Ideas@TheCentre
Don’t frighten the voters – UK election report
Peter Saunders |
16 April 2010
‘Let the baby-kissing begin.’ With these words, the BBC announced the start of Britain’s general election campaign, which is already turning out to be the most dishonest in living memory.
Everybody knows the country is bankrupt, but nobody will say what they’re going to do about it. The deficit is on the same scale as Greece; the public debt is bigger than at any time since World War II. But the first week of the campaign was taken up with an absurd argument about £6 billion of National Insurance revenues when the budget deficit is £167 billion! The parties are fiddling as the country burns.
Both parties have promised to maintain ‘front line services,’ and neither is talking about tax rises. Conservative leader David Cameron has promised health spending and foreign aid will be ring-fenced (never mind that Britain is still giving China £170 million per year in aid!).
Cameron is desperate to convince voters that the Tories have changed. They are now the nice party. He says the Thatcher years were divisive and that he will be ‘inclusive.’
But Labour wants to convince us that Cameron is a Thatcherite wolf in sheep’s clothing. This week, it launched a nationwide poster campaign based on the hugely popular BBC drama Ashes to Ashes in which a police officer is shot and wakes up in the 1980s. The poster portrays Cameron as Gene Hunt, the abrasive, politically-incorrect detective at the centre of the program. The tagline warns that the Tories will take us back to the 1980s.
But the campaign has backfired. Viewers like Gene Hunt! Cameron comes across as a rather prissy Eton toff. By portraying him as a no-nonsense tough guy, Labour has done him a huge favour.
But why do both parties think Thatcher is such a toxic brand? When she came to power in 1979, Britain was on its knees. The unions had made the country ungovernable, the Treasury was in hock to the IMF, and all the big industries were owned by the state and didn’t work. When the Tories lost office in 1997, they handed over one of the strongest economies in Europe. At a time when the country’s economy has again collapsed, you would think the Tories would be embracing this record, not trying to distance themselves from it.
The country is bust, but the parties won’t scare the voters with talk of nasty medicine to come. It may be time for the politicians to start kissing babies, but they are all determined not to frighten the children. Professor Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and will be contributing a weekly piece on the UK election.
