With every passing day, the Tory strategy becomes clearer. It could be called, after the artist who is the subject of a Mike Leigh biopic and major exhibitions at the moment, the Turner strategy. JMW Turner’s genius was to create a swirl of colour (think Sea Monsters) that at first glance seems almost entirely abstract, but which gradually reveals its realism with small, hard-edged detail.
In the Times this morning – or also available on Facebook, to avoid that paywall – David Cameron is at work on the bigger picture. He paints a golden swirl of colour around the morality of not paying tax. In phrases that echo richly with the distant tones of early Margaret Thatcher, he condemns “a bloated, high-taxing, welfare-heavy nation”. He says that every pound in the Treasury is a pound out of someone’s pay packet. He calls it “morally wrong” for government “to spend money as if it grows on trees”.
Elsewhere, the BBC has had a glimpse of a paper from the Department for Work and Pensions. It suggests there are plans afoot to slash just under £30 a week from the employment support allowance, on the basis that people on jobseeker’s allowance, worth £70 a week, are migrating to the more generous ESA in order to get more money.
This little nugget of a cut serves, like the artist depicting himself at work in tiny but perfect detail in the midst of a turbulent landscape, as a pointer to the realism of the wider picture.
So Cameron, in this battle for the initiative in the pre-election, is not depicting some abstract future. He is framing a choice, trying to make the election between a Conservative party that regards it as a moral duty to cut the taxes of the low-paid, and a Labour party that taxes high and spends more. He is shackling Labour to a version of itself that has just enough truth in it to make escape all the harder. It is not a novel approach, but it feels as if it is working better than it has for years.
Labour needs to get out and make its own moral argument. Instead it repeatedly finds itself cornered by the challenge of condemning a cut or explaining what it will cut instead. On the face of it that should be easy. There are about 2 million people claiming ESA (which replaced incapacity benefit). The cut would save maybe £60m a year from a benefits budget of £120bn. Earlier this month Cameron pledged to his party conference that he would cut taxes – raising the income tax threshold to £12,500, and the 40% rate to £50,000, which would cost about £7.2bn a year. The benefits cut is a tiny fraction of that. But voters do not trust Labour with the economy. It has failed to make the case for the morality of shared commons, and this is a very hard place to start.
Prime minister’s questions yesterday showed just how transfixed the Labour leadership finds itself. For the previous 24 hours even rightwing commentators had expressed horrified dismay at the news that the British government had decided that plucking desperate refugees from the Mediterranean before they drowned was a “pull factor” for immigration.
As a result Britain would take virtually no part in the EU coastal patrol operation that is scheduled to replace Italy’s Mare Nostrum exercise – jeopardising thousands of lives. It is a monstrous piece of inhumanity, all the worse from an island nation that cherishes the obligations of its own seafaring tradition. To ignore saving life, the most fundamental of moral obligations, for fear of offending voters’ anxieties about immigration reveals a truly bankrupt political discourse.
All Ed Miliband managed by way of protest was, some way through his third question, to call Cameron callous.
Just over a year ago, Miliband’s speech to his party conference was constructed around the refrain, Britain can do better than this. If only he’d get out there and make it happen.
• The headline on this article was amended shortly after launch
