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The worrying 35 per cent: how can we convince the country?

As I stare down the barrel of the economic collapse caused by austerity policies of this Government, it does not take long to realise that the next election is going to be fought on the lines of which party is perceived to have the competence to rescue the country’s economy.

Cameron and Osborne are definitely paying the price for their recent economic incompetence. The problem for me though is that according to a recent YouGov poll, 35% of the public still hold the last Labour Government solely responsible for the cuts, 27% the current Government and 28% both.

This leads me to speculate that despite successive quarterly economic downturns, voters still perceive Labour as “spendaholics”, and only a catastrophic economic meltdown would change this perception. What does Labour need to do to gain the confidence of Britons that they are competent in rescuing and managing the economy, not just in the short term, but in the long term?

Voters simply remain indifferent to the slash and burn policy being implemented by this Tory led Coalition Government within which their Lib-Dem partners appear to be mere spectators. Labour needs to convince the electorate that while the short term policy would require some spending in order to stimulate the economy, the long term gain would be that only a vibrant economy coupled with restrained austerity will finally pay the dividend on the county’s deficit.

The alternative would be to continue to blindly walk into the abyss of austerity which is simply unsustainable in its intended aim. Our beloved NHS is being pillaged and privatised where recruitment firms known to donate to Tories are supplying costly temps while they sack experienced permanent staff.

Meanwhile, council tax benefit will be abolished and passed on to local authorities from April 2013, replaced with a grant which only covers 90 per cent of the bill, a cut on working age adults of up to 20 per cent. The introduction of the Welfare Reform Act means this government is unashamedly and indiscriminately capping benefits, banishing the vulnerable forever to the ghettos beyond the outer fringes of our great cities.

2 Comments

  1. Robert the cripple says:

    Of course the simple fact labour was not kicked out just because of the banking crises it was thirty years of being looked down at by Blair and then being spoken to like children by Brown, it was all the rest the immigration without house building, it was watching L New labour become a party which was controlling, it did not mind a bit of private enterprise within the NHS.

    Libor scandal and all the other which labour saw nothing or did not want to know anything, it was being told terrorism laws would only be used for terrorists, then watching an eighty year old man being arrested at conference under Terrorism laws.

    Yes the Tories who I do not like much or Newer labour with a leader who moans about everyone else but has nothing to offer us because it’s well to early and Cruddas has not done his review.

    I have voted labour all my working life, now to day the fact is the Tories are useless sadly so is Miliband lot

  2. Chris says:

    Well, that 35% are ill-informed but we all know what Labour really has to do: wait. After a certain amount of time every government becomes unpopular and its support and majority slowly slips away. Once that has happened the opposition comes to power and the process starts over again. The key thing for Labour is to focus on our own program so that when we inevitably return to power we have policies in place to actually improve the country, unlike in 1997.

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