Deja Vu? Actually not quite...
I think that Michael Howard has been looking far and wide for ideas to help him in his troublesome task of knocking Tony Blair out of 10 Downing Street. His search has discovered another conservative party leader named Howard, who has won four elections on the trot.
He thinks, with the help of his Australian campaign manager, that he's discovered a trick he can use. Last week Michael thought it was a good idea to copy John and attack refugees and immigrants. This tactic doesn't appear to have won the support for Michael that it did so effectively for John in 2001. Only some 7% of swinging Labour voters said that they'd change their vote on the back of Howard's immigration policy while 20% said that they would not be more likely to stay with labour as a result of the policy.
Sure the circumstances are different, John's reffos were in a boat just off the coast, and he didn't need to win Govt, just to hold it. But it might just say a little something about us too. We (collectively) brought the bull, just as we did again in October.
The again it could just be the nature of British politics, after all the Labour Party has been getting into trouble over its use of bad English. And it seems that Tony Blair is prepared to match his Tory counterpart on the feeding on the fears of the ignorant anyway. Indeed the proposed Britishness test stinks of a similar kind of test we employed for the moajority of this century.
It appears that Tony is (as most of the world suspected) a pretty cynical politician, and like most of them is not above taking some fairly dodgy stands to ensure more votes. The sad thing is that these parties have obviously done some serious calculating of number and have determined that the number of votes you will win by putting out anti-immigration policies will be significantly larger than the number of votes such policies may cost.
This is not to argue that both countries are racist, its simply a matter of priorities, peoples votes will mostly be driven by self interest. I think that the majority of people in both countries do not feel threatened by immigration and the impact people from other cultures have on their societies. Unfortunately when determining who to vote for the reasonable people put issues like immigration relatively lower in the list of priorities behind things like taxes, interest rates, health and security concerns. For the people who are threatened by the issues around immigration their concerns fit into the heirarchy of voting determinates at a higher level.
I would suspect that votes gained from anti immigration policies will not determine elections (they really didn't here in 2001) and the tories will not get much of a boost from appealing to such voters, but taking such a stance can help the stronger party whose base of votes is determined by the higher order personal impact issues such as those listed earlier.
He thinks, with the help of his Australian campaign manager, that he's discovered a trick he can use. Last week Michael thought it was a good idea to copy John and attack refugees and immigrants. This tactic doesn't appear to have won the support for Michael that it did so effectively for John in 2001. Only some 7% of swinging Labour voters said that they'd change their vote on the back of Howard's immigration policy while 20% said that they would not be more likely to stay with labour as a result of the policy.
Sure the circumstances are different, John's reffos were in a boat just off the coast, and he didn't need to win Govt, just to hold it. But it might just say a little something about us too. We (collectively) brought the bull, just as we did again in October.
The again it could just be the nature of British politics, after all the Labour Party has been getting into trouble over its use of bad English. And it seems that Tony Blair is prepared to match his Tory counterpart on the feeding on the fears of the ignorant anyway. Indeed the proposed Britishness test stinks of a similar kind of test we employed for the moajority of this century.
It appears that Tony is (as most of the world suspected) a pretty cynical politician, and like most of them is not above taking some fairly dodgy stands to ensure more votes. The sad thing is that these parties have obviously done some serious calculating of number and have determined that the number of votes you will win by putting out anti-immigration policies will be significantly larger than the number of votes such policies may cost.
This is not to argue that both countries are racist, its simply a matter of priorities, peoples votes will mostly be driven by self interest. I think that the majority of people in both countries do not feel threatened by immigration and the impact people from other cultures have on their societies. Unfortunately when determining who to vote for the reasonable people put issues like immigration relatively lower in the list of priorities behind things like taxes, interest rates, health and security concerns. For the people who are threatened by the issues around immigration their concerns fit into the heirarchy of voting determinates at a higher level.
I would suspect that votes gained from anti immigration policies will not determine elections (they really didn't here in 2001) and the tories will not get much of a boost from appealing to such voters, but taking such a stance can help the stronger party whose base of votes is determined by the higher order personal impact issues such as those listed earlier.
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