Author Archives: Ben Westwood

Campaign contrasts: land of hope and fears

By Ben Westwood | Fri 28th April 2017 - 12:36 pm

“Be afraid, be very afraid”. Hardly an inspiring rallying call in progressive politics, but scaremongering is a strategy that often wins elections, and we cannot ignore that.

The Labour party used that very slogan in the 2001 general election, depicting William Hague on a campaign billboard resplendent with a Margaret Thatcher hairdo, It worked and Hague’s Conservatives took a humiliating beating at the ballot box.

Fast forward to 2017 and the party that wins the battle of hopes and fears is still likely to come out on top. Fear of the liberal elite, used so effectively by Trump in last year’s US election, is going to be a big factor in the coming weeks. The Conservatives and UKIP would have us believe that the liberal elite is trying to defy democracy through the courts and in Parliament. This Conservative narrative is helped hugely by the massive machinery of big money donors and media moguls are backing this message. The Tories outspent all the other political parties put together in 2015, and with the daily artillery fire on whingeing liberals and dangerously deluded Corbynites from Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, the odds are stacked heavily in their favour.

So between a heartless right wing machine and a clueless left wing opposition led so ineptly by Jeremy Corbyn, where does this leave the Liberal Democrats? With our yellow ‘liberty bird’ emblem, we have never been an angry party, but now is the time to harness fear and righteous indignation because our principles are under attack.