Talk politician to me

The relationship between politicians and people, at its best, is an oddly imbalanced one. Politicians should be fascinated with people - but they must remember that people are totally uninterested in them. When it works, it’s not like a healthy marriage, it’s more like cat ownership.

If a political message assumes the public is interested in politicians, it will fail. The general public’s feelings about politicians range from indifference to antipathy. Half of people wouldn’t care if the politicians all jumped in the lake - the other half actively want them to.

Not caring about politicians is quite different from voter apathy. Some people either don’t care about the issues or, more likely, feel that politics has no effect on the issues they do care about. Or they think there is little difference between the available voting options. They feel that voting is a choice between being punched in the face or kicked in the goolies. And that’s why they won’t schlep out to a local primary school on a Thursday next May.

Voter apathy is understandable but sad, and should be fought against. But the public’s indifference towards politicians is not just inevitable, it is healthy and natural. It is the politicians’ job to make themselves relevant to people’s lives, not the other way round. No voter ever heard a politician speak, went away and thought about it for a while, made some calculations on the back of an envelope, and then came back and said, ‘Right, now I’m inspired.’

Politicians often make this mistake, but it’s a particularly common error at the moment. And what has caused the party leaders to ignore this golden rule of how to talk to the public? UKIP. A new party with a genuinely gifted communicator at its helm, who always speaks from the point of view of normal people. Admittedly, his definition of ‘normal’ is disgustingly narrow, and his plans for those who fall outside his normality are at best neglectful, if not actually hostile. But he speaks to the people he considers to be his public from an angle they understand. They never have to translate Farage out of Politician and into English.

So this is exactly the worst moment for the main party leaders to forget how to speak. The Tories’ favoured line about UKIP at the moment is, ‘If you go to bed with Nigel Farage, you’ll wake up with Ed Miliband.’ Cameron first said it at the party conference, which is the right place to say it - to a live audience of your own party, and a wider national audience composed entirely of political obsessives. This is the kind of crowd that would laugh at a punchline about the public sector borrowing requirement: nerdiness is allowed.

But outside the conference hall, it doesn’t wash. It is undemocratic and patronising. When you vote for a party it might be out of principled conviction, or as a complex tactical hedge, or to win a bet - it is no business of politicians to tell you what your vote means. If you start persuading people that their vote isn’t what they think it is, you are tampering with the democratic process. You’re also likely to get people’s backs up. Voters will quite rightly say, ‘Hey, politicians, you get to run the country the other 1825 days of the electoral cycle. But on election day we’re in charge, so butt out.’

The Tories are assuming that normal people see politics the same way they do. Their message of ‘vote Farage, get Miliband’ is assuming that UKIP voters have one precise set of opinions about three political parties: they normally like Tories, but UKIP are exciting and new, and Labour are filthy vermin. That’s a lot of assumptions, and if any one of them is wrong, the message breaks down. The claim to understand the minds of so many people in such detail is highly patronising. Many UKIP voters have deserted the major parties exactly because they felt patronised. You’re not going to solve that problem by patronising them a little bit more.

Labour have pounced on this tactical error from the Tories by replicating it precisely. The main slogan Labour is using to attack UKIP is ‘More Tory than the Tories’. It’s true of course. If you dislike the political principles of the Tory party, you will object even more strongly to those of UKIP. But what possible campaigning value does that have for Labour? How is comparing the Tories and UKIP going to persuade a single person to vote Labour? It should be a chance for Labour to tell the country what’s good about them - instead it sounds like they’re changing the subject. Every time Labour says, ‘UKIP are more Tory than the Tories’ they may as well be saying, ‘Looks like it might rain’. It's like trying to sell oranges with the slogan, 'Bananas are yellower than apples'.

Looking at the polls, Labour have made a pretty poor job of persuading people that the Tory plan for the British people is bad news. Why do they think there is any value at all in tarring UKIP with the Tory brush? You would think that Labour had vanquished one right-wing foe, and are now gleefully dispatching the next. In fact, having inflicted very few scratches on their first combatant, they are expecting the second to be terrified at their fearsome reputation. No wonder Farage always seems to be giggling a bit.

Like the Conservatives’ ‘Wake up with Farage’, Labour’s ‘more Tory than the Tories’ tries to explain political parties by forming an analogy with political parties - as metaphors go, it’s wildly uncreative. It is the sound of politics eating itself. And all the while, the true danger of UKIP goes unskewered.

UKIP preaches isolation on the EU and intolerance on immigration. It does both in a highly populist way. The mainstream parties are then frightened of their popularity. So the Conservatives offer eurosceptics enough treats to keep them sweet, and Labour attempt to talk tough on immigration. It shows a depressing lack of imagination, and a low opinion of the public.

You don’t oppose UKIP by impersonating them. Then you're giving them little victories, and encouragement. The way to oppose populist intolerance is with populist tolerance. You don’t beat Farage by stealing his song and singing it worse - find a better song and sing it better. He appeals to people’s worst instincts, so appeal to their best instincts. Actually, they will like you better for it. Assume people are tolerant and nice and they’ll take it as a compliment.

We can’t complain that the public are intolerant if we never gave them anything inspiringly tolerant to cheer along with. The narrow-minded can say, ‘I agree with Farage’, but currently there’s no credible banner for everyone else. Farage is good at his job, but from the reaction of the main parties you would think he cannot be bettered.

If that is what they really think, they must have a pretty low opinion of the country, and themselves.