Jonathan Freedland is correct: Labour need to start asking tough questions of the Tories. It isn’t ‘negative’ to expose the paucity of your opponents arguments. The media are allowing David Cameron a free ride as he keeps his head down, popping up only occasionally with banal soundbites like “new Labour is dead” (he surely cannot understand what joy those words bring to so many of us). But in a week when violent crime on the streets and rising fuel prices have dominated the news headlines if the Tories are we should focus on what the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition has had to offer. Instead, as Johann Hari observed,
Cameron is benefiting from a growing gap in British politics. While the Labour government’s flaws are (rightly) ripped from its stomach and left out in the sun for all to see, Cameron is being waved through with a cheery smile. He has not been subjected to even the gentlest frisking to check for sharp-edged policies.
The overwhelming number of Conservative MPs, never mind the electorate, don’t want to ‘hug-a-thug’… they want to thrash them within an inch of their lives before locking them up and throwing away the key. Posing alongside huskies with a daft grin on your face is good for the photographers, but tell us, David, what are the Conservative proposals for dealing with the issue of rising world oil prices? From what I recall of Gummer and the boy Goldsmith’s Quality of Life stuff they were advocating higher car tax for the larger and more polluting vehicles… is that still your way forward?
Try typing in ‘Cameron fuel crisis’ in to google and see what response you get. Of course, it is the Government’s job to govern, and the opposition’s job to expose their frailties, but as we get closer to a general election David Cameron is going to have to get off the fence, and Conservatives will be watching him just as closely as the electorate.
There are lots of Conservative Policies and this Policy-lite line is pure myth made all the more risible by the Labour party copying everything that emerges from Conservative thinking.
I also think it is unfair to say , as Nick Clegg did , that the Conservatives are promising the moon on a stick. Against considerable political pressure they have not promised tax cuts to the point where Labour MP s like Mc No Shame are suggesting Brown should outflank them on the right. We make no bones about the fact we are in exceedingly difficult times and maintaining the Public Sector without ruining the economy is not easy. Party members are prepared to get little of what they want for a long time , this happens when you have been in opposition for a long time . Remember
The Conservative case is not that this or that measure now is a magic bullet but that the feckless overspending of the last ten years has been wasted and now we are suffering because Labour did not mend the roof when the sun was shining. Labour MP`s continually underestimate the intelligence if voters (Look at the patronising Crewe farce ).
I’ve been thinking for a few days how not-so-nice Mr.Cameron is losing his green ‘liberal Conservatism’ as the polls rise for him. Green taxes thrown away. The Daily Mail fraternity pleased by a youth employment ‘strategy’ where the numbers just do not add up and which is based on good old Tory bullyboy tactics than any sense of reality.
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Add to this the ramblings of existing Tory MPs about ‘terrorists in Government in Ireland’- remember the ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ card?- and the omnipresent Gideon ‘George’ Osborne [surely the scariest Tory since J.Enoch] waiting in the wings with vicious tax cuts and vicious life choice cuts and we do have to ask- why are the media desperate to lash out at Labour and ignore the Tories going back to their usual form? They don’t think that they run the country- do they
Did everyone know Tony Blair’s policies before 1997!?!
I thought he rode to power on a slogan of “End Tory sleaze”!