Page 127 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 106

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
(although such tactics had worked well in previous campaigns). The British
people (or enough of them, at any rate) had grown tired of the Tories and
sceptical of their messages, and were prepared to give Labour a chance.
Evidently they were not to be put off by attack ads of the type almost wholly
relied on by the Tories in 1996–97.
For the general election campaign of 2001 the Tories under William Hague
sought to contrast Labour’s record in office with its electoral commitments of
four years earlier. PEBs and posters designed by advertising agency Yellow M
focused on the length of hospital waiting lists and excessive school class sizes,
for example – promises of success in improving the state of health and
education services having been central to Labour’s 1997 victory. The strategy
failed, however, since all Labour’s campaign managers had to do was to
remind voters that the Tories had not long been evicted from government
after eighteen years in power, and that Tony Blair’s administration, for all its
imperfections, had still achieved enough since 1997 to warrant a further term
in office. Labour’s campaign ads, designed by the TWBA agency in London,
pastiched the posters used to promote disaster movies, for example, inviting
voters to imagine the consequences of the return to power, after only four
years, of those same Tories who had been so decisively rejected in 1997
(Figure 6.4). Another poster used digital imaging to portray William Hague
as a clone of Margaret Thatcher, a tactic deemed sufficient to scare voters off
the Tories for another few years. In the 2005 campaign both major parties
adopted relatively low-key campaigning styles. The Tories’ PEBs acknow-
ledged that under New Labour Britain was ‘a great country, but could be
better’, stressing the need for tougher immigration controls and better public
services. Labour stressed its record of achievement after what was by then
eight years in office – economic success, investment in public services – and
urged the voters to stick with the party for the sake of ‘stability that leads to
growth’, and moving ‘forward not back’. This approach of reminding voters
of the Tory past was successful in 2005, delivering Tony Blair’s Labour Party
an unprecedented third election victory (see Figure 6.5).

POLITICAL ADVERTISING IN THE UNITED
KINGDOM: LABOUR

Notwithstanding its electoral successes after 1997, and in some contrast to
the Conservatives’ unashamedly commercial approach to the selling of
politics, the Labour Party was, for most of the period under discussion here,
resistant to the charms of the professional advertisers. In the 30 years up to
the election campaign of 1987, only in one of the earliest campaigns – 1959 –
did Labour successfully use the medium of television as a marketing tool.
Ironically enough, the two figures most associated with this use were
Woodrow Wyatt, who later became a prominent member of the British

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