And another thing…

TORY blogger James Cleverly seems to have a problem with Labour’s latest party political ad.

“It proves beyond a doubt that the spirit Draper (sic) and McBride is still strong in Labour HQ,” he writes optimistically.

Nonsense, of course, though I admit I can see why Tories will want to raise the spectre of the two aforementioned individuals in every sentence that conatins the word “Labour”. 

But trying to pretend that any form of attack ad is the same as smear is… well, it’s a smear, isn’t it? Negative campaigning is an essential part of our democracy, if you define it as attacking your opponents. James might want to watch his beloved leader at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday (“But Brown never answers any of the questions, it says here on this Tory Party HQ memo…”). There’s not much positive campaigning there, is there? Unless you define positive campaigning as innuendo about Brown’s personality and attacks on other ministers, attacks on the government’s record on the economy, attacks on the government’s record on the environment, attacks… you catch my drift?

And as Leader of the Opposition, that’s Cameron’s job. I’m not saying the Tories shouldn’t attack their main political opponents. They are expected to. And the government will continue to attack the Tories. If you genuinely believed that another party’s policies would damage your country, it would be irresponsible not to warn people, to tell them your view.

If this advert is, as James claims, a smear against the Tories, then the Tories’ “Labour’s Tax Bombshell” advert in the 1992 general election was a smear against Labour. Except that it wasn’t; it was negative campaigning, and like a lot of negative campaigning, it was both legitimate and effective.

Alas, such negativity, although it’s been with us forever, and will be with us for longer, is just too, too horrid for poor James. Which makes you wonder why he even wants to be a politician.

AS WE leave behind us the “celebrations” of The Feast of the Ascension of the Blessed Margaret, this comment from Nicky reminds us that many of the myths spread by Tories since then aren’t actually just myths: they’re complete fabrications.

Here are some myths surrounding Margaret Thatcher and the 1979 election.

1. Jim Callaghan was a complacent old duffer who said ‘Crisis? What crisis?’
2. The winter of 1978/79 was an apocalyptical vision of hell on earth with rubbish piled up in the streets and the dead unburied. These horrors are still used by the Tory Party to put the fear of God into the electorate.
3. Mrs Thatcher arrived like Boudicea to mend a broken country and a broken economy.
4. We are now in a parallel situation to 1979, because Labour have wrecked the economy and the Tories are going to have to sort it out.

Here’s some myth-busting:

1. Callaghan was a former lieutenant in the Navy during WW2. He was inculcated with the principle of staying calm in a crisis. He wasn’t complacent, but he was irritated by the hysteria in the press, particularly the Tory supporting Sun and Daily Mail. Having said that, his aide when he returned from an international meeting in the Caribbean knew Callaghan had misjudged the situation by lecturing the assembled reporters on not running the country down, and also adding he’d been quite relaxed during his time abroad and had even gone swimming in the sea. This resulted in the famous Sun headline ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ – which was actually the title of a 1975 album by prog rock band Supertramp. (The line came from the film ‘Day of the Jackal’, apparently.)

2. The winter of discontent was pretty bad, although not actually the vision of hell that it’s hyped up to be. The bit about the dead going unburied for example – that was a two week unofficial strike which was confined to Liverpool. There was also the strike by refuse collectors in London which resulted in rubbish piling up in Leicester Square, which got a lot of media coverage. However, for most people life carried on pretty normally. By February 1979 the government had reached an agreement with the TUC (a concordat called the ‘The Economy, the Government, and Trade Union Responsibilities’ ) to bring the situation under control.

3. Ted Heath – deeply unpopular even with the Tories – had left the economy in a parlous state when Labour came to power in 1974. By 1979 considerable progress had been made in bringing down inflation and unemployment. The ground work for the bonanza of North Sea Oil had been done. Mrs Thatcher of course benefited from revenue of North Sea Oil. She could have used that to invest in British industry, but instead she decimated our industrial base (and made us reliant from coal from abroad) and squandered it all on unemployment benefit.

4. The Tories are desperately keen to present our economic woes as a home-grown recession, when it quite obviously isn’t. It’s a global economic crisis. Also, exactly how is Cameron going to ‘fix’ the situation? Has he got a vast windfall from North Sea Oil, or has he got any utilities to sell off? Unfortunately for him, he hasn’t.

