Are we a lynch-mob who won’t vote for a bunch of ‘hangers’?

Don Paskini has a post up here that I’d like to be able to agree with. I’m very comfortable with his logic but remain to be convinced about the details of his arguments.

Do 'Dog Whistle Politics' really work? (Click for pic credit)

He’s picking up on the popularity of banker-bashing and placing it beside the short-term popularity that politicians believe that they get by being tough on immigration.

Some commentators, like Danny Finkelstein for the Tories or David Aaronovitch for Labour, would argue that it is still the case that occupying the “centre ground” of British politics means steering clear of taxing the rich like Foot and Kinnock or banging on about immigration like Hague or Howard. They point to David Cameron’s emphasis on ‘detoxifying’ the Tory ‘brand’, following in the footsteps of Tony Blair and New Labour.

I think that in fact the centre ground has shifted, particularly since 2007, and that Labour and the Tories have in practice agreed a new and more populist consensus which is much tougher on immigration and in favour of higher taxes on the rich.

Now I don’t have any evidence to back up what I’m about to argue – this post is all conjecture – please bear with me here?

This reminds me of the debate on capital punishment. I understand (can’t remember where I read this) that 2008 was the first year that general opinion polling recorded a small majority of people who didn’t want capital punishment reintroduced. One can’t help wondering if the timing of such a poll makes a difference – would one conducted during the Ian Huntley trial have had a different result?

Hanging was effectively formally abandoned in 1965, so for over 40 years, the public have been hangers themselves, but have not voted for hangers.

You can’t do opinion polls retrospectively, but I wonder if the public would have changed it’s assent to the following statement over recent years:

“I have my own views, but I would prefer to vote for people who take a more considered view on big issues.”

Surely the widely touted ‘decline of deference’  would suggest that agreement with that statement would have fallen? In Don’s post, Finkelstein and Aaronovitch are arguing for a model of politics where politicians garner votes for their statesmanlike stance rather than their position on key questions.

But did the Tories really lose the election in 2005 because they came across as a bunch of Alf Garnets?

I would suggest that the ‘dog whistle’ politics may have slightly ameliorated a terrible situation for the Tories. It may not have had the desired impact because it didn’t make the difference in the key marginals. It’s targeting rather than it’s ability to swing individual votes may have been faulty.

A few weeks ago, I put this observation in a post on this blog, and I’ll repeat it now:

The media focus upon general concerns. My newspaper is always full of the coverage of international football and the big clubs- England, Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool. Never the coverage of Nottingham Forest, D*rby County and Fester Leicester City that every cell in my being yearns to read.

Similarly, the mediated politics that dominates public life focuses on abstractions and issues that people actually hold relatively lightly in their own scheme of things. If politicians were dealing with us more directly – understanding our real interests and being able to challenge and respond to us in a direct way – surely a new set of political contours would emerge quite rapidly?

Are issues like immigration / banker bashing very visible to the media and politicians without actually being the key concerns of the public in aggregate? Do we care about immigration in the same way that we care about international football? Listen to the national noise after a controversial international and you’d believe that international football is important to us. But find a way of tuning into the lower level buzz around football, and I’m certain that you’d find that local teams benefit from a much higher aggregate level of concern.

Was the 2005 election decided by people who weren’t convinced – for a variety of reasons ranging from bad memories of the 1980s-90s through to the conduct of the party leadership – that the Tories were up to running the country? Did the dog-whistle populism compound this problem or did it ameliorate it.

It’s a question that seems to me to be a key one. It’s also one that I’ve not seen answered properly anywhere. Purely on instinct though, I suspect that Don Paskini is on shaky ground discounting it.