The Great British Public: Too Thick For Change?

Of all the many posts written about the LibDum double act (Cable & Son) and its nonsensical, lightweight, irrelevant manifesto, I have enjoyed not a single one. Mainly because by their very existence they operate from an implied premise that it's worth engaging with these Yellow Tit-coloured, failed Labourists/Tory rejects.

So I won't be saying any more about that. What I will talk about instead is a pretty startling post by Daniel Finkelstein on his Times blog this morning about a poll for that newspaper which shows that the majority of people had no idea that it was the Tories who were offering to abolish the National Insurance hike for businesses and low/middle earners. They thought it was Labour (the party responsible for the rise)! But are the Fink's conclusions sound?

Think what this means.

First, that most voters are not following the argument one little bit. For a week this was headline news, yet they still ascribe the policy to the wrong party.

Second, and further to many past posts and many arguments, voters see policy only through their understanding of a party's values. The only policy of eight that was correctly attached to a party by the majority of voters was the marriage tax one.

According to him, therefore, all the great British public's political perception amounts to is a mixture of blissful, bored, complacent ignorance and a kind of passive awareness of propaganda terms associated with parties ("values"), rightly or - as is far more often the case - wrongly.

I disagree. These conclusion are based on fuzzy logic. A crisper, less politically explosive theory would be that all the poll really means is that the Tories - and this is comes as a big shock to me - have completely failed to get through to people, something that Margaret Thatcher (and even John Major) managed to do - and with, on the face of it, a far less palatable message.

The great British public is not thick, as in stupid. But it is thick, as in weighty and hard to move. Well, the Tories better start shifting their policies soon, or else...

...or else they'll wind up with a smaller majority! Boom boom.

Tax On Jobs and Cuts In Waste

It's incredible, really, how fast the political currents can shift when a couple of objectively true concepts suddenly coalesce into slogans. It's extraordinary that within the space of 24 hours, Labour's 1% NICS rise, conceptually a heroically dumb idea even in the worst of economic times, has now become known - and will be known henceforth until doomsday - as a 'tax on jobs', and 'cuts in frontline public services' has shifted, it seems to me as permanently, to 'cuts in government waste'.

If that's not a massive shift in the 'narrative', (if you like postmodernist critiques of this sort of thing), then I'm a stinking socialist!

Cameron and Osborne have been absolutely dead right on the mad Labour NICS policy since Budget Day (I wonder what Kenneth Clarke's part was in all this), but the real consequences of being right in this case (they've been right a lot of times before, but to little or no political avail) is not merely that they've won the argument hands down, they've changed the very terms of the debate, and there is nothing, but nothing, that the Labour Party media machine can do about it. They've been linguistically neutered. For good. (At last!)

There is now, in everyone's minds, judging by the late night media coverage of the papers, a very clear, articulated, choice between Labour and the Conservatives, between Brown and Cameron: Labour offer nothing more than a tax on jobs and more waste; the Tories will deliver no tax on jobs and they will cut government waste.

If you find this hard to believe (and you shouldn't, because it true!), then read this Andrew Porter piece for this morning's Telegraph. Brown is now under pressure to kill Labour's National Insurance hike! Business groups, representing 10 million workers, have praised the Tory plan and say they will 'fight' for it to happen.

This is a tectonic shift in the mood of the nation, and the fortunes of the two main parties. I think it started with the hubristic vanity of Mandelson when, off the leash as always and carried away by a sense of his own superiority - as always - during Labour's desperate damage control operation this morning (that went well, lol), he effectively branded a lot of high-powered employers "a bunch of mugs who should know better". They should listen to him, he implied, because he knows best, according to his own estimation of himself.

Massive, massive mistake. And it will cost Labour the election, and then some. Big day, then, for everyone.

Halleluja!

Update:
Iain Martin thinks it was all part of a carefully choreographed Tory sting operation. I'm not so sure. I think this was, in addition to the media planning, a genuine, momentous outing of the truth, and therefore massively more significant in terms of historic political outcomes. No one could have planned an operation as successful as this one. He's underestimated the terrible impact of the Mandelson intervention, in my 'umble.

++Labour Economic Policy Meltdown Latest++

The latest phase of this exciting day's news, playing out before our very eyes on TV and online, sees things taking a turn for the even worse for Darling, Byrne and Mandelson. Far from their emergency smear operation, covered live and in its entirety on the Beeb, having the desired effect of lowering the graphite control rods into the overheating core of their economic policy, it has merely triggered a super-critical reaction - from the business leaders they have accidentally patronised as being too stupid to understand that the Tory Party is tricking them. Business leaders don't like that. No one does.


The Spectator has more...

Mandelson was in political warlord mode, flanked by Liam Byrne and Alistair Darling, his unlikely musclemen.

