Recently the people of Peckham chose their Conservative candidate to fight the next general election in an open primary and hustings. The man the Conservative party chose to preside over the evening was the flamboyant Stephan Shakespeare – former educationalist, campaign manager for Lord Archer’s London mayoral bid, co-founder of Yougov, and now Internet television pioneer.
As he did with YouGov, Stephan Shakespeare is harnessing the power of the Internet to break new ground – this time as the financial backer and head of online TV channel 18 Doughty Street. Mainly a benign and relatively safe News 24 for politicians, Doughty Street has recently branched out in to new territory – the American style personal attack ad. First there was a subtle attack on Gordon Brown’s policies, then last week there was a much sharper, more blatant, more personal attack pulling apart Ken Livingstone’s character.
18 Doughty Street’s attack on Ken Livingstone, artistic though it was, had a basic flaw. The message – ‘Ken’s a commie-sympathising left-winger’ shocked no-one. The public know what he is, and Londoners voted him in anyway. Though the message was weak, in the process of stating the obvious Shakespeare’s video producers set out to drop a bucket of shit over Livingstone’s head, embracing the near-fanatical polarity of American political discourse. ‘Ken has been to Cuba – he cares about Cubans more than you’ stands up about as convincingly as saying ‘David Cameron was photographed hugging a husky – he wants to have sex with a dog.’
The principle of attack ads is simple – keep them short, keep them cheap, make plenty of them, throw lots of shit, and a little bit of shit sticks each time. But then inevitably the political parties adapt, and before you know it there’s shit flying in all directions. After a time politicians are standing in so much shit that the public can’t stand to be near any of them – we lose, the public lose, democracy loses.
Why Stephan Shakespeare believes that British politics will be improved by running personal attack ads, I don’t really understand. He probably doesn’t believe it – his goal is doubtless less lofty: he wants a Conservative government. That means winning an election, and if Labour and the Lib Dems are too slow to adapt to his ads he can prepare them safe in the knowledge that he’s the only one heading in to the next election ready-armed with a bucket of shit. He may have the upper hand for only one election, but in the present political environment one is enough.
The real danger in 18 Doughty Street’s new ads is their ability to sidestep election law. If a political party wants to run a TV ad in an election, it can’t – it’s confined to the Party Political Broadcast. Stephan Shakespeare on the other hand, though embraced by the Conservative party – as in Peckham – is not a Conservative party employee. So long as he doesn’t collude with his party, he is free to use his own money to act as the unleashed attack dog of the Tory party at the next election if he so chooses – rolling out as many films as his wallet can stretch to.
18 Doughty Street’s first attack ad was a national policy attack. It’s taken very little time for Shakespeare’s men to produce a video on a regional level – across London. Imagine what would happen if he went to the next level – local – in an election. In many parts of the country a Conservative sympathetic local press could fall over themselves to give coverage to locally targeted video attacks.The Liberal Democrats must decide how we will respond to this potentially poisonous new practice. Some may call for an air of aloof disdain, others may call for the regulation of online political ads in elections, still more will say that it’s a free country, and if a wealthy man wants to use his money to influence political debate and doesn’t seek to do it in secret then he’s free to do so. Personally, I favour that latter argument. In a liberal democracy, a man (no matter how short-sighted) must be free to attempt to poison the well of political discourse – but his opponents must be equally free to try and stop him.
There seem to be three courses open to us. The first is to hope that the Livingstone ad was a one one off, pray that Shakespeare comes to his senses and we don’t see the like of it again. The second is to beat him at his own game and prepare our own bucket of shit – we have, I believe, equally wealthy and net-savvy backers. The third is to forensically rebut each and every attack he makes against us.
At the last election Channel 4 ran ‘Factcheck’ – a rebuttal service that operated both for and against all parties, seeking to cut through claim and counter-claim and bring out the truth as they saw it. Come the next election, we could have our own version of Factcheck.
Parties are often reluctant to rebut for fear that doing so may give a story legs that it wouldn’t otherwise have. That’s a valid concern – but there’s nothing stopping the party from, say, having a page on its website where it forensically rebuts opposition attacks, without fanfare. As the election continues, we will have a long page demonstrating how low our opponents are prepared to stoop to issue misleading information about our party.
Of course, there is a fourth option – in many ways the easiest to implement, and perhaps the most appealing. Do nothing, and in the process take the hit. Hope that Shakespeare will turn his fire more on Labour than he does on us. It’s a deeply risky strategy – particularly if Doughty Street does indeed ‘go local’ with its video campaigns. Imagine if David Rendle faced such ads when trying to regain Newbury – or Sue Doughty in Guildford. For the sake of our talented candidates in Tory marginals, inaction should not be an option.
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13 Comments
It says something about the sleaziness of British politics that a man like Stephan Shakespeare, who made such an ass of himself backing Jeffrey Archer, can reinvent himself as a serious player.
Shakespeare does have to be careful, though. It is an offence to publish false statements of fact relating to the personal conduct or character of a candidate during an election (not quite analogous to defamation, since it is necessary to prove fault). As his chum, Archer, found out, it is sometimes not possible to buy one’s way out of clink.
Negative campaigning does, as you have accurately observed, depress turnout, and that tends to benefit parties of the right.
