Dave seeks economic battleground

With middle England increasingly battered by the credit crunch and rising inflation, Conservative leader Dave Cameron has chosen to make the state of the economy a key battleground with Labour. For many years the strong state of the economy meant that it got a low rating on voters' rankings of important issues. But voters tend to punish governments for economic failure rather than reward them for success and the economy is becoming a key issue again.

Of course in the global recession of the early 1990s (but before 'Black' Wednesday damaged the Conservatives' ratings for economic competence for fifteen years) voters stayed (just) with the Conservatives in the 1992 election on the principle of 'stick to nurse for fear of something worse'. However, that may not work for New Labour despite their attempts to depoliticise economic management. Voters are likely to blame Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling for tight family budgets rather than Mervyn King or the downturn in the global economy. Or so the Conservatives hope.

Dave Cameron has stressed that a Conservative government should be judged on whether it delivered economic stability rather than tax cuts. This message does not please many Conservative activists, but it is a responsible one which enhances the image of the opposition as a government in waiting. Mr Cameron emphasised that he wants to cut the size of the state but that reducing borrowing came before tax cuts.

He also said that he would seek a restoration of Britain's opt out from the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty. How feasible that is is open to question, but some employers would argue that Britain's reputation for labour market flexibility has been undermined by measures on working hours (the working time directive) and proposals on temporary and agency workers (albeit resisted by the Government). The contrary view would be that these measures provide necessary protection to workers at a time when unions have weakened.

The difficulty is that opting out would require the unanimous agreement of all the other 26 EU members which is a near impossibility. It could be that Conservative strategists regard this as good ground on which to provoke a crisis with the EU but that is a risky path which may not win the support of the businesses the Conservatives are trying to help.

Cold caller threat to voters

This alarming photograph appeared in the Financial Times yesterday. It is obviously posed with the photographer standing behind the voter. Some hapless Labour supporter in Stevenage has been asked 'would you like the prime minister to call round today?'

Gordon Brown is looking dapper and smiling, conveying some of the personal warmth that is at odds with his dour image. However, what would be really alarming would be to find the Miss Goody Two Shoes of New Labour, Harriet Harman, peering round your door.

Why Stevenage? Local MP and novelist Barbara Follett, whose seat is on the line at the next election after her majority plunged from 12,000 in 1997 to 3,000 in 2005 put it this way, 'What has happened with governments of both colours is that they tend to look after the people at the ends of the system, the very poor or the better-off. And then you have a big block in the middle, C2s, Ds, and that is what we have got in the new towns.'

The visit of Labour's dynamic duo was a prelude to the council elections on May 1st. If the Conservatives do well, it will give further momentum to the narrative of an inevitable Conservative victory which could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gordon and Harriet were hoping to meet the legendary 'Mondeo Man' in Stevenage, although perhaps they should have gone to Worcester in search of the ultimate median voter, 'Worcester woman'.

Of the 4,500 seats to be contested on May 1st, about 3,000 were last fought in 2001 when Labour was hit by discontent over the intervention in Iraq. Anotherr 1,500 are new seats, largely the result of the creation of unitary authorities. If Labour lose further ground, particularly in the south, it will not be a good sign for their prospects of getting back into an election winning position.

At Prime Minister's Questions yesterday Dave Cameron berated the government for a 37 per cent increase in the rise of milk etc. It is difficult to see what a Conservaive government could do to control world food prices driven by supply and demand. Do they plan to bring back food subsidies? But then Gordon Brown was equally disingenuous when he claimed that inflation was only 2 per cent, using the CPI index that does not reflect everyday experience.

Bozza's Zone 5 and 6 strategy

Boris Johnson, the 4/9 favourite to be the next Mayor of London, is following a canny strategy designed to mobilise the Conservative vote. His 'Zone 5 and 6' strategy (based on Travelcard zones) involves him travelling, often by train or tube, to outer areas like Hillingdon and Sidcup and meeting commuters at stations. He has also been paying some attention to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which is solidly Conservative but had a poor turnout at the last mayoral election.

