by Peter Watt

Being in opposition can be thankless and getting the tone right can be tricky. Right about now it is doubly so. Which is why I was taken by an interesting article over at Labour List penned by Mark Ferguson. In “Labour can’t afford to look smug“, Mark argues that Labour risks looking smug in the face of the current dire economic situation if they appear to take every bad headline or statistic as vindication for their proposed approach. As he says, if we look smug:

“…then all we do is ensure that at best the public think ‘a plague on all your houses’ and at worst, we end up looking smug about a crisis that many people think we caused”.

Now I didn’t agree with some of the underlying assumptions in the post, but on this central tenet he was spot on. We do sometimes and inadvertently sound quite pleased at the poor economic outlook and the public hate it. And so I started thinking about what exactly the strategy for opposition should be for Labour right now. And I have come up with a cunning three point plan. (more…)