Sunday 28 February 2010

Feeling The Need to Blog

Mmmm. Many months since posting; for various reasons, and active elsewhere but times is hard and earning a living stops the flow.

It is of course easier not to comment if the flavour of comments elsewhere essentially covers what one might want to say. This morning though I am persuaded to put finger to keyboard.

The polls are appalling and suggest that with only a slender lead to the Tories (2 percentage points this morning) if the positions were reversed and Liebore had the Tories' recent 39% rating the wonderfully skewed electoral system may deliver a "landslide" to Gorgon McDoom's Liebore. You can work out your own scenarios over at UK Polling.

I have not seen much written so far that to my mind fully explains the Tory poll decline we are currently seeing. So here goes.

I suspect a combination of factors:

1. We politicos put far too much weight on what happens online than Joe Normal; the Tories thus may have felt more comfortable than they should have done. Overwhelmingly the UK's Joe Normals rely far more on the TV news, including the shockingly biased BBC* (comprehensively tamed over Kelly) and the frankly muddled Sky** output. Joe relies less so on the newspapers, and all the print stats prove that, hence why The Sun's support this time has not "won it".

2. Given the BBC, which dominates the TV news agenda, is little more than a Government mouthpiece and in recent weeks has been on overdrive in order to "work on" a Liebore turnaround; the poll shift is not a surprise.

3. A fair bottom line point is that the Tories themselves jumped the gun by starting their campaign in January. That has not helped. The logic was good on the surface, start rolling out content early to wrong-foot Liebore who are bust and do not have the resources to campaign for five months solid.

Unfortunately forgeting that Liebore have no qualms about using their position in power to present and promote and spin their party political position and that actually it costs nothing to attack you back if you shove your face over the parapet. As Dave did. In military terms the Tories knew they outgunned Liebore in campaign funds and just strode out into the open. Result: shot to pieces and cheaply.

4. Another shoot yourself in the foot issue with the Tories is that they have nil room for mistakes. Nil. And yet they get basic things wrong such as sink estate pregnancy rates. Getting things wrong is one thing (fatal anyway) but getting things wrong in respect of the nation's council estates is doubly wrong; what a great way to demonstrate that you are far, far removed from the streets. How many people saw that data and didn't question it? Why not? Did it seem reasonable? Very scary.

5. And it cannot go unmentioned that Tory policies are in a muddle. How on earth did they allow themselves to get embroiled again in a fox-hunting debate? There was no need to firm up the rural vote, thus no need to put their proverbial head out of that particular fox-hole.

Other policies that involved any sort of new "investment" ie funding from tax needed to be tempered with a caveat that they were subject to affordability. Affordability, plus detail regarding spending cuts, needed to be subject to a caveat that "until we get the real accounts we have no idea how bad things are and all bets are off until that day, if it comes". People would understand that.

6. There is a huge problem with what I would call the youth and trendy vote. The kids out there are spectacularly thick and feckless. Not all but, sorry, the many. They have grown up under soppy Liebore and were taught in huge numbers by Liebore trendies. Add in the kidults too.

Don't ask but I have to deal with this on a daily basis. They have a truly fantastic opinion of themselves and are very much on side with the bong eyed mong and his spectacularly daft lieutenants. No coincidence that the awful Balls is where he is. Doling out cash, plaudits and faux-education to the young will get them where you want them. Either that or the Hitler Youth movement was just an accident.

7. The issue of climate change is problematic. This is an area where the sceptics have been swamped (with youth and trendies in the vanguard) and yet where the general population are with the sceptics. It would have been honest and politically convenient to side with the sceptics.

But the Tories read the signs wrong and went down the green path. Actually, and to add complication, the Tories are more natural conservators than the Stalinist Liebore but that argument (against waste and profligacy, for the small state and actual sustainability) is I appreciate a more complex nuance to present. But hell we should have had a go. What we now have, even amongst the Tory Most Faithful, is that the Tories are just Blue Labour.

8. Personalities, trivia and Gordon Brown's bullying. Well what can you say, except that the Tories should have kept above this strata of debate whilst pointing out that a disfunctional government has brought us a disfunctional State. No harping on details, let these things burn themselves out either way, no carping, no jokes, no pointless questions during PMQ.

The Tory handling of the bully-gate issues (which are real, important and speak for themselves in terms of Joe Normal) has led to Liebore being able to present this as McDoom's passion and drive to "get things done" and an upswing in his personal ratings, apparently amongst males predominantly; so presumably the nation's wife-beater and cage fighter demographic sorted. Own goal.

9. There is something difficult for Joe Normal about change. The Tory call to change is spot on and the man on the street knows that too. But. Here's a story:

A solitary man out walking stumbles and falls over the edge of a high cliff. Only by good fortune does he grab with one arm a branch sticking out of the rock face. He swings momentarily in the air and can see he is too far from the cliff edge above to save himself and below him is a sheer drop to the sea crashing onto sharp rocks. In desparation at his position he shouts out "If there is a God, please save me!"

Strangely a voice booms down from above and says "I am here to help; just do as I say".

The man is hugely relieved and shouts back "Of course, please just tell me what to do". The response is immediate "Then let go of the branch; I will save you"

The man swings for a moment and shouts up into the sky "Er...Is there another God?"

People out there are scared of change. The nearer we go towards the cliff edge the more people are scared. In addition Liebore's natural audience in my experience err towards the nation's bedwetters who are more inclined to sit in the damp for a bit rather than make the journey to the toilet. I believe the polls currently reflect that but as time goes on they will go from damp to cold as well.

10. I am clearly ending this list with some hope for the Tory position. And I believe that ultimately they will prevail once the election is over. If that is not the case then it will be only a matter of months, assuming they hold their cool, until that changes.

Canute can only pretend to hold back the waves for so long and the realities of life will roll in later this year. Joe Normal, the man on the street, the woman in the pub understands this.

My final point is that for a number of the above reasons, for example point six ie the influence of yoof (which means I keep quiet myself in public, not least when at risk of being stabbed or humiliated!) what people actually think and how they will actually vote differs from what they are currently saying.

In my day to day life I come across many, many people and they on the whole want McDoom out and Liebore out, they know they have been lied to and they know the country is bust and the evil day of reckoning has been postponed by a huge and wasteful spending spree.

The majority knows it. And the edifice will come down one way or another.

Let's hope it can be clean and the country does not fall too hard into the chaos that Liebore have created. Again.

NOTE: * & **; this piece was written prior to Dave's Spring Conference speech on Sunday afternoon but posted afterwards. In time for me to notice that the BBC bookended Dave's speech with the horrid Liebore apologist Kevin Maguire of The Mirror whilst Sky started the speech with half the screen taken up with their poll showing the Tories down and ended by managing to find (with apologies where due) some "horrid" Tory who appeared to give Dave a maximum "6 out of 10" for not actually announcing a policy to string up immigrants (as far as I could tell). Well there you go.