After Labour's 1992 defeat, they determined to be ruthless, disciplined and unremitting in their destruction of Conservative legitimacy. Their attacks were without mercy. They wasted no opportunity to revile any Conservative that came into view as corrupt, uncaring or stupid. They endlessly, single-mindedly repeated the charges of sleaze, weakness and incompetence. Tony Blair himself was all smiles and beamed a positive message, but the dogs of Millbank tore into every mistake or ambiguity with speed and efficiency. Labour strategists monitored their spokesmen ensuring they used the right language. Pensioners became nervous at deliberate spreading of false rumours about what Conservatives were doing next, from destroying the health-care on which they depended, to cutting their pensions. Even as the economy recovered, they never hesitated to "paint it black": it was a masterfully negative campaign. By the time they were finished with the Conservative Party, large parts of the electorate not only disagreed with them, they were disgusted by them.
Conservative campaigners, rather than learning from this, seemed to have developed a nervous aversion to professional negative campaigning. Perhaps they felt that it was morally wrong or disliked by the public. But all campaigning experience shows that negative campaigning works. (Negative campaigning being distinct from ad hominem attacks.) And there is also a moral case for it: we have an oppositional system which insists good ideas must be tested by attack. It is one of the ways of ensuring a vivid public debate. As it turned out, voters remained confused about the degree to which Brown was responsible for economic failure; he was allowed to portray himself at least half-convincingly as some kind of saviour in the banking crisis; and the degree of waste that Labour introduced into public services was never impressed on the voter. The situation didn't seem so bad to them. They still had something to lose through change. This helps explain the resilience of the Labour vote - particularly in Scotland, in constituencies with large public sector votes (ie people dependent on the state for earned income or benefits), and amongst black and ethnic minority communities.
