As a result of past and present cowardice, grubby dealmaking and other political skulduggery, the 1967 Abortion Act that applies in England, Scotland and Wales does not apply in Northern Ireland. The basic rules date back to 1927 – but there are no clear guidelines. So only 70 to 80 abortions are carried out each year in Northern Ireland, under extremely restrictive conditions.

Otherwise, by the official count, more than 1,300 women last year, and 50,000 women over the past 40 years, have had to travel to England, Wales or Scotland, or even further afield, and to pay for their abortion, since if they give a Northern Ireland address they cannot have an NHS abortion.

The minimum cost, with travel, of that is £450, but it may well be more, plus the added personal and financial costs of lost pay, providing substitute care for women who are carers etc.

And the real figures of women leaving Northern Ireland to have an abortion must be far, far higher, since many women must – and who can blame them – use another address to access free NHS services.

Just imagine a typical situation, which I heard described a couple of years ago. A woman in her mid-20s, with two or three children, quite likely a single mother, is studying, or startingto get her career started. Contraception fails. She has to find many hundreds of pounds, has to find someone to care for her children while she’s away for several days (and come up with some explanation for that if she doesn’t want to tell the temporary carer the real reason).

She’s in a far worse situation than her compatriot in England, Wales or Scotland – because of a blatantly discriminatory law.

But that could change next month. An amendment has been moved in association with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which would bring the abortion law in Northern Ireland into line with other parts of the UK.

The movers seem quite optimistic about its chances, and one can only hope.

And, I’m pleased to say, draw attention to the issue, as I’m doing here, and as was done at the Green Party annual conference in London, which passed an emergency motion calling on MPs to vote in favour of the amendment.*

It’s not an easy topic to raise and get attention paid to. As soon as you mention any issues associated with Northern Ireland a great many journalists and political types roll their eyes and change the subject, and then if you combine that with abortion – a subject that tends to sink into conversations of uncomfortable silence – you’re really fighting a battle (although I’m pleased to say the emergency motion received overwhelming support, with only a handful of votes against it).

But if this is the United Kingdom, surely women across it should all have the same rights?

* Declaration of interest: I moved the emergency motion at the Green Party conference.

But I am pleased to say that after the Spring Conference in Reading, which concluded yesterday, it is now rather better, backing three changes to recognise medical developments: to remove the requirement to obtain two doctors’ signatures, to allow nurses and midwives to perform abortions, and to loosen restrictions on where abortions can be performed.

These are all measures backed (in slightly varying patterns) by the Royal College of Nurses, the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Ob/Gyn, and match the finding of the Joint parliamentary committee on science and technology – which found that they would reduce waits for abortions that would anyway being carried out.

You would think that all sides of the debate would agree that earlier abortions are preferable to later ones, but I’m not seeing any sign of such sense from those who are trying to use the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to reduce women’s access to abortion.

There’s a lot of concern about their efforts in the feminist community – as well there should be, given that any reduction in access to abortions, the “nibbling away at rights” that they’ve learnt from the US, would be hugely damaging, particularly to vulnerable women.

But I’m also with the Conservative MP John Bercow, who told a recent Abortion Rights parliamentary lobby that since the “other side” had raised the issue, those who want an abortion law fit for the 21st century should use the opportunity to create it. He said he’d asked the Commons library to carry out an analysis which had found that about two-thirds of MPs were pro-choice.

We can’t just stay on the offensive. It is time to advance.

And, I suspect, further afield. There’s something about left politics that makes it particularly prone to believing that if you just present people with the facts, with a solid rational argument, then of course they’ll see sense. It tends to produce leaflets dense in text and detail, arguments involving complex mathematical formulae, and headline high on accuracy and low on sexiness.

Yet just as the “rational consumer” is a myth, so is the voter. Westen devotes the first part of this book to some detailed, factual studies and arguments rather like those he is suggesting politicians avoid. These are scans of the brains of committed voters as they are faced with political contradictions in the (imaginary) actions of their “own” side. This is what the researchers found:

“A network of neurons becomes active that produces distress. Whether this distress is conscious, unconscious, or some combination of the two we don’t know. The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins to search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion. We know that the brain largely succeeded in this effort, as partisans mostly denied that they had perceived any conflict between their candidate’s words and deeds…. And this all seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.”

