Hey, 


Reading yesterday's The Guardian I stumbled across Charlie Brooker's article about how the Right-wing are brilliant at creating snappy-yet-misleading nicknames for political disputes. He named examples, such as the "boom and bust" economy, the National Insurance increase being a "tax on jobs" and, most recently in the US, the "ground zero mosque" to support his claims. The Left, in his view, were pretty unimaginative, resorting to the age-old insults of "Bastards! Fascists! Racists!" which don't support their argument because a) they are wrong and b) they aren't, well, catchy enough. 


His article made me think - which on its own is always worrying - about whether he is right to propose this hypothesis; are the Right-wing better at sprouting their propaganda? To investigate, I used the easiest readily available sources - the official party websites of the Conservatives and Labour. To give the research some depth I also looked at the Democrats and the Republicans in the state of New York, where the Democrats are in power as opposed to the Conservatives here.


The United Kingdom - The Labour Party and The Conservatives


(http://www2.labour.org.uk/home)
(http://www.conservatives.com/Default.aspx)


The Conservative website tells you more about the bad things New Labour did during their thirteen years in Government than the actual positives of the ConDem coalition. This, in my opinion, is not healthy. Four out of the five headlines on the Conservative homepage are about Labour's failings, ranging from economic policy to pension warnings and Labour's "legacy". The only headline that is not Labour related is that about aid for Pakistani flood victims. 


The Labour Party website is a bit side-tracked by the leadership campaigns being conducted by the Milibands et al. There is disgruntled mumblings at the Government - they are in opposition, after all -  but they are more centred at the Liberal Democrats, the unexpected enemy following the General Election in May. The Conservatives have always been the rivals, but Nick Clegg was the centre-left flirt that left feelings hurt. And it hasn't been forgiven.


What is interesting to see is that both Parties are aware of the importance and power of social networking. Both sites have links to Facebook pages of their party (if you are interested, more people "like" the Tories than Labour). Both sites also offer a "find your nearest representative" application. It showed I live in Conservative desert-land, with more hope of my skin turning Smurf-like blue than of meeting a Tory in the West of Scotland with any influence at all. 


New York State - The Republicans and The Democrats. 


(http://www.nygop.org/home)
(http://www.nydems.org/)


The New York case study is useful to look at since in the USA the conservative Republicans are not in power and the Democrats are.With this change in role between the two countries, have the patterns that we have seen in the UK - that of the Right publicly attacking the Left - different?


In a nutshell, no. 


The Democrats website is far from perfect, before we look into it. There is a cheap dig at the Republican lobbyist Rick Lazio by the side of the site, which is a bit tacky by the standards of a serious political organisation. Compared to the Republicans however this is tame. Whilst the main story on the Democrats page is "Andrew Cuomo, The New New York Agenda: A Plan For Action", a plan for reform, the Republicans use their equivalent space to focus on the "Hall of Shame" of the Democrats leadership of New York, with satirical, "comical" images to boot. And it all seems a bit cheap.


Conclusions


I have only made these judgements by browsing the websites of these parties and not much else e.g. election campaign material. Both sides of the political spectrum tend to be at their ugliest during these elections and just as bad as each other (just search for election posters from previous elections on Google to find out). It isn't a new practice by any means, but the internet (and social networking) has just proved to be a new outlet for this propaganda. However, I would have to agree with Brooker. When it comes to these "dirty tactics" the Right appear to be more street-wise than the Left. They have their reasons, of course; the Conservatives have big cuts to make and want to place as much blame as possible on the previous administration, whilst the Republicans have mid-term elections this November. But overall, although the Left can often appear to be the more passionate, the Right have the sharper tongues. 


DC
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