by Atul Hatwal

Rule 3: Re-draw the dividing lines with ring-fenced, costed policy measures

Following each election, there is a single characteristic common to the public view of the loser, regardless of party or the issues which defined the election.

They represent the undeserving few rather than the honest many.

In 2010, Labour was the party addicted to state spending at tax payers’ expense. In 1997 the Tories were too busy settling their own personal scores to be bothered with the welfare of the country. And in 1979 Labour was a government beholden to the unions not the country.

The central task for any political campaign is to convince voters that the other side is on the wrong side of this divide.

Rule three of opposition involves using ring-fenced, costed policies to re-draw these dividing lines in the opposition’s favour.

It means defining in detail those areas where privileged, special interest minorities, preferably allied to the government, will pay for the measures that benefit the hard-working majority.

This is easier said than done, but all it takes are a limited number of emblematic policies.

For example, in 1997, one of Labour’s five pledges in the election campaign was for a windfall tax on utilities to pay for training and work for the long term young unemployed.

As a policy it tapped into voter anger at the privatised utilities making abnormal profits, an area on which the Major government was vulnerable, and made the connection to tackling youth unemployment, something to which the Tories were seen as indifferent.

The dividing line between helping the young unemployed under Labour versus protecting privileged utilities under the Tories was as clear as it was bright.

In a similar vein, in October 2007 George Osborne announced that the Tories would raise the threshold for inheritance tax to £1m and abolish stamp duty for first time buyers on homes upto £250,000, funded by a charge on non-domiciled tax payers.

Again, this drew a stark contrast between supporting the interests of the aspirational many, this time under the Tories, versus maintaining the privileged wealth of the lucky few under Labour.

The universal acclaim that greeted this policy announcement was sufficient to scare Gordon Brown off from holding an early election in November 2007 that Labour would likely have won.

The critical feature common across all of these types of measures is absolute clarity on where the revenue is being raised from. Without that, the debate will focus on the source of the funds and how the cost will be met.

There are legions of examples of policies that have been framed to redraw dividing lines, without clear costing that have subsequently become bogged down in a debate over their funding.

In the 2010 election campaign, the Tories successfully made the deficit the defining issue and painted Labour as wasteful lovers of big government. Gordon Brown was a deeply unpopular leader and the Labour party had struggled to develop a robust rebuttal.

Yet still the Tories didn’t win a majority.

In large part this was because the Tories’ reliance on funding their policies through “efficiencies” meant that the spectre of Tory cuts was sufficiently frightening to enough voters to deprive them of a majority.

In parts of northern England, Scotland and Wales, David Cameron’s warm words about change paled when voters’ fears of a return to the worst scorched earth excesses of Mrs.Thatcher’s reign were stirred by Labour, defining the types of services that might be cut.

This wouldn’t have been possible if the Tories had been clear about where the cuts would have fallen.

Given that the Tories completely rewrote their deficit reduction plans after coming into office on the pretext that the situation was worse than they had anticipated, it’s not even as if committing to specific smaller cuts in the election would have been more misleading than their actual campaign.

At the time they did not mention that they were going to hike VAT and were only talking about public sector redundancies of around 40,000. Some way short of the 700,000+ public sector redundancies projected by the office for budget responsibility.

More recently, Labour has fallen into exactly the same trap.

In 2011, Labour’s economic centre-piece, a commitment to an unfunded VAT cut that would pay for itself through growth has been greeted with predictable scepticism by the electorate.

A YouGov poll at the end of November asked the public whether they thought a Labour election victory in 2010 election would have meant the economy would be doing better today.

The public response was unequivocal. The Tories had a 12 point lead, with 25% thinking it would have been better and 37% worse, with 29% thinking it would have been much the same.

The discipline of having to be specific about funding for measures may not be welcomed by politicians who are happiest talking about the sunlit uplands, but it is an essential part of building credible dividing lines.

If the financial details of the policies are sound and cannot be undermined, then the exclusive focus of debate will be the substance of the measure.

This is the discussion all oppositions should want to have. The government will only have two ways to respond.

They can oppose the policy, and define themselves as on the side of the minority. Or they can co-opt the proposal and implement their own version of it.

Gordon Brown’s immediate reaction to George Osborne’s inheritance tax and stamp duty cut was to stumble towards the latter. It gave the Tories momentum and made Labour look weak. Most importantly it showed that Brown could be blown off his course and forced to make policy on the hoof.

In combination with rule two’s general adherence to government tax, spending and borrowing plans, a range of these ring-fenced costed proposals will give the opposition differentiation and a dominating role in the political debate.

Atul Hatwal is associate editor of Labour Uncut.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Uncut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.