Andrew Cooper, Conservative peer: ‘Cameron is at his best when he expresses his innate optimism about Britain’
With three weeks to go, no party has any momentum and nothing said so far has cut through with voters. The polls continue to scatter either side of the unchanged reality of deadlock, with declarations of clear daylight emerging between Labour and the Conservatives lasting only until the next batch of polling.
One flicker in the polls caught some attention. Ed Miliband’s rating was boosted slightly when he exceeded unfeasibly low expectations of his performance in the Jeremy Paxman/Kay Burley party leader Q&A (which left a bit more of a mark than the seven-way debate a few days later). The improvement in Miliband’s position is, however, nowhere close to a game-changing moment, whatever his cheerleaders may say. His rating has lifted from catastrophically, historically abysmal to merely very bad: on YouGov’s numbers, from -39% to -25% and, furthermore, this relative improvement was disproportionately in the view of people who were already Labour voters. Among his own party supporters, satisfaction with the Labour leader has risen to +32% in the latest Ipsos Mori data this week. But this compares with David Cameron’s rating of +79% among Tory supporters.
Continuing stasis is a more sobering fact for the party campaigns than it was a week ago because they have all now launched their manifestos – deploying what they will have regarded as their strongest material – and still the dials didn’t move.
There were some substantial policies in the Conservative manifesto and its thematic focus was the right one: telling a positive story about the benefits for the whole country if Britain completes the job of fixing the economic mess Cameron inherited in 2010.
The economic recovery over the last couple of years has been strikingly voteless for the Conservatives. This is because most people say emphatically that they’re not feeling the benefits yet. There is a big gap between the number of voters expecting the country’s economy to be stronger in a year’s time and the number expecting their own family’s financial situation to be so. It is a mantra of American politics, often cited by Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager who is advising the Conservatives in this election, that “all elections are a referendum on the future”.
In other words, the question in most voters’ minds is: “What will you do for me next?” not “How well have you done so far?” So it is critical to persuade floating voters who don’t feel they have benefited yet from the recovery that they will do so if the Conservatives return to government.
That is why the Conservative manifesto was squarely focused on showing how “working people” – the poor as well as the rich, the struggling as well as the successful – will, in the next parliament, feel the benefits of the long-term economic plan. The most eye-catching commitments were the extension of the right-to-buy to housing association tenants and legislating to guarantee a tax-free minimum wage, the latter backed by 80% in polling immediately after the manifesto launch.
Probably of more strategic significance was the redoubling of the Tory commitment to increase funding of the NHS and ringfence spending on schools.
The manifesto launch also marked an important tonal shift in the Conservative campaign, moving on from the brief but unappetising personal attacks on Miliband – whose unfitness to be prime minister should be left to speak for itself. Cameron is at his best when he expresses his innate optimism about modern Britain and its future, as he has done that this week. It is in his “modern, compassionate Conservative” mode that his best hope lies of gaining the 2-2.5% swing from Labour that he needs in order to remain prime minister.
Only 7% of voters said they followed the main party manifesto launches “very closely” It isn’t surprising, therefore, that manifesto week hasn’t changed the basic dynamics of the campaign.
Each party’s support is solidifying rather than growing; there are fewer and fewer people switching between the main parties, while those voters who remain in-play are still, for the most part, tuning out the election.
A lot of people who don’t really want to vote for either Labour or the Conservatives will end up doing so, recognising the reality (however much they may dislike it) that one of the two has to form the next government. Where those late switchers come from, and the proportions in which they go to Labour or the Tories, will decide who governs. The best evidence at the moment is that more will break in the Conservative direction and that in the final knockings of the campaign, the decisive factor will be that along with the country as a whole, those who don’t really like either of the main parties have a clear preference for Cameron over Miliband for prime minister and for the Conservatives rather than Labour when it comes to managing the economy.
- Lord Cooper is a Tory peer and former director of strategy to David Cameron
Miranda Green, journalist: ‘Coalition government has proved toxic for the smaller party’
“Who do you want to be holding the leash on the big parties?” asked Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, at the party’s manifesto launch on Wednesday. Later, either punchdrunk by the campaign or buoyed by 160 pages of policy (it’s hard to tell), the imagery of how the Lib Dems would keep any coalition government stable and moderate was taking a more threatening tone and his fingers stretched forward to illustrate the point: “Whose hands do you want around their throat?”
