The Bleeding Heart Show

Wherein the blogger writes the most dry, wonkish thing he’s ever published in his life…

I suspect Sunder Katwala and Chris Leslie are doing the Labour Party a favour by trying to begin a conversation about council tax reform. Indeed, given just how totemic this issue is for low-tax populists on the right, I’m amazed the party hasn’t gotten around to it sooner.

In these two posts, Katwala & Leslie propose to trump the Tories’ short-term gimmick of a ‘council tax freeze’ by offering their own ‘reform discount’ of £200 for the average household, raised by taking an extra 10p in income tax from every pound earned over £250,000. In the longer term, they would replace the outdated 1991 property values we currently use with a biannual revaluation of properties, to ensure the amount paid by residents is a fair reflection of their property’s worth. In addition, they would broaden the narrow range of tax bands and try to do more for those with the least expensive properties.

Given the meat of the proposal is only about 300 words long, it’s not something you can critique too heavily, and indeed there’s yet to be any reform proposal that hasn’t proved in some way problematic. But there are several important questions that need to be asked here.

Firstly, if we were to base council tax on a twice yearly revaluation of a property’s value, wouldn’t this threaten to tie council funding to the fate of the housing market? Hypothetically, if we were to suffer a fall in house prices (as we see today), this would lead to a fall in council revenue and put important services at risk. Second, a “shift away from grant dependency and towards a broader basis for local revenues” is fair enough, but how would they ensure that regional inequalities are addressed and that poorer areas don’t receive significantly worse council services than you’ll find in a richer area? Finally, the proposal doesn’t seem to address the most widespread criticism of council tax; that basing it on the value of your home rather than your ability to pay is to the detriment of one of society’s fastest growing and most vulnerable groups - pensioners. If you really want a vote-winning reform, you’re going to have to do something about that.

But regardless of these problems, I think Katwala & Leslie’s intervention is a welcome one, and if Labour was smart, it would be thinking right now about how to produce a fairer, more equitable council tax. There’s plenty of votes in it should they succeed.

Well, at least I included a neat little picture to make it seem less dour. This is taken by Flickr user John-Morgan (Creative Commons)

In general, there are four key characteristics which distinguish a professional conservative commentator from some third-rate Tory blogger. They should posses an independent mind, have a sufficient grasp of political history, be able to state their party’s principles without simply spewing their party’s spin, and write to a higher standard than the average commenter on ConservativeHome. Yet despite failing to exhibit any of these qualities, The Guardian still allows Tory parliamentary candidate Charlotte Leslie to write for its Politics Blog, and apparently without supervision.

As is the case with most of her posts, Charlotte sings the same yawnsome song about how New Labour is only slightly less left-wing than Lenin and that only ‘hard-headed’ centre-right leadership can save the country from the statist malaise they’ve imposed on us. This is too predictable to get riled up about. She believes the power of state should be limited and so do I; we just disagree profoundly on what those limits are. No, it’s only when she starts asserting things as ‘facts’ to prove her case that things get messy. Here’s her assessment of where Labour went wrong:

Many of those genuinely good centre-ground ideas (such as academies, for example, resurrecting the idea of Conservatives’ city technology colleges) were being implemented off the back of old-left mechanisms. They are more bureaucratic and expensive than they need be. Funded by ever-increasing taxes, administered by a burgeoning civil service. (emphasis mine)

The civil service is ‘burgeoning’, eh? So if I was to look at a chart showing civil service employment, I’d be able to see a sustained and rapid growth over the past few years, right? In that case… how would she explain this?

For those who, like Charlotte, may be averse to graphs, what this link reveals is that Civil Service employment has fallen every year since 2003, and is now only 20,000 bodies greater than the number of Civil Servants (PDF, page 3) Labour inherited from the Tories. Considering the population’s grown by a good two million in that time, that’s not particularly bad going. So rather than ‘burgeoning’, the Civil Service is, in fact, dwindling.