I WAS called today by an Australian journalist who was researching a piece on political blogging in the UK. He asked a question which has become something of a cliché in blogging circles: why does the right wing dominate the blogosphere?

The received wisdom suggests that it’s because Labour is in government and blogging, by its nature, lends itself to oppositional language. I think that might be partly true, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.

Both Guido and Iain Dale started their blogging efforts (I think) in 2004. This was at a time when Labour activists were undoubtedly feeling a tad discouraged in the aftermath of Iraq and the media had started to fall out of love with Tony Blair’s leadership. Although the Tories were hardly in the ascendancy (Michael Howard was leader, after all), there was clearly an appetite in the party for a discussion about its direction in the period up to, and following, the impending general election, an appetite which, arguably, didn’t exist to the same extent in Labour.

Guido, not being a Tory blogger per se, managed to tap into the “a plague on both their houses” mentality which culminated in a combined Labour/Conservative vote share in 2005 of less than 70 per cent.

And Labour and leftie blogs have been playing catch-up ever since.

Either that or most Labour blogs are just rubbish. You pays your money you takes your choice.

HIGHER tax rates, so received wisdom argues, don’t actually result in a higher tax take. High earners find ways to avoid paying it, either through hiring clever accountants or by fleeing the country altogether.

The problem with this argument, of course, is, who’s to say what is the optimum level for a higher tax rate? Why is 40 per cent seen as the ideal level? Why not 35? Or 30? Why not scrap the higher rate altogether? After all, if higher tax rates result in no extra revenue (or, as some argue, result in actually lowering revenue) then making everyone pay the basic income tax level on all income will result in a windfall for the Treasury…

But if higher rates actually do result in less tax take, why is George Osborne refusing to commit to scrapping the 50p rate if he takes office? Surely, if he actually believed that revenue to the Treasury will be lowered by taxing high earners more, then he could save the country money by scrapping it.

Or does George not actually believe that? I think we should be told.

JUST watched Damian Green’s statement in response to the news he won’t be charged.

As I said earlier today on another thread, I have been careful not to pre-judge Damian’s guilt or innocence, choosing the old fashioned tradition of waiting until the police investigation had finished.

But my! Isn’t he enjoying his “wounded martyr” status! He continues to pedal the nonsense that his arrest was a political one — “the first arrest of an opposition politician since Britain became a democracy”. What pompous nonsense! I accept that it plays to the Tories’ own propaganda agenda, but where is the evidence that this was a politically motivated arrest?

This is it:

• Damian Green is a Conservative MP.
• Damian Green has issued some press releases that were unhelpful to the government.
• Damian Green was arrested and investigated.
• The investigation concluded he should face no charges.

Well, that’s a prima facie case, then, isn’t it? He’s a Tory MP, he was arrested, so therefore it must have been politically-motivated.

We don’t have a politicised police force in this country. The Tory trolls and the libertarians would love it to be so, so that their paranoia could be justified, but it’s simply not the case.

The fact is that the police did what they had to do after being alerted to the possibility that the law had been broken. And in arresting Damian and investigating the case against him, they were doing what we pay the police to do.

Personally, I quite like Damian, and I’m glad it turned out he had done nothing to warrant a charge. But without the investigation, no-one could make that conclusion.

SO BOB Quick has resigned.

There will, no doubt, be those who will rub their hands in glee, since this was the officer who dared criticise the Conservative Party during the Damian Green investigation.

But it says a lot about our society that in the middle of a crucial anti-terrorist operation, there are some who are rubbing their hands in glee at the removal of someone they saw as a poliical enemy.

Whether it was right or not for him to pay for a mistake with his job, I can’t accept that now was a good time to quit.

CONSERVATIVEHOME editor Tim Montgomerie describes Daniel Hannan’s scheduled appearance at his party’s spring conference as “an extra incentive to apply for a pass if you haven’t already.”

So let’s get this straight: if a keynote address by your leader, David Cameron, and a plethora of Shadow Cabinet members wasn’t enough to persuade you to attend, then Hannan’s appearance will?

Splendid!

