Before I went away to see the family and the Boys in Blue (they won 3-0), the Wilted Rose asked what New Year's resolutions the Shadow Cabinet should make. I have three ideas.
1) To get onto the front foot on the economic crisis. Cameron and Osborne have been found wanting since September and it's allowed Brown to look (to some people, at least) as if he knows what he's doing. He's come up with some "initiatives" such as the ruinous fiscal stimulus and the equally crazy mortgage bail-out and, with the help of the Mandelsson / Campbell spinning machine, he's couched these as crafted measures which suggested he knows how to beat the recession. Which he doesn't, because he can't.
The Conservatives, for their part, have been seen (fairly in some ways) as carping from the sidelines and failing to come up with an alternative strategy. Cameron's analysis of why we're in this mess and how Brown is only making it worse will, I'm sure, prove correct in the medium term. But he has to offer a narrative for how we move forward. There are signs, today, that he's grasped this at last, with the tremendous pledge to abolish tax on savings for basic rate tax-payers; if he'd have done it for everyone it would have been even better. Taxing the interest on people's savings is one of the most immoral, insidious, indefensible taxes on earth and it would be wonderful to see the back of it. We need more announcements like this over the coming weeks, backing up with a well-constructed strategy, which we haven't yet seen.
1) To get onto the front foot on the economic crisis. Cameron and Osborne have been found wanting since September and it's allowed Brown to look (to some people, at least) as if he knows what he's doing. He's come up with some "initiatives" such as the ruinous fiscal stimulus and the equally crazy mortgage bail-out and, with the help of the Mandelsson / Campbell spinning machine, he's couched these as crafted measures which suggested he knows how to beat the recession. Which he doesn't, because he can't.
The Conservatives, for their part, have been seen (fairly in some ways) as carping from the sidelines and failing to come up with an alternative strategy. Cameron's analysis of why we're in this mess and how Brown is only making it worse will, I'm sure, prove correct in the medium term. But he has to offer a narrative for how we move forward. There are signs, today, that he's grasped this at last, with the tremendous pledge to abolish tax on savings for basic rate tax-payers; if he'd have done it for everyone it would have been even better. Taxing the interest on people's savings is one of the most immoral, insidious, indefensible taxes on earth and it would be wonderful to see the back of it. We need more announcements like this over the coming weeks, backing up with a well-constructed strategy, which we haven't yet seen.
2) To launch a wholesale attack on the erosion of our freedoms that has taken place over the last ten years, including the abolition of habeous corpus, the right to trial by jury and the freedom to demonstrate peacefully. The Conservatives say, David Davies style, that they abhor the whole ethos which has created 3,000-plus new criminal offences since 1997, but they are short on policy which actually supports that view. They need to thump the table and say "This must stop". And they need to keep saying it, even after they've all been arrested.
3) To promise a wholesale reversal of the utterly insane Health & Safety and litigation cultures which have been sweeping across our beleaguered nation - in fairness since well before 1997. We cannot go on insisting on CRB checks for all and sundry, having to fill in risk assessments before throwing a snowball (no, really), or having coaches risk being sued because little Johnny hurt his leg playing football. The amount of work ahead for any freedom-loving government here is phenomenal, and would take years, but the Conservatives need something that sets the tone. the abolition of the Health and Safety Executive would be a great start.
Anyone else got any more suggestions ?
