Cassilis

After 6-8 weeks in which the Conservatives have had an understandable spring in their step the Economist sounds a welcome note of caution on how much remains to done before they can take the next election for granted.

"...the Tories have not pulled away decisively: they are polling at around 40%, which is short of both the 45% mark that Mr Cameron has made his party's target and the 60% that Labour scored under Tony Blair in 1995. Labour then was more than 30 points ahead of the governing Tories; today the Tories are less than ten points ahead of Labour. Conservatives note that they face a stronger government than Sir John Major's. None of its recent mistakes has been as ruinous for voters as the recession of the early 1990s. Neither is it as exhausted of ideas: Sir John never produced anything as vaulting as the children's plan unveiled on December 11th."

That's a timely warning. Tribal Tories may struggle to accept this but no matter how many dazzling policy initiatives they can produce they will only win power when public disaffection with Brown & Labour passes that difficult to track tipping point and despite recent debacles we may not be there yet. In the decade before Labour took office we’d had race riots, poll tax riots, unparalleled hostility from the arts establishment & popular cultural figures all against a backdrop of serious in fighting and ill discipline in the governing party. That’s why the returns on Blair & Campbell’s Labour rebranding were far more immediate and substantial than those we’ve seen on Cameron’s project (the 60% polling referred to above). I don’t think any serious and objective comparison between Brown under Labour in 2007 and the Conservatives under Major in 1997 could find many significant parallels and somebody, somewhere in the party should be acknowledging this.

Labels: Politics