Attack politics

I know it’s only a local election coming up but you can feel things hotting up on social media, so much so that I have been turned off from watching. What has sickened me is the use of so-called attack ads, which use negative messages to highlight some perceived inadequacy in the opposing party’s policies, or worse, in individual politicians. 

I gather this has long been a tradition in the United States and that the Conservatives have used such an approach in the past yet this time Labour has joined the fray.

One ad, aimed at the Prime Minister stated that he did not want child sex offenders to be locked up, while another said that he did not want to see thieves punished. I cannot believe that either of these is true. OK, I accept that crime resolution is appallingly low and that the government needs to accept some responsibility for the poor performance, yet to extrapolate this to somehow mean that this has been a deliberate government policy, signed off by the Prime Minister, is farcical. 

It is also downright stupid in that nobody believes it, especially as Sunak has only been Prime Minister for a few months.

My first ever sales manager said to me once, and it is about the only thing I remember of him, that you should never speak ill of your competitors in front of a customer as it only advertises them and makes you seem worried. He was right.

By using such attack ads it looks as if Labour has run out of ideas, or doesn’t have any in the first place and all it can do is be ludicrously offensive about its opposition. It draws people away from them as a political force and on to the very thing they are trying to beat. The ads are so obviously wrong that they draw sympathy towards Sunak and makes any doubting Conservative voters more likely to go back to their fold.

With our corrupt first past the post system we are left with very little choice. No one is as bad as the other. I am going to have to hold my nose come election time, whoever I choose to vote for. That is if they let me vote because of ID, but that’s another story.