Now, anyone like to guess what Hannan won’t be allowed to speak on during his address? 

“I really think it needs to be said, Eric.”

“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel… you are not going to mention the words N, H or S.”

“But I’ve got a really brilliant line on it: ‘it is the devalued system of a devalued nation’. What do you think?”

“Daniel, it’s not going to happen.”

“Anne Coulter liked it…”

“Oh, here we go again with Anne Bloody Coulter! Look, just stick to economics.”

“Oh, you mean the nationalisation of the car industry? Unforgiveable!”

“No, Daniel, just leave the car industry alone, will you? Just plain economics, okay?”

“Ah, you mean Iceland’s economic miracle! Got you!”

“Daniel, look, just forget it. If you can’t stay on message, just forget it.”

(SILENCE)

“Can I do another boats metaphor?”

“Yes, you can do a boats metaphor.” 

OPPOSITION parties don’t win elections by appealing to their own voters. When Labour won in 1997, we won by persuading Tory voters to switch their support to us. And if the Tories are to win next time, they have to have a wide enough appeal to persuade Labour voters to make the switch. Convincing core Tory voters to vote for Cameron won’t guarantee them any more support than they won in 2005.

So why has Edward Garnier, the Shadow Justice Minister, decided to raise the spectre of a future Tory government repealling the Hunting Act? Who, beyond those who will always vote Tory anyway, will be pleased by this prospect?

In fact, isn’t it more likely to harm the Tories’ prospects? There will be plenty of floating voters who might well be considering switching to Cameron’s party but who are unlikely to welcome the re-opening of this old chestnut.

So where is the politics in Garnier’s comments? Which group of voters previously sceptical about the Tories will now be more likely to vote Conservative?

The wisdom of his comments is even more  questionable when you consider the oft-repeated claim by pro-hunting interests that, despite the Hunting Act, there are more hunts taking place in Britain than ever before. So everyone’s happy, right?

So again I ask: why raise this now? It’s about as sensible for the Tories as the “Tory toff” attack is for Labour.

THE One has spoken again.

Daniel Hannan MEP, the most popular politician in the Tory Party, has appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox TV show in the US to claim that the NHS was “a mistake” that “has made people iller”.

All music to the ears of Hannity, who is so right wing he probably thinks Donald Rumsfield’s a communist. 

So what will Hannan’s “leader”, David Cameron, think of his views? Cameron is still trying to convince the nation that he’s a supporter of the NHS. This should prove difficult since it was Cameron huimself who devised the “Patient’s Passport” for inclusion in the Tories’ 2005 general election manifesto. This wheeze, you may remember, was to drain billions of pounds from the NHS and divert it to the private health sector. But although Cameron may privately agree with Hannan’s contempt for “socialized medicine”, he can’t afford to let this particular mask slip this side of a general election.

Can we assume that Hannan’s extremist anti-NHS views are shared by a substantial proportion of his party? Will Cameron disown The One and his comments? There have always been a substantial number of Tories who have tolerated rather than supported the NHS. Can Cameron risk offending them by carpeting Hannan? Or will he attempt some kind of fudge by dismissing his comments as being part of “a wide debate” within the party?

This is the relevant clip. Apologies for it being completely out of sync. If you have a stronger stomach than I and can bear to watch the whole thing, it’s over at LabourHome.

UPDATE at 8.10 am on Sunday: As expected, most readers are at least as hostile towards universal free healthcare as is Hannan. Which is all very well, but what are the chances that the Tories will be honest about their view on the NHS between now and the general election? Let’s hope The One gets an awful lot more air time between now and then.

THERE’S a certain predictability about the right’s response to the G20.

Never in a million years were the Tory-supporting blogs going to concede that Gordon had achieved anything substantial. The trouble was that although most Tories wanted McCain to beat Obama last November, they recognise the president’s popularity, here and internationally. And they wouldn’t want to jeopardise Cameron’s photocall with Obama, so the trick was to decide in advance how to diss the conference while going easy on Obama.

That seems to be what some of the right wing blogs have done (although at least Iain Dale conceded that Gordon put in a show-stopping performance at the post-conference press briefing). 

Except it’s hard to imagine that if they had been written this time last week and scheduled for publication today, they would have read any different.