Labour, why hire a David Axelrod when you've got a Yoda on hand?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/09/labour-david-axelrod-yoda-political-messages

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Hardworking Britain Better Off. Hardworking Britain Better Off. Hardworking Britain Better … No, sorry: no matter how many times I say it, I can't shake the thought that Labour are now running their slogans through translation software. Either that or they've devolved their messaging to Yoda.

Perhaps the latter was the logical next step. To all too many ears, the political class have never sounded more like they are from another planet, so maybe Ed Miliband's outfit really have hired the gnomic pseudo-sage of the Dagobah swamps as their master communicator.

Hardworking Britain Better Off. Luckily, it's not like people already think the party leader's robotic. But a tense, a tense, my vote for a tense! Unless you anchor your patronising participle at some point in time, this might as well be a slogan for the Tories. Considered on its own terms, there's no reason it shouldn't mean that Hardworking Britain is better off with this lot, as opposed to suggesting that Hardworking Britain would be better off with you, and would presumably live happily ever after, if only its trusty voters would take up their axes and chop through the impenetrable forest of un-words to free the princess of meaning slumbering therein.

But is she still there? Is anybody there? Was anybody ever there? When Miliband was asked to actually explain what he meant by the "squeezed middle" a few years ago on Radio 4's Today programme, he didn't seem to have a clue. At least when John Prescott talked rubbish, you knew basically what he was on about. Most of the time, -ish. But the rubbish we have now is a different class of rubbish – the final apotheosis of Orwell's newspeak, which was, of course, the language deliberately designed to prevent human thought.

David Cameron is far less of a logocidal maniac than Miliband, it must be said, but to listen to the message from any side these days is to wonder if they focus-grouped it in a head trauma unit. If so, my double sympathies to the poor patients. At present, Labour and the Tories seem to be fighting an immensely worthwhile pitched battle for ownership of the word hardworking. It appeared in that excruciating online Tory poster about beer and bingo – "help[ing] hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy" – but now Labour are parading it. It's hard to be sure which party "hardworking" has officially given its backing to, but on current performance it is the lexical equivalent of Barbra Streisand, who has been perceived as the black widow of the Democratic party, for the way her endorsements seem to have a kiss-of-death ability to kill a candidate.

What any of it truly means appears to be a matter of not-very-sublime irrelevance. As someone already saving up for a haul of covetable 2015 election merchandise, I do hope they bring out Westminster Fridge Poetry – a niche product that would enable you to string together Miliband speeches on your cooler door while drinking generic cola from a big carton. Or you might be shaking the brine off a white asparagus spear, one of the other typical grocery items featured in Labour's malarial shopping-basket poster.

Have you seen this poster? Or rather, have you been communicated to by it? If it could talk, it would be saying: "Help – I am trapped in a gibberish factory." Ostensibly about the coalition raising VAT on shopping bills, it features lots of items exempt from VAT, and some antipasti, and is capped with our deathless Yodaism, Hardworking Britain Better Off.

There seems little point in hiring the red-hot Obama strategist David Axelrod to advise on your election campaign, then turning out such mind-bogglingly lame stuff as this. Painful as it is to break it to Labour's strategic brain, Douglas Alexander, he might find this sort of poster was not how Axelrod got Obama re-elected, or even a tiny plank of it. I hardly dare mention the calamitously crap party political broadcast Labour unveiled this week, or at least not without feeling like intruding on private grief. Clearly, none of it was Axelrod's doing, but if he even catches sight of this sort of material he will surely be wondering what on earth he has got himself involved with. It'll be like Cate Blanchett waking up on the set of Hollyoaks.

Quite why posters even happen any more is a puzzle. They seem a relic from an analogue world that exists only as raw material for digital wits. Many – most? – people's first glimpse of these things is in their amusingly defaced form. Putting out an election poster these days is the equivalent of Gordon Ramsay declaring "I am a total cook," and then being surprised when someone has their way with the Tippex.

For my taste, the best defacings are the simplest and bluntest ones, a bit like the two-word review of Spinal Tap's Shark Sandwich album, which read simply: "shit sandwich". I can scarcely read letters from Ukip harrumphing about defacements without wondering whether the jokers in question went wittily surreal or just did something classic and elegant, like Ushit. There's always a huge amount to be said for the strategically drawn male genitals – yet still campaign managers persist in putting out posters of their leaders smirking next to inviting white spaces.

So, more power to the piss-takers, when the parties are capable only of being so extravagantly, robotically meaningless. It's bewildering; it's contemptuous; it's profoundly depressing. Maybe the most human reaction is to claw back a laugh.