News from Labour Matters

Off message: Day one of the election campaign won by Labour

Hello and welcome to the first article in our new ‘Off message’ blog, written by our Editor. Think of it as a vanity project if you like, just don’t think that he’ll be writing every day!

Yesterday was back-to-work day for many of us, and the first day of a new job at Labour HQ for others who’ve recently been recruited to bolster the party’s campaigning edge. It was inevitable then that the campaign for general election votes would step up a gear even if Cameron and Co had all decided to all take an extra ‘duvet day’.

So how did ‘day one’ of the longest election campaign in history go?

By 9am Alistair Darling was in full flow detailing why the Tories had a “£34bn credibility gap”, saying:

“The Tories have made over £45 billion of promises, but can barely explain how they can pay for a quarter of this.”

Labour’s press office was on the ball too, with the press release and a link to the 148 page briefing document being received and published by us before the Chancellor had started taking questions of the assembled media.

Of course, Labour sending a document to the press isn’t much different to sending it directly to Conservative Central Office nowadays, so the Tories, who were busy trying to pretend that the NHS would be safe from Osborne’s cuts because ‘Dave’ Cameron was there to defend it, had plenty of time to rip Labour’s claims to shreds. But Mr Cameron said it had taken him just 11 seconds to spot 11 errors in the Labour dossier, denying that the promises Labour had listed were promises at all.

In a flash, we discovered that they didn’t plan to spend £4.9bn to allow married couples to transfer their tax allowances, £2.4bn wouldn’t be spent by a Tory government abolishing the 50p tax rate, and £3.6bn wasn’t going to be given to the top 2% of pension savers reversing the restrictions on pensions tax relief for higher earners.

Within an hour, the backlash was in full flight with Osborne claiming:

“The credibility of Labour lies about Conservatives has collapsed… the dossier includes commitments we have never made, wild exaggerations of our costed policies, and, in some cases, admissions that some changes would actually be cheaper than we have budgeted for. Labour must be deeply regretting their decision to go negative on a day when the Conservatives have been so positive.”

Normally that would be game over for any chance of positive headlines for Labour, and many newspapers did indeed swiftly adopt the Tory line, but at Cameron’s press conference six naughty journalists asked six questions which (shock horror!) actually questioned the Conservative’s policies. At which point Cameron, sticking to the rapid rebuttal unit’s line, claimed that they never promised to reward marriage (and penalise the unmarried) at all, it was always just an aspiration.

Despite beating a hasty retreat so nobody else could be so impertinent as to ask any more ‘tough’ questions, ‘Dave’ had inadvertently made a mistake. The rapid rebuttal unit swung into action again, but this time to contradict both themselves and their own Leader.

So that’s how ‘day one’ ended: The Guardian was preparing their lead story which detailed Cameron’s gaffe and the subsequent u-turn, while most of the rest stuck mostly to the Tory line that it was Labour who had blundered with their “dodgy dossier”. The winner, if you want to believe Tory blogger Iain Dale, was Cameron and Co, but with the evening TV news leading on the Tory troubles you’d have to be deluded to reach that conclusion.

Day one to Labour then? Yes, but only just.

The dossier had done its job: turning the spotlight on previous Conservative ‘promises’, highlighting their cost, and inviting the press to take a more critical eye on ’shallow Cam’. By the end of the night, another Conservative pledge – on mixed sex NHS wards – came unstuck too.

This was exactly what Labour strategists wanted to happen. They knew that many of the ‘promises’ detailed in the dossier could easily be claimed to be “lies” for the very same reason that they should be included – nobody knows what the Tories stand for (apart from cutting the deficit/services and Inheritance Tax for the top 2% of estates). As it turned out, even David Cameron doesn’t seem to know what is, and what isn’t Tory policy.

If Cameron hadn’t stumbled however, the Tories would have gone to bed safe in the knowledge that the media is ready to blunt even the sharpest attack from Labour. Instead it’s clear that, for now at least, the media are more interested in gaffes than policy. The problem for Labour is that even when they do something right (like the dossier) it’s called “a blunder”, and that is going to cause a lot of problems in the future unless Labour can keep Cameron on the back foot.

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