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LONDON — With just 48 hours until polling day in the U.K. general election, political campaigns are nearing fever pitch as they attempt to persuade, cajole and manipulate voters into backing their candidates.
During an exhausting six week campaign the public has been bombarded with claims, counter-claims, attack ads and big promises. It’s certainly confusing being a voter in 2024. But don’t worry — POLITICO is here to help cut through the spin with our deep dive into the sneaky strategies being deployed to win your support.
Keep your hands clean
What’s better than attacking your opponents or bigging yourself up? Getting “normal people” to do it for you.
With trust in politicians at a record low, parties have become increasingly reliant on wheeling out ordinary voters to push their perspectives in an attempt to convince fellow citizens a message is more heartfelt plea than cynical spin.
It’s a tactic that has become a major facet of the U.K. Labour Party’s campaign, with dozens of paid social media ads showing former Tory supporters now espousing full-throated support for Keir Starmer’s party.
Shot inside ordinary living rooms and back gardens or out on suburban streets, the videos are more personal and engaging than the normal slick clips pushed out by the parties. Those who might scroll past a big-budget policy promo video, party strategists hope, could well be drawn in by Mrs Mitten at No. 14 detailing her Damascene conversion to Labour.
With Labour having largely shied away from pushing too many overtly negative ads about the party’s opponents, these regular voters have also filled in as Labour’s top attack dogs.
Military veteran “Michael” appears in one recent clip to lambast Rishi Sunak’s National Service plan, claiming it’s a “con” to think military service and supporting the Conservatives go hand-in-hand.
“Nat,” a teacher with stage-four cancer, appears in multiple videos saying there’s a “good chance” the waiting list he was left on as a result of the government’s mishandling of the NHS has “literally cut my life in half.”
In the final weeks of the campaign, the Tories have also leapt on the strategy.
Dozens of candidates have paid to target videos into their local postcodes with clips of “neighbors” talking about why — even if you don’t like the Conservatives more broadly — the local candidate is worth supporting.
The only problem? Several of those portrayed as “normal” local voters have already been identified as Conservative councilors or activists. Talk about having skin in the game.
Fake it till you make it
While Rishi Sunak was preaching about the importance of integrity in politics in a debate last week, his party was attempting to bamboozle voters by rebranding its X account to the official-sounding “Tax Check UK” to attack their opponent’s economic plans.
It’s an old trick. Back in 2019, the party provoked fury with a similar stunt during a debate when it dressed itself up as “Fact Check UK.”
Full Fact — an actual fact-checking group — said voters “deserve better” than another grubby attempt to hoodwink them, but it’s not just the Tories up to these kinds of dirty tricks.
The Labour Party has splashed more than £10,000 during the campaign pushing sponsored search results on Google for torymanifesto.org.uk. Visitors to the mock website are provided with damning claims about supposed Conservative failures on the NHS, small boats, tax and sewage spills, alongside links to Labour’s alternative plans.
According to Who Targets Me, a transparency group tracking political ads, Labour has pushed these sponsored searches at people searching the keywords “Tory manifesto.”
While Labour’s branding is clear at the bottom of the website, many voters seeking genuine information about the Tories’ manifesto promises are likely to have landed on the attack page instead.
The fear factor
Begging, pitiful pleas and clickbait. It’s all par for the course from political parties as they attempt to manipulate supporters on their email lists into donating time and cash.
This inbox invasion has become incessant since the campaign started, with some parties issuing multiple emails a day warning that only you, loyal and loved supporter, can save the the party from electoral disaster.
“Not the news we wanted to share,” warned one attention-seeking subject line from the Labour Party. “Disappointing,” read one from the Conservatives’ treasurer.
Pioneered by former U.S. President Barack Obama, and then aggressively pushed by his successor Donald Trump, such manipulative tactics have become endemic across the U.K. political scene.
Beyond the clickbait headlines, the missives issue grave warnings about how a lack of support from ordinary supporters is putting the country at risk by letting the other lot get in.
For instance, despite official figures showing Labour has vastly out-raised its opponents during the campaign, its emails remain thoroughly downbeat.
Ramping up the fear levels, one recent correspondence warned: “We don’t want to wonder if we could have done more after polling day, so we are asking now.”
Another opened with the panicky statement: “The truth is our fundraising has not picked up as much as we had hoped at this point.”
The timing of that slowdown is “not great,” party spinners warned. But you could avert disaster by simply clicking on one of those big red donation buttons below …
Hosting an election night gathering? Keep your guests entertained before the exit poll by grabbing a few subject-line samples and playing “Pin the plea on the party.”
Suppressive fire
Lagging far behind Labour in the opinion polls, and feeling the heat from Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform, the Conservative Party is trying out a novel election tactic: admitting defeat.
When Tory ministers first started talking up the likelihood of a Labour “supermajority” two weeks ago, it appeared they were offering an unprecedented early concession speech.
But as polling day approaches, this dark entry into the political lexicon has morphed into a cynical campaign strategy.
Party strategists and ministers have weaponized the phrase to suggest a Labour landslide would turn the U.K. into a de facto one-party state, a narrative that has been amplified by the right-leaning press.
Critics argue the move is a flagrant attempt to suppress turnout among potential Labour supporters by suggesting there is no need for them to trudge along to the polling station, given that the result is apparently a foregone conclusion.
But Tory spinners have been pushing the line equally hard at their own base in the hope that warnings of a unchecked socialist superstate will cajole apathetic voters into backing them, or at least dissuade those tempted by Reform.
While that narrative shift came late in the campaign, there are clear signs Tory tacticians were simply waiting for the right moment to strike.
A Facebook page called “Keir Starmer needs you” was created by the party just hours after the election announcement, but sat dormant until mid-June.
Since then, more than £30,000 has been spent pushing attack ads which claim voters switching to Reform will not actually increase Farage’s chances of winning any seats, but instead “risks getting Labour for life”.
Lies, damned lies and statistics
And if none of that works, parties can just try flat-out fibbing.
While the British public is resigned to a certain degree of spin on election claims, this campaign has seen more than its fair share of blatant bull.
According to Full Fact, both Labour and the Conservatives have made “misleading” claims about the government’s promise to build 40 new hospitals by 2030.
Sunak and his party have repeatedly claimed a new Labour government would raise taxes on working families by £2,000, despite major concerns about their sums.
Meanwhile, the fact-checking site branded Labour’s claims that spending commitments in the Tory manifesto would add £4,800 to the average mortgage over the next parliament a “speculative estimate that relies on several uncertain assumptions.”
Away from the spotlight of mainstream political debate, the whoppers only get bigger.
A major Tory social media ad campaign targeting hundreds of individual constituencies claimed Labour was planning to immediately launch a “national ULEZ” scheme if it won on July 4, a reference to London’s anti-gas guzzling car levy.
Repeated on paper campaign leaflets, the claims may have been viewed by tens of thousands of voters, only a tiny majority of whom will have spotted that the ads disappeared a few days later following emphatic Labour denials.
And while online ads are open to some degree of scrutiny, paper leaflets dropped through letterboxes have become a veritable buffet of bad-faith claims.
Want to over-inflate your role in a local campaign? Why not? Make tenuous claims about your opponent’s record? Who’ll notice? Butcher a bar chart to suggest council by-election results make you a top contender? Well, we’ve already lost the statisticians’ vote.
In several constituencies where the Liberal Democrats came a distant third in 2019, voters are even being told that either they win, or the incumbent stays in post. “No other result is possible,” the leaflets claim.
When it comes to election time, it appears a cheery willingness to deceive voters is the only cross-party consensus we’re likely to get.
