There is a great piece in the Times today about Labour's claims that they will be politicising the queen's speech.He clearly lays out the difference's between Conservative and Labour policies in a number of areas and highlights yet again the Conservative's approach to cutting the level of public borrowing. The statistic that keeps coming up from the high ranking Conservatives at the moment is that by next year we will be borrowing almost 14% of GDP (or as it has morphed into lately, our national income, for those that don't know what GDP means) and that this is twice the borrowing which under a labour government nearly took us bust in the 1970s.
I think this is a good tactic to remind people that we have been here before and that really New Labour inherited more of the foundations of a good economy than created them . Yes there were mistakes in the previous conservative government on pubic finances but nothing to the scale we're seeing today. At the end of the day I see it as an ideological issue, Labour is tax and spend, spend money to get people out of poverty (which hasn't worked), spend money to bail out the banking sector, spend money to solve pretty much any problem in fact. As an alternative the Conservative party are more willing to look at root causes, to look at the issue as complex and interconnected, a complex systems view, that sees the system as a number of interconnected parts that are more than the sum of the whole will always beat a throw money at the visible issues solution.
On the subject of throwing money at poverty an ICM poll last night showed that the Tories have a 13% lead over Labour, but more importantly in the context of this post are more trusted than labour to lift people out of poverty (admitedly it's 42%, 41%). I think this really shows that the messages on compassionate conservatism are really getting out there. Well done Team Cameron for beginning to change the established narrative (more on that later today)
No comments:
Post a Comment