ACCENTUATING THE NEGATIVE
The media: Paul Johnson
identifies doom-merchanting as the Left's big turn-off
AS THE Left is at present engaged in a `What went wrong?' reappraisal, with the object of devising a new long-term strategy to win the next election, I offer them what I believe is a useful piece of advice: go easy with the gloom. The soothsayers of the Left have, over the last two decades, typecast themselves as the merchants of misery, the prognosticators of perdition. Are the unemployment figures falling? Instantly, up pops a Labour spokesman on television to say that they are faked, that the true figures are actually much higher than any of us thought and that any fall is `cosmetic'. Is the balance of trade good and improving? Then here is a Labour econo- mic expert to prove that it is bad, and getting worse. Growing poverty, increasing Inequality, rising injustice with inevitable riots at the end of the road: that is what the Left has been telling us. And — need one be surprised? — the public does not want to hear it.
The Left's concentration on political horror-stories was seen at its most self- destructive in the News on Sunday. There were many solid commercial reasons why the project failed (at any rate in its original incarnation) but the overriding one was the pessimistic stress. The paper might more accurately have been called Doom on Sunday. It was one of the most depressing publications it has ever been my duty to read. Now there is nothing wrong in a newspaper shocking its readers by publicis- ing an outrage. On the contrary: that is one way to get the readership adrenalin flow- ing. But the campaign must be specific. Equally important, it must give the reader some hope that the injustice or scandal is remediable, and that some kind of solution is at hand provided vigorous action is taken. What a paper should not do — and what the News on Sunday emphatically did, wittingly or no — is to give the reader the generalised impression that the world is an impossibly wicked place in which the weak, the innocent and needy always get a poor deal. This is a particular turn-off when those who cause all the misery cannot be identified and named, photo- graphed and hunted, but are presented as impersonal forces, capitalism, big business, the City, American imperialism etc.
The truth is that most people lead hard lives, or think they do, and if they have a bit more money to spend, and are buying a house or have just got a new car, they do not want to be told it is all an illusion, that they are heading for bankruptcy and/or that their prosperity, such as it is, is acquired at the expense of starving people in the Third World or the deprived of the inner cities. They have consciences, they are willing to be made indignant but they do not want to be submerged in tales of unhappiness about which they can do nothing and which merely leave them feeling impotent and low. Even the indignation-raising stories must be ba- lanced by jokes and fun, tales of success and extravagance and splendour, enough to give the reader the sursum corda, the lifting of the heart which he, especially she, so badly needs in the morning. Newspapers and popular papers above all need a touch of glamour, a whiff of expense and conspi- cuous consumption. The imaginative capacity to live and experience pleasure vicariously is one of the strongest of human propensities. Readers want to be encour- aged to believe they will become mil- lionaires, win the pools, get to wear the Duchess of Windsor's jewellery, stay at the Cipriani, make a hit with Princess Diana. Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, Bartholomew, Cudlipp, all the great builders of mass- circulations knew this well.
Unfortunately there is a distinctive sec- tion of the educated middle class who seem to enjoy the contemplation of misery, and these people tend to write left-wing jour- nals and dominate the thinking echelons of the Labour movement. There is a reason for their pessimism, which almost verges on the masochistic. Early socialists did not forbear to dwell on life's horrors or abuse villains like Castlereagh or Louis-Philippe or the Tsars. But they were uplifted by tremendous hopes of ideal societies just round the corner. They delighted in thoughts of communes and Owenite towns, later of model cooperatives, kibbutzim, public ownership, national investment boards, ideal council housing, 'waving cornfields and ballet in the evening'. All that has now vanished, with the discredit- ing alike of Soviet and Chinese commun- ism on the one hand and of social democra- tic nationalisation on the other. No one now believes in these utopias, and com- munal experiments are at best a minority taste. So all that remains is the discontent with existing society, which has filled the vacuum left by the collapse of idealistic solutions and now dominates the minds of the middle-class Left almost to the exclu- sion of anything else. They have developed a positive taste for misery-mongering and expect the rest of us to share it. We decline to do so, and that is why both their journals and their political campaigns fail.
When the Left puts misery behind it and looks for cheer, it does better. As the anti-gloom Broadway ditty goes, 'Accentu- ate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative'. When Labour remembered this, during the recent elec- tion, it made some impact. Much nonsense has been talked and written about Labour's 'brilliant' campaign. If it was so successful, why did Labour lose by a landslide? In fact, by trying to tell voters that Thatcherite prosperity was all an illusion — by spreading the customary message of gloom — it probably did Labour more harm than good, as a survey by Campaign seems to suggest.
Where Labour's effort, directed by a closed circle of fervent Kinnock admirers and henchmen, did succeed was in its real but secret aim. The chances of a Labour victory or even a hung parliament were largely discounted before Parliament was dissolved. What the campaign was de- signed to ensure was that, even after the inevitable defeat, Kinnock remained lead- er of the party. To this extent it seems to have succeeded, at any rate for the time being. Why did it succeed? Because it pushed a positive product. Kinnock may have an empty head. He may not do his homework. But he is young. He smiles and laughs a lot. He seems to like kissing everybody, not just babies. He had his indignant-outrage act but he keeps it in place and the net impact of his campaign as seen on television was to cheer people up. Now Kinnock himself comes from the doom-and-gloom Left and in the routine way of parliamentary business this is what he peddles. But in his election television campaign he struck a different note: he accentuated the positive. There is a lesson here for the Left, perhaps for all of us.
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