Well, the government would have done better to read Fraser’s response to the fall in GDP before they went and blamed much of the 0.5% decrease on the inclement weather. Cue “Wrong kind of snow” jokes everywhere. And, frankly, Tories would be laughing all the way to the nearest TV studio had Gordon Brown ever suggested something similar.
Better, surely, to agree that the figures are disappointing but stress that they are the first and therefore somewhat provisional numbers that may well be revised in due course. Not a great line to sell but some days you take a beating and just make things worse by trying to wriggle out of it.
But what this shows, I think, is how Labour have benefited from Mrs Alan Johnson’s adventures. Mr Johnson, nice and decent and all the rest of it, was plainly not terribly interested in the Shadow Chancellor brief. Unsurprisingly, he never seemed comfortable in that berth. Ed Balls, by contrast, is made for opposition. Conservatives may loathe him but that’s some kind of mark of respect too. And Balls, like it or not and, importantly, whether or not you agree with him, has performed well today. Pete is right to note that he’s rewriting his own record but that’s the kind of thing you can do in opposition and, frankly, he can get away with it too.
The cost of this, for Ed Miliband, is that Miliband can’t help but be overshadowed by a media performer so much more forceful than Miliband himself. Who’s running the show now? Today you’d say it’s Chairman Ed. So: Balls is good for the opposition but not necessarily good for turning opposition into government. There will be trouble ahead for the Double Ed team, mark my words.
However, while spending cuts are not happening yet they may be priced in to any number of business decisions. More to the point, I suspect Labour’s relentless assualt on Tory spending – that is, deficit-reduction – plans had an impact during the election campaign and helped save more than a few seats. Especially in Scotland and London. I think raising the spectre of knife-crazed Tory bogeymen slashing their way through government helped shore up the Labour vote and supress opposition advances. In some seats anyway. That’s the problem with an Age of Austerity: people might recognise it might be necessary but they don’t much like it.
At the very least it’s helped create the impression that all this government is interested in is cutting, cutting, cutting. That this isn’t happening is not really the point. The impression remains and much of the time it’s about all the government is associated with.
This isn’t the day for it, obviously, but at some point it might be a good idea for the government to make a more forceful case for its own policies – on the economy obviously but also across a wider range of areas. It needs some good news and needs it quite soon since even if the GDP figures are subsequently revised upwards the damage will have already been done.
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