He is following the 'below the radar' tactics used by Michael Howard which although they only produced a 0.6 increase in the Tory vote at the last general election led to the Conservatives gaining 23 extra seats. However, Bozza will probably be not using the 'dog whistle' tactic. The problem with the dog whistle (a focus on issues such as migration) was that it could be heard by everyone and reinforced the suspicions of some AB voters that the Conservatives were the 'nasty' party.

Policy papers issued by the Johnson campaign make no reference to the Conservative campaign and come in a variety of colours (a colleague of mine in Australia has done some fascintaing work on colours and politics). Ken Livingstone has similarly avoided branding himself as the Labour candidate, recalling his earlier spell in office as an independent repudiated by the Labour machine.

In a sense this is all fair enough as Londoners are electing an individual to a powerful post as much as they are voting for a party.

Red Ken comes over all Green

Sian Berry

Kev Livingstone is making a pitch for green votes in the London mayoral election. He may have little success in attracting first preference votes from the Green's impressive Sian Berry. The Oxford educated sciene graduate is surprisingly the only woman candidate apart from a rather grim lifelong revolutionary put forward by the Left List. Rather unfairly described as a 'ditzy blonde' by one commentator in conversation with me, Berry is both smart and personable.

Ken is, of course, going after supplementary votes from those who choose Berry as their favoured candidate. These could be crucial if he can close the gap with leading contender Conservative Boris Johnson. Some of the ideas put forward by Ken look like crowd pleasers, e.g., turning Victoria Embankment into 'London beach' for the whole of August. If it's such a good idea (and it has apparently worked in Paris), why hasn't he implemented it before?

However, a key battleground will be the congestion charge. In what looks like old style 'envy politics' rather than a real contribution to a greener London, Ken is proposing to slap a £25 C-charge in sport cars, 4 x 4s and people carriers.

I was down in London yesterday and it seems to me that the congestion has been getting worse for some time. The West End seemed to be gridlocked (I was on foot, I hasten to add). Apparently there has been a dramatic increase in the number of cars in London with 'private hire by pre-booking' stickers. It's not difficult or expensive to get a private hire license and once you have it you are exempt from the C-charge. People will always find loopholes in regulations.

Tories worried about Bozza time bomb

At first it looked analogous with winning the war in Iraq: secure the victory and then worry about what you do afterwards. But now the Conservatives are getting increasingly worried about possible collateral damage if Boris Johnson becomes the new mayor of London, as looks likely.

Asked if there were concerns that a poorly run London under a Tory mayor could rebound on Dave Cameron, a shadow cabinet minister is reported to have told the Financial Times: 'Absolutely ... we need very good people in place to help Boris.'

Some analysts think that the mayoral contest is a dress rehearsal for the general election campaign with calls for change from the Conservatives being contrasted with Labour charges of inexperience. Boris Johnson is being advised on his strategy by Australian election guru Lynton Crosby.

Labour loses ground in the killing fields

To Labour's high command they are known as the killing fields. They are in London, along the M4 corridor, the north Kent coast, the south coast and the M11 corridor. They include lots of C1 (junior non-manual) and C2 voters (skilled manual). They are the voters who turned to Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and to Tony Blair in 1997.

Now Lord (Giles) Radice who wrote a famous pamphlet on southern discomfort in 1992 is warning that it is emerging in a new and more complex form. New Labour needs to win back families who have been hit by high interest rates, are concerned that taxes are not being wisely spent, and are worried by immigration and crime.

This crisis has sparked an ideological debate within New Labour. The left believes that Gordon Brown is siding with the Blairite modernisers. A fresh set of advisers have been brought into No.10 from the media, advertising and banking. His chief adviser, Stephen Carter, is portrayed by left opponents as the head of a 'Lib Dem cell' in Downing Street. Jennifer Moses, an American former Goldman Sachs banker who didn't notice when £1m went missing from her bank account worked for a Lib Dem-oriented think tank.

The modernisers want Gordon Brown to speed up public service reform and to address the perception that his government is uneasy with wealth and aspiration. Aspiration was used as an organising theme in the Queen's Speech, but events since then have served to undermine its resonance. Reforms to capital gains tax and action on non-doms affected few voters, but could be portrayed as anti-wealth and anti-enterprise.

