Before we were so rudely interrupted on Wednesday (and let us speak no more about it) Labour could take some comfort from the prologue to the election. On Monday the Tories attempted to ‘shock and awe’ us with a spectacular display of offshore-funded fire power. A thousand posters, a mini-manifesto, a visit to Gloucester, and half a million pounds up in smoke. For Labour, a party struggling to pay the staff wage bill every month, it was designed to be both shocking and awesome.
The ‘Airbrushed Dave’ campaign launch revealed both the Tory campaign’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It showed us that the Tories have money. Lots and lots of it. They can afford to blow half a million pounds on an oversized, touched-up picture of David Cameron in every town in Britain, six months out from polling day. Like a gambler upping the stakes, it was an act of swagger and bravado, designed to sap our morale.
Posters are the least effective tool in the political toolkit. They have a negligible impact on voting behaviour. The government should have had the sense to ban them after 2005 as part of a clean-up of party funding and election expenditure, but it failed to do so. By spending so much on Enver Hoxha-style vanity advertising, the Tories showed that they have money to burn in the election campaign. They’ve been outspending us in the marginal seats for nearly five years. They will outspend us in the next election, just as they have done in every election since anyone can remember. The size of the Tories’ war chest is their greatest strength. We will, as they say on Jeremy Kyle, just have to get over it.
This week also revealed the Tories’ greatest weakness. Their policy agenda falls to pieces under even the lightest of scrutiny. Labour’s forensic dissection of the Tories’ mini-manifesto revealed a £34 billion ‘black hole,’ and the rebuttal from Victoria Street was both rapid enough to catch the media’s attention, and robust enough to have credibility. Cameron’s gaffe over marriage tax added to the Tories’ state of confusion. Sam Coates for the Times treated the Tories like a government-in-waiting and put their health policy under the microscope. The five-page document, put together with the speed of an X-Factor winner’s new album, was shown to omit or downgrade several policies previously announced by Andrew Lansley, including a moratorium on hospital closures, 4,200 new health visitors and maternity nurses, and 45,000 single rooms in NHS hospitals. The Tories’ health policy had more holes than a Swiss cheese by the middle of the week, and Lansley was thoroughly humiliated by the Cameroon teenyboppers.
The entire Cameron project is predicated on the need to rub away the stain of the ‘nasty party’ by pretending to care about the things that matter to people who voted Labour in 2005. Ask yourself why Cameron repeats his ‘party of the NHS’ soundbite. Is it because of a genuine conversion to the principles of universal healthcare? Or is their polling telling them the public loves the NHS. Have they really become converted to increasing overseas aid, after years in office when aid was linked to dodgy trade deals such as the Pergau Dam project in Malaysia, and there wasn’t even a department for aid and development? Or is it because the Tories have seen the success of Make Poverty History and know the public increasingly wants trade justice? Have the Tories really become fully committed to women’s equality, after fighting the 1992 general election with not a single woman in their Cabinet? Or have Cameron’s advisers told him women’s votes will decide the next election? When Cameron was interviewed on his train journey to Gloucester, a copy of the Guardian was placed on the table in front of him. Was that because he looks forward each morning to Jackie Ashley or George Monbiot? No, of course not, it was because the Tories know they have to appeal to liberals and progressives to win a parliamentary majority.
Every one of Cameron’s policy shifts to the centre is based not on principle, but on electoral calculation. Without principles to fortify them, and genuine believers to champion them, policies die a swift and terrible death inside a government. No policy can survive as an orphan in Whitehall. Which means, sure as eggs is eggs, the Tories will soon abandon their centrist manifesto if elected and revert to right-wing type. Unlike Blair, who could declare with both conviction and prescience in 1997 that ‘we were elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour,’ Cameron will only be able to say ‘we were elected as New Conservatives, but we will govern as the same old right-wingers you grew to loathe last time.’
Labour’s task is simple: to present a policy programme which chimes with the British people’s aspirations to get on and do well, to see criminals locked up, to have a good local school and hospital, and an immigration system which is firm and fair. It needs to be anchored in an economic policy which projects jobs and services, but abhors profligacy and feather-bedding. It needs to be presented by public servants who look like they know how to buy a bus ticket and the price of milk.
In the coming campaign, we won’t be able to outspend the Tories, so let’s not even try. Let’s make a virtue of not polluting the high streets of Britain with political advertising, and donate some cash to Help for Heroes instead. Labour will probably lose the national campaign. But on the big policy choices we can win the argument, and with it, a parliamentary majority.