I doubt Labour’s negative ads about Rishi Sunak—claiming his party has sent too few child sex offenders to prison, and that he is somehow culpable—will register much beyond Twitter and the media. It’s the economy, stupid, and Labour is streets ahead in the polls because Middle Britain feels poorer after a decade of austerity, Covid, Brexit and now stagflation. And because they feel that Keir Starmer is ready to take over.
“Labour Isn’t Working”—the celebrated Saatchi & Saatchi ad for the 1979 election when Thatcher came to power—is the best British political ad of my lifetime but I doubt it moved many votes. The underlying reality of a Labour government imploding was there for all to see, and Thatcher was clearly ready to lead.
The politics of the next year will turn on the economy, and whether the Tories are able to make anything of the coming fall in inflation. I suspect they won’t, because there is little scope to tackle the legacy of the cost-of-living crisis either through tax cuts or extra spending. But either way, I doubt eccentric political ads like the latest one on Sunak will make much difference.
The attack ads to watch out for are the ones on Keir Starmer, not the ones by him. The Tories’ only hope is to project Starmer as, well, even more economically unsafe than they are. This harks back to the “Labour’s tax bombshell” campaign of 1992, when John Major successfully portrayed Neil Kinnock as a dangerously high-tax alternative to a recession-bound Tory government. Given the Tory reputation on tax increases since Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini budget last September, and Starmer’s persona of implacable solidity, this won’t be an easy trick to pull off.
The Tories start off with an advantage in this game because most of the print media is, in effect, an extension of their campaigning team. In a close election, with a vulnerable Labour opposition leader, as in 1992, the Mail and the Sun could possibly make a difference. It doesn’t look as if that will happen this time because the gap is simply too great.
The real significance of Labour’s negative campaigning on crime is what it reveals about Starmer’s own self-confidence in taking on the Tories in their heartland. He is coming at them like Tony Blair, and they don’t know which way to turn.
