Swivel-War

The Conservative party appears to want to fight a civil war.

I think this analysis is interesting; http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5dde96d6-c138-11e2-b93b-00144feab7de.html#axzz2UFOuJEH7

Mr Ganesh makes an interesting point; that the modernizers in the Conservative party were right, that the reforms were not enough. He suggests that by making austerity such an integral part of the election campaign the Conservatives did the right thing in the medium term, but that it has hurt them in the polls.

I disagree.

They did play up the tough stance they were going to take.  Budgets were to be "slashed", "swingeing cuts", blood curdling calls for swinging and axe, etc.

I didn't understand it at the time, and I still don't. Because there have never been any plans to do anything as radical as that. The budgets that Osborne wrote kept spending flat in real terms, they just didn't increase at the boom era rate that Labour had been planning, and hoped to close the budget deficit when tax income increased during the recovery.

That plan has failed.

The euro crisis has delayed the recovery, there has been no rise in tax revenues, and we therefore still have a large budget deficit.

Now they have a terrible mismatch between the rhetoric and the reality. The public believe that spending has been brutally cut, yet the reality is that it is higher in real terms than two years ago.

Every piece of negative economic data is evidence that the cuts have hurt the economy, and every time public services don't live up to expectation it can be blamed on cuts to their budgets.

The problem is that Osborne has left the Conservatives without any achievement for all of this, the budget deficit is still gaping. It is absolutely the worst of all worlds, they have the reputational damage of being the party to have slashed services, but are unable to claim any particular achievement.

I think the political analysis of the party's reform is still being viewed through a 'third way' Blairite prism. That the party that sits on the centre ground wins the most votes, because they win the votes on their side plus the centre they now occupy. I have a strong hunch that this actually doesn't work for the Conservative party. I don't think the Tory brand is popular enough to actually win under those conditions.

If you ran an election with identical personalities and policies for both the Labour and Conservative party, I think Labour would win a hefty victory. For the Conservative party to win an election, they'll need to actually want to change the country, rather than just administer it with a New Labour + 1degree to the right policy booklet.

Osborne has been the biggest let down. His budgets have been tremendously Brownite, tweaking, tampering and trying to score headline victories without really doing much. They just aren't likeable enough to win like that.