James Bethell wrote an excellent piece on Monday about the practicalities of negative campaigning; I do think his four essential points apply more widely than just to UKIP. They are:
Timing
Vehicle of your message
Carrier of your message
Substance of your message
I would, however, add a fifth and make it the first one: that the aim of your message is equally important.
If your policy is just about micro-targeting, then it is, as Stephan Shakespeare says, likely to miss its target and indeed put off others. The aim must be a broad, coherent offer, not a jumble of contradictory and inchoate buy-offs.
One of the (many) problems that UKIP has (and this is, really, one for those of us who work in politics, not so much for voters) is that its manifesto is a stupid mish-mash of reactionary and contradictory knee-jerk clap-lines. But that is only a problem for those campaigning against them, because the reality of their manifesto and beliefs will not only never be tested, but more importantly is irrelevant because their overall tone is so clear.
That overall approach is the first thing that the Conservatives need to work on. The finer details can come later. Last weekend I was at a conference and ended up (slightly randomly) discussing the Built to Last process. Someone else also mentioned that Bolivia and South Korea had had, maybe fifty years ago, very similar sized and shaped economies. South Korea had invested heavily in education; Bolivia had bought the very latest agricultural technology.
South Korea is now the 12th largest economy by purchasing power parity; Bolivia is 87th.
I think there is a very clear lesson to be drawn between the principles (the education) and the policy expression of those principles (the agricultural equipment) and the need for us to look again at how we can express those values and principles in policy terms, rather than trying to squeeze individual, targeting policies into some sort of whole. Built to Last didn’t, I confess, set the world alight but there is greater value in remembering some fundamentals and being able to make a broad offer than in trying to put everyone in little boxes and making it too transactional. Making a strong case for something you believe in – even if your target voter doesn’t agree with your policy – can often garner more respect than if you try to bend to every contradictory whim that passes.
