Recess

In true political style I took a recess on this blog over summer, but now I'm ready to put some renewed impetus into it and kick off properly!

The next nine months will define British politics for the next five years. We approach a General Election that David Cameron and his Conservative Party are expected to win comfortably. After much umming and ahhing it seems Labour MPs have conceded that they will fight this election with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. Despite the assumption that Gordon Brown will fail at his first electoral hurdle I am not convinced that it will be this simple, and nor are the experts. In fact the idea of David Cameron being Prime Minister in waiting is very much assumed, Labour still hold a significant majority and the Conservative Party cannot afford to become complacent. But the past few weeks have seen them do exactly that.

Remarkably it was not British policy that led to this but US politics and the possibility of a National Health Service in the United States. Cameron had affirmed his commitment to the NHS in his spending plans several months ago and that had not been in question. But his party has managed to do away with all of their leaders hard work to show them as a party that cared about health by making very public attacks on the NHS, the exact details I'm sure we are all aware of. This has certainly enlightened me with regards to how the next 9 months might unfold. Cameron is what Brown isnt, a camera friendly leader who knows how to work the media and make the "Conservative Party" brand very electable. He's done a fine job of this, but cracks have always shown when other members of his shadow cabinet have spoken up on critical issues. In the past year George Osborne, David Davis and Alan Lansbury have all caused Cameron scares, but ones he's been able to gloss over. But this latest crisis has shown cracks, division and confusion within the Conservative party about what it and its members truly stand for.

With campaigning picking up accross the country I can see the Conservatives being found out by the public as its members come into one on one contact with the electorate. From my experiences of door-to-door canvassing I've learnt that the people of this country really do care about politics and really do demand to know what their candidates stand for. Usually this is a pleasant experience and you can exchange views with all sorts of people and understand what matters to them. But if you're not sure of what you're campaigning on, if you don't truly believe what you're arguing for then the public will catch you out and will make your job very difficult, and rightly so! With such confusion within a party over what it stands for there are going to be huge problems winning over the public and Cameron's job is far from done.

I'm not going to lie, I've been a very reluctant supporter of Brown's premiership so far. He is not a leader that inspires confidence, nor one that does his party any favours by letting the governments achievements become lost in the back pages of the press whilst he suffers a barrage of abuse over non-issues. But on the policies that matter, on the tough decisions and on steering this country out of a recession I find it hard to fault his politics. Elections are not won by wowing the press, they're won by presenting the public with clear policies and plans for the future. And on that basis I think this is going to be David Camerons toughest year yet!

And I could hardly finish this blog without my own prediction for the next election. Labour have a strong majority, but so much has changed since the last General Election and in practice the Conservatives have already gained ground. But nevertheless I think that we'll still have Mr Brown as Prime Minister in a years time, although he could well have to rely on a coalition or minority government to get there!

Well we have to start somewhere...

After months of having a blank page on this website waiting for me to find a use for it and after many draft blog entries I have finally been spurred on into the modern age of political campaigning and by the most unlikely politician. I have just returned from a local Labour Party meeting where I heard a revelation that Tony Benn was hoping to start blogging in the near future. The idea of being beaten by Mr Benn was the final prod onto the national and international forum of debate that is political blogging that I very much needed.

But something that Tony Benn said inspired me far more. I have spent these months pondering ways to make my blogging space relevant, unique and attractive rather than simply my own little internet space for thinking, but one comment of his changed all this. He highlighted the absolute importance of party members grasping the opportunity to campaign on matters they truly and wholeheartedly believed in. For him this is the only way of achieving your aims and if you push the matter enough “first you will be seen as a radical, then they will call you mad, then they will consider you dangerous and finally it will be adopted and you won’t be able to find a soul that didn’t think it was a great idea in the first place”. Political history is littered with examples, universal suffrage, the NHS, minimum wage, environmental policy. But unfortunately politics has strayed from the idea of fighting for what you believe in to simply fighting the battles that will win you an election.

The legacy of the Thatcher and Blair governments is a society where the entrepreneur is valued more highly than the intellectual and the short term fixed is prioritised over long term progress. This attitude has filtered through society across the board and in particular amongst the British press who are happy to sacrifice healthy debate for a few cheap stories. Tony Blair left office cursing the beast he had helped create and blogging has become one of the few ways that the public can bypass the media monster. Through it we can engage in real debate about policy rather than personality and avoid the pages of speculation and scandal that can be so damaging to British politics (although unfortunately there have been occasions where our new “media class” in the political circle have attempted to taint blogging in the same way that the press has been tainted, “Red Rag” springs to mind).

This has been an important lesson for me to learn, that this blog does not need to be some pioneering project like LabourList and similar sites but instead just real politics. I must just hope that my opinions can become radical, mad and dangerous enough to help pull British politics out of the rut it currently finds itself in.