Labour must by now be entering coffin corner
Tempus Fugit.
By now surely the Labour leaders have to chose their election date. So much has to be planned around governing early next year. We have the pre-budget statement soon and the real thing in April ( the pre-budget statement was a Brown invention to get two goes and the same announcements and free publicity - when you have good news to impart. )
If Brown were to stop being PM then would there be time for Labour to go to the country with anyone else than Harriet Harman as PM ? Time must be running out.
Whilst the Conservative leadership contest improved the party's popularity, a Labour one might do the opposite. Campaigning for votes with the trade unions and those party members still left will be a left wing envy driven affair. Lots of hints about further crushing the middle classes will be made - indeed they have already started.
Maybe the core vote might hold up - but then the betrayals on Afghanistan and Immigration are most keenly felt by the same people so they can't rely on that.
Labour have entered that corner of the electoral envelope that's like the maximum cruising heigh for an airliner. Any slower and it will stall, any faster and shock waves will form. Its coffin corner, and I always thought that after seeing Jim Callaghan back himself into it in 1979 that Labour would know better.
Surely it is now too late to replace Brown ?
The final sign that Cameron agrees will be when he starts landing hard punches in PMQs. I suspect he'll wait till after Christmas when the brutal nature of the new year has to be faced up to.
6 comments:
It is going to become very difficult and very nasty.
It all looks too obvious.
What have I missed ?
The only thing I can think of is they are now trying to lose.
The effect of "quantitative easing" along with the Christmas retail blip might provide an extremely modest growth figure for the next financial quarter, enabling Labour to announce "the end of the UK recession". However, the figures for the quarter after that, published in early April, are not likely to be so helpful to the Government.
I thought it inevitable that Labour would hang on to the last moment, but the expensively induced uplift in the economy in time for a May/June election does not seem to be going to plan. I am forming a view that there is a real possibility that Labour will make a dash for the polls in March, before the figures start to look really bad.
Now it is all a question of damage limitation, containing the electoral swing to the Conservatives to manageable proportions. Labour hopes that a minority Conservative Government or one with a tiny majority will too weak to deal with the second dip of the recession and not being able to borrow any more (the UK having reached its credit limit courtesy of G Brown and A Darling), will collapse exhausted (and humiliated by the IMF) after a couple of years.
I do not believe in Labour’s “dream scenario” for one second. This is a sea change moment. At the next general election the drift to minority parties will reverse (albeit temporarily), the percentage of the electorate voting will increase and in spite of the electoral dice being loaded heavily against the Conservatives, they will secure a majority sufficient to govern for a full term.
It's definitely too late to replace him, but that doesn't mean his mistakes will be easily forgiven.
They probably are trying to lose.
After all, whatever their faults, they are not stupid (at least, Mandelsnake is not), and they know the sort of thing that has to be done to get the economy sorted. How much better if the Tories have to deal with all that, and NuLab can then ride to the rescue in 2015 once the heavy lifting has been done.
otoh, the Tories before them tried this, when the EMS was upon us and Maastricht looming - the idea was that Kinnock would get stuffed by having all that happen on his watch. But, much to his own amazement, John Major won in '92 and had to face the flak; he never recovered.
If Cameron self-destructs, it could be deja-vu all over again.
I'd love to see a post-Lisbon, post-Broon Labour Government trying to explain how things are so screwed up that they've had to get the IMF in again. I expect they'd manage to blame it all on Mrs. Thatcher.
Post a Comment