Leslie also dredges up the age-old issue of our armed forces and claims that Labour has overseen a steady decline in numbers from 238,550 in 1978 to 73,290 today. Now, she’s not wrong to point out the decline, but I do find it curious that there’s no mention of one rather significant development which made that reduction possible, nor any recognition that the number of service personnel also declined under both Margaret Thatcher & John Major’s governments. (PDF, page 23).

As I said earlier, the question about the size and purpose of the state is one of the most important & relevant debates in politics, but you’re not going to advance that debate if all you’re doing is blithely repeating trite Cameronisms you’ve been emailed from Tory HQ, linking to some failed 90’s pop band and trotting out some statements which are, at best, erroneous or misleading. Seriously, if the standard of the Tory party’s parliamentary candidates is no better than the average blogger, what hope should we have about how well they’d run the country?

I suppose that given the mitigating factors - the lousy weather, the generally poor turn-out in by-elections and the fact that anyone in their right mind should be sunning themselves in the Mediterranean right now - the 34% turnout and 75% of the vote is a pretty impressive victory for David Davis.

Did the absence off the major parties turn it into a circus filled with loonies, fringe parties and knuckle-dragging malcontents? Absolutely, though Davis was gracious enough to acknowledge that the crowded field speaks well of our election system. Did the beauty queens, greengrocers and Elvis impersonators dilute the impact of Davis crusade? Perhaps, as it bolstered the media narrative that his campaign was quixotic and vainglorious. But did these factors fatally undermine his campaign? Only if your expectations were too high. At the very least, this by-election gave us another three weeks when the issue of 42 days - and civil liberties in general - had some place in the news. This meant it was being discussed by more than just bloggers and Guardian columnists. For all David Davis may or may not have achieved in Haltemprice & Howden, his prolonging the debate can only be a good thing.

Since the (hurrah!) next American President is on his way over here and looks set to meet the likely (boo!) next British Prime Minister, here’s Andrew Sullivan on David Cameron & Barack Obama:

His policy prescriptions - more autonomy at the bottom of public services, more accountability within the public sector, a gentle tax incentive for marriage - are more in line with traditional conservatism than wage subsidies, for example. And there’s an Obamaite tinge to Cameron as well: a young, eloquent, inexperienced and culturally modern individual emerging to replace a period of rule by the other party. One similarity: both are gay inclusive. One Cameron difference: he, like any Tory should, places more emphasis on environmentalism than Obama does.

[...]

What Obama is to race in America Cameron is to class in Britain: cultural game-changers. (emphasis mine)

So America gets a black man to usher in a postracial future and Britain gets an old Etonian to usher in a post-class future? Great. It’s a wonder there are no Cameron murals in Barnsley.

Policy-wise, there are sure to be some similarities between Obama & Cameron. As a community-organiser, Obama has experienced what can be achieved by empowering people at a local level and the way America was devised means it’s very difficult to have the kind of large, centralised delivery of public services we have in Britain. If elected, both men would find their hands tied somewhat by our countries’ respective borrowing and budget deficits.

But I think Sullivan continually overstates the symbolic value of a Cameron premiership. Sure, a postracial America could only emerge with something as symbolic as a black man being elected President. By the same measure, Britain isn’t going to overcome class antipathy by electing yet another Prime Minister who attended Eton. If you look at the two men’s biographies, Obama mixed race and multiracial upbringing meant he was able to identify the antipathies and resentments that exist between black and white Americans - as a result, his campaign has made overcoming these divisions a key theme. Cameron, on the other hand, was reared in great privilege and has spent his entire life amongst wealthy conservatives who resent that their taxes go to such undeserving lowlifes as single parents and the unemployed. Until becoming leader of the Tories, he’s never been anywhere near the deprived side of Britain and can’t hope to speak of it without sounding like a dillettante.

