Will Cameron’s grand gestures save him?
BRITAIN’S ELECTIONS are just a week away, and polls and bookmakers agree: it’s an unpredictable mess, with the most likely outcome a minority Labour government backed by Scottish nationalists.
The ruling Conservative Party has only itself to blame.
By any measure, Prime Minister David Cameron should be well ahead. He has a strong economic story to tell. In Labour leader Ed Miliband, he has an opponent most Brits can’t picture as their leader, and who was last week savaged by a television studio audience over the economy.
Tory donors accuse Cameron of running a lacklustre campaign, but the root problem is different.
If Cameron is ousted on May 7, it will be because he paid too much attention to his party’s Europe-obsessed backbenchers for the past two years, instead of trying to change Conservatives’ image as a ‘‘nasty party’’, ruled for and by the nation’s moneyed elites.
Politicians usually get one big brand-making issue that defines them. The one Cameron began with in 2010 had to do with a new, more modern, more open-minded Conservative Party that would rescue Britain’s economy from the financial crisis.
Fast-forward two years, though, and Cameron’s defining issue had switched – to the twin monsters of Europe and immigration.
Spooked by the rising popularity of the UK Independence Party, he let his backbenchers scare him into a narrative he couldn’t con- trol. He promised a referendum on whether the UK should pull out of the EU, and became bogged down in efforts to meet an undeliverable pledge to reduce net immigration to the tens of thousands (it was almost 300,000 last year).
Had he persuaded Britons that he took the tough decisions necessary to put Britain on a sustainable path to recovery, he’d be doing a lot better.
Despite healthy growth over the past year, average real wages are still lower than before the financial crisis. Voters aren’t feeling the feelgood factor.
Now Cameron is resorting to grand last-minute gestures to get his economic message across.
First he promised an extra £8 billion for the National Health Service, then he said he’d give more renters in subsidised housing the right to buy their flats at discounted rates. Most recently, he pledged to pass a law prohibiting rises in income, social security or VAT taxes over the next five years.