The Tories are struggling to get their campaign off the ground. Will the manifesto launch do it?
The politics could hardly be more difficult after last week’s sequence of misjudgments over non-dom status, the “backstabber” attack on Ed Miliband and what looked like the bizarre timing of the announcement of a new tax break for rich homeowners, the exemption of £1m family homes from inheritance tax.
If campaign uplift could be achieved by pure rhetoric, David Cameron’s speech as he launched the Tories’ 2015 manifesto would have it speeding down the runway. In an effective speech, he wove homage to Churchill with a bit of the beginning of the end, knitted in a tribute to Thatcher and the traditional Conservative commitment to creating a property owning democracy, and finished off with a touch of his own. That was an attempt to respond to the critics of politics as a business of trades and dividends by repeated references to the Aristotelian idea of A Good Life.
The political cross-dressing is getting bewildering. Who was he speaking to?
The Conservatives are now the party of hope and generosity, claimed by Ed Miliband on Monday to be less fiscally credible than the Greens. Labour argues that it is the party of fiscal rectitude, announcing in its manifesto a triple lock on spending and a pledge not to increase lower or higher-rate income tax.
In recent weeks, the Tories have struggled to shore up their rightwing against the depredations of Ukip, counting on what they imagined to be the unelectability of Miliband’s Labour party to deliver them the votes in the centre that they need for a majority.
At the same time the Tories have also been damaged by appearing to be the party of the rich, supported by donations from hedge funds, defenders of the non-dom status, offering tax breaks to a minority at the top and bearing down oppressively on people who need to rely on benefits at the bottom. So there were nods to the party’s core support on immigration, the EU and Trident.
Cameron’s overarching theme, however, sought to counter the impression of being hard-faced without actually altering any of the fundamentals. His proposition was carefully designed to appeal to voters who want a kinder, more generous Britain, a government that created the conditions for that good life.
The first of these, an extension of home ownership through the right to buy for housing association tenants, was trailed ahead of time. That left two headline innovations for the launch.
First, the commitment that anyone on the minimum wage would never have to pay income tax and the second, a pledge to double the amount of free childcare for four and five-year-olds from 15 to 30 hours for working families. The childcare promise will be expensive. The coalition has struggled to deliver affordable childcare, and its rising cost is a serious disincentive to work in low to middle income families.
Together with the rail fare freeze, the Tories will now hope they’ve come up with a package to meet the consistent Labour challenge on the cost of living.
Anything to negotiate on?
No one can explain where the cash will come from for the recent largesse, just like George Osborne’s promise of £8bn a year for the NHS by the end of the next parliament and the new inheritance tax break. The latter at least could be negotiated away, as it was in the last coalition deal. Trident was delayed then too, and it seems possible that that too could be knocked back to avoid starting on the £25bn spend the upgrade is currently estimated to cost. So could the whole new right to buy offer.
Indeed it is not hard to imagine the circumstances when most of the generosity of the past week could evaporate, while the £12bn cut in welfare remains. The elimination of the deficit reduction was the principal raison d’etre of the coalition, but it never delivered.
What are the red lines?
English votes for English laws, in some form. The whole constitutional question is clearly going to be one of the dominant concerns of the next parliament, whoever’s in power. Cameron and earlier Theresa May were also both emphatic about the need for new security measures, including more powers to intercept and gather communications that the Lib Dems repeatedly watered down last time.
Many a Tory election campaign has been built around the basic principle of “don’t let Labour ruin it”. When Chris Patten was running the campaign in 1992, he often used to refer to the sunlit uplands that were just over the brow of the hill. It was the same Chris, now Lord Patten who warned Tory strategists not to underestimate Ed Miliband. If they had listened then, they wouldn’t be playing such frantic catchup now.
