Nastiness in Crewe
For a fair summary of Labour’s Crewe campaign, see John Harris and Labour Home. This, too, is relevant.
Labour’s antics have been disgusting. Playing on class and race, Labour has taken its voters for fools. They have engaged in the most hypocritical and cheap campaign. The real question is why? They had £2.7bn to throw about, and 7000+ votes to hold. They have the power of the government to throw behind a seat 165 places down the Tory target list. Why on earth would you cheapen your core vote and alienate any other potential supporters?
The only suggestion I can make is that they have accepted failure and want something to blame it on. Bad campaign, nasty tricks, hypocrisy and the seat is lost. Nothing to do with Gordon Brown, of course. Call me cynical, but I cannot see any other reason why any political strategist in the world would think this kind of campaign is a good idea.
Perhaps the strategists could simply be genuinely useless?
The most worrying line is this:
“Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry and ID card?”
Which would really not feel out of place in BNP literature. I would hope that this is the case of the creator of that pamphlet being utterly foolish and far to the right of the actual candidate over this issue and it slipping through into wide distribution without getting cleared.
Which would suggest that Dunwoody’s campaign is out of her control…
I find your suggestion that Labour would set out to intentionally lose a campaign pretty absurd, actually. At this stage a win is vital to ensure that Cameron’s momentum can be diminished and nobody in their right mind would set out to lose.
That said, nobody in their right mind would run a campaign this poorly.