Ed Miliband today promised that Labour will offer ‘hope, not falsehood’ in its General Election campaign. It’s a bold pledge given the party is making so much of the claim that the Tories want to reduce public spending to levels not seen since the 1930s – a claim that has foundations made of something oddly similar to sand. Similarly the Tories have today produced an interesting dossier that Miliband’s party has interestingly called ‘dodgy’ because it contains a number of ‘assumptions’. As James explains, that’s part of the plan, as Labour now has to say which cuts it wouldn’t reverse and which it would.
But one of the central tricks of the Labour campaign – which it is proving very good at – is to threaten the voters with a vision of the NHS under the Tories, unable to function and severely under-funded. Andy Burnham is, as I said earlier, very good at doing the emotional pitch on this even if that gets rather confused when he’s asked why he did the same sorts of things when he was Health Secretary.
But even his own colleagues know that while he’s very good at annoying the Tories and making emotive noises, Burnham hasn’t come up with a plan to ‘save the NHS’ either. One frontbencher says to me ‘Andy is doing a lot of populist stuff on the NHS, but no-one really believes that a £2.5bn bung will solve all the problems that the NHS has. We are too tribal too much of the time and we don’t think about things ourselves. None of us are really talking about what needs to be done with the NHS.’
Election campaigns, though, aren’t the time for serious thinking about how to do anything really serious – and that goes for all the parties, not just Labour. Instead, Miliband’s party seems to be aping the SNP’s strategy in the Scottish referendum by scaremongering about a Tory threat to the NHS. Strategists couldn’t exactly miss how well this worked – and also felt that their own campaign which focused on the risks of independence also shows the importance of striking fear into voters’ hearts. One Better Together strategist remarked after the result that he didn’t need to look at the polls because he knew ‘how we won it: we scared the bejesus out of them’. It seems Labour wants to do the same on the NHS, which isn’t exactly a message of ‘hope, not falsehood’. But then neither is the Tory campaign currently, either.
Comments