The momentum is now with David Cameron and he is set to become Prime Minister. His strongest debate performance came when, at last, he started to explain the elementary conservative proposition that scrapping a tax on jobs isn't taking money out of the economy, but leaving it in the hands of job creators. That the economy and government spending are not the same thing. This is a genuine dividing line that should have been turned against Labour much harder and earlier.
How now to use this week? The danger is that David Cameron will become a Prime Minister without a mandate to do what needs to be done. The deficit, not imigration, was Gillian Duffy's main concern. But all main parties are refusing to acknowledge the scale of the problem. And in public opinion terms they have reaped the thin fruit that their collective failure of leadership deserves.
Yesterday, Today carried a story about a report from the 2020 Public Service Trust. Two poll findings, which should terrify anyone hoping to be in government in a week's time:
- Only 24% of the public believe that spending on public services needs to be cut at all to address the level of national debt (yes, debt, not deficit was what Mark Easton reported and I guess he knows the difference)
- 75% believe that efficiencies alone can deliver the required savings without damaging the services themselves.
We shouldn't be surprised by this; those findings reflect exactly what the main parties have been saying. Public opinion is in the place that politicans have led it to. But it means that an enormous task needs to be done to explain and then build consensus around the cuts that must come.
There are things that can be built on in the next week. David Cameron was the only politician last night who wanted to talk about Greece and he needs to do so again. We have said that we will publish an emergency budget, and we need to explain why. We need to challenge Labour for their failure to publish a Comprehensive Spending Review before the election. We need to explain the power of publishing on-line all government contracts for goods and services over £25,000 (an immediate benefit will be the number of bids and contracts that might otherwise have been worth up to about £30,000 suddenly coming in at £24,950). In power, publishing a Domesday Book of public debt and Labour's liability legacy, including public service pensions and PFI, will be vital.
Conservative strategy has been too risk-averse for too long, and culpably, it saw conservatism as too much of a risk. Momentum has come from getting real and getting conservative about cutting business taxes and trusting wealth creators not waste creators. In the next few days more needs to be done to build a mandate for being in government. CCHQ should understand that doing that will also help us get into government.