It brings a whole new resonance to the oft-repeated plea made by both parties in the current coalition to “let us finish the job”.
Moving into the final half of the campaign, the Lib Dems are even more focused on their fight for survival across the UK, and it is becoming a bare-knuckle fight with their erstwhile Conservative government partners.
In Scotland, where they have 11 seats, the game is to harness as much of a tactical anti-SNP vote as possible.
An internal Survation survey of Jo Swinson’s seat seems to show this might be working in some areas, but it’s all within a margin of error, making for a frantic last three weeks .
In central London, there’s a Labour tsunami coming. But in the capital’s suburbs and, more dramatically, across the south-west and south-east, it’s a fight to the death for wavering centrist voters between yellow and blue.
In previous general elections, the Lib Dems have done well with undecided voters during the campaign itself, especially women.But the context for the party, after five years in government with the Conservatives, and the electoral landscape, with voters tempted by a new crop of outsider, none-of-the-above parties, is transformed.
Happily, the Tory party’s refusal to explain where the famous “rollercoaster dip” in public spending would fall during the first half of the next parliament has given the Lib Dems their strongest argument for why voters should send them back into the Commons and into government: David Laws, author of the manifesto, spelled out the party’s refusal to countenance another £12bn of welfare cuts, for example.
This message – the Lib Dems as a restraint, curbing the extremes of the Tory plan and keeping to the coalition’s economic plan (less Plan A as it turned out, and more like B++) will be rammed home with voters being targeted by Tory mailshots that try to argue the Lib Dems will be part of a Miliband-led rainbow coalition. Conservatives hope that fear of red Ed and the lefty ladies will scare soft Tories into voting for Cameron, and have switched to claiming – baselessly and somewhat brazenly given the static polls – that they can win an overall majority.
In the Lib Dem seats with Tory challengers, the party has to head that off with a combination of “local hero” campaigning for well-liked incumbents, and the decidedly unglamorous message to prudent middle England that the party is now, quite literally, selling insurance door-to-door.
“This document,” said Nick Clegg, holding the manifesto aloft, “is an insurance policy against the other two main parties lurching right and left.”
Yes, the Lib Dems can argue that coalition has now been proven, whatever your view of its works, to deliver stable and strong government. But that does not mean, the argument goes, that any old coalition can work – hence the new “Blukip” campaign warning of a Tory party pulled rightwards by its own backbenchers and a combination of Ukip and the Ulster Unionists.
The last five years, an intriguing experiment in cooperation and long the dream of those who feel the swingometer model of red/blue politics was outdated and unrepresentative, has proved electorally toxic for the smaller party, as it has done elsewhere in Europe, where coalitions are the norm.
So now it’s all about survival – and the real strangling hands are attached to Tory arms, not Lib Dem ones.
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Miranda Green is a journalist and former press secretary to Paddy Ashdown. Twitter: @greenmiranda
Marcus Roberts of the Fabian Society: ‘Labour’s manifesto is a window on the party’s conflicted politics’
Labour launched its manifesto against a backdrop of neck-and-neck polls, consistent and strong debate performances by Miliband, and a voter contact operation that Lord Ashcroft’s polls show outclasses the Tories. This is the strategic landscape of the campaign with just three weeks to go: a better than expected air war and a strong ground war.
This leaves the question of policy and what a Labour government would actually do – and whether those plans can win voters in a tight race.
Manifesto week is a joy not just for policy wonks but for Kremlinologists who study the shifting patterns of power within parties and campaigns. Labour’s manifesto offered particularly rich pickings in this regard.
The 84-page document is a window on the party’s conflicted politics, not only revealing its past and present faultlines, but pointing the way to its future – regardless of the election’s outcome. The story of Labour’s manifesto is the story of both the intellectual and political struggle to reconcile New Labour technocracy with the need for soundbite-friendly retail policy offers and the emerging Blue Labour politics of identity and community.
