Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS THE ANXIOUS VOTER TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: John Kampfner Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 28.04.05 Repeat Date: 30.04.05 Tape Number: PLN517/05VT1017 Duration: 27.38 Taking part in order of appearance: Frank Furedi Professor of Sociology, University of Kent Joanna Bourke Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London Tom Bentley Director of “ Demos” Dr. Margaret Scammell Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication, London School of Economics Andrew Cooper Director of the polling organisation “ Populus” and former Head of Strategy at Conservative Central Office Dolan Cummings Research Director of the “ Institute of Ideas” Sir Andrew Green Founder of “Migration Watch UK “ Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington Previous Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police KAMPFNER: Immigration is out of control. Crime is out of control. Hospital bugs are out of control. So say the Conservatives. If you let the other lot in, Labour says, the NHS will be in danger, our schools will be in danger, our economy will be in danger. Both major parties are telling us to be very afraid. Perhaps we are. FUREDI: In contrast to the past, today’s fear is much more diffused. If you talk to people, there’s a sense in which they tend to fear one thing on Monday; it can easily go and attach itself to a fear of a tsunami on Tuesday; by Wednesday it’s the Asian flu that’s bothering people. So it’s a much more free floating one than has been the case in the past. BOURKE: What we decide to fear is always a political decision that individuals are making. Individuals are making them, of course within the context of groups and communities and of course, even broader, nations. At every single one of those levels, there are forces acting upon us, enabling us to choose what it is that we fear. KAMPFNER: Professors Frank Furedi and Joanna Bourke. Even if we, the voters can - to a certain extent - chose what to fear, politicians have concluded that high anxiety levels are useful campaign tools. Tom Bentley, director of the think tank Demos. BENTLEY: The main parties are always competing to differentiate themselves. They’re trying to get clear answers and clear identities because everything else has gone a bit grey and soggy. There are no strong, ideological dividing lines and so the politics of fear becomes a kind of condenser - something that can focus, generalised uncertainty into some kind of clarity and some simple choices. KAMPFNER: Does fear provide clarity and simplicity amid all the sogginess? Politicians have apparently concluded that it does, at least for the duration of this campaign. They use it to accentuate the differences, painting the opponent in apocalyptic terms, juxtaposing the blue sky with grey sky. They have convinced themselves that it will galvanise us and motivate us to vote. But will it? Dr Margaret Scammell is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the London School of Economics. She has been tracking election campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic and notes that the deployment of fear is nothing new – it’s been going on at least since 1988. SCAMMELL: The watershed campaign, the campaign that made this the tactic for everybody was the election of George Bush Senior. The key issue was crime and capital punishment. The rule of thumb had been that if you’re the incumbent, you stay away from negative tactics, you run a mainly positive campaign. The challenger who’s trying to undermine your record is more likely to go negative. George Bush, although he wasn’t the incumbent but of course he was the Vice President standing, changed that thinking around. Since then negative tactics have been the predominant tactic ever since. KAMPFNER: With each election, it is ratcheted up. Last year’s US presidential contest was dubbed “ The Fear Election” with the message from the Republicans that America, post 9/11, was safe only in their hands. Existential fear evoked by one side, but a different kind of fear evoked by the other according to Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent who has published widely on the Politics of Fear. FUREDI: Many Democrats went on television and said, “I am really scared of Bush. I find Bush really, really scary.” And the more that people repeated that in the media and elsewhere, the more they themselves were complicit in precisely promoting the politics of fear by creating a sense of dread about this one individual. When you went in many liberal bookshops in the United States, you know the minute you went into the bookshop you would see twenty books about Bush, all of them telling you how stupid Bush was, how scary he was. And by doing that, basically what you were doing was acting as Bush’s mirror image and in that sense being entirely complicit in perpetuating and institutionalising the politics of fear. KAMPFNER: So Democrats and Republicans were equally guilty of painting each others’ candidates in terms inspired by the horror film industry. The technique has a track record over here, too. In 1997 the Conservatives were flummoxed by the fresh face of Tony Blair. With no record to attack him on, they went for their only available option, the fear of the unknown, the man with the evil eyes. Andrew Cooper was head of strategy for the Conservatives at the time: COOPER: The Tory campaign was very explicitly about trying to take the newness of New Labour and make it worrying to people. New Labour meant new danger and Tony Blair, in particular, by putting demon eyes on him in that infamous ad, they tried obviously to show that there was something sinister, something