sorry thomas, but I can't agree at all. Negative campaigning is deeply damaging to politics.
Just look at the quality of some of the comments on your own website. Do you seriously think they do the labour cause any good? Infantile ignorant nonsense.
Do you not realise that they just make the author look like a prat, and his cause will look prattish too?
On the other hand, serious intelligent argument will win through every time.
look at the NHS "crisis" at the minute. Anybody using it knows that the NHS has improved drastically over the last few years.
A few people pick out some glitches - and that's all the deficits are , minor glitches. If you argue those things through seriously, you can show in 30 seconds that they're smallscale hiccups. But instead of calm reasoning, you get a mixture of name calling, patronising dismissals and panics, and you're stuffed.
These bloody spin doctors have caused havoc with "grooming" politicians on "presentation" and whatever.
They're spoonfed a series of pre-prepared answers, and they spout this crap instead of actually arguing their case, and they simply look evasive and childish and lose the argument.
You look at Dave "Chameleon" . Prescott was used to roadtest this little wheeze. People laughed, so now it's used daily to attack him. And it's SO boring.
And it replaces proper argument. If instead of endlessly repeating a cheap slogan they actually took him on head to head, they'd soon show him up for the lightweight that he is. Instead, they actually avoid the argument, so the tory message gets more credence than it deserves.
