Too Much or Too Little?
Regular readers of this blog will note that virtually since it’s birth in 2008, I have been calling for Cameron to announce policy ideas so that we and more importantly the country knew what his ideas would mean in practice.
Since Christmas I have not complained about the lack of policies. That is because we have been announcing a ton of policies since the new year. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to be washing with the public. Saturday’s YouGov poll put the Tories just 2 points ahead of Labour and only MORI have a Tory lead of double figures and even then it’s only 10 points.
I reckon the lack of reaction to the policy announcements has got very much to do with their timing. Now, I know that CCHQ is anxious to not announce policies too early for fear (and it’s a well founded fear) that Labour will simply steal them. However, I you suddenly announce so many policies so close to the election without any talk of them before now it starts to look like they’ve been cobbled together in a bit of a hurry.
I’m confident that the party has been sitting on these policies for quite some time and that they aren’t just hastily arranged announcements. However, we should have started to announce policies at the conference last October. I expected the shadow cabinet to make some announcements in their speeches, instead we got staged managed cloned speeches that all said “what we need is change”. I tell you, if I hear that stupid word again I’m going to go insane!
Anyway, I think Tim Montgomerie hit the right note when he said that the Tory leadership need to focus on the policies they’ve already announced rather than continuing to announce more and more policies. Having announced so many policies, what now needs to happen is tying them into the broader themes of the campaign and if they can do this successfully then the polls will improve again.
The election has not been won, or indeed lost. The Conservatives need to win 117 seats just to get a majority of 1. They need something like a 6.9% national swing just to get that slender majority and that’s no mean feat. I am confident in CCHQs abilities to conduct the election campaign properly. The campaign bulletins have been taken up a notch. On Friday evening, a 52 page ‘summary’ of all the stories going on went out. Yes, it’s a top-down campaign and yes I don’t particuarly like it, but if that’s what is going to work then we just have to accept it.
If you need any further evidence of the Americanisation of UK politics then look no further than the news that team Cameron have secured the services of some of Obama’s election advisers. Again, I don’t like the Americanisation of the UK, but if these moves are going to shift Labour and give the country a chance to pick itself up off the ground then, again, it just has to be accepted.
