A few days ago I published a tweet suggesting that if the next election was to make a difference then the campaign had to be deeply partisan. Polly Toynbee has the same theme in the Guardian this morning, saying:
This time there is no safe option. With growth returning, only a frontal assault can turn people against the complacent and inept nastiness of Cameron and Osborne economics.
My work has a bias to the poor within it. I happen to think all of conscience and faith should have such bias because the system is already stacked against those with least. When the party that is the majority partner in the government is now so clearly acting against the best interests of the majority in this country the next election is no time for other parties to ape them; it is time for outright opposition.
Nothing less will do if politics is to speak to most people in the UK, or whatever is left of it by then.
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I am sure that all parties, including the Greens, will come up with polices that are vote winners. This is why Ukip is a threat to both Labour and the Tories. politics is about telling the voters what they want to hear, that’s how they get votes. That’s how Tony Blair did so well and how Labour hasn’t done anything since then.
I wish we would stop lauding Blair as the great election winner. As I remember the Tories from the late 80s onward Screaming Lord Sutch could have beaten them – all right with a bit of effort.
@ David Drinkwater
Quite! And people always forget that, despite her victories (and even more Blair’s) Thatcher never got a larger share of the vote than Sir alec Douglas-Home LOST on in 1964! (Not to speak of the 4 million votes Blair lost between 1997 and 2005 – some supremacy!)
Mr. M.,
You keep passing on reports from those on the Left saying that the ‘public sector’ is dying on its feet and that any cuts what-so-ever will bring a ‘plague o’ locusts o’er the land’…..
….yet it appears that some Universities are so awash with cash that they can afford to advertise for a ‘PR bod’ on an eyewatering sum of cash….
http://jobs.marketingweek.co.uk/job/463509/head-of-corporate-communication/
I can’t help but think what else the taxpayers cash could be spent on….or even should the cash be spent at all….
PS: Noticed you got a name check in the DM on Monday (think it was Monday as it was a paper that was left lying around at work).
If you create public bodies in the model of the corporate world they waste money like the corporate world
Fair comment Mr. M….does that mean then you’d sack ’em and put ’em on the Dole…..
The House of Parliament at Westminster is a magnificent structure & would make a wonderful museum.
Take the actual legislature & move it to Stoke, Sheffield or Ipswich.
That would sort out house prices, structural unemployment etc at a stroke.
The USA, Australia, India, Germany & Brazil all have this in common; the biggest city isn’t the capital city.
I will believe that Labour are serious when they say they are dropping their ludicrous insistence on following much the same fiscal policies as the ConDems!
Miliband’s approval rating jumped when he unveiled his timid policy of putting a cap on the price of the utilities. Even this slight prod at the establishment in favour of the people increased the amount of people likely to vote for them.
They should take the hint!
Watching BBC QT this week I was once again struck not by the differences but by the similarities of the major parties. The rise of UKIP, and the electoral success of the Lib-Dem’s at the last general election is indicative of the desperate desire of the electorate for a champion. As the tenet ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ disappears into the mists of time little of what the Labour Party says convinces people that they are any different to the rest of the rabble. A seeming inability to create a discourse based around the needs and aspirations of the unwaged, the disadvantaged the working poor, has isolated the Labour Party from its natural constituency.
People do not buy the ‘market knows best’ rhetoric any more.
It has been tried. It has failed.
From prisons to power generation the voting public has witnessed the risible attempts to supply services that the state once managed at least adequately well. But Miliband et al seem unable to divorce themselves from the Blairite neo-liberal thinking that has dominated the political agenda for three decades.If Attlee were alive today he would be a Green.
And yet the appetite among the electorate for a truly radical agenda has never, in my lifetime at least, been greater. Renationalisation of the rail companies, power generation and the utilities would be huge vote winners.
This is not the time for timidity or tinkering at the edges.
I agree Martin