by Peter Watt

Last week’s decision to end the so called bin-taxes was clever politics by the government.  And as there hasn’t been an awful lot of clever politics recently by the government, I thought that it was significant. What was particularly clever was that the weekend “announcement” was actually an announcement that the ending of bin taxes would be announced in about a month’s time.

But the government knows that the local elections and AV referendum (whatever the result) are going to be pretty challenging for them. They know that there is not a lot that they can do to alter that. So they have decided to keep reminding people of what they think the public see as Labour weakness. So they might lose the battle in the next month, but they will keep sowing the seeds of an election victory in 2015. These reminders obviously include playing the blame game on the deficit and attacking Labour’s economic competence. But it also involves something else. Something more personally emotional for many voters. A perceived tendency by the last Labour government to overly interfere in people’s lives. (more…)