The nine-point plan

I don’t think that daily polls tell us much of a story anyway but the news that the Conservative lead over Labour is back into single figures isn’t surprising or worrying to me.

Despite everything that has happened during the past 18 months, George Osborne’s speech on Tuesday outlining cuts that need to be made if we to have any chance of bringing the country’s huge debts under control, will have come as a shock to some people. They probably don’t read a newspaper or listen to the news and use the internet for other things. The simple fact is that not everyone is going to understand the context of George Osborne’s message – for some, it might become clearer later – others will never see the necessity for spending reductions.

Others will understand the message and will have decided that they don’t like it much. Included in that may be thousands of public sector workers who fear for their jobs. For them, the Conservative message could be pretty glum – although it’s a glumness that we in the private sector have had to manage for the past 18 months. Today in the FT, there is an advert for a Deputy Head of Internal Audit at the DfT for £80,000 + benefits and in the Local Government Chronicle for an Interim Change Manager at £35-43k. I could go on.

This stoking of the public jobs market that Labour has indulged in not only has to stop – it has to be redressed. There are, for example, 99,000 soldiers in the Army and 85,000 officials in the MoD. That’s the equivalent of each soldier having a 0.85FT official to look after their needs – it’s clearly ridiculous. And turkeys won’t vote for Christmas – what is important is the creation and expansion of alternative economies for people to move out of the public sector into.

If you put 40%, 31% and 18% into Electoral Calculus, you still get a Conservative government – albeit with a majority of four (the same nine-point lead for Labour produces them a majority of 124). But I’d rather have a Conservative government that will sort out our national problems with a razor-thin majority than a Conservative government that tells people what it thinks they want to hear with a majority of 124.

If people then vote for five more years of Gordon Brown’s denial and escapism, they will get everything they deserve.

Friends in the North

Some very interesting polling news from the FT this morning, showing that the Conservatives – despite what the left-wing media will tell you – have done more than enough to cancel out Labour’s majority in the north of England and may even be winning there.

I don’t expect that cities such as Liverpool, Manchester or Middlesborough will be returning many Conservative MPs in 2010 but what this polling shows is that among C1 – classified as “lower middle-class” although I’m not keen on this type of stuff – and C2 (skilled manual workers), the Conservatives are now in the lead.

And both in the north of England, which kept Labour in power in 2005, and in the Midlands the Conservatives now have an overall lead in the polls – in the case of the Midlands, it’s a pretty thumping one too.

Strangely, none of this information appears to have been reported by the BBC, which usually defends itself by saying it doesn’t report “routine polling data”. I seem to remember it gleefully reporting routine polling data when Tony Blair was on the way up and John Major was on the way out – has politics or society really changed that much?

More likely, the BBC has become more aware of the self-fulfilling nature of polls and has come under severe pressure from PM – and the actual PM – to report more serious news - such as the buying out of ConservativeHome by Lord Ashcroft, for example.

For DC, surely this is gold dust ahead of the Conservative Conference – in Manchester. Okay, he’d be a fool to be triumphal about it – but also a fool to ignore the powerful message it sends out to the north of England; that the Conservatives can genuinely be their voice in Westminster.

Economical with the truth

It’s a mixed day for the economic forecasts at the moment. Gordon Brown, for obvious reasons, is keen to claim credit for a few signs that the recession misery is easing. More likely, the dire straits of the first few months of 2009 are calming and the economy is being stimulated by production starting up again and the billions of extra pounds that the Bank of England has been forced to print.

Elsewhere, economists aren’t as optimistic as Gordon. Ann Pettifor thinks the worst is yet to come and the FT reports that even after a recovery is in full swing, there will be parts of the economy that have been permanently damaged and that will not return to pre-recession levels.

On a political level, Gordon’s front-page splash in the FT (complete with exclusive picture of Blairite hand gestures) is designed to keep City relations on an admittedly delicate even keel by trying to convince bankers that controlling their bonuses is vital to re-establishing the City’s reputation abroad.

He also knows that the FT is the newspaper that journalists read and that a front page there will get picked up everywhere else (notably the BBC, although they are obviously annoyed the story was fed to the FT as they only run it in the business news) for more populist purposes.

The point is this – that Gordon and his gang are going to try and claim that far from wrecking the UK’s once vibrant financial services and manufacturing economy with ruinous debts, strangling regulation and non-existent oversight, the government has actually saved it from destruction and navigated the financial storm. Really?

DC writes today in the Times about the Lockerbie decision and that’s fair enough because clearly some pretty underhand stuff has gone on there. But he needs to be ready to maintain pressure on Gordon over his economy-wrecking and head off Labour attempts to create a competence myth around the embryonic recovery.

Labour governments always end up out of office with the country bankrupt and 2010 will be no exception. DC needs to bring his communications skills to bear on this fact if Labour are not to slip out of the electoral noose.