But they blew it. First, Byrne and Mandelson asserted, with absolute certainty, that the Tories will raise VAT. Opaque pledges cannot be successfully criticised by baseless soothsayings. Alistair Darling then compounded the error by suggesting that the Tories were too incompetent to cost tax pledges but sufficiently artful to con leading businessmen. That is absurd. Already, two of the letter writers have rejected the suggestion they’ve been duped, and maintain the incontestable point that a NI cut would encourage growth and employment - yesterday, Darling admitted that the NI rise would hit jobs - and the recovery by extension. Ian Cheshire, of Kingfishers, said:

"It's a little patronising to say we've been deceived, this is not a political point, it is a business issue."

After a momentary wobble, the advantage is with Cameron and the National Insurance cut.

This is turning out to be a marvellous April Fool's Day - but not if you're a Labourist fool, of course. But this is a major victory for Cameroons. And all because they started being Tories again. Who'd have thunk it?

Byrne Wriggling

Liam Byrne, no stranger to the odd pork pie, told a whole tray-full of them a few minutes ago during his interview on Radio 4. In response to the serious damage caused to Darling's tax-on-jobs NICS policy by 23 business leaders, who between them employ over 500,000 people, and who've come out in favour of the Tory proposal to more or less scrap the plans, Byrne wriggled, exaggerated, diverted and lied like only he can. The ever-changing Labour economic narrative has just morphed again, this time into an even bigger cutting machine.

For instance, while Darling was only a few days ago talking about £12Bn of 'efficiency savings' - of cutting Labour's massive overspending in other words - today Byrne talked about £35Bn in cuts. Where the hell did that come from? I'm sure he has an answer (he always does), but that's a monster leap in the cuts bidding war in just a couple of days, and gives some indication as to how hurt Labour's economic policies have been by the letter (the bigger the lie, the bigger the damage - it's always been proportional with Labour). Anyway, that's the first bit of wild exaggeration.

Then he goes on about the Tories 'magicking' up figures out of thin air (yes, Liam Byrne said that, ho ho). They will need to find an extra £9Bn in cuts, on top of Byrne's new £35Bn mega-number (he was on a roll by now). The reality is, of course, a little more modest. The Tories will need to find £11Bn in savings, of which £4.9Bn will be counted as a loss against the extra NI money that would come from Labour's tax hike and rest pumped back into the services they have ring-fenced. Byrne damned out of his own, lying mouth again, then.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this Byrne wriggling, what it shows is that the Conservatives have won the argument on cuts; Byrne's wild numbers at least show that the debate is heading in the right direction, that the government must stop overspending so that it can cut the monstrous national debt. The other thing he singularly failed to do was attack the letter from the business leaders itself. Never once did he say that the businessmen were wrong about the tax on jobs, or, directly at least, that the Tory policy was wrong, either. He did make some feeble reference to the last NI rise, hilariously saying that jobs actually rose after it (it was well before Brown's bust, when public sector employment was still ballooning, and paid for by, you guessed it, tax rises lol), but the thrust of his trainwreck argument was that the Tories were right, but they're Tories, so they're still wrong.

Very lame, Liam. Even for you.

Massive win for the Tories.

Scrapping Labour's Tax On Jobs: All Good

So this evening we learn that the penny has finally dropped with George Osborne and he's announced that he'll be immediately scrapping Labour's crazy plan to hammer national insurance if they win a fourth term. Whatever the economic impact of this - and it will only be good in the sense that businesses will be able to breathe a sigh of relief and Joe Public will have a little bit more to spend next year, at a time when the standard of living is falling in real terms - Osborne's promise has just won the Conservative Party another million votes-plus. Don't believe me? Remember the '92 Tories? It was the campaign against Labour's tax bombshell that turned that election.

All Osborne has to do now is keep his promises on becoming Chancellor, unlike Norman Lamont, regardless of the economic situation. The only way government overspending can be brought under control is by cutting that spending, not by shafting middle (and low) earners and squeezing small businesses all in the name of propping up bloated, inefficient, poorly managed and often appallingly wasteful public services, which is all half Brown's laughable pledges meant anyway.

Whichever way you look at it, this seems like a firm, confident change of direction for the Tories - a change in the right direction, therefore. It's clear, blue water they're putting between themselves and Labour, and it speaks directly to the electorate. It says that they value aspiration and enterprise over punitive taxation and out-of-control spending. It says productive jobs, not non-jobs. It also says to people "we want to win", something I, at least had begun to wonder about. People back a team that wants the prize.

Many will think that all this has come if not in the nick of time, then not a moment too soon. To me, though, as they bring their policies further into focus, and as their message becomes clearer and voters' attitudes crystalise as they gain more confidence in that message, the Tories will absolutely annihilate Brown in the general election. Yahoo!

So, bye bye gold-selling, fake-boom-and-giant-bust, giant dithering weirdo Brown. You're going down, buster, and my God you damn well deserve all you get, and then some!

PS: Iain Dale's latest 7 Days Show podcast covers some of this policy ground, among many other things. It's well worth the listen (if you like that sort of thing). You can get to it via his blog here.