If you want to win drop the bile

Both Labour and Lib Dems specialise in negative campaigning. They abuse Conservative MPs and Councillors, making false allegations and twisting what we say or ascribing views to us we have never held. Their fellow travellers on this site often do the same. They imply no decent person can vote Conservative and  claim an unfounded moral high ground. Indeed they seek to control and use language to rule out some decent  Conservative values and questions. The BBC often backs up these ideas.

Yesterday on the Today programme a couple of voters from  Hartlepool were put under pressure to explain why they voted Conservative, with the BBC seeking to suggest to them that somehow the culture of the party of Thatcher should have made that morally impossible! No mention that Margaret was our first female Prime Minister who won three huge General election mandates for her popular policies of cutting taxes, promoting wider ownership and recovering the UK from Labour’s high inflation and economic crash which led to a trip to the IMF to borrow and to be told to cut spending . I do not recall Labour voters in 1997 or SNP voters more recently being made to explain themselves and being told they were wrong to vote as they did.

In this latest set of elections Labour caricatured their own campaigning technique by spending all their national media time on vilifying Conservatives and making a wild series of  unsupported allegations, when people wanted to hear their approach to Cv 19 , economic recovery and getting wins from Brexit.

Keir Starmer rightly made Labour  dress smartly and show some respect for our flag. You need however to live a brand. In the Commons Labour MPs still queued up to support the EU side in disputes, to back the needs of foreigners and overseas countries  over the needs of U.K. voters, and above all to use Commons powers to develop their sleaze campaign instead of pushing a positive agenda.

Given the large number of people who voted Conservative a good starting point for Labour’s recovery would be to accept that many people enter Conservative politics to serve the public and make things better. By all means have some good disagreements with us, offer better solutions or different aims, but do not falsely claim Conservatives are in it for wrong motives and want to harm the interests of the very people who helped vote us in. It is not helping Labour, as it is as dishonest as it is negative.  A good opposition respects their opponents and presses hard for improvements or changes that the public wants. Running sleaze campaigns and nothing else can boomerang against the party. It means they have  nothing to say on how to govern better, and are vulnerable to counter accusations against the people in their own party who make mistakes or undertake criminal activity in public office.