David Cameron said yesterday that the next general election is absolutely not in the bag for the Tories. “The public are going to take a lot of convincing” about Tory policies, he added, particularly about their ability to be “safe and sensible on the big economic decisions” that must be taken in the coming years. As a result, Mr Cameron concluded in his radio interview: “We are really focused on what we need to do between now and the next election.” How true — and how sad.
What is both true and sad about this confession is that voters really are almost as unimpressed with the Tories as they are disillusioned with Labour; that Tory economic policies really are unconvincing and, worst of all, that Mr Cameron really is more focused on rhetorical gimmicks to use against Gordon Brown than on the policies that he will need to implement if he comes to power.
If only Mr Cameron and his minions spent less time thinking about the next election their prospects of victory would probably be better and their credibility as a potential government would certainly be far greater.
The obsession with electioneering may reflect professional backgrounds. Exactly as Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, Mr Cameron and Andy Coulson, the former News of the World Editor, who would now appear to be the chief intellectual influence on the Tory leader, have spent their entire careers in adversarial politics and manipulating “gotcha” news cycles. But whatever its cause, this permanent state of mobilisation helps to explain the parallels increasingly drawn between the present Tory leadership and the Blair-Mandelson- Campbell partnership and that, in turn, suggests even less flattering analogies with Brown-Balls-McBride.
After the country’s experience with spin-doctor partnerships, it is hardly surprising that the Tories are still disliked and distrusted. More surprising is that Mr Cameron has failed to understand that he will damage himself and his party by trying to imitate the techniques perfected by Blair-Mandelson- Campbell and taken beyond their logical conclusion and discredited by Brown-Balls-McBride.
Let me give some examples from the area I know best. Since the start of the economic crisis almost all the important statements made by Mr Cameron and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, have been marred by a stridency and exaggerated belligerence towards government policies. This has distracted from the many good ideas in the detailed proposals: for example, the plan to create an expert group independent of the Treasury to monitor fiscal sustainability; the proposal to change bank accounting practices to soften the impact of the credit crunch; or the call for Northern Rock to be wound up in an orderly manner after nationalisation, rather than maintained as a going concern.
Worse, the Tory obsession with causing maximum embarrassment to Mr Brown in every policy statement, has drawn them into positions that will make economic management needlessly difficult if they win power.
The latest case of such exaggerated opposition, seemingly just for the sake of some anti-Brown headlines, was this month’s paper on financial regulation. This contained many good ideas and was a clear advance on the Treasury’s rather bland White Paper a few weeks earlier. But all the worthy plans for anti-cyclical capital regulations, intensified bank competition and stronger consumer protection were sabotaged by one headline-grabbing demand: abolition of the failed Financial Services Authority, whose main crime was to have been created by Mr Brown.
Abolishing the FSA and persuading thousands of its employees to move to the Bank of England will be, at best, an expensive and time-wasting rearrangement of bureaucratic deckchairs. Worse still, it would probably end up as a reverse takeover of the Bank by the FSA. Not only would the regulators and financiers from the FSA be more numerous but they would also, by the nature of their jobs, be better paid than the quasi-academic economists employed by the Bank.
The credibility of Mervyn King, the Governor, could be fatally undermined, since amputating the supervisory divisions of the Bank and transferring all the regulators to the FSA was as much his idea as Mr Brown’s. By reintegrating the two, the Tories would virtually guarantee that the next governor was a financier rather than an economist. As a result, the Bank would once again be seen as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, whose main job is to discipline and manage the City, rather than a truly national institution guiding macroeconomic policy for Britain as a whole.
Which brings me to the second, and even more troubling, case of short-term calculations overriding economic strategy in the Tory high command. Alongside perfectly valid criticism that Mr Brown shamefully used the credit crunch as an excuse to abandon all efforts to control the long-term growth of public spending, the Tories could not resist spinning several false accusations and rash promises that will cost them dear once they are in government.
Their misguided attacks on the fiscal stimulus that is helping to pull Britain out of recession will raise excessive expectations about the short-term deficit reductions that can be — or need to be — achieved in 2010-11. And the chances of achieving long-term deficit reductions in an economically sound manner have been jeopardised by headline-grabbing commitments to protect health from any future spending cuts. This promise flies in the face of the fact that the NHS is where Labour’s biggest uncontrolled spending has occurred. It is only by cutting pay and pension costs that a Tory government can regain control of the nation’s finances — and protecting the NHS would destroy any hopes of enforcing a pay squeeze on the public sector as a whole.
Viewed from a political standpoint, it is understandable why Mr Cameron has promised not to touch NHS spending while exaggerating the dangers of Mr Brown’s public borrowing spree. Maybe such Blairite triangulations will help to get him elected, but they will make governing much more difficult for the Tories.
Is it surprising that the public remain unconvinced?
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Anatole Kaletsky writes for The Times Comment pages on Thursdays. One of the country's leading commentators on economics, he was formerly Economics Editor and is now Editor-at-large of The Times. He has won many awards for his financial and political journalism. Before joining The Times, he worked for 12 years on the Financial Times
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