Has Brown blown it?
Well worth a good look at the excellent UK Polling Report blog for an analysis of the state of the political parties, whether Brown has blown it for good and whether the Tories really are riding high enough. Scroll down for a view on each of the main parties.
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/
Briefly summarised, Anthony Wells’ view is that Brown will never fully recover from his current travails, that Nick Clegg will not be able to make a decisive difference and that while David Cameron and the Tories are doing well, they have been largely the beneficiaries of government unpopularity on the basis that they are now ‘detoxified’ and less unelectable than previously. Is that a fair summary of the prospects for the main parties for 2008/9?
Gordon Brown first. What really happened to public opinion last October when Labour went from 11 points ahead to 13 points behind in a couple of months?
If you look at the polls before Gordon Brown took over as PM when pollsters asked about Gordon Brown versus David Cameron, they regularly and consistently showed Cameron over 40 per cent and Gordon Brown in the low thirties – 31-34 per cent. On this basis and at this time - e.g. spring 2007 – Blair scored consistently better against Cameron than Brown. The reason for this was – and is – that while Blair had become unpopular, people generally, and the middle class in particular, did not hate him. He was likeable and very centrist even though he had made some major mistakes.
Gordon Brown however, was – and is – actively disliked particularly by the middle class, who saw him as closer to the trade unions, more ‘old’ and more tribal Labour, a tinkerer with the tax system and a tax and spend politician. So Conservative support rose when Brown was posed as the Labour leader by the pollsters compared to when Blair was put forward. At that point, the thought of Brown as PM provoked an increase in Tory support.
Brown had one chance that will never recur to change perceptions of him when he took over power. He succeeded for three months. He went to great efforts to show he was not what people feared, not a tribal Labour politician, not a control freak, not a centraliser and this approach, in conjunction with some clever changes from unpopular Blairite policies, initially worked.
But he made a huge mistake which was then compounded by misfortune. That punctured his honeymoon unpopularity and reminded the electorate that they had never instinctively liked Brown in the first place.
Brown’s mistake was not that he decided against calling an election as some have argued (including the UK Polling Report as above).
His mistake was that he should never have allowed himself to consider an election in 2007 at all.
The reason for that is relatively simple. Brown’s honeymoon popularity was very unstable and relied on him pretending that he was something that he was not – i.e. against spin, decentralizing, not tribal, out for the common good, above party politics etc. Calling an election three years earlier than one is required simply to cash in on your honeymoon and to smash your political opponents rather goes against the grain of what you have attempted to portray.
Going to Basra during the Conservative party conference to announce troop reductions that turn out to be largely false, bringing forward key government announcements to inflate popularity and aping Conservative party policy proposals in order to blunt their popularity is simply not the way a statesman should behave and it massively undermined the electorate’s fragile trust in Brown.
Enter a Conservative party that had to be united for fear of an imminent general election, a strong speech from David Cameron and some eye catching tax cut proposals from George Osborne, and suddenly an election was still winnable but could have resulted in a pyrrhic victory with Labour having a far smaller majority than now.
Brown’s loss of face over the election that never was has then been compounded by self inflicted wounds – the dreadful mess over capital gains tax and his awful performances at the dispatch box – and by misfortune in the case of HMRC incompetence on child benefit records and on another party funding scandal that predated him as premier.
The UK Polling report above thinks that Brown would have won a November election convincingly. I don’t agree. People hate general elections when they are not required. The fact that Brown would have been cashing in a short term political advantage for his own ends and in order to attempt to smash his opponents could have produced a backlash against him that would have substantially reduced or even removed his majority.
As a consequence of all this, the electorate have reverted to the original views they had on Gordon Brown before he became PM. Funnily enough, the polls now are pretty well exactly the same as they had been when Brown was compared to Cameron in the spring of 2007 – i.e. Conservatives 40-43 points and Labour on 30-35 points. So much for ‘renewal’.
So where do we go from here?
I agree with the UK Polling Report that Brown has blown it. His popularity will never recover back to the same levels as we saw in the summer of 2007. He had one chance and he blew it, partly because he was so tempted with the chance of smashing the Tories once and for all. He should have held firm, never entertained the idea of an election last November and sought a mandate on his performance over his first two years in government.
On top of this, unless the Government succeeds in turning this around, Labour seem tired and the political pendulum may at last be beginning to swing in their favour. What have Labour got for us this year that could turn this around? Their big policies in 2008 are important and may be necessary – e.g. nuclear power stations, planning reform, pension reform, further health reforms – but they are unlikely to be hugely popular. Dealing with Northern Rock, capital gains tax, the EU Treaty and calls for a referendum are hardly a promising backdrop either. May’s local elections will be the first real test for how Brown and the Tories are faring but if Labour polls badly, expect more rumblings about leadership from the backbenches.
Does this mean we are headed for a Conservative government or a hung Parliament? The electoral arithmetic means that it is very difficult for Cameron to win an overall majority. It is possible, but he needs to be 8-12 points ahead and over 40 in the polls to achieve it. It is perfectly possible to see Labour’s core support coming through in the long term at between 33-35 per cent. That will make it very challenging – but not by any means impossible - for Cameron.
While the Tories are currently comfortably ahead in the polls, it would also probably be fair to say that this reflects disillusion with Labour rather than wholesale conversion to Conservative policies and principles. On top of that, the Tories are not yet making the progress in the North of England, Wales and Scotland that they need to achieve. They have some time to work on all of this in 08/09.
It is highly risky to make any predictions, given that Brown may not call a general election until as late as June 2010. But looking at the position right now, a hung Parliament and a minority government or a government with an unsustainable wafer thin majority followed by a further general election in the same year, as happened in 1974, has to be a real possibility.