Gordon Brown's announcement that he intends to introduce some kind of binding legislative means of reducing the national debt might make the headlines for a while and strike us as strange - who is it binding upon and what are the consequences of breaching it? - but reminds me of another struggling Labour Prime Minister and, more importantly, suggests the battle lines of the next general election's media wars.
In 1974 Harold Wilson appealed to his ministers for ideas that cost little and were insignificant in governmental terms but had a large emotional aspect. The ideas may be small, they may be frankly bizarre, and they may breach a wider ideology, but to the average voter or a specific demographic - localised or interest based - they appeal. It was an appeal to the "little things", to people's hearts rather than heads. Wilson planned to nationalise small local breweries to save them from mergers, improve access to waterways and lochs for fishing enthusiasts, make May Day a Bank Holiday (achieved in the end of course), protect caravan owners and restrict rent increases. All small, all insignificant, in many cases wrong - breaching property rights in the case of waterways - but all examples of "Grandmar's apple pie". Who could be against Grandmar's applie pie and such things as saving local breweries and going fishing?
And so in 2009 Brown has promised this debt reducing law, and a guarantee of all cancer patients seeing a cancer specialist within a week, and no doubt will promise many more ficticious legal frameworks to counter specific political bogiey men and announce more attention grabbing shifts of resources. The aim is simple: they grab the media's attention and corner the opposition, forced to back the idea and be accused of playing catch up, or oppose it - whether on practical grounds or not - and risk the media wrath of opposing an apple pie issue.
As Labour gathers for it's conference in Brighton the strategists will have their thinking caps on. Rather than eating the humble pie and admitting the many mistakes they have made - something which would actually be popular - they will instead be attempting to serve up political apple pie. It's going to be a long wait until the election...
