The political, moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the current Conservative party is once again on full display
The political, moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the current Conservative party is once again on full display, after an article appeared recently on grassroots Tory website, Conservative Home, encouraging the party to adopt a Republican style, gutter politics campaign against Keir Starmer based on dog whistles.
The article ran with the headline: “CCHQ must find Starmer’s Willie Horton”. In Massachusetts in 1974, Horton, along with two accomplices, robbed Joseph Fournier (a petrol-pump attendant) and fatally stabbed him nineteen times. Fournier died from blood loss. Horton was convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and incarcerated at the Northeastern Correctional Center in Massachusetts.
Then in 1986, Horton was released as part of a weekend furlough program but did not return. On April 3, 1987, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Horton twice raped a woman after pistol-whipping, stabbing, binding, and gagging her fiancé. He then stole the car belonging to the man he had assaulted.
Horton’s case was used as part of a negative attack ad by George H. W. Bush in the 1988 presidential election. As Vox reports: “The infamous “Willie Horton ad” was a 1988 presidential campaign TV spot created by Bush’s supporters that attacked his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis for being soft on crime.”
Dukakis, the then-governor of Massachusetts at the time of Horton’s release, supported his state’s “weekend pass” program, which allowed imprisoned individuals — including those not eligible for parole — to leave prison for a day or more to work or go home.
Bush seized on the issue from June 1988, repeatedly portraying Dukakis as soft on crime. And yet the ad was more than just about tackling crime. It has been widely condemned since for ‘playing on racial fears by featuring a black man’s mug shot and linking blackness with depravity’.
As Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times: “To many African-American people, the scars from that campaign attack remain fresh. Whatever Mr. Bush’s intentions, they said, the campaign encouraged more race-based politics and put Democrats on the defensive, forcing them to prove themselves on crime at the expense of a generation of African-American men and women who were locked up under tougher sentencing laws championed by President Bill Clinton, among others.
“The reason why the Willie Horton ad is so important in the political landscape — it wasn’t just about a racist ad that misrepresented the furlough process,” said Marcia Chatelain, a Georgetown University professor of African-American history who teaches a class on race and racism in the White House. “But it also taught the Democrats that in order to win elections, they have to mirror some of the racially inflected language of tough on crime.”
The piece published by Conservative Home then wants the Tories to produce similar negative attack ads. Devoid of any political arguments on how to make people’s lives better, the Tories have resorted to gutter politics, encouraging the party to copy the attack ads of US Republicans.
As one social media user wrote: “Utterly astounding Conservative Home would publish this. The Republicans’ use of Willie Horton is the most extreme example of race-bating in modern US political history. It’s not something any decent party would want to be openly associated with, never mind actually put to use.”
Others have slammed the publication for engaging in ‘sewer politics’. A Twitter user wrote: “There’s gutter politics, and then there’s sewer politics.
“Willie Horton is why Bill Clinton made sure to have himself filmed in 1992 going back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a man with severe brain damage.”
The piece on Conservative Home praises effective “negative campaigning” and adds: “It’s always good to make your opponents squeal.”
It suggests avenues such as going after Starmer for ‘joining a 2020 campaign to prevent foreign criminals from being deported’, for example.
Such negative campaigns, involving mudslinging and engaging in gutter politics are what poisons our public discourse and must be resisted.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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