Saturday 12 December 2009

How to have a landslide win - or loss.

Labour talked back in 1997 that we could import everything we needed using the money from the City of London so we no longer need farming or manufacturing. The war against farming was done in relative openness but the war against manufacturing and any other industry was kept in the dark.
Company profits have been squeezed for such a long time now that employers no longer do training. Prospective workers have to get college qualifications or degrees at their own expense, thus excluding the poor from bettering themselves and exacerbating the divide between the have and the have nots. Hence large swathes of the electorate are shut out of the job market and are sick of hearing Brown say he is doing all he can to get people back to work, thus shutting out all who have never been in work. That would be around 20 million voters with no experience to put on their CV and no chance of getting to interview stages in any job application.
So why would his saying he is redirecting overseas aid to combating climate change strike any chords with that 20 million? I mean, whose money is he throwing away now? There is no reason those who have never had the chance to pay tax should care about his spending and it is therefore irrelevant as an election issue.
There are jobs, we see people working. But the young British born and educated male cannot get into those positions and be part of a community. We need to see how those who are in work got the jobs offers, how they found out about openings and got invited to take up work there. Obviously the notice boards in the Polish community places, like churches, are written in Polish and so exclude all who did not learn that language in school or at home. Likewise Gujerati, Urdu, Ukrainian, Russian – we do not teach those languages in school here in the UK. Modern language departments in state comprehensives are in decline now that foreign languages are no longer compulsory and are thought to be hard, and tend not to teach languages other than French and German, or Spanish, for lack of teachers and exam markers. Nepotism is the norm in most cultures, looking after one’s own is a normal human thing to do. But it excludes outsiders, in this case culturally British people. This is what the BNP are seeing and working on to make progress in the polls.
The workless do not see the mass exodus of the manufacturing wealth creation base of Britain as the fault of government because nobody has told them, or shown them that is what happened. But shown that foreigners are taking jobs here is easy to understand. Unless Labour comes clean about what they have done they will lose voters to the BNP, as will other parties.
The Conservative Party needs to find a way of telling these truths in the language of the target audience, the words they use, in ways that chime in with the world they live in and experiences they recognise. That is the language of the state comprehensive, of the streets and of the X Factor – the language that might not be learned at Eton though it seems to have been taught in the scholarship funded selective public school our Glaswegian Prime Minister attended.
Labour got their message across in the late 1990’s. Now the Conservative Party must do the same only better. But to whom are the target audience listening. We must assume that a third of them have left school unable to be reading it.

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