When I read this morning about Brown and his failed attempt to appear on Match of the Day I tried hard to feel the contempt for his cynical PR ploy that the newspapers suggested I feel. Instead I felt a strange kind of admiration for such blatant opportunism and the willingness of the PM and his PR team to grasp at anything to hitch a ride on the political zeitgeist of popular-cultural integration. As we all know, this is a technique pioneered by Blair and elevated by Cameron in his early years as leader of the Conservative party to a fine art. Despite the cynicism of parts of the media, it has been very successful in winning over the ordinary punter – something that both parties need to be doing to turn around a legacy of low turn-out in UK elections.

The fact is, I admire Brown in this case because, rather than seeing it as a desperate stunt, I believe that in politics the counter-intuitive often works. Sarah Brown’s stewardship of London Fashion Week was completely unexpected when it first took place a couple of years ago. But in the opinions of many it has turned her into Brown’s greatest asset. If Samantha had done the same thing, it would have made no impact at all on David Cameron’s reputation.  Although the Match of the Day attempt may not have worked, more broadly this approach is where Brown might have the edge over Cameron. Brown is perceived as impersonal and awkward, but what if Brown’s faltering style and capacity for PR blunders make him the perfect candidate to build a campaign around his ‘everyday life’? I wouldn’t be surprised if we see at some point during the campaign another Match of the Day style PR attempt for Brown suddenly strike the right chord and have a real impact on his hither-to un-glittering profile as a figure of public empathy.

Based on the counter-intuitive premise, it follows that Cameron’s excellence at using this technique in the past might make the public more cynical about any carefully choreographed PR moments he is planning in the next six weeks. The air-brushing accusations and the android connotations all make this ground trickier for him in the future and my feeling is that Cameron should be careful that he is not seen as trying to emulate his success of a few years ago when he was seen as a star-in-waiting rather than as the possible Prime Minister in a few weeks time. Cameron may well therefore be sensible to steer away from a very ‘lifestyle’ focused campaign and concentrate on winning over the doubters with a serious straight campaign that delivers some really meaty policies – and indeed recognises the public as having the intellectual metal to deal with these.

Posted by Administrator on behalf of Isabella Sharp

Most political news is about personality and politics rather than policy.  At the moment that’s particularly true – the big stories of recent weeks have been about Brown’s behaviour, Lord Ashcroft, what the polls say.  Next week promises more of the same – a Channel 4 programme on Cameron, and the court appearance of some of the people charged as part of the expenses scandal.

I’ve often wondered how much difference all this news makes.  Sit through a focus group, or speak to your least political friends and you will hear one thing time and time again: “they are all the same”.  So much of this bad political news is just reinforcing what people think anyway – it is “already in the share price” as they say in the City.

Danny Finkelstein made the point nicely in an article last week:

The cynicism about politics is so pervasive that it embraces almost all political activity. Use a statistic? It’s a lie. Cry on television about your dead child? It’s an election gimmick. Attack your opponents’ policy? You would say that, wouldn’t you.   And this cynicism extends to the media and our coverage.  So not only politics, but news about politics, is seen as a fiction inside an untruth wrapped in a piece of spin… Most of politics and most political coverage proceeds as if there was still a reasonable degree of trust. As if the messages were still getting through, still being listened to, still being weighed up.

For the government of the day the clear implication is that what really matters is not their spin but whether they can deliver better results on the ground (a point grasped by Tony Blair some time in his second term).  It is rather more difficult for the opposition to act on this insight.  However, at the start of his time as Conservative leader David Cameron did emphasise that he would always aim to “show, not tell” people that the party had changed.  And there was something of this in Cameron’s initial reaction to the expenses scandal – when he was prepared to take a stand unpopular among some of his MPs.

The big problem for Cameron is that the Government has managed to shift so much the real-world pain the public will feel until after the election by running up huge debts.  So right now the public services are still hiring away. On the ground, things don’t look so bad.  At least, not yet.

We know more or less what the Budget is going to say already.

The Government is thinking not about how to reduce the soaring deficit – but how to spend the receipts from the super-tax in a pre-election giveaway.  We will see mock “surprise” at how much the bonus tax has raised, and condemnation of those who “said it wouldn’t raise any money”.  We will see big figures for savings based around finally officially scrapping the disastrous NHS IT programme and merging a few Primary Care Trusts.  If Liam Byrne has his way (and he probably won’t) the government may even nod to the markets by stressing how “tough” it is planning to be on public sector pay post election (nominal rises less than 1%, meaning small real-terms cuts).  The one thing it won’t do is make any meaningful effort to control the vast deficit.  Instead the Government will try to keep the debate narrowly focused around the timing of cuts – not the content.

