Who will this benefit?

We got this political ad in through the door the other day.

It’s quite a nice way to make people understand that Brown’s government is borrowing money like there’s no tomorrow.

However, it has one big problem: There’s no indication of who to vote for instead of Brown.

If you flip it over, you’ll find out it’s from the Tories, but many people won’t realise this, and anyway it’s not integral to the message, so it doesn’t stick in the mind.

This is the kind of negative campaigning that works well in a two-party system. You just need to make people hate your opponent, and they’ll have to vote for you.

But the UK has a three-party system, and Scotland and Wales have four significant parties.

So in very large parts of the country, the main opposition to Labour is not the Conservatives, but the LibDems, the SNP or Plaid Cymru.

Why don’t they understand that in a multi-party system, you have to do positive campaigning?