Its symptomatic of government that when they have difficult decisions to make and hard policies to sell, they invariably do their best to convince you that its somebody else's fault. We've all heard the Tory chant about the situation that they inherited, the massive amounts of debt that they suddenly had to deal with when they came into office. We've all heard the Lib-Dem attempts to justify their change in position on the cuts with cries of the situation is much worse than we thought. Well that's politics, you can either agree with it or not and you can make your political judgements on that basis.
But sometimes governments stray into a different kind of politics, one that is not based on fair debate and discussion. Over recent weeks a trend in the Conservative Party's communication strategy has become apparent that is indicative of a different kind of political strategy, one that is based, not on the rough and tumble of political disagreement, but rather on the political ideology of spite.
The ground work for the current strategy was laid down by Cameron's speech on immigration, in which he presented us with the notion, that the reason the long term unemployed are unemployed is because immigrants come in and do the work that should be done by British workers. He was of course not the first to do this and we only need to think back to Gordon Brown's British Jobs for British Workers Campaign to see it in an earlier guise. But Gordon Brown's commitment to this kind of politics has always been half hearted and whilst he raised the issue of how immigration may affect competition for jobs, he failed to show the finesse of Cameron in directly linking immigration to welfare dependency.
So in Cameron's mind getting the long term unemployed back into work, can only be achieved by reducing the number of immigrants who are able to come into the country; less people coming in, less people competing for jobs, more unemployed people working. A simple enough rationale for people who like their social theory simple. What is perhaps less straightforward is the way in which these reductionist approaches to complex social phenomena have been applied across a range of social phenomena to develop an attractively simplistic strategy .
The next element of the conservative approach to minority groups has been the use of stereotyping. Most recently in their portrayal of disabled people. Potentially cutting services to disabled people could have been a difficult issue for the conservatives. But in order to justify cutting benefits and support to some of the most vulnerable within our society, the government has simply reduced the community of disabled people to two categories. Those who are genuinely disabled or those who can be described as alcoholics and drug addicts. Whilst the former are deemed to be deserving of state support, the latter are descibed as malingering and undeserving. Again the complex social world of disability and addiction have been reduced to an overly simplistic representation of good disabled people and bad disabled people. As a result of this approach Ministers can confidently argue that what they are doing will receive public support.
These simplistic conceptions of minority groups represents a powerful ideological tool for Cameron's Tory right and the press that supports him. Each is targetted for cuts and any resistance is divided and represented as undeserving. It is simple and effective and it is this strategy that lies behind the Conservatives good showing in the recent elections. Whilst most people have sought to explain that success as an outcome of the Lib Dem demise, what has received less attention is the relatively poor showing of UKIP and the BNP. The brutal and frightening reality is that the Conservative success owes much to the way in which they were able to appropriate the language of the BNP without people realising that this is what they had done.
David Cameron's Conservative Party are champions of a new political ideology -The Politics of Spite-
.
No comments:
Post a Comment