Ignoring attacks is rarely successful. But responding to them may be equally perilous, because the attack – rather than the respective merits of the parties – becomes the dominating issue.
Throwing mud ourselves is dangerous, because we will never be completely squeaky clean. It will always be possible to find something unpleasant to say about some of our candidates. Tories are far worse human beings than ourselves, but we’re still not perfect.
If the UK really does go down this road, who is going to choose politics as a career?
It technically doesn’t sidestep electoral law, as it is covered by the existing legislation on third parties. However, your invocation of David Rendal unfortunately should alert us to the fact that the Tories used third party legislation to their advantage last time round in the form of Vote-OK and its ilk.
Of course, Labour has had trade unions campaigning on its behalf for years (as candidates who were attacked by Amicus leaflets on Ian Huntley in 2005 can testify).
The trick is not to roll out attack ads, in my view, but to start thinking more in terms of movement politics, as opposed to party politics. We need to identify and court our base better, instead of always concentrating our appeal on the floater. Doing so would not just mean that we would have a more stable supporter base in terms of opinion polls, but it would help us develop links with organisations that are naturally sympathetic to our position but don’t feel we are a horse they have to back in order to further their interests.
Hi James, I agree with much of what you you say. On third party expenditure, as I understand it the rules surrounding third party expenditure are based on ‘real world’ campaigning rather than internet campaigning – so think how many online videos you could distribute compared to the cost of, say, a billboard.
The rules are also much more relaxed than on parties, so there’s much greater scope to hide when your money has come from if you operate as a third party.
I’m see where you’re coming from on this Rob but free speech, something I hope you agree is a liberal principle, means unpleasant speech as well.
All three parties engage in ‘attack’ strategies on each other, the only difference is Labour and the Tories do more of it, more often.
I see precious little moral difference between 18 Doughty Street releasing an online attack ad aimed at Ken Livingstone and a Liberal Democrat Focus leaflet aimed at ‘three jobs Bob’. The only substantive difference was our attack was entirely accurate and theirs made a slight error on the ‘Cuban party’ point by not checking that their source had issued a correction to the original story. Both though were aimed at undermining the character of the target and quite right too, they both have questionable characters and have made questionable decisions.
Also, speaking from the experience of South London where we ran largely positive campaigns in the locals in Southwark and Lambeth against a pure attack strategy by the opposition, often highly personally focused, I did’t get the sense that it put off the public. Quite the reverse turn-out went up and our vote went down.
On the technical point about the mad law we have in this country that bans any sort of political advertising on TV (except the BBC defending the licence fee it would seem and the government’s mammoth advertising budget), but not the cinema, radio, or any other form of media, it’s not very credible for this party to suggest that ban should be extended. We would say that wouldn’t we given we don’t have very much money compared to the others.
What would be better is some consistency across media, i.e. very little regulation, and low spending limits on campaigns, applied to political parties, third parties, and individuals. I appreciate that means the likely creation of dozens of political action committees instead, but that in turn dilutes the power of political parties which is surely no bad thing either.
As I understand it, that was always the point of Doughty St – to do opinionated news & to abandon the slightly faux neutrality of current british broadcasters. That doesn’t mean that such pieces all have to flow from the same political perspective, or from anyone’s personal agenda. That depends on who chooses to engage with it.
I absolutely agree – my core point is that we need to work out how to respond 🙂
The reason that mud sticks is, in part, that the public has a very low opinion of politicians and is therefore predisposed to believe negative things about them – the “you are only in it for yourself” response. In my experience there are very few people who go into politics with the primary aim of doing anything but working for the community, and the more that negative campaigning takes a hold the less likely it is that people of integrity will wish to involve themselves in politics: there are councils where the level of personal abuse between the parties is such that I would not be politically active if I lived there. Once negative campaigning becomes entrenched it is virtually impossible to regain public respect for the political process.
It’s David Rendel.
I think you are over-estimating 18DS’s viewership. ID says it was “in the thousands” when they launched. That could be 2001. It has decreased since by all accounts. It is TV by Conservative anoraks for Conservative anoraks. I think the KL attack ad is a pure PR/advertising gimmick for 18DS itself. We could counteract any attack on LibDem candidates by 18DS with two Focus deliveries.
Here in Canterbury the rightwing Tory MP Brazier was convicted in Italy of causing the death of a motorbiker – Brazier was driving on the wrong side of the road.
The last Tory leaflet we got from the loathsome Brazier had a “name & shame” section, attacking a local Zimbabwean asylum seeker who had admitted Housing Benefit fraud.
Do you think Brazier will squeal when I put out third-party leaflets about his Italian-killing exploits at the next General election?
Why are the Tories selecting a candidate for Peckham – is it a target seat for them? All very strange.
I have blogged about this. The short answer is that this kind of attack ad is only persuasive to people who don’t pay attention to politics. Traditional TV is a good way of reaching these people, political websites are not.
So I’m not worried.
I see your point, but I think elections are a special time, and if the election is two years away then we’ll be two years further along the path that people like the Times Online, Mirror et al are currently only just starting down – that of accepting video on to their websites. Also, as you rightly point out, these videos can be uploaded to Youtube too.
Stick a video on Youtube, get something viral going, and potentially you’re landing in inboxes in every office in the country under the subject line “Hey! Have you seen this, it’s well funny????”