In UK election news, the Liberal Democrats have a clever new campaign that’s attacking both Labour and the Conservatives through the use of fake ads for a fake party, the “Labservatives”. From the Guardian:
The Labservatives use the slogan “For more of the same”, and has a logo of a scribbled tree sitting on top of a rose stem.
The outdoor ads feature a number of different headlines placed on a purple background, which merges Labour’s red and Conservative’s blue.
Headlines include: “Scandal. Recession. War. There’s no substitute for experience,” “You might not trust us but at least you know us,” and “We’ve had 65 years to get it right. So what’s another five?”
This is quirky and inventive and it’s no surprise that the Ad agency behind it is claiming to have been inspired by the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that Barack Obama used in his campaign stateside. But is it effective? I don’t think so. It suffers from the one thing you don’t want in an election campaign: too many messages. Look at all the points it’s trying to get across: Labour are the same as the Conservatives… They are both rubbish… Together, they’ve been in power for ages… They have a lot of experience, but since they’re rubbish this experience is actually a bad thing… They’ve had ages to get it right, but have only given us war and recession instead…
Great for a speech, not so good for a poster campaign. But to be fair, this isn’t really a creative fault. It’s a result of the ridiculously tricky situation that the Lib Dems, as the third party in a two-and-a-half party system, find themself in. On the one hand, they obviously need to attack the government, but they also have to make sure that those attacks don’t send voters into the arms of the Tories. In electoral terms, they are hindered by our brain-meltingly mental first-past-the-post voting system which means that while their candidates face mostly Labour opposition in the North of England, in the South they are mainly up against Tories. This means they are having to attack two flanks at the same time, and it makes electoral messaging very difficult.
Nice idea though!
36 comments | tags: 2010 UK general election, Liberal Democrats, UK Politics
Last Monday The Times reported that the Lib Dems have started “scenario planning” for what they should do in the entirely plausible event of a hung parliament – which is what would occur if the Conservatives win the election but can’t form a majority government. According to the Times article, they plan to use a variety of scenario planning techniques including mind maps, game theory and, uh, writing on whiteboards – indeed, the article itself has pictures of some tantalising yet conveniently vague whiteboard scribblings in Vince Cable’s office, which I assume we are meant to think are incredibly clever what with Cable’s past experience as a professional scenario planner for Shell.
Game theory aside, two things really struck me from the article’s fascinating discussion of what the Lib Dems are thinking vis-à-vis a hung parliament. One is their determination not to prop up Gordon Brown:
There is an assumption that should the Tories be the largest party in a minority Parliament, the Lib Dems will probably support them in some form. This seems unlikely, at this stage, to be a formal coalition. But they recognise it would be electoral “suicide” to do the reverse and prop up Gordon Brown to keep him in Number 10 if the Tories are the largest party.
Now it could be argued that this isn’t a very logical view to take. If you agree that the Lib Dems and Labour are both centre-left, then the fact is that in every election since 1979 there has been a centre-left majority – yet in 18 out of the last 30 years we have been ruled by a centre-right party. Following this, it makes complete electoral sense for two centre-left parties – that together form a bigger majority than the centre-right one – to form a coalition. It is, technically, the best way to express the will of the voters. This is my view, at least. However, I concede that this arguably ignores two vital points. The first is the truism that though we have three main parties, we are in many ways rooted in a two-party mentality: if Labour is losing, then the Tories must win and vice versa. The idea that a ruling party could fail to get a plurality but still remain in power (albeit in a coalition) is one that might seem perfectly natural to the inhabitants of many proportional representation-using, coalition-loving countries out there but would seem entirely alien to us.
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2 comments | tags: 2010 UK general election, hung parliament, Liberal Democrats, UK Politics
