All this juvenile baloney tells us is that Labour needs a credible message – pronto

ONE of the good things about being a blow-in (apart from not having any allegiance to any of our political ‘tribes’) is realising that while the names may change, politicians the world over are the same. I’ve been lucky enough to cover politics in four countries now, so when I saw the badly-photoshopped image of Micheál Martin ‘marrying’ Gerry Adams outside Leinster House, I knew just what was going on.

For a start, the picture – on the front page of a national newspaper, no less – looked like a primary school art project. Above it, a headline screamed: ‘Labour plots “gay” attack ad on Martin and Adams’; beneath it, a breathless story claimed that this cack-handed collage was in fact a ‘controversial attack ad’ that was being considered by Labour for its election campaign.

There followed a tragically predictable media rumpus about the ‘ad’ – was it homophobic? Was it ‘negative campaigning’? Was it offensive? Labour said it was just one of a number of proposed campaigns that had been mocked up, although none had reached approval stage: the party lamented that this one had been mysteriously leaked (funny, that!) to a Sunday newspaper. Then, after letting the row rumble on for a couple of days, Labour announced it would not be using the ad.

To which my response is: grow up. This whole thing was a stunt – one of the oldest in the political book. I’ve seen it used repeatedly in elections around the world. You draw up a nasty attack ad – one which you’d never actually dare use; you accidentally-on-purpose leak it to a journalist; they run the story; there’s a big row and everyone gets to see your nasty message without you actually having to stand over it.

Once you have enough journalists to swallow the notion that this was a real ad, you get all the publicity benefits with none of the costs.

So I’ll admit I was a little surprised about how many of our media were prepared to go along with this silliness: but I was far more taken aback at how desperate this tactic suggests Labour is becoming.

Most people haven’t realised this yet, but we’re now probably only seven weeks from the next general election – and Joan Burton’s party simply can’t get its campaign going.

It’s not just fake attack ads: pretty much every day for the past fortnight Labour has made some grandiose promise for voters if re-elected. Put ‘Joan Burton promises’ into Google and you’ll see what I mean. To date, she’s pledged a €25 pension hike, a €2 minimum wage increase, a living wage, full employment, paid parental leave, a child benefit hike, help for first-time buyers, a vote on abortion, the airport rail-link, the M20 motorway, reform of schools admis sions and tax cuts for the lower paid. Frankly, I’m surprised they are not offering everyone a free iPhone if they’re re-elected: it’d be a lot cheaper, and probably a good bit more credible.

Because the simple problem Labour has with these pledges is one of credibility. After the broken campaign promises from 2011, many Labour voters just don’t believe the party’s commitments this time around. Moreover, the obvious question to Ms Burton is this: if this stuff is what you believe in, why didn’t you deliver it during the five years you were in government?

The answer to that, of course, is that they were the minority party and only had so much influence. But given that they’ll be an even smaller minority next time around, that suggests they’re even less likely to be able to deliver this set of promises. Labour is now the cheating husband who’s finding it very hard to convince his wife that things will be different next time around.

It’s a great shame, because Joan Burton is actually an incredibly decent, honest politician who believes in taking a pragmatic approach to helping the people her party represents (principally by helping them find work: many of us appear to have forgotten that that’s what the ‘Labour’ in the party’s title means). Her TDs are also probably right to suggest that things might be significantly worse for their constituency if they had not joined Fine Gael in government. Welfare rates might well have been cut; child benefit rates might not have been partly restored; the minimum wage might not have been restored, then increased; and public sector pay might not be heading upwards as fast as it is now.

But ‘the fear of what might have been’ is a hard thing to sell to voters who want to look forward, not back. Besides, Labour’s own supporters are far more upset that the party backed water charges, which was the Rubicon of most left-wingers, than any real or perceived success in moderating Fine Gael in other areas.

THE truth, of course, is that Labour’s long-term strategy would have been far better served by not going into government with Fine Gael at all. As one leading political analyst told me this week: ‘If Labour had gone into opposition then, they’d have a 10-point lead by now!’

It’s not just that junior coalition partners usually get squashed: it’s that for a left-wing party to go into coalition with a right-wing one, it has to abandon a lot of its core principles. And the core principles are what your voters believe in: ditch those and they’ll go elsewhere. Certainly, the Labour voters I talk to are still nursing a deep sense of betrayal – and are seeing Joan Burton’s pledges as the last, desperate pleadings of a woman about to be marched to the tumbril.

So is there anything Labour can do to persuade its voters back into the fold? The notion that ‘we need Labour to keep Fine Gael in check’ won’t really wash because Labour wasn’t seen to do it the last time. They can’t campaign on political standards, because they let Fine Gael get away with the shenanigans of James Reilly, Phil Hogan et al (and even threw Róisín Shortall under the bus to do it).

Nobody really believes Fine Gael can win an outright majority, so the notion of voting Labour to stop single-party government won’t ring true either. And no one buys the idea that voting Labour will help prevent a mythical Fianna Fáil-Sinn Féin match-up. Frankly, they’re in trouble. Fine Gael is doing what it can to help them, but the lack of a strong Labour message is still a killer.

Voters want stability, yes: but will they really sign up to the notion that voting Labour is the way to achieve it? If you want stability, why not just vote for Enda Kenny?

Perhaps the only argument I can see working on an emotional level with Labour voters is to say that, for all the concessions the party has had to make, it is still the only credible left-wing party the country has: and that without it, the principles of the movement will be destroyed forever.

One hundred years after James Connolly gave his life in support of those principles, saving the Labour Party is a message that might just have some resonance on doorsteps.

Although they’d probably be just as well to promise everyone that iPhone too...