Miliband warning on EU poll
Through conflicting polls and the cacophony of smaller parties, it’s the battle of Ed and Dave that will be decisive
DAVID CAMERON today for mally kicked off the 2015 general election with an appeal to voters for five more years to steer Britain through a “dangerous and uncertain” world.
The campaign finally commenced with the pomp and ceremony of official visits to Buckingham Palace by both the Prime Minister and his Liberal Democrat deputy Nick Clegg for audiences with the Queen.
Then Mr Cameron raced back to Downing Street to begin fighting to keep the keys to No 10.
“I have just had an audience with Her Majesty the Queen, following the dissolution of Parliament,” announced the Prime Minister.
“The General Election will be held on May 7. Until that day I will be going to all four corners and all four nations of our United Kingdom, with one clear message.
“Together we are turning our country around. And for the sake of you, your family, and your children’s future we have got to see this through.”
Mr Cameron was beaten to the campaign trail by Labour leader Ed Miliband who used a speech to business leaders to warn of “instabilit y and chaos” in a Tory second term following an admission by Iain Duncan Smith that there would be a Tory leadership battle as well as an EU referendum.
Mr Clegg appealed for another coalition, claiming that “only with the Liberal Democrats in government again” could the economic recovery be fair and stable.
Setting out his case for a second term, Mr Cameron argued that there were too many dangers to change national leadership. “This election also takes place at a time when the world is dangerous and uncertain.
“So we need strong leadership to safeguard our national securit y as well as our economic security. ” He said his job was not over. “Of course we haven’t fixed everything, but Britain is back on its feet again,” he claimed.
Labour denied Mr Cameron’s claim that it would hike taxes by £3,000 a year for the average working family.
A spokesman said: “This is desperate stuff from a Tory party which has borrowed £200 billion more than they planned.”
But Mr Miliband was rocked when on e pr o mi ne n t corporate donor renewed concerns that his policies would penalise “wealth creators”.
Hull City Football Club owner Assem Allam, who has given up to £400,000 to Labour, said the Tories’ ability to run the economy was a “strong point”.
He said: “The only way to make everyone rich is to support the rich to be richer. We need to stop saying tax the wealthy, do this, do that, mansion tax, we need something different.”
The latest batch of opinion polls were at odds with each other. A ComRes survey found the Tories ahead by four points, at 36 to 32 per cent.
But a weekend poll by YouGov had Labour leading by exactly the same headline figures.
In a tight race, there is scant room for error. Put brutally, Cameron cannot afford another week like the one he has just had
IT’S wobble time among the big contenders: each taking it in turn to emulate that magnificent toy, the Weeble. YouGov’s latest poll puts Labour at a four-point lead over the Conservatives. This morning, ComRes puts the lead the other way around, with a slew of further surveys due today to deepen the confusion. It shouldn’t surprise us — a neck-and-neck race is very likely to produce deadlocked results along the way. What matters as much as the points and graphs are the spirits of the parties and their confidence in those who lead them.
Unnerved Cameroons wonder why their man underperformed in his first TV outing, blessed a doomed attempt to unseat Parliament’s Speaker when his MPs are otherwise engaged saving their seats and clumsily pre-announced his retirement, all in a few days of foot-shooting.
True, the format of last Thursday’s event — a kind of political Go Compare, in which we were invited to figure out who had the worse small print — lacked the clarity of choice that voters will make on May 7. And true again: the demographic of those who watched the first round was more Labour-ish, so perhaps inclined to give Ed the benefit of the doubt. Miliband also had a good first TV outing, while Cameron’s seemed unnerved and a tad mechanical.
But in a tight race, there is scant room for error. Put brutally, Cameron cannot afford another week like the one he has just had.
So this Thursday’s debate, which the optimists might call the Magnificent Seven of multi-party leaders, including the SNP, Greens and Lib-Dems — or the Seven Dwarfs if one is less deferential — needs to showcase Cameron at his best. That means looking sovereign, while the others squabble, but not wounded or defensive when his record is attacked.
I reckon that there are two reasons Camp Miliband has been feeling more chipper. The first is that the electorate does not believe the economic good news in the way that Conservative politicians and activists do. Few people feel better or more secure than they did in 2010, which makes it harder to sell a message of “Don’t wreck it ” with conviction . Th e reasons for this insecurity are common to ma ny Western economies challenged by emerging ones. A real-terms fall in wages is common and Britain has yet to unlock better productivity, which would help address that. The education and skills offered by UK Plc still lag behind our lifestyle aspirations. Who is going to tell the voters? None of this lot.
A suspicious mood plays to Miliband’s suggestion that the spoils of the recovery have been creamed off by the Tories to benefit their rich friends and that changing the way tax breaks and credits ar e distributed would solve the problem. This falls well short of the truth but democracy is about what the demos believes as much as the evidence.
So the Tories have to improve in an area where they have been weakest throughout this parliament — putting across the case that their economic remedies and welfare reforms will provide a springboard to a more prosperous life for a broad group of Britons. Alas, an odd insistence by George Osborne on highlighting a further £12 billion in spending cuts in the last Budget means that senior Tories will spend much of the c ampaign dodging questions about where these will fall.
Elephant traps are equally distributed in the weeks ahead, however. Miliband chose a stance with Jeremy Paxman in his first TV outing that was gratingly truculent. Was he tough enough to be PM? “Hell yes,” shot back Ed, sounding like a candidate for office in Wisconsin, rather than Westminster.
Cameron’s subsequent attack on the “sneering Hampstead socialist” was stupidly tribal. Hugh Gaitskell, the reforming socialist Webbs and George Orwell left more of a mark on posterity than Dave and the gang are likely to do. Yet it reinforced a view that Ed trades in a kind of progressive politics that is often more about what he thinks ought to happen than a practical engagement with what is going on.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the phoney debate on the health ser vice. The NHS is a rugged old institution but patchy, erratically managed : it c annot deliver the standards and scope people expect for an ageing population without refinement and innovation. Labour’s NHS debate is about keeping private providers out of the mix — as if that were an answer to anything very much. Neo-Socialist-Worker rhetoric of “saving” the NHS tells us nothing about how Labour would improve it or indeed afford to fund it more generously.
That should play to the Tories’ strength as the part y of a sound economic recovery that is the bedrock for good public services. It can only do so if Cameron can undermine Labour’s economic argument, which boils down to: “We have a better economic plan, but cannot easily tell you what it is.”
Some key factors are outside the main parties’ control. A trouncing for Labour by the SNP in Scotland could mean it fails to be the single biggest party while granting it a ready (if high-maintenance) coalition partner. A chunk of Ukip voters might feel they have made their point and return to the Tories. The balance of these variables will help determine what kind of government we get.
But the dynamic of the two leaders competing for the crown has always mattered . It still does . Amid the cacophony of small parties insisting that their moment has come and prophets foretelling the end of politics as we know it, the battle of Ed and Dave counts, because undecided voters will screen a lot of the other less reckonable factors out. “The personal,” as Cameron said at the weekend, “is the national.”
That is the connection Dave needs to clinch to avoid an even earlier retirement than he is planning. Anyone who has encountered a Weeble will remember that its mesmeric ability is to wobble precariously a lot of the time but not fall down. Take a Weebles lesson, Dave.