Critics on the left say that the core vote is being neglected, while Hazel Blears has insisted that Labour has to be a party of the affluent as well as of the poor. In reality, Gordon Brown may welcome a row with the Labour left. He was as much a part of the New Labour project as Tony Blair and the ideological differences between them were very slim. But it suited him to play up the differences in the succession battle. There were big personality differences, of course, but the prime minister is less dour and more engaging on a one to one basis than he appears in public. He is very good at getting the information and ideas he needs out of someone very quickly.

Before the narrative of a foregone conclusion to the next election is pushed too far (notwithstanding Labour's very real southern vulnerability) it should be remembered that Dave Cameron is unlikely to be able to deliver much in the way of tax cuts. Indeed, shadow chief secretary Phil Hammond has warned that tax cuts could be the 'the great bonus of the second election'.

In 1979 James Callaghan, as a former naval NCO, noted that there was one of those great sea changes in British politics that produced Thatcherism. Another sea change in the mid 1990s led to the 'third way' of Tony Blair with its mix of social democracy and neo-liberalism tilted towards the latter. Another sea change could now be on the way, but the currents are more conflicting and turbulent than they appear on the surface.

It all goes off in Cabinet

Two arguments have caused trouble in Gordon Brown's Cabinet during the last week. The issue of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is not yet fully resolved, but it is understood that an 'accommodation' will be made to allow Labour MPs to abstain on parts of the Bill so that their conscience as Catholics is not infringed. One Catholic minister, Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy, is belived to have consider resignation, while some aspects of the Bill caused difficulty for transport secretary Ruth Kelly, who is a member of Opus Dei, among others. The Government also faced an Easter Day attack from the Catholic hierarchy which is not a trivial matter electorally given historic links between the Roman Catholic church and the Labour and the fact that communicant Catholics in Britain outnumber Anglicans.

A somewhat less serious but still divisive row involved the environmental friendliness or otherwise of the cars used by ministers. Transport secretary Ruth Kelly was also to the fore here and she also got some publicity this week when she fulfilled a lifelong ambition of riding in the cab of a commuter train.

The argument was about whether to replace British built ministerial cars with Japanese Toyota Prius hybrids. I do intend to test drive the Prius at some time, although whether it is as environmentally friendly as claimed is questionable. There are also issues about its performance. One might also ask, given that it looks like being an increasing commercial success (particularly given road tax incentives) why other manufacturers don't come out with their own version.

Self-confessed petrolhead John Hutton questioned whether importing the Prius sent out the wrong signal to British manufacturers. One might think that this was compatible with the globalisation rhetoric the government favours, but Jack Straw and Ed Balls argued that the move smacked of gesture politics.

Incidentally, a friend of mine was commissioned to write a history of the Government Car Service, one of the more obscure branches of government. It hasn't appeared yet, but I have seen some chapters and it has some fascinating stories.

The Sunday Times went to town with a number of stories on the 'government falling apart' theme, one suggesting that a backbench malcontent had 'broken cover' to suggest an 'Anthony Eden solution', i.e., that Gordon Brown should resign on grounds of ill health. If you probe hard enough, you will always find some peripheral figure ready to make some off the wall statement. Another story suggested that a shift of just 7,500 votes would give the Tories victory. That's like suggesting that it's still artithmetically possible for Liverpool to win the Premiership.

What is interesting about this is that the Murdoch empire does prefer to back successful politicians as they liked to be linked to those in power (perfectly sensible from their perspective). Hence, their approval of Tony Blair. Clearly they think that, like John Major's government, that of Gordon Brown is now rotting like a fish from the head up.

I think that they need to distinguish between disllusionment with the government and enthusiasm for the Conservatives. There is still some evidence of reservations about them. What we could see at the next election is a combination of low turnout and more voting for minor parties. Their share has gone up from three per cent in the early 1950s to nearly a third at the last election. The recent row about MPs' expenses has been damaging to the reputation of the political process and reinforces a popular sense of distance from the 'political class'.

While I think the Conservatives will be the largest party in the Commons after the last election, it is by no means done and dusted, as the Tories themselves realise.