I'm sick of this Golden Rule

When I was on 18 Doughty Street on Thursday night, I was asked, by Iain Dale what I thought the Labour reaction to John Redwood's report would be. I said that it would be "Lurch to the Right", "this mean cuts to front line heath services", "the sums don't add up", "Cameron is weak and has caved into his party". I'm not going to claim some sort of special knowledge of course, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that that is what they were going to say. They've been saying it for years whenever the Conservative Party announces anything, and it all comes down to one simple rule: Use fear and fallacy to win.

Take a look at each of the attack lines that Labour has used every time the Tories say something and it's pretty clear this is the real "Golden Rule" of New Labour. First, you paint the Tories as extreme in they say and do and exploit the British love of "moderation". If there are two sides in a contest and one can make the other look extreme Britain will always opt for the least worst and most moderate one irrespective of absurdity of what either side is saying.

If the Conservative Party argued that to tackle unemployment you should make 100 employed people jump off a cliff each week thus creating 100 jobs*, and the Labour Party said "we would never so extreme to make 100 employed people jump off a cliff each week, we'd cap it at 50". Britain, in her ever typical desire for moderation, would vote Labour.

The next line of attack is deliberate conflation between apples and oranges. If the Conservative Party offers a tax cut that would, for example, imply a direct reduction in revenue of £4bn, the stock response is to figure out some random thing that £4bn will buy and conflate the cut to the loss of given random item. It is also a standard practice to say that the tax cut will "cost" something. It's worth nothing that a "cost" would imply the money belongs to the Government, it doesn't they took from people who earned it but I digress.

As I said, the Labour attack line is to say that a cut in revenue of an arbitrary figure is equivalent to some arbitrary thing that will appeal to a given electorate. Tell people that the cut is equal to the building and operating cost of one hospital, and you instantly create the inference for everyone in the entire country that their hospital is at risk. Now some might say that this is "just politics", and in some respects they'd be right. However, it doesn't change the fact that its intellectually bankrupt, and it also tells us something about the contempt held by those who say it for the intelligence of the wider-public.

Once they've conflated a tax cut to some arbitrary but emotionally specific public spending cut they then go for the mathematical accusation. If you say your opponent is not in full command of his calculator you can, quite simply discredit the idea out of hand, and equally reinforce the view that they are dangerous compared to your moderation, as well as implying they're a little bit thick actually. It's worth noting that evidence of the sums not adding up is never presented, it is merely stated as a fact, usually with a figure that has so many zeros it become meaningless to most people. As with the last two lines of attack, the Golden Rule is followed, fear and fallacy.

This final line of attack, the "cave in" is the double-edge sword. It might look like a a direct attack on the leader, but is in fact designed to purely to say that the whole party are walking around in Margaret Thatcher wigs, rubbing their hands and happily looking forward to eating babies as soon as the next chance arises. It matters not of course that many of the party's members were in short trousers during the time the attack is trying to portray. Membership alone makes one guilty by association with all acts of the past.

Please note that this line never applies in reverse, if you dare to suggest the Labour members today are responsible for the three day week and are guilty of militant Trotskyism by association you will be either told that you can't make such an argument because it's a fallacy, or that the three day week was all the Tories fault and not the failure of Keynesian economics. I mention this simply because it just goes to show that New Labour know their line of attack in this respect is intellectual bollocks, yet they still do it.

Now I do of course accept that some might not disagree with these observations. They'll probably say, "this is how politics has always been". That doesn't make it right though.

* This was the policy of Sir Mortimer Chris, played by Peter Cook, in Whoops Apocalypse. Very funny film, he gives people who voted for him Union Flag umbrella to protect against an atom bomb.