The Tories believe that if they repeat their negative message about Labour’s tax plans often enough, some of it will stick. Labour thinks its rebuttals remind voters that it was the Tories who lied about tax in 1992, so it claims a “score draw” in a policy area where it used to have only defeats.The legacy of such tactics may, however, be damaging for us all. In Chicago, one of the British politicians was heard to ask a Clinton strategist: “When two politicians tell the voters they should have contempt for their opposite numbers, doesn’t the public end up with contempt for all politicians?”. It is now a good Time to bleed and take Phyfick; abftain from much Wine, or ftrong liquors they will caufe a Ferment in your Blood, and ruin your Conftitution. Their public behaviour is calculatedly menacing but curiously innocent in the manner of small-town American teenagers in the Fifties.
They form those groups which occupy great swathes of the pavement in market towns on a warm Friday night and make you cross the road to avoid the combined effects of lager and doner kebab. From time to time, a passing car, usually a yellow X-reg Fiesta bearing about 10 passengers, will draw alongside them and a short burst of apparently hilarious, abusive crossfire will be exchanged through the rolled-down windows; but this is essentially a private conversation in what, to you and me, is a foreign language for which no phrase-book exists.The young men tend to be politely but irredeemably chauvinistic. Youth squads of rural drinkers create their own tribal rules, territories, drinks (some of them terrifying) and even a kind of social structure which actually ensures that everyone gets safely home through the lampless night. And in communities where the bush telegraph is on permanent red alert there is always the chance that some friend of your parents is propping up the same bar.This, then, is not the Thickhead’s market, driven by the tacky squeals of public relations airheads. Under-age boozing in thatched rural pubs or small-town bars is tolerated widely by landlords who, driven by benevolent, bucolic greed, turn a Nelsonian eye even to the large print of the licensing laws The realities of country life enforce further constraints.
Lack of public transport means someone’s parents have to ferry the little topers to their teenage party, and being sick in a ditch on the way home carries a certain social stigma that morning- after bravado never quite neutralises. Very few country childhoods were spent in the care of serial nannies who handed over to an exhausted mother as she came in from the office A laptop was something you sat in, not worked on. As you grew older and got about by bicycle, there were neighbours and acquaintances who would pick you up when you fell off, patch you up, give you a cup of tea and send you home comforted.And then you grew old enough to drink. Thus Did Cardanus Rider’s pocket diary for country gentlemen admonish the gouty to abstain during September 1778 One imagines his strictures were ignored. A couple of centuries on and the message could just as well fall on the deaf ears of Carlsberg-Tetley, creators of a glutinous brew called Thickhead.
Thickhead was launched and immediately withdrawn amid one of those ritual metropolitan angstfests, the triviality of which never ceases to startle those of us who live in the sticks. A lot of the squawking came from (where else?) that feverish little hen-house of middle-aged moral high-grounders, the noisy lady columnists who perch in the posh prints. To hear some of them rattle on, you would think they’d spent their lives with their little fingers crooked around a soothing cup of Messrs Carlsberg-Tetley’s other famous beverage.
It’s the noise they always make whenthey haven’t been bringing up their own children properly.Out here, in the rural heartlands of Dorset, youth drinks as determinedly and as ill-advisedly as its urban cousin, but it pursues the hobby in a different landscape with a different history to it. One Labour strategist has suggested shifting debates and speeches to evenings, forcing television news bulletins to carry them live on prime time as in the US. More likely are increased use of video, simultaneous campaigning outside the conferences and new ways to humanise politics – what one strategist calls “the Oprah Winfrey factor”.British politicians know the pitfalls here. Even American observers are struck by the blunt negativity of Tory advertising.
Lawrence Ingrassia, London bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, rates the “demon eyes” campaign “more negative than most of the material in the States; it ranks up there in my top 10″.And British parties are now looking to make changes at their party conferences this autumn. Whatever they see, if it works and it will travel, they will use it here.One result of all this has been cruder, simpler politics. Party election broadcasts have shortened from 10 minutes to five, with Labour floating the possibility of two-and-a-half-minute broadcasts. Balancing positive and negative campaigning has caused tension at Central Office.Moreover, the difficulty of the Republican candidate, Bob Dole, in dealing with Clinton’s shifts to the right have helped focus Tory minds. Having argued first that Labour hadn’t changed, then that it had but was a pale imitation of the Tories, Conservative strategists have now decided on a new line: Labour has changed but it has come up with the wrong answers.Labour and the Tories, then, are desperately learning all they can from the American experience, and they are watching the presidential contest this autumn with rapt attention.
