If you’re going to take anything away from Andy Burnham’s press conference this morning – apart from his denials about a £20,000 “death duty” – it’s how heavily those Labour “guarantees” are going to feature in the election campaign. Here we had social care guarantees, cancer treatment guarantees, waiting line guarantees, and even a new website and poster (see above) attacking the Tories for not signing up to the same guarantees. So far as the government is concerned, it matters not that these pledges have been made before – what matters is the opportunity to draw more dividing lines across the landscape of British politics. “Caring” versus “cruel”, as far as the eye can see.
All of which rather prompts the question: how should the Tories respond to this deluge of guarantees? So far, they’ve taken the sensible route of not paying them too much lip service – the thinking of many party insiders is that voters are going to be naturally sceptical about promises made by a thirteen year-old government.
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