Maybe Cameron is sincere, the Tories are serious about helping the poor and they all honestly believe this is best achieved through localism and decentralisation; only time will tell whether this is a real change or just ‘back to basics’ with superior presentation. But you won’t see a postclass Britain by electing someone for whom class has brought nothing but benefits; it’ll be by electing someone as Prime Minister who, like Obama, had to break a great many barriers just to get there

Since I only heard the name yesterday, I’m happy to recuse myself from the argument over whether James McGrath is a racist. Regarding the comment he made, it’s true that there’s an unfortunate similarity with the kind of sewerage spewed by the far-right, but it’s still a bit of a stretch to ascribe a real racial malice to what he said. Rather, what the comment does reveal - which is perhaps even more damaging to Mayor Johnson - is a flippant dismissal of the serious concerns behind the question he was asked. It’s probably useful at this point to put his words in context:

I brought along to the meeting copies of the Black community Voice and New Nation weekly newspapers covering the fortnight since Boris Johnson was elected Mayor of London, and pointed out that Johnson was getting a bad press in these publications. I put this down to a ‘problem of perception’.

McGrath was far from politically correct, David-Cameron-new- cuddly-Conservative Party, when I pointed out to him a critical comment of Voice columnist Darcus Howe that the election of “Boris Johnson, a right-wing Conservative, might just trigger off a mass exodus of older Caribbean migrants back to our homelands”.

He retorted: “Well, let them go if they don’t like it here.” McGrath dismissed influential race commentator Howe as ‘shrill’.

He scoffed at the New Nation front page “Stabbings or stop and search? The choice is yours. Will new tough policing really stop the tragic murders or simply take community-police relations back 30 years?”

McGrath might well have said that City Hall’s new administration is not into this politically correct race relations stuff. He stated firmly: “Boris’s main priority is fighting crime.”

So the entire point behind the interviewer’s questioning was to make McGrath address the fear within minority communities that Mayor Johson has cloth ears when it comes to their concerns and only a half-hearted commitment to diversity, community and equality that his predecessor claimed to strive for. But instead of addressing this issue, McGrath just bulldozed over it with an insensitivity that’s hardly a positive attribute in an advisor to the Mayor of such a diverse city.

As much as his defenders on the right might hate that this is so, the man who reintroduced the word ‘picaninny‘ into political discourse has to take greater care than anyone to be seen as championing diversity and addressing minority issues. With that in mind, stopping the Rise festival from being branded as ‘anti-racist’ probably wasn’t a great idea, and with McGrath’s belligerent ‘we’re going to do what we want and don’t much  care what anyone else thinks’, a narrative is forming around Boris that could be electorally disastrous.

If he wants to get re-elected in four years time, Mayor Johnson simply cannot risk alienating ethnic minority groups, and in his apparent ignorance of their concerns, sacking McGrath was just about the only action Boris could’ve taken.

I really hadn’t intended to write anything more on David Davis’ resignation. For a start, the whole job-hunting thing is still an unresolved faff and I’m spending more time wondering whether to abandon Sheffield for the land of rats and rogueish Mayors than I am wondering what Sir Lancelot’s up to. There’s also the fact that BritBlogLand is already engulfed with opinions and I doubt there’s much insight or profundity I can add to the wealth of well-argued posts that are far more worthy of your time. The other reason is that in the past 72 hours I’ve found myself swinging between two extremes and I don’t suppose anyone wants to survey the carnage that occurs when I have an argument with myself. But since someone’s had the impudence to challenge me to put forward a semi-coherent position, I suppose it’d be a good idea if I actually had one. So without further ado, here’s another tract of interminable twittering about the Courageous One and why we should/shouldn’t vote for him. 

A question: if you were a Labour voter/party member in Haltemprice & Howden rather than Barnsley West and Penistone, would you vote for Davis? Would you campaign for him, even? Would your answers to these depend on whether MacKenzie stands, or whether Labour fields a candidate? This Labour party member would vote for him if he could, and I’m waiting for the Internets to provide a means to donate to the otherwise unsympathetic Tory’s self-destructive crusade.

