Terms and Conditions Apply.

Fear makes people stupid. It shuts down the brain, reducing your options to fight or flight. This can be good for a hunter-gatherer facing a large predator in North Africa half a million years ago. But it’s confusing for a right wing Irish politician looking at an opinion poll one month ago.

Flight isn’t really an option in politics. Just ask George Lee. But fighting isn’t always a good idea either. Attacking other parties, rather than attacking their ideas, doesn’t win you votes. All it does is persuade undecided voters that the whole business is a waste of time, that politicians are fundamentally uncivilised, and not worth bothering with.

This has been shown repeatedly in the USA, where election campaigns often, but not always, go off the rails as candidates start insulting each other, and turnout at the polling stations collapses.

Here in Ireland the government parties would probably benefit from a low turnout at the next election, so it’s not surprising that John Gormley, the most desperate man in Leinster House, has been lashing out at Labour lately. What’s more surprising is that Fine Gael have been joining in, and with gusto.

Now if you are going to play the dirty game, it would help to do it right. Keep your attacks vague. Stick to insinuation. If I keep claiming that you can’t be trusted, then eventually some people will believe me, and it’s up to you to prove that you aren’t dishonest. But if I say something specific about you, and I’m lying, then it’s very easy for you to prove that I’m a liar.

And that’s precisely what Labour’s opponents are doing wrong. They keep repeating the tired old mantra of “Labour haven’t got any policies.”  This is a ridiculous claim to be making, for two simple reasons.

The first of these is that Labour do, as a matter of fact, have policies. Barrels of them. 45 policy documents since the last general election. 28 private members’ bills in the same period of time. This isn’t because Labour are particularly hard working, it’s because opposition parties always have lots of policy. They have time to devote to policy formation that simply isn’t available to government parties.

But it’s the second reason that shows precisely how stupid these attacks are. A decade ago looking up the policies of different parties was a very time consuming business. Most people simply didn’t have the time to do it, so they relied on the media to keep them informed. These days any voter with access to the internet can hop on to Google and find the answers they need in seconds. In the world of cheap point scoring, the referees are no longer in the dark.

The time has come for Labour to respond to these attacks, but to do so intelligently. Not by calling other parties liars and cowards, even if they having been frightened into telling lies, but by launching a campaign to sell our policies as aggressively as we’ve been selling some of our personalities.

We need a billboard campaign, backed with advertisements in the print media and online, under the slogan “Terms and Conditions Apply.” We’ll set out a group of five or six policies that Labour will insist on in any negotiations for a new government.

Not only will this help us address our ideas directly to the electorate, and bypass the filter of the media, but it will keep us left wing. The Spring Tide went out the moment we were seen to U-Turn on coalition with FF. The Lib Dems are currently, and quite rightly, getting hammered for flip flopping on VAT. If we’re going to run a campaign like this, and we should, we cannot afford to break our promises.