And another thing…

IN KEEPING with my (slightly) new look election-ready masthead to the blog, here’s a video that’s as close to the positive message I advocated two months ago, arguing that Labour could do worse than try to replicate Ronald Reagan’s outstandingly effective partly election broadcast, “It’s morning again in America”.

This is about as close as we’ve come so far, and it’s actually pretty powerful, although I still think we could do with some of the emotion and heartstring-tugging the Americans are so good at.

Hat-tip to Allan Davies:

IF YOU can put to one side your (and my) partiality for a second, let’s have a look at what’s happening to the Conservatives at the moment.

However far ahead they are in the polls, no-one doubts that the gap has narrowed in recent weeks. Labour’s hope is that that trend continues or even accelerates between now and polling day. Cameron’s hope, of course, is that the gap widens again. No-one can predict either development with any certainty, though it’s hard to see what might reverse the trend towards Labour, given the assault we, and Gordon Brown, have endured already. What else is there in the Tories armoury? What do they imagine they can pull out of the bag that voters haven’t already seen?

James Forsth of The Spectator seems to agree that something is going terribly wrong with the Tory campaign. I’ve always maintained – to indignant disagreement from Tory bloggers – that there isn’t anywhere near the same levels of enthusiasm in the country for Cameron’s new Tories as there was in 1997 for Blair’s New Labour. I’m sure we can all at least agree that that much is true.

Other historical parallels are tenuous at best. After Labour’s cataclysmic performance in the 1983 election, Neil Kinnock was always going to be given at least two goes at overturning the Tories’ massive Commons majority. But there is at least one valid comparison of him and Blair: Blair had one shot. Had he failed to become Prime Minister in 1997, he would have been replaced very soon afterwards as Labour leader, presumably by GB. Similarly, Cameron has one shot at this. There is far too much grumbling from the Tory old guard, too many bitter pills swallowed by MPs so desperate to become ministers that they’re prepared to parrot the Cameron line… for the time being. But Cameron himsef knows that failure in the 2010 general election will mean a career as a back bench elder statesman of his party in the mould of William Hague.

In the meantime, it’s hard to come across a single Tory MP whose confidence has not been dented in the past few months. The talk has gone from how large the Tory majority will be, to how many seats short of a majority the party will win, to whether or not they’ll even be the largest party after polling day.

I’m not saying for certain that the polling gap will continue to narrow, but I would be surprised if there weren’t at least a few Tories who are contemplating, with the appropriate amount of dread, the prospect of (at least) another four years of opposition.

Hat-tip to Douglas McLellan, by the way.

“I KNOW that Labour hasn’t done everything right and I know I’m not perfect… take a second look at us and take a long hard look at them.”

Those words from Gordon Brown are probably the most powerful – and potentially the most damaging for the Tories – he has uttered in this long campaign so far.

IS IT just me, or do I detect a certain level of nervousness among some of the right-wing blogmeisters?

As two polls put Labour within seven and eight points of the Tories, and Cameron looks for a policy – any policy – on which to perform a U-turn, Tory asumptions about being swept to power on a tidal wave of enthusiasm for Dave seem to be thinner on the ground of late.

The only person who seems absolutely convinced beyond doubt that they’re heading to an unambiguous win, if not a landslide, is Iain Dale, who interprets the retirement of a 65-year-old Labour MP as defeatism (but presumably sees the retirement of a 65-year-old Tory as a sensible move to make way for an aspiring minister).

Yet, look through some of the comments left by cyberTories on this and other blogs. Just sample some of the vitriol used by them to attack the government and Gordon Brown personally. According to them, this is the worst government in history. We’re regarded by every single voter as traitorous, incompetent liars. We’ve burdoned the next five thousand generations of Britons with a billion and a half pounds of debt each. And that’s before they get to the personalised attacks on Gordon’s character and mental health.

And yet, and yet…

Surely, if there were any validity in these silly accusations, the Tories would indeed be heading for a landslide? That at the end of the longest and deepest recession for half a century the Tories can barely get their opinion poll lead into double figures and their own poll rating above 40 per cent says a great deal about the suspcion with which David Cameron is viewed by sensible voters.

You have to wonder what the polls would look like if the Tories had elected a charismatic and trustworthy leader instead of him (presuming, of course, that such an alternative been available at the time)?

And if you turn down the volume of the telly and listen carefully, that sound you can just about hear in the distance is the sound of fingernails at Conservative Central Office being chewed to the quick.

BEHOLD,  a blast from the past!

The one on the left is legendary Scottish sports TV presenter, Arthur Montford. And we all recognise the long-haired hippy in the middle who was obviously too busy to bother zipping his flies up.

But who is the Third Man? Why, none other than the Rt. Hon. John Reid MP, back in the day when everyone drove Cortinas and looked like John Thaw off of The Sweeney.

