Far Too Little Too Late

We always knew it was going to take something bigger than big to make Gordon Brown’s speech change the course of the political tide, but how upset must the bunker be feeling now. After pulling what they thought, and to their credit was not a bad speech out the bag, the Sun then rains on their parade by declaring their support for the Conservatives.

Yesterday I was of the mind that the speech started quite well with the great list of achievements, but now having had time to think it through a bit more my opinion has changed. The trick he was playing was by reeling off the list of achievements, he would trick us into thinking that that justifies why he and Labour should get a fourth term in office. However, the public unfortunately do not care so much about what you have done, it’s more about what you haven’t done and what you will do.

So, we had a list of policy announcements. I say announcements, most of them had previously been announced. the scrapping of compulsory ID cards is not only a dramatic climbdown and u-turn, it has already been announced by the Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who incidentally was centre in the Blair project of ID cards. Secondly we had a commitment to a referendum on Westminster electoral reform and a commitment to an elected second chamber. Again, both were manifesto commitments back in 1997. To be honest, if they haven’t delivered such basic things after 12 years are people really going to trust that it will be delivered in the next five years? And whilst we’re on trust, we were promised a referendum on Lisbon, they failed to fulfil that commitment so why should we believe them on electoral reform?

Next came the most obvious and brutal form of social engineering seen in this country – the so called ‘gulags for slags’. The idea to provide help to teenage mothers is good in principle, but to say that they will be pretty much locked up in a system not too dissimilar from the workhouses is nothing short of a disgrace and infringement of our basic liberties as free citizens of this country. I don’t think there has ever been a stronger argument for using contraception with the threat of the Prime Mentalist taking control of your life should you get pregnant. This policy is a nonsense because as with so many Nu Labour ideas, they look at the consequences rather than the causes. It’s no good spending forever picking up the pieces because it is not actually dealing with the problem, in this case teenage pregnancies which in this country are among the highest in Europe.

The other problem Brown had in his speech was that he kept fluffing lines and using the wrong tones in the wrong places. A speech of this kilter should have a rousing climax, this just had random words about fight, change and believe but it didn’t resonate with the rest of the speech and thus the desired effect was largely lost.

Labour is completely sunk now. We’ve had the Lib Dems farce of a conference, we had this gathering of bored lefties in Brighton. Next comes the Tories. The atmosphere in Manchester will certainly be much more positive than the libbies and socialists, but it’s Cameron’s election to win or lose now and he needs to be careful that absolutely no slip ups are made between now and the election.

I’m unable to go to the Conservative COnference as I’m still recovering from my hip surgery, but I will be blogging on it throughout the week.