Lobbydog...

Thursday 29 January 2009

Crap attack

At a Number 10 drinks do last night I was chatting with hacks and one of the PM's aides about parties' attack lines.

Earlier in the day PMQs ended up a battle between Brown’s "they’re the do nothing party" line and Cameron’s "admit we're in boom and bust" attack.

Most seemed to think Labour's strategy of nicking Tory policies and then calling the Tories "do nothing" was working, while my opinion – that it's crap – was in the minority.

Lobbydog still holds to that. I don't necessarily agree with Tory policies but they undoubtedly exist.

Only occasionally do ministers note their existence and when they do, as someone noted last night, a much more effective attack is to show where Tory policies are badly thought out.

Hoon did it well against Villiers in the Heathrow debate and Darling has also shown the flimsiness of Tory policy when challenging Osborne.

Rather than branding Tories as evil free-market capitalists that think the recession must take effect – the basis of the “do nothing” line – the “flimsiness” attack exposes them as lightweights, a more damaging strike.

The way things are going it won't matter soon anyway, as the recession deepens people will cry out for change whatever it is.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The point of all this to the man (or woman) in the street is that these jokers seem to spend more time thinking up ways to make each other look stupid and to score cheap points than they ever do working out proper policies.

The global financial crisis has shown that banks and big business actually run the world now and politicians can only look on as the Chairmen, CEO's, speculators and fraudsters make us all richer or poorer with their wheeling and dealing, and then try to mitigate the worst effects of what follows when they get it wrong or claim the credit for the good times when they get it right.

I think you're spot on with your last point; people will want a change of government... but it won't make any difference.

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