Blog:Labour and Tory Panic
From Bolton Interweb
del.icio.usMyles Aweigh, Election Correspondent, 17th April 2010
To be honest I found the first Leaders' debate on ITV boring, especially when compared to Question Time that followed on BBC1. I suspect the rules against any audience response contributed towards that as well as the moderation. When my attention wandered from the paint drying on the wall and back to the debate I felt that Brown was just repeating sound-bites I had heard time and again and were as unconvincing in this forum as in any other. Cameron fared somewhat better but his performance did not exceed expectations. If he was going to sway me then it failed this time. So Nick Clegg, not exactly Mr Dynamite, was the winner. All the pundits got it right and Clegg the Unknown could do nothing but benefit. In terms of style and confidence, with nothing to lose, he also hit the mark better than his opponents. My vote was already firming up towards the Lib Dems but I was surprised, and pleasantly so, to hear the Lib Dem policy on immigration for the first time, and it made some good sense. Brown's policies, though not dissimilar, sounded hollow - you've had 13 years, it's too late to correct things you should have corrected before now.
Gordon also had horrid habit of saying "Nick will agree with me on..." and then repeating a Lib Dem policy he had just adopted. Had I been Nick I would have probably got quite annoyed and come back with "No Gordon, you've agreed with me on...". This was clearly a trick taught to Brown immediately before, but Brown doesn't do spin well and in the end over-used it and it probably backfired.
So Clegg and the Lib Dems won the debate and, from the opinion polls, that equal exposure has given them a significant boost. It just goes to prove the power of TV exposure. In one poll they even lead, something that hasn't happened for over 80 years. In others the parties are neck and neck. People clearly want a proper change, something new, not the two-horse race we've had for those 80 years. It is still too early to be certain but conceivable that we are standing on the verge of something truly historic, a once in a century shift in the political landscape. And also conceivable that there will be a snowball effect. For years those inclined towards Lib Dem allegiance have been told their vote is a wasted one, they cannot win. So they vote negatively for their second choice or don't vote at all. If they can maintain the momentum and there is a real prospect of them being part of government via a coalition then their support will firm up and their vote will turn out, and that makes the final outcome very difficult to predict.
This seems to be what the polls are saying. The trouble is that the political pundits can't forecast the impact. The predictor software models say that a Lib Dem - Tory - Labour standing in the popular vote translates as a Labour - Tory - Lib Dem standing in seats and that would be a travesty of democracy. But the software wasn't built for this kind of unprecedented swing a couple of weeks before an election. Very few seats are actually safe and anywhere with a low-ish turnout last time, or an incumbent party with less than 50% of the vote is up for grabs.
So how do the Tories and Labour respond? They don't know, that much is clear and panic and desperation is in the air. The tactic appears to be to target the "hung parliament" is bad for us, the City says so, argument. They are telling us to vote Tory or Labour to create a strong one-party government, and that government cannot be a Lib Dem one because it is impossible for them to gain enough seats, even if more of us want to vote Lib Dem than for either of them. Don't vote for who you want to vote for, vote for me so we can carry on having a one-party state for the next 5 years. They've missed the point that many people don't want the same old rotation of Tory - Labour dictatorships. And that the opinion of the City, that got us into this mess in the first place, is worse than irrelevant, it is counter-productive - what they think is a bad idea must be a good one. Coalitions work around the world and there is no reason to suppose they could not work here. In the Scottish and Welsh devolved governments coalitions have worked fine. And who knows, it is more and more possible by the day that we could have a party with an outright majority, but this time a Lib Dem one!
A week is a long time in politics and what a week it has been. It will be interesting to see if the panic that has beset Conservative and Labour leaderships alike continues because that can do nothing but further benefit the Lib Dems and we will have the most exciting election in my lifetime after all.
© Evrose, 2010
