Foreign Perspectives

One of the things that has become increasingly clear as the leader debates have been going on is that Labour have been going all-out to manipulate how they and their ideas are presented.

At a simple level is the body language. Almost always when David Cameron is speaking about some policy, Brown is shaking his head. You don’t see that so often on the TV but it’s aimed primarily at manipulating the audience in the studio. Simple, but quite effective. Notably, the other two leaders don’t stoop to this level in response.

As I write this, the big push is on tax credits during the latest Brown interview (this time with wife in tow to emphasise the family friendly aspect). First off, they aren’t “tax credits”: they are a benefit payment. That status is a problem for a number of reasons including the administrative difficulty of implementing benefit payments compared to true tax credit systems, then there’s the whole business of having such a large proportion of the population on benefits which in turn means a sizeable number of civil servants required to handle the administration. However, the main issue that Brown raises is that he wants everyone to get these regardless of circumstances: that’s how some people have ended up getting over £40,000 (yes, forty thousand) pounds a year on benefits. The Conservative “elimination” of this benefit would only kick in for those getting more than £50,000 or so income.

It’s amazing at how much Brown confuses the difference between the government and the wider economy. He reckons that taxes can’t be cut because he needs all the money to fund all kinds of government assistance. In fact, the greatest government assistance we could have is none. Nobody will run with that level but less is definitely better: why shouldn’t we spend more of our own money rather than have the government make all those spending decisions for us? What he forgets most of all is that the government doesn’t have any money as such: all the money that it takes, it gets from us.

Laughably, he “had” to support the banks. Just a few years ago, he was encouraging them to get on and do just the things that got them all into trouble. Moreover, since he managed to borrow so much money over his time as chancellor and prime minister, the country was in a much weaker state to deal with any problems than it might have been had we had a sensible government over that time.

Since he was on a breakfast time programme he didn’t have any of the hard questions thrown at him which is, of course, why he appeared on it. Thus he wasn’t pulled up on his job creation schemes which it turns out have merely created jobs for the immigrants that his policies have pulled into the country. Hence, our relatively new IKEA is almost entirely staffed by Polish rather than creating employment for the locals. So far, nobody has really ran with the link between unemployment and 90% of new jobs going to immigrants.

I wonder how well Labours spin doctoring will work when they’re in the opposition? Somehow, I suspect that it’ll be several years before the realisation sinks in that they need a better way to go. At the moment, they seem to be as much taken in by the spin as they would wish the electorate to be.