I suppose one reason Davis’ decision is so significant is that it gives a great jolt to people like me who’ve managed to trudge through 24 years of life with the stubborn vow that I would never, ever vote for a Tory. Whilst the by-election renders this vow as pretty self-defeating (Kelvin MacKenzie’s intervention reminds us there are far more noxious options than voting for a Conservative), it refuses to go away because an election that’s ostensibly about a single issue will result in electing someone who will then vote on every other issue. Since Davis is militantly right-wing, I’d be in the position of helping elect someone who will vote against my beliefs 99% of the time. This is where the gag reflex comes in, and makes me have a great deal of sympathy for Unity’s suggestion that voters back a fringe candidate or spoil their ballots.

And yet I’m conscious of how significant a large, cross-party vote for Davis on the issue of 42 days could be, and how it might have the effect of stunning some of those Labour MPs who voted for sensible terror-averting tactics internment to think twice before they reach for the battering ram of the Parliament Act. Since stopping this heinous bill from becoming law should be the primary aim, we should welcome any opportunity to demonstrate our opposition. If that means helping Davis win a landslide majority in a symbolic stunt of a by-election, then we may just have to swallow it - acts of symbolism don’t get much more potent than those delivered at the ballot box.

I don’t like him, I don’t trust him, I disagree with him on almost every issue ever to have faced mankind and most of the time I just wish he would bugger off. But when it comes to 42 days detention, David Davis is indisputably right. On this issue alone and for one night only, I would break the habit of a lifetime and vote Conservative, and I urge all those who actually live in Haltemprice and Howden, whether Tory, Labour or Lib Dem, to do the same.

Update: If that’s not enough to convince you, fans of schadenfreude would surely have some fun watching Murdoch’s sneering little sock-puppet - a liar, a devout enemy of working people and an All-Round Bad Guy - being dealt an embarrassing punch in the jaw by the people of Haltemprice and Howden.

So you know this plan to threaten a school with closure if it fails to meet its targets? I was wondering; any chance we can apply it to governments, too?

For those who still care about that nebulous concept called social justice, it’s been a pretty wretched week: health inequalities are becoming sharper, the number of children in poverty has increased by 100,000 and the number of poor pensioners by three times that amount.

Since the poverty rate also increased last year, we can no longer view it as an aberration, but as the beginnings of worrying trend. Given the increases in food and fuel prices and the unlikelihood that Darling’s 10p tax ‘compensation package’ will reimburse everyone who lost out, it’s likely to rise next year as well. Thanks to the financial straightjacket Brown has imposed on his government, we face the very real prospect that by 2010 - the target Blair set to halve child poverty - the figure will continue to creep back towards pre-Labour levels.

At this point, it’s difficult to know to respond without reaching for clichés: sure, we can say Labour’s been subservient to big business & the super-rich, too obsessed with their middle class marginals to bother with sane social policy and so petrified of tongue-lashings from the Tory press that they’re happy to adopt any authoritarian measure that’ll keep them quiet. We can say all of this, but it won’t really get us anywhere.

Instead, we need to look at Brown’s actions since becoming PM and try to deduce whether his government has either the ability or the resolve to correct its mistakes and pursue the new ideas needed to close the gap between rich and poor. The evidence is… well, what do you expect?!

Where to start? We’ve seen him brutishly declare British Jobs For British Workers, shamelessly announce troop withdrawals during the Tory conference, sign the Lisbon treaty when he thought no one would be watching, give inheritance tax away, abolish the 10p tax band to pay for a middle class tax cut and reclassify cannabis despite there being no evidence it’s required.

But perhaps most reflective of Brown’s approach to politics can be seen in the awful, unnecessary, and ghastly authoritarianism displayed in passing 42 days detention. As has been noted elsewhere, there have been no coherent arguments about why the bill is required now, nor why 28 days was so dangerously insufficient; there have been a paltry number of cases that’ve even gone close to original limit and a Home Office Minister suggested the new power might never even be used - arguing, laughably, that it will just be a benign safeguard in case counter-terrorism officers encounter a villain who could evade even Jack Bauer.