more than met the eye. You know there were things that they weren’t telling you about; there were hidden dangers in the Labour campaign. Maurice Saatchi used to call it the “Big D”. The big danger was what they were always looking for and actually of course a lot of negative campaigning is fear- based. William Hague’s Foreign Land strategy was explicitly fear-based, the demon eyes in 1997, “New Labour New Danger” – absolutely fear-based. And I think what Labour are saying now - you know the point of the “ Forward Not Back” strategy, drawing a contrast, trying to remind people of the reasons why they got rid of the Tories in the first place in 1997 and very much saying do you want to go back to those dark days, you know do you want to go back to negative equity and punitive interest rates and cuts in the National Health Service and all these things - that’s a very fear- based strategy. BENTLEY: Labour is very clearly using fear in a certain formula to try and scare people who may otherwise be disgruntled and disillusioned back into voting Labour. I mean they’re trying to woo the disaffected Left Wing voters back by saying there’s a real possibility of a Tory government here, and they’re also trying to woo the kind of so-called floating voters in the centre ground by saying you’re taking risks with our economic stability if you vote Tory. KAMPFNER: Tom Bentley points to a different calculation. Labour is appealing to core voters disgruntled over Iraq and distrusting of Tony Blair, not to toy with the Liberal Democrat alternative, thereby letting the Conservatives in by the back door. Tactical voting, once regarded by Labour as highly desirable, is now held up as dangerous. In their election leaflets, Labour candidates cite all manner of statistical permutations to raise the fear of the unintended consequence. Labour’s posters say Howard equals Major equals Thatcher equals a return to a dismal past. Dolan Cummings, Research Director of the libertarian think- thank the Institute of Ideas, says this approach has now seeped into the broader political discourse. CUMMINGS: In a sense fear is the lowest common denominator. If you can’t inspire people with political ideas, if you can’t engage them with a political programme, then you know you can at least be seen to be doing something about their fears. And it’s very easy to kind of stir those up, and the fact that all the political parties have done it means that there’s a kind of auction of who can be seen to be you know doing most about the issue and really encouraging fear. It’s significant that politicians have never come across a fear that’s illegitimate. You know every fear has to be accommodated, has to be taken seriously however irrational it might be. That’s a very important aspect of contemporary politics; that is one of the few ways that politicians feel they can connect with people is by being seen to do something about fear. KAMPFNER: Politicians cannot ignore fears. Nor do they summon the courage to face any of them down, to say they are misplaced or exaggerated. In each case they have to at least give the impression that they’re acting upon them. The Conservatives’ poster campaign: “ Are you thinking what we’re thinking” mixes fear with a subtext of reassurance. Don’t worry, it’s OK to think what you’re thinking – we’re on your side. One of the most prevalent concerns of this campaign, according to the polls and the evidence I’ve seen first hand in a number of constituencies, is immigration and asylum. This is the sole policy area where surveys suggest a significant lead for the Conservatives, so on one level it’s hardly surprising that Michael Howard has focused on it so heavily. Sir Andrew Green, who started his own think- tank, Migration Watch UK, says politicians are belatedly tapping into the public mood: GREEN: I think that what is happening is that people are seeing the nature of our towns and cities changing. We get, as you can imagine, thousands of letters and e-mails from people around the country, and the first thing to say about them is that they are entirely sensible. We do get a lot of correspondence and there are three main themes. The first is housing. People are finding that their children and grandchildren are told that they have no chance of getting social housing because immigrants and asylum seekers have greater needs. Now that is a clear and widespread perception. Secondly, there is a link perceived – rightly or wrongly – with crime. I don’t think that there are statistics to back that up, but there is certainly a perception. And thirdly, the third main one is, as I mentioned, the changing face of our towns and cities. So this is how it is, if you like ,playing out to the ordinary citizen. KAMPFNER: Is this a case of chicken and egg? Is this a question of politicians following the public mood or politicians creating the public mood? GREEN: There is to some extent a chicken and egg problem here. My own view is that the political system is now responding to concerns that already existed, indeed strongly existed among the public, rather than the other way round. I think it is the case in recent years that there has been a reluctance to discuss the scale of immigration and its consequences for our society. The public did not feel free to express their views because of a fear of being accused of being racist, but those concerns were there, they were strong, and it is right that politicians of all parties should respond to them and say how they are going to deal with the situation that we now have. BENTLEY: What the Tories have been doing over the last few months is a distinctive variation on the politics of fear, which is to take single issues and to adopt almost a single issue style of campaigning and to