach. Firstly it stresses the one great weapon the opposition has in its arsenal, that of the idea of ‘change’. This shouldn’t be underestimated as a means to electoral victory. Any administration is going to look weary after a decade in power, most don’t look so good after four or five years.

And as a visual configuration it’s crisp clean and the emphasis is on the concept of ‘change’, hence the emphasis on the first part of the sentence.

But…there are also problems with it. And they are encapsulated in the second part of the sentence. It’s always dangerous to ask a question in a slogan. Particularly one where the answer is a simple Yes/No. The instinct in the mind of the viewer is most likely to answer No, and there is some research which appears to bear out the idea that in referenda it is more difficult to gain acceptance for a proposition than maintain a status quo.

Moreover, and David Cochrane noted this as well, my mind was irrisistably drawn to another political campaign, that of the British Conservative Party in 2005 with their entirely resistable “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” slogan.

Here, by way of reminder, is an example of a billboard from then.

The problem is apparent from the start. Ask a question like that and your political opponents will be piling in to answer it in the negative from the word go. And granted, in the rather more superheated polity that is British national politics there are no end of people who bear a grudge against the Tories, and implicitly and explicitly the Conservative posters played to a much more unpleasant world view than that of Irish Labour, but even so. Were the slogan to appear on billboards around Dublin, and perhaps it already has, the result would be similar.

Still, that’s not the only similarity between the two campaigns. Here for your delectation is the cover of the manifesto launched by the Conservative Party during the 2005 General Election.

Now, form follows function. And the significations of the faux handwritten list are all we need to know about the attitude of those who created (or more correctly those who commissioned) it to their potential audience, who presumably are meant to have the attention to detail of particularly dim weevils. But still. I can’t help thinking that this approach is not a million miles away from this…

Of the two lists three issues are on both, schools (sort of, kind of), cleaner hospital and more police. The differences are due to more localised political conditions, immigration, accountability, carers and homes being driven by less global dynamics, and it’s fascinating in view of the ’surprise’ approach to taxes that it’s not mentioned on the Labour list.

Note how Labour have fleshed out their commitments with links to PDFs on each. Note also how these are genuine points (whatever one’s thoughts about them as policies) and are personified around the image of Pat Rabbitte. I’m certainly not on the issues or policy level attempting to make any comparison between the Labour Party and the British Conservatives, merely to point out that the two campaigns do share at least some aspects in common. Perhaps more than one might expect.

And the reduction of a political platform to it’s simplest elements, something Lenin was equally well aware of, and arguably as cynical in his own way as the Conservatives in terms of his attitude to his constituency, is depressing. Is this the way politics really has to work? Simple ideas, simple lists and so on. Blatantly obvious signifiers that serve to sweep away all complexity.

I don’t blame Labour for their approach. From their perspective it probably makes perfect sense. It’s crisp, professional and may even be effective. But to return to the central core of their campaign, with any question you really need to be sure you want to hear the answer before you ask it.