Plumbing the depths

The Tories’ attack ads are getting worse. Why?

The thing about elections is that they’re more interesting when they’re competitive, and so in the absence of other forms of jeopardy it makes perfect sense that the staff of CCHQ are competing amongst themselves to see who can make the worst campaign ad.¹ It’s a hard-fought battle, and every day brings a new contender, but this video is going to be hard to top.

It is fair to say that this ad has caused some confusion. Why does Angela Rayner have that moustache? What’s that hat about? I have seen people on Twitter sincerely concluding that she is supposed to be Stalin, and many more believing that this is a Super Mario reference while being - quite understandably - unable to account for why on earth it might be a Super Mario reference, given that Super Mario appears to have bog all to do with anything in the ad.

The moustache and the hat (by the way, they’re to make her look French.² Angela Rayner is, in this ad, supposed to be turning into a French person, because her employment rights plans are supposed to be a bit like French employment laws. Yes, I know) are, unlikely as this may seem, the least of this ad’s problems. Because what the ad does is to let Angela Rayner set out, in her own words, some elements of Labour’s employment rights policies, and then behave as if this is some sort of scandalous confession that she should not have admitted rather than something she went on the telly and proactively told Beth Rigby about on the grounds that she thinks they’re good and she wants you, a voter, to know about them.

There is a debate to be had, as there is on any area of policy, about Labour’s employment rights plans. But this requires more than setting out Labour’s descriptions of them and asserting, in an implicit and only vaguely comprehensible way, that they are a bit French. As it is, the Tories have let Labour say that they will abolish fire and rehire (fire and rehire? Sounds bad!) and bogus self-employment (bogus self-employment? Sounds bad!) and then played the Marseillaise over the top. There is, I suppose, a “Well, at least they’re talking about it” defence of this approach, but you can create a genuine talking point by smearing shit all over your office bathroom, and my advice to anyone starting a new office job would be: don’t do that.³

It’s a shame this video is nothing to do with Super Mario, because then I’d be able to say that both main parties produced a plumbing-related ad on the same day.⁴ As it is, only Labour did. Here it is.

They’re just better at this stuff, at the moment, aren’t they?

Everything the Tories are doing at the moment is just embarrassingly half-arsed. Even their tax attack, which is pretty much the only thing they have to say about Labour which has a hope of having mainstream appeal, is being executed in a shoddily unprofessional way. On Wednesday night, after the latest TV debate in which Rishi Sunak did, to be fair, have a certain amount of success, at least on his own terms, by interrupting a lot - the downside of which is that people may well notice that he has just not done his job well enough to have earned the right to be that smugly perky - the Conservatives launched a website purporting to help you calculate how much more tax you would pay under a Labour government. Go on, have a go at it.

It doesn’t work, because it has forgotten its own argument. The Conservative claim is that every working household will pay an additional £2,094 over four years, thanks to Labour’s tax rises. But the calculator takes that figure as its base, and then adds to it depending on your answers to the questionnaire. So if, for example, you say you get the state pension, then your total additional tax figure is £2,829: £2,094 plus an alleged £735 from not introducing the Triple Lock Plus.

But if you’re getting the state pension, then you are highly unlikely to be in a working household. The Tories’ desire to maximise their per-household figure means that they excluded pensioners from it; now they are pretending that they haven’t done that to maximise their per-pensioner figure. That’s quite apart from the confusion between household and individual tax. And in any case, the bogus £735 per pensioner number is already incorporated into the bogus £2,094 number, because it is one of the tax rises the Tories are already claiming will go towards filling the alleged black hole they say Labour’s spending plans imply. It’s double-counting of made-up numbers. You can’t say “Labour will need to raise taxes to fill their black hole. These taxes will cost you £2,094, plus the cost to you of any taxes they raise”.⁵

Anyway, it’s still better than this ad, which has either forgotten how time works or forgotten how politics works.

This ad only makes sense if Labour is in power for literally decades: it asks you to think about Labour taxes that will affect your young children when they reach adulthood, all the way through to when you are a great-grandparent: that is to say, not when your children have children, but when your children’s children have children. I have reached a point now where I am reasonably confident that Labour will win next week. I have not yet got to the stage of assuming that they will win every election for the next 50 years.⁶

Back to Angela Rayner. Earlier this year I wrote a post about how interesting it was that Conservative public-facing messaging tended not to mention Rayner, while Conservative member-facing messaging mentioned her all the time. This, I argued, was perfectly rational: the Tories know that Rayner is popular with the public, and they know that she is unpopular with their members. Well, that’s changed. Not just with the ad I started this post with, but with a range of attacks whose message is that Rayner is the power behind Starmer: Vote Keir, get Angie.⁷

What can we learn from the fact that messages they used to confine to their absolute core support are now out in the wild? Well, there are two basic possibilities: either they have no idea what they are doing or their main public messaging is, for rational reasons, now focused on their absolute core support. Given the state of the polls, given the constituencies they are sending their senior ministers, and given that they spent much of last week tweeting at farmers, I think the latter is more likely. It’s not that they’ve lost the plot. It’s worse than that. It’s that they’ve lost the election.

I wrote a piece for The Critic this week about Keir Starmer and the question of whether Labour’s imminent election win is anything to do with him or if he is just lucky. Here’s a bit of it.

Just as the “any other leader would be 20 points ahead” idea was daft when anti-Corbyn Labour people were pushing it during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, so the “any other leader would also be 20 points ahead” idea is daft now. It matters whether or not a government is failing, but it also matters whether or not an opposition, and especially an opposition’s candidate for prime minister, is someone voters are prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to. 

It does not go without saying that in an alternate universe in which Starmer had lost the 2020 Labour leadership election, Rebecca Long-Bailey would now be on the verge of power. Starmer may be lucky, but it isn’t just luck. To paraphrase the great South African golfer Gary Player, “the more I don’t promise free broadband, the luckier I get”.

Read the whole thing here.

1. At the end of each day, Isaac Levido gives the person who made the worst one a toy koala.

2. The biggest clue that she is supposed to be French, given that she just does not look French, is that the Marseillaise is playing; but a lot of people watch Twitter videos with the sound off. Despite the fact that it did occur to them to include subtitles, I think the Conservatives may have forgotten about this.

3. Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay package includes giving basic rights from day one for all workers, including protection from unfair dismissal; but Labour has been clear that this would not preclude probationary periods or fair dismissal, and smearing shit all over your office bathroom would get you fired even in France.

4. It is, however, true to say that all three main parties did pottery-related photo-ops on the same day.

5. Sorry, am I boring you? I appreciate that this is either deeply boring or quite fun, and I am counting on my readership being in the “I find this quite fun” category on the grounds that if you weren’t you’d have wandered off a long time ago.

6. There is an alternative explanation, which is that the Tories are saying that Labour will put up taxes and that a future Tory government will never cut them again. I don’t think this is what they’re going for.

7. You have to admit she looks cool in that ad.