to the polls
Notwithstanding today’s rubber-stamping exercise by the House of Lords and irrespective of our personal political machinations over Brexit and the woes of our collective two-party system, we now know there’s going to be another general election. Thursday 12th December if it’s not already in your little black book. All well & good I hear you say and not before time but do we appreciate the cost of an election and just exactly how many millions of pounds are spent in getting us to make our mark in the box that says yeah or nay?
Our last general election, in 2017, came in to the taxpayers’ tune of £143m. In stark contrast to the astronomical £1.75bn cost of the collective Trump/Clinton campaign ours appear relatively short and perhaps even represent good value for money. Election campaign spending is strictly limited by laws dating back to the 19th century which attempt to ensure the rich and wealthy are unable to ‘buy’ social power and influence. Each candidate is given a fixed spending limit of £8,700 plus 6p per voter in urban constituencies and 9p in rural ones. In addition, parties are able to contribute from their own coffers, via donations. The Tories raise great sums from rich donors, and their largest was John Griffin, founder of taxi firm Addison Lee, who gave just shy of a million pounds. Labour relies heavily on the trade unions and £2.6m came from Unite alone.
Campaign money tends to be divided into ‘ground war’ – local efforts to get party activists and volunteers out there on the streets, and ‘air war’ – national media and advertising campaigns. The former is restricted by the aforementioned spending limits and the latter is obviously where the vast majority of the budget goes. Surprisingly, all political parties do not have to pay for TV advertising as an allocation of national TV and radio air-time is automatically allocated, so the largest amounts go on bill-boards, battle-buses, newspapers, online ads and increasingly on ‘market research’.
At the last election, Mrs May paid almost £5m to pollsters and over £3m to two of the world’s most successful US political consultants, Lynton Crosby and Jim Messina. The Conservative party ran the most complex campaign ever mounted in the UK, using vast amounts of ‘big data’: commercial research, questionnaires and phone banks to design extremely well-targeted, specific and appealing messages. They greatly outspent Labour on Facebook, with ‘micro-targeting’ now being recognised as one of the most powerful political weapons, by £1.2m to £160,000. Not forgetting the Brexit referendum fall-out from last years’ Cambridge Analytica scandal this is where the serious money is going to be spent in the future.
The irony is that recent research has shown that the average voter (‘Workington Man’ this time around) thinks about politics for no more than four minutes a week, so consider reading this to be your weekly dose! And the only campaign event which achieved over 55% widespread knowledge & association was Diane Abbott’s (Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary at the time) disastrous, cringingly dreadful interview on LBC, during which she struggled to explain how much it would cost to recruit 10,000 police officers. Money well spent then!
