‘Poor taste,’ said Julie, ‘Really desperate,’ added Shawn. Mark thought it was ‘A low blow’ and Becky was simply ‘gobsmacked’. That was the verdict of our focus group participants in Erewash in Derbyshire last week when they were shown Labour’s controversial advert suggesting Rishi Sunak did not believe that those convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison.
Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has defended the advert and suggested ‘There’s more to come’. But based on the feedback of voters, if these adverts are to mark the start of a more aggressive approach, the spinners at Labour HQ might want to think again.
Because this was not a group of pearl-clutching snowflakes, but instead encapsulated middle England’s tendency towards fair-mindedness and fair play. Indeed, more problematic for Labour, several participants felt that the advert was an attempt to mislead them: as Shawn pointed out: ‘It’s not up to him, is it? He’s not the jury, he’s not the crown court. Nothing to do with him, is it?’
People are exhausted by politics
Worse still the advert played into what has emerged as a consistent criticism in our focus groups of the Labour leader, that he is ‘just someone who criticises’ and doesn’t have positive ideas of his own.
What those who say that the Labour party needs to be more aggressive, and ‘take the fight to the Tories’, badly misjudge is that the public is just not in a fighting mood. Speak to any focus group and you’ll find people are exhausted by politics and battered by the rapid succession of Brexit, Covid, partygate and the cost-of-living crisis.
Instead, what people tell us they want to hear from the Labour leader is not what the Conservatives have done wrong – unfortunately for the government, many people have very strong views on that themselves – but how a Labour government would, in practical ways, make things better for them. How will Labour make energy bills affordable, make them feel like they’re not just working to live and living to work, get them a GP appointment when they need it, and end the terrifying series of NHS strikes? If Starmer can come up with convincing answers to these questions, it will propel him far closer to Number 10 than any clickbait attack on the PM.
Labour’s best chance of winning the next election is to fight it on a change agenda and a chance for Britain to turn the page – that opportunity for a fresh start is the area where Keir Starmer by far out-polls Rishi Sunak. But an election that is fought in the mud is far more likely to leave the electorate believing that Labour are simply more of the same exhausting politics they’ve had enough of.
Some have suggested Labour’s attack adverts have opened the floodgates for the Conservatives to go negative. Here, too, some caution is needed. While Boris Johnson had an exceptional ability to make attacks like ‘Captain Hindsight’ stick – and I have been genuinely surprised how often his comments about Jimmy Savile and Starmer have been raised in numerous focus groups – the style does not suit Sunak. His more tetchy performances in the debates against Liz Truss last summer were panned by the members of the public we spoke to at the time.
Instead, ask a focus group what they like about the Prime Minister and they’ll tell you it’s precisely because he ‘is smart and sensible’, ‘just gets on with it’ and is a ‘competent safe pair of hands’. If the Tories are to have any chance of pulling back the next General Election, keeping Sunak focused on delivery and ‘above the fray’ is essential.
In fact, the two main beneficiaries of a campaign that descends into the mud won’t be the government or the opposition, but the ‘stay at home party’ and Reform UK. Because if people struggling with the cost of a weekly shop see politicians spending the next few months engaged in personal smears about who is ‘soft on paedos’, they simply won’t bother to vote. Alternatively they will decide they’ve had enough of the lot of them and opt for Richard Tice’s populists, who our research finds have much more potential to eat into the votes of the two main parties than their performance to date suggests.
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