Colours
I’ve just realised one of the things bugging me about Chris Huhne’s campaign is his choice of colour.
He’s ditched the comforting gold/orange/yellow and gone for green. I assume this is trying to bolster his green credentials, but I can’t help wonder whether its a hint at a New Labour/New Tory style rebranding… (Labour of course toyed with dropping red, using purple instead…)
I’m sure that’s being silly, but no tradition Liberal/LibDem colour* is a bit disconcerting. Okay, orange is now associated with the dreaded Orange Book, something Huhne is probably keen to distance himself from given his campaign, but yellow is perfectly respectable, its association not tarnished by such ‘right wing’ ideas…
* This is where some wag pipes up and points out that some local party used green as their colour, just as some local Tory parties used to have red as theirs.
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November 15th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
If Labour would indeed have adopted purple, that would have been highly symbolical, since purple is a mix of red and blue.
Orange, too, is a mix of two colours, yellow and red. As red is generally associated with socialism, you’d think that orange means a shift towards a more centralised government and economy.
Therefore it’s a bit ironical, that a book that was meant to remind liberals of their roots in *both* political and economic liberalism, used this colour as its symbol (”golden” would perhaps have been better). Ironically it’s name was probably a reference to Keynes’s and Lloyd George’s “Yellow Book” of 1929, which shifted the Liberal Party to a more socialist direction.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Was orange not originally the colour of liberalism even before socialism was born and adopted red?
November 16th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
I think gold/orange/yellow was always the colour of the Liberals. Nationally at least. I can’t find any documentary evidence for this though.
The Red/Blue thing is very recent anyway, and in the US the Republicans appear to be adopting red (although officially there is no colour for the two main parties).
In the 50s, some Conservative associations still campaigned with red colours and officially the Conservative colours are red, white and blue (and apparently in Cumbria it uses yellow…)
November 17th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
This is actually a little bit marginal issue for me, so I’m not quite sure about it, but I have the understanding that the Liberal Party adopted yellow as their colour during the leadership of Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery. Of course one of the predessors of Whigs was the Green Ribbon Club, so Huhne’s choice of colour has some historical justification, as well, though I doubt that he was thinking about that when he chose the colour for his site.