Are people stupid?

I’m trying to work out why, when a good 60% of domestic political coverage over the last 3 months has been concerned with party funding/spending (see previous rant here); no member of the general public has raised the issue with me, despite doing a pretty constant routine of door-knocking. Nobody has said anything to suggest that they think any situations or people are right or wrong.

There must be a right and wrong, and people are not stupid. They recognise when something is corrupt or unfair, and they care very much about those things. But I wonder who, outside Westminster, cares about the in and outs of what is declared and how. They certainly don’t follow the role of the Electoral Commission or the various forms of enquiry that they hear about in each news cycle.

People notice if they’re hearing a lot from politicians or if they’re hearing nothing. Something in between will leave most people with the most positive impression. Money spent other than communicating with voters won’t have a clear impact, it’ll just leave an impression of the kind of people we in politics and the political parties are.

But the fact that people seem to think the details of the Hain/Osbourne sagas are irrelevant doesn’t mean they won’t influence people’s opinion of politics and in turn their voting behaviour. In both cases, people will think badly of the politicians who spend large sums on what are essentially internal party issues.

In the case of the Labour party, the problem is ostensibly quite old-fashioned. While we are not an exclusive or class-based party any more, we still have our people that we operate for. And they’re not the kind of people who understand how politicians don’t notice sums in the hundreds of thousands, whether it’s theirs personally or part of their campaigns.

That is why it’s so important that the rules are clear, and the authority of the Electoral Commission is clear. It either is the authority in charge or it isn’t. There should be heavy sanctions for corruption, and for outright dishonesty. The parties and the press should not be trying to make the Hain affair into either of those things, because there is no evidence or likelihood for it. There is nothing helpful in pursuing stories to what, if you watch rolling news, appears the natural conclusion - resignation without people ever really knowing why.

But politicians including Hain should be considerably more responsible because of the damage these stories do. If politicians get access to large sums, they should take responsibility for it being declared. But they should also make sure that they are sensible about the spending that goes on in their names, and make sure it’s to the benefit of the party. It’s not hard, they should just spend the money on communicating with the electorate.