try and play on this anti-political sentiment and to blow up particular concerns. I think the danger for politicians is if they come too close to a particular issue that’s defined by fear, then they can actually be eclipsed by it. And also it’s very easy to be perceived as following rather than leading. KAMPFNER: Tom Bentley of Demos levels the same accusation at Michael Howard as Tony Blair has done – that no matter how strong the popular sentiment may be, no mainstream party aiming for government can be seen to be obsessively focusing on a single issue. Some Conservatives have also indicated misgivings about the tone and the prominence accorded to immigration. And Tom Bentley is worried that politicians who harness people’s fears may create a dangerous momentum: BENTLEY: I think that where the politics of fear really explodes, it can help to create voter engagement but only in the sense of the anti-political backlash – throwing out all the major parties, voting for populist, anti-immigrant parties, kind of redrawing the political map entirely. You get those kinds of explosions; we’ve seen them in some European countries. I don’t think we’re going to see one in Britain this year, but that possibility is steadily growing. KAMPFNER: Perhaps it’s a good thing that our first past the post voting system militates against extremes on all sides. As for the mainstream parties: any issue on its own can be pursued only to a point. So it carries more salience if it’s linked to other concerns. A case in point was Kamel Bourgass – the failed asylum seeker found guilty of murdering a police officer and of conspiring to cause a public nuisance after police discovered what they said was an al-Qaeda poison plot. His conviction enabled the Conservatives to link immigration with terrorism. Margaret Scammell of the LSE identifies a strategy: SCAMMELL: In a way they’re using that terror issue as, if you like, the horror wedge. So we’re not doing the straightforward crime genre in the party election broadcasts. We’re using a slightly more subtle tactic to get the horror wedge in there through the issue of terrorism, about which there is no real difference between the parties and how they respond to it. So it’s not a policy thing here. It’s an issue that helps attach fear in an indirect route but a very direct appeal to fear to the issue of immigration. KAMPFNER: So the fears of asylum and immigration are the low level anxiety and the linking of that to terrorism takes that anxiety onto a higher plain? SCAMMELL: I think it’s exactly the other way round. I think actually the anxiety about terrorism isn’t colossal in this country, but there is considerable anxiety about immigration. So attaching terror to the idea of immigration , if you like, allows this topic to be discussed more openly in terms of fear, which might be more difficult to do without attaching the issue of terrorism to it. KAMPFNER: Margaret Scammell may be right. The threat of a terrorist attack in the UK – similar to the train bombings in Madrid that so affected the election outcome in Spain a year ago – is taken seriously, with armed reinforcements at key installations for the duration of the election. And yet, intriguingly, terrorism in its own right is one area where politicians are treading carefully and where the public doesn’t seem too worried. When the cabinet minister, Peter Hain, declared last autumn that security was in better hands under Labour, he was widely criticised for going too far. Perhaps this invoking of fear does, after all, have some boundaries. Lord Stevens who until this January was Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police: STEVENS: I believe there’s a consensus between the political parties. I mean I have the ability and have the privilege of talking to the different leaders of the political parties, being apolitical as a police chief, and I think there’s a lot of synergy, there’s a lot of agreement between which way we should go. I’d like to see people concentrating on what is agreed rather than what is the disagreement because that’s for the general good of the country and that’s what we should all be about whether we’re a policeman or whether we’re a policewoman or a politician. KAMPFNER: What do you think the nature of our society is at the moment when politicians invoke issues ranging from crime, anti-social behaviour, terrorism, MRSA? The impression is given that we are right to feel very fearful. STEVENS: I think people have got to be extremely careful about that – about painting a picture which is too black or too good. I think the consequences are for society very serious. If people will not go out and socialise, go to restaurants, cinemas, go into the park, that they lock themselves within their house and they are fearful of even going out through their front door, I think it creates a society which is fearful, and that has I think a terrible effect on the way people live generally. KAMPFNER: A stark warning, then, from one of our most senior security chiefs about the damage that competing appeals to our anxieties can do. But it’s precisely because the broader fears Lord Stevens describes are gripping the country that the Labour government introduced Anti Social Behaviour Orders six years ago. The Conservatives have said they would make them tougher still. Dolan Cummings of the Institute of Ideas has just published a major report on the issue: CUMMINGS: Anti Social Behaviour Orders tell people they’re right to be afraid, that if our neighbour is causing us trouble then it would be dangerous for us to approach them. That idea’s been very much institutionalised and we have the idea now that if you were to tell off a group of kids who were vandalising a bus shelter, for example, that