Ironically, this is where public cynicism might ride to the rescue of the Conservatives. The idea that politicians will spend now and cut after the election is highly plausible for most world-weary voters. In the 1974 election Willy Whitelaw accused Harold Wilson of going “round and round the country stirring up apathy”.  The Tories won’t need to go round “stirring up” cynicism about the budget.  But they will need to try and be in a position to exploit it.

Neil O’Brien is the Director of Policy Exchange

Governments are under enormous pressure especially in Britain where both main political parties are pressing for immigration to be an issue at the next general election with a race to the bottom of who can impose the strictest controls. They face conflicting pressures: significant levels of resistance to increased immigration in public opinion on the one hand, and sound economic and social rationales for the relaxation of entry barriers on the other. By creating a true property-owning democracy, Margaret Thatcher ensured that the vast majority of us have an active interest in a Conservative ideology. A masterstroke. What we must not allow to happen is the likes of Nick Griffin redefining the narrative – contrary to the evidence – around immigration.

The massive inflows associated with European Union accession led neither to the displacement of local workers nor to increased unemployment in the UK. Simulations following the European Union accessions of 2004 suggest that output levels in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which allowed large-scale inflows from the new member states of Eastern Europe, would be 0.5–1.5 percent higher after about a decade, and the net fiscal figure for the United Kingdom at the present time is ± 0.65 percent of GDP. Given that the recovery of our economy is so fragile, it would be madness to place more restrictions on immigration, and it isn’t the reason we have a legion of NEET’s across the country – it’s Labour’s failure in education that has let a generation of young people down.

It is easy to make cheap platitudinous statements defending the Labour government’s abysmal record in education (remember its slogan Education, education, education), but the hard work of the pupils and teachers is irrelevant if it is directed (by the government) toward means that give them and the country so little benefit.

Can anyone say that more choice, more competition, more efficiency, more responsiveness to parents and more resources spent on actual teaching wouldn’t be the best thing to do? Because that’s what would happen under a Conservative Government.

Students don’t get suitable careers advice and end up not picking suitable A-Levels for their choice of university/career/life simply because no-one told them what the implications of their choice were. Can anyone tell me how Conservative policy isn’t the right thing to do instead?

The Labour party’s response to the crisis in education is simply to extend the pain by raising the school leaving age in an attempt to delay the consequences of their failure to live up to expectations they set in 1997. As a way to improve educational standards, and to act as a cure for unemployment evidence shows this to be suspect. Is it any surprise that social mobility has decreased under Labour?

We have the plans to fix a broken education system, it’s time to tell that to the people on the doorsteps. We must not pander to populist calls for more restrictions on immigration.

Posted by Administrator on behalf of Thomas Byrne; you can visit his personal blog here

We have lost one of the political greats today.

We mustn’t remember Michael Foot for his leadership of the Labour Party.  He was, in so many ways, ill-suited to the demands of leading a modern political party.  But the fact is that the Labour Party in the early 1980s was verging on being unleadable and Michael Foot did a tremendous job at keeping his party ‘in the game’.  Instead, we should remember Foot for his radicalism, his passion, his oratory and his love of country and Parliament.

I had the good fortune to meet Michael Foot a few times.  He was a thoroughly decent, honourable man – happy to spend a few minutes talking about literary figures, politics and memories of the likes of Nye Bevan and other massive post war figures.

He was undoubtedly one of the finest orators of the post war years.  Listen to his speech against the Common Market in 1972, or his speech during the wind-up of the No Confidence motion in 1979, or his famous speech about the conjurer’s watch when he was gently mocking Keith Joseph in the early 1980s.  The oratory is spellbinding, the passion is clear and the humour is brilliant.  I saw Michael Foot speak a few times.  Although his powers were clearly deserting him – it was still clear that we were in the presence of one of the greats of oratory.

Foot also seemed to represent a whole tradition of romantic radicalism.  His radicalism was firmly rooted in a long British tradition – that of Swift, Hazlitt, the Levellers, the Chartists and Byron.  Whatever you might think of his politics, it is desperately sad that this great tradition in British politics seems to have died with him.  He is the last of the great links with the anti Fascist and anti appeasement movements of the 1930s.  The last of the great links with the passion of the Bevanites in the 1950s.

Although you might disagree with his political means, it is hard to dispute the passion with which he fought for the noble ends of a fairer society, a more equal society and a more just society.  He felt that people involved in politics should be in politics to help those “who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves.”  Like many on the Tory side, he felt that the poverty and unemployment of the pre war period should never be repeated.

He was by no means a narrow political tribalist.  This was the man who named his dog ‘Dizzy’.  He understood that there was a radical tradition in the Conservative movement as well – although he clearly did not sympathise with it.  His essay about Disraeli in ‘Debts and Honours’ illustrates Disraeli’s importance to radicalism as much as almost anything else ever written about the greatest Conservative.