No, the prime motivation behind this bill, just like so many other actions he’s taken as Prime Minister, is a craven brand of politics. Faced with worse polls ratings than Michael Foot, Brown’s spent weeks scrabbling around for an issue with which to begin his ‘comeback’, and since the opinion polls are in favour and both the Tories and Liberals are opposed, he gets to ‘fight courageously’ for Britain’s security against the ‘hug-a-terrorist’ brigade who bleat about human rights.

Yeats once wrote “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” This isn’t always true. In fact, when looking at Brown I’d argue the worst all lack conviction. Since becoming Prime Minister, Brown’s modus operandi has been calculation and triangulation, surrendering key policies for short-term gain & scoring cheap points on trivial issues. Above all, his Premiership has been defined not by a desire to govern well but by a desire to win. He has been successful in neither.

You don’t go into government to beat the Conservatives; you go into government to help those who most need it. And when your desire to beat the Tories and save your own skin prevents you from helping those your party represents, then you really must question whether you’re fit to lead Labour into next week, let alone the next election.

Change quickly, Gordon, or resign - there are millions still living in poverty and they just can’t afford you.

Photo by Flickr user davepattern (Creative Commons)

An interesting catch from The Guardian:

Friends of Spelman say the unusual arrangements, which will be investigated by the parliamentary standards commissioner, John Lyon, were caused in part by what they describe as the “sexist” demand when she was selected as the Tory candidate in Meriden. Spelman was asked to give an undertaking that she would live in Meriden and educate her children there.

One friend said: “All aspiring MPs are asked if they will live in the constituency. Everyone says yes, they buy a property there and the matter is dealt with. To expect Caroline to educate her kids there as well was the sort of sexist demand women candidates faced in the 1990s.”

Spelman and her husband, Mark, an energy expert, found the requirement burdensome because their lives were centred in London. It is understood that they complied with the demand when their children were young. But they then moved to bigger schools outside Meriden.

This doesn’t explain away the appearance of wrongdoing, but it always seemed peculiar that someone who’d be doing so much work in Westminster wouldn’t have her kids there. There’d be a delicious schadenfreude if it turned out that the constituency party’s overzealous demands had contributed to the mess they now find themselves in.

Having had the day to read about it, there’s clearly no way that Caroline Spelman’s nanny problem is of the same seriousness as the allegations made against Messrs Purvis, Dover and Chichester; it’s possible to have a degree of sympathy for the circumstances she found herself in at the time, and if the record can show that there have been no similar conflicts of interest since since ‘97, then she should be given the benefit of the doubt. This allegation alone isn’t a resigning matter.

Unfortunately for Ms Spelman, she happens to be Chair of the Conservative Party, whilst the other state spongers who’ve been outed this week merely belong to the European Parliament - a body that’s pretty much banished from public consciousness as a bunch of Britain-hating bruschetta-munchers. It might be unjust that she finds the press parked outside her home whilst the other guys just get followed around Strasbourg/Brussells by a sole spotty graduate, scrutiny is the price of power, and Ms Spelman’s party had better get used to receiving more of it.

At the very least, this mini-scandal will remind those journalists who’ve feasted on Labour’s carcass for the past few months that the party of the red rosette is not the only one filled with flaws, tensions and scandals-in-the-making; nor is it the only party with questionable policies and objectionable politicians. If we are to be believed that the Conservative Party are favourites to become the next government, then it is absolutely crucial that they receive a level of scrutiny which is in proportion to their poll ratings.