they’d probably pull out a knife on you. The whole point of ASBOS, politicians talking about ASBOS and dealing with young people, reinforces this idea that society’s breaking down, that you can’t trust your neighbours and that there really is a big problem with crime and anti social behaviour. But anti social behaviour is a very subjective thing. So that if two people experience the same thing - one thinks it’s fine, another is afraid - politicians will side with the person who’s afraid. The politics of anti social behaviour isn’t just about ASBOS, it’s much broader than that. It’s about the relationship between the citizen and the state and it’s really premised on the idea that we are vulnerable individuals who need to be looked after and that we really can’t deal with the kind of petty, everyday irritations and inconveniences that happen, and it means that fear has become much more prevalent. KAMPFNER: The jury’s still out on the effectiveness of ASBOS, but if Dolan Cummings is right, they might have achieved the opposite of what they were intended to do. Rather than alleviate our fears, ASBOS might have raised our anxiety levels even further. Undeterred, politicians press ahead. Why do they do it? Frank Furedi at Kent University: FUREDI: Through playing the fear card, you get attention because fear lends authority to your agenda. You could have the most impressive agenda in the world, but if nobody hears about it you’re not going to go very fear. One way you can make sure that your agenda enters into the public domain is by playing the fear card. KAMPFNER: Do insecurity and anxiety and fear make people less or more likely to vote? FUREDI: Well some people have argued, particularly in the United States, that one of the ways you can make people vote is by raising their anxiety, and the argument is that the more anxious the citizens are, the more they will look for information, the more they will listen to politicians, the more they will listen to the news and go out and vote. I don’t think it’s so simply straightforward; there is no clear answer to this. I think that an anxious electorate who is very scared may well go out and vote on a Tuesday, but maybe in a different year at a different time they might feel immobilised and become very conscious of their fears and passivity and may well do the opposite. KAMPFNER: Frank Furedi suggests that the evidence in recent elections both here and in the US is unclear. So do we have anything more to go on this time? Will the focus on fear in this campaign increase or depress turnout? Andrew Cooper moved on from Conservative Central Office to become director of the polling company Populus. He sets out their most recent findings: COOPER: We said: Thinking about the campaign so far, do you think the parties have been mainly trying to explain what they would do if they were to win the election, or do you think they’ve mainly just been attacking each other? And eighty percent said: they’ve mainly been attacking each other. There is a very strong sense that parties don’t really try properly to explain what they would do and that, increasingly, parties do lean on just attacking one another in a very negative and rather depressing way; and that the more people see of that, the more voters are inclined to say: a plague on all their houses, I can’t be bothered with it, they’re all the same, I’m not going to bother to vote at all. SCAMMELL: We can say for sure that positive content seems to influence voters in a positive direction. If they see positive information coming forward, they’re more likely to be favourably disposed towards the sender of that positive message. Negative stuff, it’s a little bit more difficult to be sure about this. There is some suggestion that it makes no difference at all to the average British voter and there is some possibility that it even backfires, so that a heavy negative campaign might have a boomerang effect on the people who are putting forward the negative content. KAMPFNER: Margaret Scammell. So if the evidence suggests that the fear strategy is not working, if surveys show that it turns voters off, it’s difficult to understand why politicians nevertheless insist on using it. Andrew Cooper thinks it’s because we, the voters, may not be as consistent or high-minded as we might want to believe: COOPER: It is certainly true that floating voters in focus groups will tell political parties they hate negative campaigning, they wish that they would stick to saying what they would do and not knock the other lot. But in practice political parties are very sceptical about whether that’s actually true. You know voters say they hate negative campaigning, but actually political strategists take the view that you could demonstrate that good negative campaigning works even though people at the time will say they don’t like it. KAMPFNER: So voters are telling strategists one thing, but actually they do tune in to the negative messages that are put to them and they’re not particularly alienated by them? COOPER: I mean the theory is that you know mud sticks. If it’s well done and if the negative point being made is rooted in some aspect of people’s real perception of that party or leader, then some of that mud will stick. It’s an age-old American political theory that it’s much easier to knock down the other guy than it is to build up your own support. KAMPFNER: It’s rare for party strategists to reject the evidence of focus groups. Perhaps it’s because, during an election campaign, strategists hope the ‘mud sticks’ theory overrules voters’ distaste for negative messages. Perhaps they feel impelled to use fear, for want of another viable option? But what would happen to the election campaigner who didn’t use fear? Tom Bentley