If you want to know about Labour’s election campaign, simply turn on a commercial radio station.
If you want to know about Labour’s election campaign, simply turn on a commercial radio station. Soon enough, you will hear an advertisement offering to help you lose weight, buy a car, claim more benefits, deal with door-to-door salesmen or stop smoking.
Who provides all these services? The government, of course. The covert message is that Gordon Brown cares and Labour, if re-elected, will look after you. The cap on election spending in Britain is £19 million, a sum that the Labour party cannot hope to raise. So instead, the Prime Minister is doing what he does best: helping himself to taxpayers’ money, in this case to advertise the virtues of his big government.
So far, the extent of this scandal has been anecdotal. But The Spectator can now reveal the figures. Last month alone, the UK government spent £34 million on ‘public service’ advertising — more than any organisation in the country. According to unpublished figures from Nielsen, the marketing research company, this is 24 per cent more than was spent in February last year.
Might this be because there’s an election coming up? During an election campaign, government advertising has to be reduced to a minimum. So it is obvious what Mr Brown is doing: spending as much as he possibly can now before he has to rely on the resources of his near-bankrupt party.
There’s no escape from this soviet-style propaganda. Trains and buses are plastered with public service adverts, persuading passengers to join the prison service, catch their sneezes in a handkerchief or cut down on salt in their diet. There are Civil Service rules to stop prime ministers behaving in this way with public money — but Mr Brown specialises in circumventing such regulations and bullying the people who police them. His excuse is that advertising is cheap, due to the recession. But why, then, does it seem to cost the taxpayer more than ever before?
Ever since Gordon Brown entered Downing Street, he has sought to turn the powers of state to the service of the Labour party. This goes way beyond the scores of politically appointed special advisers, licensed to engage in party political operations at the taxpayer’s expense. The Prime Minister has sought to increase the number of voters dependent on the state — and, ergo, more likely to vote for a high-spending government. He sees this as a piece of social engineering that is a retaliation for the Thatcher years, which liberated millions by cutting tax and regulation and allowing the purchase of council houses.
He has employed as much of the electorate as possible, taking the public sector workforce from six million to seven million. Add in those people on out-of-work benefits, and it comes to 13 million — a third of Britain’s working-age population reliant on the government for employment or welfare. This is, to Labour, a pleasing picture: a dependent army of voters who can be told at election time that the wicked Conservatives will take away the horn of plenty.
These tactics will, of course, fail. Even public sector workers can recognise that this Labour government has led to failing schools, dangerous streets and spiralling debt. The adverts will fail because people tend not to fall for Big Brother, no matter how many advertisements they see, read or hear. And that problem lies at the root of Mr Brown’s desperate premiership: he has always underestimated the British national character. As he will find out in the general election, our votes are not for sale.
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