Published in today’s Scotsman.

SINCE I’ve made a resolution not to blog about the weather, I might as well say something about the only other issue that’s got the chattering classes all excited: the leaders’ debate.

First, a few observations.

I do hope that at last we can get rid of the permanent ticker tape on Sky News asking us to sign their bloody petition as if their whining about wanting a debate actually qualifies as news.

Nick Clegg? WTF?! If we must have a debate, it would surely have been far better to involve only the main party leaders, with a separate one for Clegg, Salmond and whoever is leading UKIP these days. As it is, we’re going to have Brown and Cameron talking about the big issues, occasionally interrupted by the Liberal leader’s sanctimonious hand-wringing and lip-quivering sermons on “trust”.

Remember the 1992 presidential debates between Bush Snr, Clinton and Ross Perot? You get the picture.

As for the SNP, of course they’ll fulfill everyone’s expectations by having a wee tantrum. But their previously successful policy of book-burning preventing an interview with John Major being broadcast nationally in 1992 won’t work this time – too many of us can get the English regions on our Sky boxes. But if a Scottish debate is to be held, I assume Alex Salmond will not be representing his party, since it’s a Westminster election and Alex won’t be a candidate. (Having just typed that sentence, I now realise that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot summon any interest at all in who represents the SNP in the debates, but I thought I’d make the point anyway.)

Barring any legal difficulties, election debates will now become part of UK general election coverage. My guess is that the response of the general public to the leaders’ performances will have less impact on the final result than will the coverage of the debate by the media, since I doubt if the TV audiences will be large enough to have much of a direct effect (and I imagine the audience numbers will drop with each successive debate).

RORY Bremner seems to think that affecting a Scottish accent is all it takes to impersonate the PM. John Culshaw, on the other hand, has nailed it.

I’m sure even Gordon would find this funny…

Hat-top: Obnoxio the Clown

GORDON Brown made an unintended (but rather good) attempt at stand-up poetry on Monday night as he addressed the Parliamentary Party:

It has been a difficult time, a difficult day
And difficult letters are on the way

So is this a new development in political communication, I wonder? At the risk of encouraging some unprintable attempts at similar rhymes from readers, may I suggest this for David Cameron:

It’s Gordon Brown, not me, who’s failing
I do hope someone’s told Chris Grayling

Or how about this for Nick Clegg:

Why can’t everyone be as pure as me?
The voters would thank, not moan at us
Yes they’re less honest than I
But I’m going home to cry
Cos I can’t find a rhyme for “sanctimonious”

Okay, folks – do your worst. But please remember, this is a family blog.

AFTER all the hysteria and oh-so-clever observations about similarities to BNP policy, there’s actually been some intelligent analysis of Gordon Brown’s commitment to a new approach to teenage single parents.

The BBC Magazine website looks at Barking Foyer, a state-of-the-art complex where teenage parents get the kind of support GB was talking about in his speech.

After the furore caused by my earlier post on this subject, I had a discussion with a colleague about possible solutions to all of this. “I’ve thought about this for years,” he told me, “and the only thing that makes any sense would be supervised hostels. Announce that from nine months’ time, every new teenage parent would either have to ive with with their family or in a hostel, and you would see an immediate massive cut in teenage pregnancies.”

Shortly afterwards a young woman of 17 and her boyfriend came to see me at an advice surgery. Having suffered a miscarriage a year earlier, she was pregnant again and was seeking my help in getting a flat of her own, since there was no room for her and the baby in her mother’s home. I took the coward’s way out: I didn’t ask her why, at such a young age, and with no job or accommodation of her own, she had chosen to become pregnant. Not my buiness, I told myself.

But it was my business. For a start, I was being asked for help to find a flat for her. And my council and income taxes would be used to help support her in the lifestyle she had chosen.

I wish I had been able to point her in the direction of supported accommodation. Instead, she will probably get a flat of her own and her child will be far more likely to be brought up in poverty than other children whose parents chose instead to embark on careers before deciding to have a family.

Although the commentariat has calmed down since Gordon’s coments, there will be occasional and violent eruptions from those who are simply appalled at the notion that we should ever pass judgment on anyone else’s life choices, or put any obstacles in the way of single parents who want a flat of their own, even though they have no means (and often no intention) of paying for it.

Whether Gordon’s commitment will bear real fruit will be a matter for the electorate and the Treasury. “It cannot be right,” he told conference, “for a girl of sixteen, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.” Not only was he talking the language of moral absolutism – he was saying what the overwhelming majority of ordinary voters of all classes assume without having to jump through the intellectual hoops that many on the Left seem to regard as obligatory.

If I HAD said something like this, I would’ve been excoriated:

And I do think it’s time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of sixteen, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.

From now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly. That’s better for them, better for their babies and better for us all in the long run.

Oh, I’ve just remembered – I did. And I was.