As I’ve argued before, the time for such scrutiny is well overdue. If the Big Media ask the questions required and the Tories come up with compelling and convincing answers, they’ll probably be the next government in 2010. But having four party members caught up in expenses scandals in one week is so not the way to go…

Photo of Caroline Spelman by Flickr user SouthbankSteve (Creative Commons)

So, you remember when the left’s Guardians of Moral Purity declared Ken Livingstone unfit for office; citing, among other things, his lack of openness and accountability, his lavishing money on unelected hacks and basically running City Hall as his own personal fiefdom? Well, they might have got their wish, but it turns out the man replacing him has decided he’d quite like a bit of that. Via LC, The Tory Troll uncovers the £465,000 Mayor Johnson has spent on a ‘transition team’ of spinners and Team Boris toadies.

Now, we could point out the flagrant hypocrisy of Team Boris mimicking Ken at his worst - the cash wasted on cronies, the lack of openness - but The Bleeding Heart Show abhors the use of clichés. Instead, we’ll just point out that it doesn’t reflect well on a man who tried to portray himself as the epitome of competence to spend half a million pounds of taxpayers money in the hope that someone might teach him how to do the job he applied for. Would quite as many Londoners have put a cross by Boris’ name if they’d known, to invert a well-worn slogan, that he was ‘unready to lead on day one’? I’m not so sure.

Photo by Flickr user Roystonford (Creative Commons)

Let tories be tories! End discrimination against the rich! Jonathan Freedland on class and the Crewe by-election:

Class has been a factor in the byelection campaign, with Labour hounding Timpson for his silver-spoon upbringing, despatching volunteers to the constituency in top hats and tails. And class has become a factor in our national politics, with Labour proving that it has, as yet, no idea how to handle it.

At least the Tories clearly understand their vulnerability in this area. Note their forceful efforts to have a Labour flier, featuring a mocked-up photo of Timpson in a topper, suppressed. Note their more serious, and successful, campaign to have that now legendary - genuine and undoctored - photograph of the Bullingdon Club circa 1986, featuring Cameron and Boris Johnson in full regalia, withdrawn from circulation. (Luckily for them, newspapers have complied with this edict, even though the image is just a Google away.) These are pretty strenuous exertions for a party that says it’s relaxed about background, insisting that it doesn’t matter where you come from, it’s where you’re going that counts. As Stefan Stern wrote in the Financial Times last week: “If David Cameron is so proud of the ‘great school’ he attended - it was Eton, by the way - why does he never mention it by name in public?”

Aye, if only the country weren’t so crippled by inverted snobbery - whatever have the mega-rich done to deserve being made to feel embarrassed by their extravagant wealth? Well, over in this small corner of blogtown, we celebrate diversity wherever it may be, which means that when we give this image another outing…

…we only do so to celebrate expert tailoring, 70’s hairdos and good breeding. 

For those keeping score, Boris is #8, whilst #2 is Tony Hadley David Cameron.

From the Telegraph:

As members of the Bullingdon dining club, which dates back more than 150 years, David Cameron and his friends were obliged to wear the outfits for their annual photograph. But within hours of the photo being taken, the 10 young men were wreaking havoc on Oxford, where they were all at university. One of them, said to be Ewen Fergusson, threw a plant pot through a restaurant window and the police were called. Some tried to make a getaway but were arrested and thrown in police cells overnight.

“The party ended up with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens, and trying to escape police dogs,” said Boris Johnson, who was among those arrested. “And once we were in the cells we became pathetic namby-pambies.”

Twenty years later most of the young men in this photograph are facing their 40s. Ewen Fergusson is a successful corporate lawyer and Boris Johnson is the shadow spokesman for higher education. Cameron is the leader of the Conservative Party, who said recently: “Like many young people, I did things when I was young that I should not have done and that I regret.”

He was probably referring to his youthful involvement with cannabis rather than the Bullingdon Club, but the destructive activities of the club mean that many of the members have developed an appropriate amnesia. “The blissful sponge of amnesia has wiped clean the slate of memory,” said Mr Johnson.

