In my constituency of Hornsey and Wood Green, the Lib Dem incumbent Lynne Featherstone was returned with an increased majority, beating off Karen Jennings of Labour, Richard Merrin of the Conservatives, Pete McAskie of the Green Party and independent candidates Rohen Kapur and Stephane de Roche.
Throughout the campaign I've been tracking all the campaign literature that has made its way to my doormat from these candidates, and assessing it in terms of positivity / negativity. I was pissed off by the bitchy, mud-slinging tone of some of the early mailings I received, and I wanted to take a proper look at how negatively the different candidates conducted their campaigns. There is, of course, an extent to which politics should be about highlighting the failures and mistakes of the other guy, but it's a question of how you strike the balance and whether your attacks have any substance.
What I received
Of the 31 items that made their way through my letterbox (that's a rough count - some may have gone astray and I can't quite remember which bits of paper arrived together or separately), the majority (19) were from the Lib Dems. About a quarter (8) were from Labour, and 10% (3) were from the Tories. I got one from Rohen Kapur and none from the Greens or from Stephane de Roche.
I had hoped there might be some striking correlation between the above figures and the share of vote received by the candidates, but I can't see one, except for the fact that they finished in that order (excluding the Greens and de Roche).
What I expected
My preconceptions were that Labour would be least negative because they're in government so they've got most to lose; followed by the Lib Dems because they already held the seat, and besides they seem kinda nice and sensible; and that the Tories would be the bitchiest, because they've got least to lose, and besides they're the nasty party.
What I got
Labour proved to be more bitchy than I'd expected. They took quite a few pops at the Lib Dems (some of which appeared to have been hastily concocted after Cleggmania took effect). I was particularly unimpressed by their use of an image of an axe to illustrate Lib Dem cuts. Really, no-one in this election has the right to get on a high horse about cuts. On the other hand, a lot of Labour's stuff was focused on bigging up their achievements, and as such was positive, although it tended to lack substance.
As for the Conservatives, my preconceptions turned out to be a little unfair. The first mailing I got from the Tory council candidates really got my back up with its ridiculous slurs against Labour councillors - in fact, that was what prompted me to start this blog - but the stuff I got from parliamentary candidate Richard Merrin steered mostly clear of mud-slinging. He set out his plans and he made a point of stating "positive reasons" to vote Tory - suggesting a conscious effort to avoid negativity. Of course, they didn't bother sending me much at all because they had so little chance of winning here, but what I got was mostly better than I'd expected.
Rohen Kapur was a protest candidate, so naturally he threw his arms up in the air in outrage at pretty much everybody else. Fair enough.
It was the Lib Dems I was most surprised by. Their campaign has made a lot of the idea of 'a new politics', giving an impression that the Lib Dems are somehow separate and distinct from the rest of the political world. It was this theme that brought Nick Clegg such success in that first TV debate: rolling his eyes at the other two leaders like they were his teenage sons. The message was: "We don't want any part of the Punch and Judy show that the big parties indulge in."
But on the evidence that my doormat and I saw, that just ain't true. It saddens me to say that the materials I received from the Lib Dems were frequently negative, and at times really quite low. It didn't have the vitriol of some of the stuff I got from the others, it was more a sense that they couldn't think of anything else to say. They demonstrated an obsession with two topics: the wickedness of Labour and tactical voting. They showed only a passing interest in Lib Dem policy.
For this reason I have been finding some of the commentary I've heard about the positivity and maturity of the Lib Dem campaign difficult to swallow. The 'new politics' message appealed to me but as the days went by I found it harder and harder to take seriously. Introducing PR would be a big step in the right direction, but for now it feels a long way off. I wonder if others felt this way too, and if that's why the dramatic surge in support failed to translate into votes. The more Clegg appeared in public, the more he looked and sounded like (gasp) a politician.
It should be pointed out, of course, that Lynne Featherstone won in my constituency with an impressive 3.7% swing in her direction giving her a majority of nearly 7,000. I shouldn't try to analyse the entire campaign, or even the entire local campaign, based on what landed on my doormat.
Election campaign mail, I realised quite quickly, is aimed at people of low intelligence. I felt that my intelligence was being insulted by much of what I received, in a way that I don't feel (to the same extent, at least) when I see a politician on the TV or read their blog or hear them speak. It's junk mail, and the only sensible thing to do is to chuck it away without reading it.
Whenever the next election comes around, that's definitely what I'll be doing.
