For those who can’t get enough of the political leaflets
On the right hand panel are some links to other election leaflet sites, the best of which is http://www.geocities.com/by_elections/index.html.
Here you will see collected leaflets for several by-elections, recent and ancient. By-elections get a special dispensation in law with a spending limit of £100,000 for each party (according to Section 73 of the Representation of the Peoples Act 1983). That adds up to a lot of leaflets, and explains why they can be so much more interesting.
My favourite by-election set of leaflets is Hartlepool 2004.
I could go on endlessly about the leaflets there (and probably will do in subsequent blog posts). But just to give you a taste, check out this letter from the Secretary of State for Health, John Reid, where he writes:
Let me make it clear, as long as I am Secretary of State,
Hartlepool hospital will not be closed
Obviously this is joke to people like us who knew that John Reid was the cabinet minister who tended to get moved to a different difficult department every year (we’d laugh and throw this leaflet in the bin), but to anyone who didn’t know that, this sounds like a hard statement.
A lot of people don’t really follow who is or was the Health Secretary at any time in the past or future. Why should they?
That’s what makes this leaflet perfect. It reads one way to the people to whom it is targeted, and it doesn’t offend those who know it’s silly.
I guess that makes it a sort of a reverse dog-whistle.
A dog-whistle in politics is the use of code-words that are intended to be understood by the target group, but go over the heads of the general population. It’s famously used to appeal to a party’s white racist base (eg “welfare queens”), but could probably be used to appeal to a radical left-wing (if one exists) by use of seemingly innocuous phrases familiar to socialist history when giving a speech about banker’s bonuses.
I haven’t got examples, but I’m sure they’re out there.
But here John Reid gives an example of a phrase which appeals to those who do not correctly interpret its meaning. And that’s masterful.
What about Hartlepool hospital? It closed in 2007.
But the by-election and the subsequent 2005 general election had been won, so there weren’t any political repercussions at the ballot box. And that’s what really matters.