Above all, and little remarked, in today’s tributes he was a great House of Commons man.  Enoch Powell called Foot the greatest Parliamentarian he had ever seen.  Michael Foot understood that the greatness of this country lies in the people and in the Commons.  His stances on so many issues (the Common Market, the House of Lords, Select Committees) were formed by the fact that he believed, with the flourish of a true romantic, that the House of Commons was the beating heart of the nation.  He believed that the Commons should be strong and should hold Government to account.  Doubtless, he was saddened by the emasculation of the Chamber in recent years and the great decline in its reputation last year.

Michael Foot will live on with his tremendous speeches and his mighty literary canon (his biography of Bevan is tremendous, as are both Debts of Honour and Loyalists and Loners.)  He was deeply unusual amongst party leaders and amongst senior politicians in being so intellectual and so literary.

British politics is lucky to have been blessed with Michael Foot’s considerable talents.  We will never see his like again.

What do the Tories stand for? The charge that the Conservatives have not made clear what they stand for has been slowly gathering momentum ironically ever since the Conservatives started their ‘one a week’ policy series. Right wing commentators who are fearful that a Cameron Conservative government will not govern in an appropriately conservative enough way have fanned this criticism. A few weeks ago Simon Heffer clarified this view when writing “the problem for the Tories is this, succinctly put to me by a close observer to the party of the day: if you board a bus anywhere in these islands, sat down next to a passenger at random and asked what it stood for, he or she could not tell you”. This got me thinking. Does Simon Heffer ever use public transport? Who is this sage observer who bothers random people on buses? Is the assertion true? I grabbed my Oyster card and went to the bus stop. In the interests of polling methodology I should reveal that I live what Alistair Campbell may describe as a ‘bog-standard’ middle-class London lifestyle.

I won’t lie to you. At first I was a bit apprehensive about approaching people, but I was glad to find that most people do not mind being asked about their opinions. The instant response was ‘umm not sure’ which was then followed by an opinion of what the Conservatives stood for. The two most popular answers were that the Tories would:

• Cut the deficit
• Promote the family

A couple of people said that they would protect the interests of the rich and one lady said she was not sure but they had to be better than the current lot so she would vote for them anyway.

It is only fair that I answer my own question. For me the Conservatives stand for opportunity, which they will facilitate through governing by trust. A Conservative Government will trust local groups to decide what needs doing and how plans should be executed. Labour’s obsession with mechanical control has been both expensive and stifling. It has lead to the ID card debacle; massive increase in state monitoring and situations such as a 64.4% increase in NHS managers. The Conservatives will also focus on the important task of regaining the public’s trust in politicians and Government. This will be done through the transparency agenda, which will allow people greater choice in deciding how politicians should be accountable.

Since I started my little experiment there has been a media frenzy over the Tory poll-acoaster. Most pundits have been asking the question ‘Why are the Conservatives slipping?’ and then answering their own question by saying ‘I told you so, you’re not the right type of Conservative’. This sort of analysis loses sight of the bigger picture. For me the real question should be ‘Why were the Tories so far ahead in the first place?’. This election is the antithesis of 1997. The electorate is not in the mood to place the same amount of trust and hope in our elected representatives as they did with Tony Blair in the great political love-in of 1997. There is an underlying feeling that no prospective government should be given an easy ride or have its promises taken at face value. The people I spoke to could tell me what the Conservatives stood for but this was not the same as them believing that the Tories would make a positive difference. It seems to be that the deal can only really be sealed once a new Government has proved that they are governing in a new way. Many people will enter the voting booths begrudgingly. This will lead to certain amount of electoral volatility, which will manifest itself in some odd results. The polls should be taken with a pinch of salt, and should not distract us from working hard to promote the benefits of a Conservative government.

My conclusion after a week on the bus is that this country is complex. It is full of people with differing needs and beliefs. While a couple of consistent themes did emerge no one gave me exactly the same answer (apart from the two people who looked at me as if I was a madman before declining to answer). The truth is that the question Simon Heffer poses does not have a single right answer. The Conservative party itself is a complex coalition which contains people who can both strongly agree and disagree with each other depending on the issue being debated. What I hope we can all agree on is that the future of this country is best served by electing the strongest possible Conservative Government. The rights and wrongs of certain policies can be discussed after 6 May. As Tim Montgomerie puts it “this election isn’t a choice between a perfect Conservative Party and an imperfect Conservative Party but between a strong government led by David Cameron and the chaos of a hung parliament.”

George Osborne was right when he said, “We are all in this together”. We need to work together to ensure that there is the best future for all.

PS I want to give a shout out to www.futurefairforall.org I often consult this treasure trove of information before I go out canvassing. It has a lot of evidence, which shows that 13 years of Labour has spectacularly failed to create a ‘future fair for all’.