A Brief Note On the Occasional Importance of Ideas

Politics isn't really about ideas any more, or at least that's how it seems. David Cameron spent years attempting to detoxify the Tory brand, not by laying out a sequence of coherent non-evil-Thatcherite policies, but by drawing and redrawing his personal portrait.

"Hug a hoodie", "Vote Blue to go Green", "We are the party of the NHS". And so on.

None of this ever signified anything, but he cut the right sort of a figure. Brown, on the other hand, was doomed because when he smiled he looked as if someone had touched electrodes to his cheeks and made his face twitch. That and the imploding economy.

The Origin of the Gordon Brown Smile?

When Darling Nick burst triumphant onto the scene at the debates his sudden surge could be traced back to no concrete proposals, only to the hazy idea that he was an Alternative. He offered a "New Politics" (a campaign phrase that  is, to me, about as vile and conspicuously empty as "Change").

To an extent, this is all that a reasonably happy electorate is going to be interested in. The recession was unpleasant at the time, but we were not seeing the great pain of the 80s or of past periods of struggle and austerity. When people are happy, they don't pay that much attention to the minutiae of politicians fiddling around the edges.

Newspapers too can get a nice easy narrative out of such nebulous thumbnail sketches. How do you film a sexy report weighing up the pros and cons of two competing education plans? Much better to write a piece about how Nick Clegg has vowed to rebuild the British public's trust in politicians. (Oh how we can laugh.)

Policy is something relegated to a quip, shouted by people who have already lost and are standing on the sidelines. It is cited by Lib Dems, desperate to enumerate just how many bits of their manifesto made it into the Coalition agreement, hoping that this justifies the appalling things they're now agreeing to that weren't in their manifesto. Indeed, "It wasn't in the manifesto!" is now often appended to any criticisms of government policy, like a colourful adjective. Nobody thinks it's a serious political point, but the cry is faintly nostalgic.

"This gay marriage proposal wasn't in our manifesto!", the Tory backbenchers cry.

As if it matters.

Except sometimes it does.

George Galloway is not a man who can claim a good personal brand, his history is surrounded by scandal, sleaze and embarrassment. Some of it was libel, some of it we'll never know the truth, and some of it (*cough*CelebrityBigBrother*cough) was terrifyingly masochistic, but all in all he was man who (up until six months ago) was politically dead. The charisma was still there, but win a seat? No chance.

He's like a cuddly, somewhat sleazy Santa Claus.

In a 42% Asian, North-England, solid Labour community, who do the laws of personality politics say should win?

1. A local, Labour, Pakistani Muslim, and deputy-head of the local council.

or 2. A Scottish, white, independent, who doesn't even live in the area?

Seems like a no-brainer. Independent candidates struggle to get any votes at all, even when they have something as motivating and unifying as rampant, terrified racism to spur them on (poor old BNP), and Galloway trounced his competition.

The Tories collapsed -23%, the Lib Dems lost their deposit, and Labour bled out -20%.  A majority of 10,000 votes, replacing a former Labour Majority of 5,000.

Now, I'm not a local of Bradford West. I'm a horribly privileged middle-class guy from Cambridge. So I'm not going to presume to know the in and outs of this by-election. But a man like Galloway, a man as politically and personally damaged as Galloway, wasn't going to win just by being charismatic. Certainly not against a confident local from the incumbent party, who ticked lots of the right ethnic boxes in Galloway's key demographic. The point is that Galloway had something to say.

(As a side bar I will note that Imran Hussain was by no means a slam dunk candidate. The Asian community in the area has apparently been long frustrated by the fact that the majority of major local Labour positions  have been divided up between Pakistani Muslims of a certain geographical heritage - of which he was one. He was vulnerable then, but also he had nothing to offer.)

What Galloway, born in Dundee, did, was to go to the community and reconfirm his original opposition to the Iraq War, he voiced his support for Palestine, and declared that all of our troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan  immediately. This was, apparently, most of what he campaigned on. (EDIT: Also tuition fees, which considering the significant young and unemployed popluation is not surprising.) On issues that really mattered to much of his electorate, Galloway was proposing a piece of policy that his base  agreed with. How often can any of the other parties say they do that upon any subject? At all?

(Well there were Lib Dems with the students, except then there was this whole "Being in Government" thing...)

None of this of course is to say that parties must all pander to their base constantly, nor does it deny that Galloway is conveniently placed as an independent to promise the moon to his constituents, but it would be wise of Labour - which has for almost twenty years taken its base entirely for granted - that sometimes, just sometimes, policy does actually matter.