At the heart of this struggle was Miliband’s decision to put not one but two people in charge of Labour policy. Miliband put Jon Cruddas, a blue-sky, big-picture intellectual in charge of Labour’s policy review, and made the consummate SW1 insider, former Treasury civil servant Torsten Henricson-Bell, his head of policy. Miliband hoped the balance of the two might bring together the best of both worlds, offering a strong narrative as well as detailed policy. In this, Henricson-Bell represented Miliband’s own ex-Treasury special adviser instincts to wage political warfare through policy offers, packed with statistics. Cruddas, on the other hand, spoke to the dreamer in Miliband who wished to reinvent the very idea of social democracy with a politics that focused on giving away power, not money, to transform the country. This was where the energies of Blue Labour, with its distrust of both market and state and its focus on blue-collar voter concerns, such as immigration, were to be found.
The manifesto sees two distinct strands of Labour thought vying for supremacy: a centralised, paternalistic view of society vs localisers who want to let go of central government power and budgets to see change happen. Without question, the party is most comfortable practising its traditional patrician politics: promising to heal the pain of the less fortunate by taxing the more wealthy; what Cruddas has dismissively described in the past as “the crude politics of fiscal transfer”. Against this top-down, “we know best” groupthink, the manifesto offers a glimpse of something more powerful and more interesting: a Labour party that offers greater freedom to individuals, families and communities alike by sharing power with them. Helping those who need help to decide for themselves the kind of help they need. This is the idea that drives policies such as personal budgets for NHS patients, more paternity leave and empowering parents to make schools work.
Ideologically the manifesto represents a kind of ceasefire agreement between the tribes of Brown and Blue. Supporters of the New Labour tradition of Whitehall diktats and believers in the power of gambits, such as the energy price freeze, in changing voters’ minds, will find much in this manifesto that pleases – like the extension to 25 hours of guaranteed childcare or the mansion tax to pay for further NHS spending. Blue Labour enthusiasts, on the other hand, will take heart from the manifesto’s attempt to tell a story of work, family and place – the three things they believe speak to people’s sense of identity as well as economic security. Policies such as worker representation on pay committees and a focus on vocational education will please Cruddas fans.
But the forced marriage of the two choices has created a manifesto that, like Labour itself, veers suddenly at times from Blue Labour stories to Brownite statistics. Thus paragraphs of surprisingly readable narrative prose on issues such as family life or in-work struggle, shift sharply and suddenly into transactional politics that guarantees a larger number of “good things” and a smaller number of “bad things” through the magic of a Labour government, whereby politicians solve everything. Ideas of shared sacrifice, crucial to achieving believability in sceptical voters, thus have their due in the words of the manifesto rather than the policy it proffers.
As a result, the manifesto mirrors Miliband’s own politics, which craves both the romance of Blue Labour and the tried and trusted tactics of Gordon Brown’s way of winning.
As the campaign itself has shown, the traditional Brownite dividing-line approaches of “Labour hearts NHS” and “same old Tories” attack messages are a perfectly adequate platform for the party to attempt to achieve 35% of the vote, and given Labour’s structural advantage in the electoral system this may well be enough to see Miliband into No 10. But it is in the manifesto’s words about blue-collar politics and shifting power out of Whitehall and into the hands of councils, patients and parents that the promise of a truly radical, reforming Labour government is to be found.
The key question for Miliband and his possible, potential cabinet is a simple one: “How will Labour govern?” The manifesto suggests a compromise between Labour’s warring intellectual forces. At its best that could yet prove to be a healthy fusion – take, for example, the combination of voter-friendly retail offers on energy prices against a backdrop of structural energy market change. But at its worst the instinct to devolve and to trust may be lost as a Whitehall-knows-best mindset reasserts itself in government.
If Miliband becomes prime minister the next five years will reveal the outcome of this struggle between the new and the old. The shape of Labour’s government – and its impact on society, public services and the economy – will be determined by the choices the manifesto has put before Labour. Local or central, paternal or trusting, retail or radical? As Labour minds turn to the prospect of actually winning, this is the choice before them.
- Marcus Roberts is deputy general secretary of the Fabian Society. Twitter:@marcusaroberts
