David Cameron is talking about the ‘great, black, ominous cloud’ that Labour’s economic plans would put over the British economy. Labour is talking about its immigration policies while trying not to talk about a document that suggests it shouldn’t talk for too long about them. The Lib Dems are complaining that the Tories would damage children’s futures. It’s beginning to feel a lot like a general election, even though we’re still quite a way away from it.
This is one of the benefits for political parties of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act that is sucking all the life out of Parliament itself. They are now permanently on the campaign trail, even when they’re at Prime Minister’s Questions. Today David Cameron is adopting the ‘risk message’ that so many Labourites are worried about: that it’s dangerous to vote in a Labour government, rather than a nice opportunity for some extra spending now that the recovery is on its way. Labourites have long feared this risk message appearing in speeches and leaflets, but the Tories are, to be fair, on the defensive today too as the coverage of the Autumn Statement has descended into a row about the 1930s and the Road to Wigan Pier, which wasn’t what George Osborne intended when he closed his address to the Commons with ‘a long term economic plan, on course to prosperity’.
Meanwhile the Lib Dem attack, in which David Laws points to his own party’s analysis that a Tory majority government would cut the education budget by £13.3bn a year by 2020, is a reminder that the two Coalition parties would still, if they find themselves back in power together after the 2015 general election, struggle to fill Parliament with as much action as they did when they started out in 2010. Sure, the parties are setting out pretty accommodating red lines to accommodate a future Lib-Con coalition, but their squabbles over education and other policy areas show that in some cases, the partnership has already run out of road.
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