Page 125 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 104

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

Figure 6.2 Labour’s ‘Tax Bombshell’.
Source: Reproduced courtesy of Conservative Central Office.
different specifics, of course, but essentially the same message – that a
Labour government would tax voters until the pips squeaked) it failed
utterly. Indeed, Labour’s counter-propaganda successfully conveyed the
notion that it was the Tories who were the high-tax party.
The Conservative campaign managers also attempted to make a negative
of New Labour’s widely regarded skills in political marketing and public
relations (see below and Chapter 7). In August 1996, while the journalistic
‘silly season’ was underway in Britain, leading left-wing MP Clare Short had
given an interview to the New Statesman magazine, in which she referred to
her own party’s communications specialists as ‘the people who live in the
8
dark’. In doing so she was articulating the dislike amongst many of her
colleagues of Labour’s new communications professionalism; a traditional
left-wing hostility (see next section) towards the packaging of politics. In the
interview she declared that ‘we could throw away victory. . . . I think the

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