“Until I saw that photograph I had really forgotten all about it,” said another former member.

The Bullingdon modus operandi is to book a restaurant under a false name, smash it up, and throw large amounts of money at the upset owners — a form of behaviour which dates back to Victorian times.

See, they’re just ordinary folk like you and I - behaving like ‘rascals’, getting into ‘japes’, committing ‘tomfoolery’. The only difference is that most students vomit on the street after a ‘back to school’ party or think it’s hilarious to steal a traffic cone, whereas this lot just happen to smash up restaurants. Absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about…

As pro-choicers rightly bask in the knowledge that a woman’s right to choose won’t be eroded for at least the duration of this government, now is probably the best possible moment to warn against complacency. At Comment is Free, Mary Kenny argues that this debate has become far more complicated than those had during the ’60s and ’70s, with advanced photography of the reproductive process making the emotive case for restricting abortion seem stronger, even amongst those who’re sympathetic to a woman’s right to chose.

Then there’s the question of whether this issue will return to Parliament with a vengence if/when the Conservatives win the next election. There’s a strong likelihood that if it did re-emerge (and god knows Nadine Dorries hasn’t got much else to do with her time), the restrictionists would finally prevail:

The abortion time limit could be cut if the Conservatives win the next general election, according to an analysis of yesterday’s votes.

According to Philip Cowley of the University of Nottingham, a large influx of Tory MPs into parliament could lead to a reduction in the upper time limit of 24 weeks.

[...]

Cowley told guardian.co.uk: “I can’t see 24 weeks surviving a large Conservative intake at the next election. It’s one of the underlying truths that so-called free votes are not as non-party as people think.

“The majority of Conservative MPs voted for a reduction in the abortion time limit and the majority of Labour MPs voted against. The maths are pretty straightforward when there’s a large Conservative intake.”

He added: “One of the problems for the Tories’ position is that once you state the argument for viability of the child and science, the abortion time limit will only go down. It’s never going to go up again.”

When a Conservative opposition starts attacking a Labour Government for its plans to raise the taxes of working class people, you know there’s something seriously fucking wrong with our politics. (Hat tip)

For the past two elections, Labour had the Conservatives caught in a masterful political trap: if you want to slash taxes, they said, you’ll have to slash spending, and if you’re going to slash spending, you’re going to starve our schools and hospitals of the money they need to save lives, or give kids the best education possible. The argument evoked images of crumbling schools, hospitals with 12-month waiting lists and a beds shortage that left patients lying, unattended, in corridors. Though the argument alone didn’t win these elections - the Tories were being led by reactionary weasels who stoked fears about immigration in the hope that some random bigot might decide to vote for once - it was still one they didn’t have an answer for.

But you can only use a winning argument so many times before it loses its power to persuade; the Conservatives have been much wiser in how they attack Labour’s spending, sniping about the amount that’s wasted to bureaucracy and pointing out that for all the billons our government receives from tax payers, it still can’t stop them from losing the personal details of millions. Now, not only has the ‘tax cuts = spending cuts’ meme lost its power, but the Tories are already innoculating themselves against it:

Senior Conservatives have said they would not be able to offer immediate tax cuts if they won the next election. Tory leader David Cameron told the BBC’s Politics Show that tax cuts would be impossible at first because Labour had “left the cupboard bare”.

[...]

Mr Cameron said: “We have to recognise as an opposition that if we win the next election, it will be tough and there will not be some large kitty of money to spend and we will have to say no a lot, as well as hopefully being able to say yes to some of the things we want to do.”

He’s being disingenuous, of course - the guiding principle of Conservative government is saying ‘no’ and stopping the government from doing things. Still, it’s a very smart move; not only do they neuter New Labour’s attack that Tory tax cuts will equal big spending cuts, but they also hold out the hope of allowing tax cuts in their second term, if the conditions allow. In one deft move, he’s placated his base and reassured those in the centre. I miss the good old days when the party was ruled by idiots…