Yet this is not new knowledge. Westen reports on a fascinating study from the Seventies, which asked voters about their emotions towards presidential candidates, with a list of 12, from “angry” to “hopeful”. They also asked for links to a list of emotion-laden traits such as “honest”, “smart”, “inspiring” etc. And the result was that “people’s positive and negative associations to a candidate were better predictors of their voting preferences than even their judgements about his personality and competence. Voters may disagree with things a candidate stands for or may dislike aspects of his personality, but when feelings about the candidate and more considered assessments of his strengths and weaknesses differ, feelings tend to trump beliefs.”

Taking this, Westen argues that what adverts and political messages need to deliver are powerful, emotional messages, positive associations with the candidate and negative with the opponent. Two extracts from the book, published here and here. set out examples of this.

But Westen is no fan of the “avoiding negative campaigning” school of thought. He argues that the Democrats in the US have been hugely damaged by the “politics of avoidance”. Issues such as national security, abortion and guns have been seen as “negative” for them, leading to advice to dodge them – which has both left the grounds of defining the debate to the Republicans, while also frequently appearing to be shifting or lacking in moral strength themselves.

Westen looks at the work of John Zaller, who has considered how discourse of “political elites” enters the public discourse and shapes public opinion. If the view is seen as united (as usually at the start of a war), the vast majority of the public will follow the single line. He goes on to Samuel Popkin, who argues this is “a sensible strategy for most voters, who have their own lives to lead and don’t have the time or interest to study all the affairs of state” – this is “low-information rationality”. If opinion in the “elite” is seen to be split, most will follow the line of their favoured party, for the same reasons. But if one party is staying silent, it leaves the defining to the other.

Also, he returns to the structure of the brain to note that positive and negative emotions are not opposites, but “psychologically distinct, mediated by different neural circuits and affecting voting in diffent ways. Focusing primarily on the positive and leaving the negative to chance is simply ceding half the brain to the opposition.” Candidates can’t win afford high negatives, but they usually won’t win with low positives.

So he approves (somewhat unusually) of one common political took, the “message grid”, for four questions to start a campaign: “What will I tell voters about me? What will I say about my opponent? What will my opponent tell voters about himself or herself? What will my opponent say about me?”

Successful campaigns should address all of these, and furthermore tell “good stories”: “association’s don’t ‘stick’ in voters’ minds unless they’re embedded in coherent narratives. And they stick all too well if the other side tells stories that go unanswered.”

And, Westen argues, there are times when politicians should appeal to voters’ conscious, rather than unconscious, thoughts. He uses the US example of race: many voters might hold unconscious racist sentiments – often played on by Reagan with terms such as “welfare queens” – but they will consciously reject obvious racism. He quotes the case of Senator George Allen of Virginia, who in 2006 saw a man of Indian descent in a crowd, who he knew worked for his Democrat challenger, then said “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of America.”

His opponent didn’t respond directly, but let the media do it for him. Allen’s 12 point lead dissolved in a week, but in the end his Democrat opponent Jim Webb, only just scraped the seat. Westen argues that this was because the Democrat failed to take and shape the incident, and the constant replaying of the piece may thus have appealed to the nasty unconscious, rather than the well-meaning conscious approach.

But, in the end, Westen comes back to the unconscious, with a look at the importance of the candidate’s “curb appeal”. He quotes a remarkable study of photos of winning and losing candidates shown for 1 second to voters who did not know them. Asked to rank competence, trustworthiness, honesty etc, their judgements that included competence predicted the winner about 70% of the time – in 1 second! So, he comes back to the importance of the minutae of body language – and how voters can interpret odd little “tics” or habits of candidates.

There’s a lot more in this book than I’ve summarised here – essential reading for anyone in the political game, particularly from the left.

(Cross-posted from Philobiblon)