Cameron adjustment – suit you sir?
David Cameron in his Today interview this morning repeatedly called the cuts lined up for 2015-20 an “adjustment”. It’s a euphemism he first tried out in his Andrew Marr interview at the start of the year. It makes it all sound like a bit of bespoke tailoring.
He insisted (again repeating the Marr interview line) that the £5bn clampdown in tax avoidance and evasion he planned for the next parliament meant that 15 per cent of his “adjustment” would come from taxes (he’s proposing £13bn from departmental cuts and £12bn from welfare to make up the rest of the £30bn “adjustment”).
He is trying to repair the damage done by the autumn statement and the commentary on it by the OBR and the IFS. They’ve helped Labour paint a picture of the Tories’ projected cuts as a a bit on the over-zealous side. So today David Cameron tried to re-frame the Tory policy as previously proclaimed – “we’ll fund 100 per cent of the adjustment through cuts” – into a 15/85 tax/spending ratio (much closer to the 80/20 one pursued in this parliament.
His fundamental aim though is to get the economy (today with an emphasis on welfare) at the centre of the election debate. Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham are trying to put the NHS at the front of people’s minds. Both sides are trying to frame the way the voter looks at the choice and David Cameron has a mighty advantage on his side.
Newspapers are more likely (though not uniformly) to follow his economy/welfare headlines over the span of the 100 days ahead. And David Cameron has deep pockets to fund advertising that keeps his framing of the election debate in people’s minds.
Ed Miliband is leaning (not exclusively but in a big way) on guerilla warfare in the marginal seats to help his cause. His party believes it massively out-numbers the Tories in constituency activists ready to knock on doors. It doesn’t dismiss the Tories’ direct mail and internet/social website campaigns at all. But it is using what weapons it can afford.
Central to Labour’s strategy of breaking out of the low 30s is an unmediated moment of connection with the voters they had hoped would happen three times in April courtesy of the TV election debates, a moment when voters could look at Ed Miliband afresh and, the logic ran, his ratings would (could only) go up.
On the Today programme this morning, the prime minister repeated his call from yesterday to bring the Northern Ireland parties into the first two TV debates. He could, unwittingly, be doing something to accelerate the well-progressed decline of the two main parties if there were a couple of debates that vividly brought to life the fracturing of the old system.
But his intention is to kill the TV debates altogether this time round if at all possible, and if not, then to get them out of the way so early that they don’t become seismic moments in the campaign proper when the voters are more focused on their choices.
Today and yesterday there was a tone of mockery in his voice as he talked about the broadcasters. He sounds like he has amused contempt for the way they have handled the project and the way he has forced them to ditch their finely honed plans for something quite different. But he won’t really be laughing unless the TV debates plan has a stake through its heart.
Follow @GaryGibbonBlog on Twitter