I’ve been talking to all sorts of people recently about why the Tories don’t seem to be racing ahead in the polls any more. Normally I am not a fan of dissecting little movements one way or another but I think it’s fairly well accepted now that the leads we have had in the polls are not the double-digit ones we saw previously.
I think there are a number of reasons for this – partly that those crazy days of May 2008 with a lead of 26 were probably not reflecting the true position, partly that the Tories have made some silly mistakes recently, partly that Labour seems to have recovered it’s ‘Don’t let the baby-eaters back in’ mojo… But the two key factors are these.
Firstly that if you’re Mrs Average, just keeping your head above water at the moment (maybe you’ve taken a pay freeze, or cut your hours, but your mortgage is relatively very cheap and you get tax credits to help out), it’s hard to say you’re going to take a leap into untested waters and change your voting intention. Yes, there are lots of Conservative policies out there, but normal people don’t read through screeds of (excellent) policy papers – they vote almost on instinct, on what their own interests are, and on how they feel about the parties overall. So the Tory message of ‘we will have to make painful decisions’ is perhaps not what they want to hear – they much prefer Alistair Darling’s reassuring bank manager act of ‘we are holding things steady as they go, don’t worry no cuts’. (I suspect we’ll come back to why this is just nonsense… but it’s what Darling was trying to tell us yesterday.)
Secondly, that only telling people it’s going to hurt is not really going to make them want to vote Conservative. There has to be a reason for the pain.
The Age of Austerity months were, I think, necessary in order to lay the foundations for the changes in tax and spending that – realistically – we all know have to come. I agree with George Osborne that we have to be straight with people about our thinking and our plans, partly so that we have a resounding mandate to deal with the problems, but also because it’s the responsible thing to do.
Remember all those Labour soundbites of ‘we have no plans’ to increase taxes? Well they were lies. I don’t want a government that tries to trick people – politicians are so disdained anyway that another round of lying liars is only going to do still more damage to our democracy. People have the right to expect politicians to give them a clear idea of the way that they make decisions and the direction of travel. There’s no way that any politician can set out in detail every single policy they might ever need to have but they can set out the underlying principles of their way of thinking.
However, in order to counter the sneaking suspicion that this was ‘same old Tories, slashing and burning for the sake of it’, there had to be in parallel that message of change with hope and optimism leading to sunlit uplands. That is what David Cameron does best; he is an optimistic man with great plans and simply doing doom and gloom does not play to his strengths.
Related to that is that frankly yesterday’s Budget was a nothing Budget. It inched a bit this way, and a bit that way, but it does nothing to address any of the problems we have.
To coin a phrase, we can’t go on like this. But we need to hear more from the Conservatives about where we will be if we take those tough decisions, and why it is worth choosing to change our government.
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Bring on the election campaign. Despite Labour criticism, the Tories have many policies which will improve how the UK operates. I am confident that when the electorate starts to properly scrutinise those they have to choose between enough of people will vote Tory to crate a majority between 15 – 30.
It is perverse that the Credit Crunch had a more negative impact on the Tories but in hindsight their response was misjudged. I remember the doomsday predictions and night after night of the BBC News arrow graphic crashing towards the ground. The Tories basically fell for the hype. Today most people are not significantly worse off, which is what the Tories seemed to be suggesting. The fact that the Government is borrowing silly money and adopting Zimbabwe monetary policy is not of much significance to most people. We can still but a flat screen TV. Maybe not a 40 inch but at least a 32 inch one.
Funny thing about the nasty old “slash-and-burn” Tories; there wasn’t a single year of the Conservative administrations (1979-1997) that public sector spending went down. I think we should remind the public of this fact repeatedly.
The real point is the small/medium business. RBS and Llods between them have taken some £800 BILLION out of the velocity of money equation, and the pathetic budget puts back perhaps 1.5% of that. No growth there then…
The real point is the small/medium business. RBS and Lloyds between them have taken some £800 BILLION out of the velocity of money equation, and the pathetic budget puts back perhaps 1.5% of that. No growth there then…
Rob: I agree that we didn’t decrease spending last time we were in government. I’m not totally convinced that is our best argument however – if Mrs Thatcher didn’t manage it, will George Osborne?
Personally I think he will (he has to…) but that then leads us into rather complicated nuances and things that happened years ago.
I remember in the 2005 election, one of our talking points was that the NHS had been under a Conservative government for more years than under a Labour one, and was still safe and funded and delivering the principle of care free at the point of use – it still didn’t change the perception that the patients’ passport was another Tory trick to abolish the NHS (clearly that was total nonsense. But the perception remained).
The problem for the Conservatives is that the detoxification strategy was a big mistake. The Conservatives misunderstood that times change and that what people might want in good times are different to what they want in bad times.
Blair was popular because the times were good, the housing bubble held and most people weren’t looking at the mounting government debt. It had little to do with “the nasty party”. When times are bad, if you seem like you can sort things out, then no-one cares if you lack social graces.
Cameron seems to have no political philosophy, no plan. I can tell almost nothing about where he sits on the political spectrum from his announcements. One minute we’ve got Francis Maude complaining about the Union Modernisation Fund, the next, we’ve got Central Office saying that it’s going to be kept. We’ve got him talking about reducing government interference followed by a green paper on health which smacks of New Labour nannying.
If he wants to get people to vote for him, he has to start coming out with some policies that are consistent from a philosophical basis, which means upsetting a lot more people than he’s currently doing.
Tim: I’m sorry but you are quite, quite wrong. There wasn’t a realisation soon enough that times change.
It’s not about social graces – it’s about caring about more than a few (important but not sole) issues.
I take your point on the Union Modernisation Fund – something is clearly not connecting properly there. Whether it’s something that is linked to another issue (eg party funding) or if it’s that it’s simply not been thought through as yet, I don’t know.
But the green paper on health is not New Labour nannying. It’s about giving people choices but also responsibilities over their own health. What parts of it do you think are nannying?
I don’t want some ideologue leading my party – I want someone who understands that there are shades of grey in life, understands how to work with human nature, and understands that sometimes it’s better to do what works than something that is ideologically pure – perfect can be the enemy of good, as my old boss used to say.
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