On Saturday night, I half-watched Wargames again. I am betraying my weakness for 80s teen American films here – I hadn’t seen it for years (Film 4 are also doing an 80s season at the moment – it’s like being back at school! Look out for Local Hero in particular.)
Wargames when I first saw it was a seriously geeky film about a geeky boy doing geeky things and saving the world from nuclear destruction and I wasn’t really that interested in it (I am not a very sophisticated film watcher – my favourite film of all time remains the Sound of Music.) However, last night, I realised the political point of the film. As the military and the boy are fighting to regain control of WOPR, the machine learns that there is no winner in nuclear war and therefore the only way to win is not to play.
So far, so obvious (and indeed spelled out on the screen). Today I’ve been catching up on a few bits and pieces of non-headline news including coverage of the Tories’ death tax posters and related blogs. Which have brought me to the firm conclusion that the only way to win this election is not to play by the rules set by the other side.
I have said before that this is going to be probably the dirtiest election ever fought. I have also said that I want to win it because we have the right ideas, not just because we’re not Gordon Brown. And I have said before that I don’t like politicians setting up straw-men in order to lie about their opponents.
So here is the thing. If politicians want to start to repair the terrible damage that they have done to our politics (and I mean politicians of all parties. Conservatives in the 90s with sleaze; early Blair for promising the moon on a stick, and late Blair for lying about our national security; Brown for nearly bankrupting us and finally many many lesser-known politicians for their expenses), they need to radically change the way they behave. They need to show that they are better than the public’s view of them. Continuing this endless cycle of ‘you are secretly thinking this’, ‘you actually want to eat babies’, ‘you want everyone to wear a Mao suit and hand over everything to the state from birth’ is turning more and more people off. Unless it changes, fewer and fewer people will vote and our politics will be ever more damaged by it.
WOPR learned. Politicians need to: negative campaigning turns people off. They need a reason to vote for you, not just against the rest. If for no other reason than that one day, you’re ‘the rest’ instead.
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Hear hear. I suspect the fall in DC approval is due to NOT putting across a reason to vote for him. The only potential one so far ( schools) worries as many people as it enthuses, and the flip-flop on the referendum vote and the cuts has left people thinking he is as bad as Brown for decsions.