Joyce McMillan: No need to be so personal in politics

Published on Wednesday 6 April 2011 15:23

Iain Gray doesn't fit the role of inspiring leader and needs to focus on substance not style

IT'S one of the regrettable truths about 21st century politics that the system tends to be run by people who hold two deeply patronising beliefs about the electorate. The first is that people are always more interested in personality than in politics; and the second is that voters are always more concerned about practical "bread and butter issues", than they are about the theory of politics, or the thinking about the nature of society that underpins policy proposals.

I have no idea whether these beliefs about the voters are accurate; but it certainly seems as if modern political managers are bent on turning them into self-fulfilling prophecies, by constantly pandering to the voters' supposed interest in the personal qualities of politicians, while withholding from them any serious discussion of how the policies they want can actually be delivered. Consider, for example, the once-mighty campaigning beast that is the Labour Party, which roused itself on Wednesday, and presented the Scottish electorate with its manifesto for the forthcoming Scottish Parliament election, and with its first party political broadcast of the campaign.

The broadcast took the form of a family movie about the life and thoughts of the Scottish Labour leader, Iain Gray, who said - with some force - that he wanted to make sure that Scotland never went back to the dark days of the 1980s, when people were told that their unemployment was a price worth paying for economic success, and that this was what "fired him up".

Well, the phrase "fire up" was perhaps not a wise one for Gray to use; whatever other qualities he has, the public display of fieriness is clearly not his strong suit. But beyond that, the film was obviously trying to present Gray not only as a man committed to traditional Labour values, but also as someone with a happy and "normal" family life, featuring nieces and nephews, children, a little grand-daughter, a family stroll along the river at Haddington.

In image-building terms, this is all fairly attractive. But as an attempt to outflank Alex Salmond - who has no children, and cannot offer this kind of imagery - it reeks of advertising-industry manipulation, rather than the real stuff of politics.

And if the party-political broadcast was all about the superficial business of massaging the leader's image, then the manifesto is also a strange document, like the outer shell of a vision of a fairer and more dynamic Scotland, without the inner core of analysis and understanding that would suggest how these aims might actually be achieved.Essentially, the manifesto promises 250,000 new jobs with an emphasis on new green technologies, no redundancies in the NHS, 10,000 work placement opportunities for young people, free higher education for all, a 7.15 an hour minimum wage throughout the public sector, guaranteed modern apprenticeships for all school leavers who want them, and a doubling of exports over the next decade; all apparently to be paid for through "efficiency savings."

Iain Gray and his finance spokesman Andy Kerr seem, in other words, to be completely oblivious to the intense pressure against this kind of high-spending response to recession that is affecting every developed country in the world; and to the dominant market ideology that militates against it at every level, notoriously shaping the thinking even of the Labour's UK leadership.

For myself, I absolutely approve Scottish Labour's commitment to fighting unemployment, and resisting the marketisation of health care and education; and I am sure most Scottish voters would agree. I feel, though, slightly insulted by the tone of a manifesto which simply asserts that all these things can be achieved, without showing how; and without even attempting to start the ideological battle which would have to be fought and won - here in Scotland, at Westminster, and internationally - if such a programme were to have any real chance of success.

There's no doubt, though, that the sudden explosion of personal information about Iain Gray, his life and character - combined with a manifesto that is bolder, more fantastical, and less New Labourish than might have been predicted - has slightly changed the tone of the Scottish election campaign.

A week ago, it seemed like a choice between Alex Salmond, and a listless Labour Party committed only to imitating the SNP's most popular policies.

Now, it seems like a choice between a proven leader with a reasonable track-record in defending Scotland's interests, and a bunch of slightly crazed old-time Labour religionists who claim that they would spend like madmen to save the people - and particularly the young - from the curse of unemployment. Whether this shift in atmosphere will make Scottish Labour more electable seems uncertain; for every voter they gain by pushing Old Labour buttons on employment, health and education, they are likely to drive another - alarmed by the extravagance of their commitments - into the arms of Salmond and Swinney.

They have definitely succeeded, though, in livening up the campaign a bit; even as I write, Iain Gray is being mobbed by protesters in a sandwich shop near Glasgow's Central Station, and is talking up his Oxfam experience in Rwanda as the reason why he is not alarmed by such scenes.

There is, of course, an element of pure comedy in the sight of the quiet grey man of Holyrood trying to take on the mantle of charismatic national leader.

Comedy, though, is better than abject boredom, when it comes to an election campaign.And if the campaign managers are determined to keep our perceptions of the debate as superficial and dumbed-down as our responses to a fight in the Big Brother House, then it's up to us to sharpen our minds, and ask the big questions; not so much about what should be done - because both of our main parties, and most of the voters, are in broad agreement on that - but about how we can find a way of doing it, in a world where those who care about social justice are increasingly dismissed as dinosaurs, swimming against the irreversible tide of history.