of Demos: BENTLEY: Actually, we have a real case study of this because Charles Kennedy is positioning himself as a straightforward, simple, positive campaigner. He’s precisely trying to draw on people’s weariness with the tit for tat and the ding dong of two party politics and to put something that sounds like a positive, single issue based, realistic and un-spun alternative to the voters. But I think it’s probably realistic to say that he can only do that because the Lib-Dems are seen as a different kind of alternative because they’re not seen as real contenders for power at this stage. KAMPFNER: Mind you, the Liberal Democrats haven’t refrained altogether from having a go at their opponents. As for the big two parties, they are in their different ways using fear with as much determination as they have ever done. Dr Margaret Scammell warns them their most important task is to get the mix right: SCAMMELL: What we do know about fear is that it motivates interest. Probably the greatest single motivator in terms of actually encouraging action is enthusiasm, which is why I suggest that the perfect campaign puts together fear and enthusiasm, has those two elements. So we can’t say that fear will definitely make you vote. If there isn’t if you like an appropriate quantity of enthusiasm in there, this can simply have the effect of turning people off politics altogether. KAMPFNER: If that’s the case, why would they continue to do it? SCAMMELL: It’s a very good question. Politics is very heavily about plausibility. The politicians are desperate to seem credible and they’re desperate to seem plausible. It’s pretty hard to put over a really credible, positive message about what you’re going to do and how trustworthy you are if you’re in politics for any length of time. It is much more plausible and credible to attack the record of an opponent. KAMPFNER: So we’re back to fear as the lowest common denominator, a pretty dispiriting thought. Elections are rarely edifying spectacles. Professor Joanna Bourke of Birkbeck College has just published a book on the Cultural History of Fear. She says fear is used not just during election campaigns. She suggests more sinister motives than just winning votes. BOURKE: Governments do gain a lot from having a fearful population. A certain level of fear is in a sense very, very important in order to get people, individuals to act in ways that the governments think is appropriate. It also legitimates certain policy decisions – for example the closing of borders, legislation about immigrants, a huge range of things that governments want to get passed and in fact may not be able to get passed without these fears. So the use of fears about terrorism, for example, has actually enabled this government to pass legislation that restricts a lot of human rights in a way that it would be very difficult to think that they would have been able to do that easily before 9/11. KAMPFNER: It’s certainly true that the atmosphere has changed since 9/11. But there’s more to this supposed conspiracy. Of course, ministers wouldn’t deny the draconian nature of many recent laws. Indeed they have at times advertised it, and sought to juxtapose their toughness with the other parties’. But such an approach only really works if the messages are believed by us, the general public. When the government ordered tanks to patrol Heathrow airport in February 2003, citing the danger of a terrorist strike, the public reaction ranged from sceptical to cynical. Lord Stevens was Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time: STEVENS: The police service, in particular the police service should be at the forefront of giving warnings rather than perhaps politicians who we work to and are our political masters. KAMPFNER: Because politicians are just not going to be believed? STEVENS: Well I think that’s the problem. We are the people who deliver on the streets, not the politicians. So I think we do need a different approach to what we do because we do live in very dangerous times – I think everybody accepts that – and I think that it is very, very important that we give information to the public, that it’s given in a way that has credibility or it’s given by people that do have that credibility. And I think that’s the way for the future in my view. KAMPFNER: And yet, for politicians struggling to make themselves heard or believed, the message “you have every right to be scared” requires a lower burden of proof than the more uplifting alternatives. For all the bombast and the rhetoric of the campaign, Frank Furedi identifies the helplessness that has befallen the current crop of politicians: FUREDI: Once fear becomes a common public currency, then politicians too become susceptible to its kind of destructive impacts. So in many respects politicians are prisoners of the culture of fear themselves. They themselves find it very difficult to make sense of the world. They haven’t got a clear political vocabulary to which they can interpret the complex issues that are disorienting society. And quite often they themselves are drawn towards an imagination where fear seems to be the obvious answer, so the public understands that the more that politicians talk about fear, the more they seem to be saying that we really haven’t got an answer to the problems that confront you. KAMPFNER: The sullen mood of this election shows that the public understands this alright. The relentless message from the politicians has been: opt for us otherwise the consequences will be truly frightening. The mud might stick just enough, the fear might be lodged just enough, to get just enough people out to the polling stations. But this campaign has served only to alienate the voter yet further from those we vote in. 13