Cameron’s Conservatives: wobbly on policy from day one

By Toby Flux / @LabourMatters

It was supposed to have been so different. Cameron promised to start the election campaign early in the New Year with posters and a policy announcement every day. But by January 6th – and a massive flip-flop on their £5bn marriage tax allowance – the policies would merely trickle and January would be already be marked by a string of policy u-turns.

The following day, the shadow health minister, Andrew Lansley, watered down a long-standing pledge on increasing the number of single rooms in NHS hospitals.

By now, around 750 airbrushed posters placed around the country, estimated to have cost the Conservatives between £400,000 and £500,000, were being ridiculed virtually and literally, in an epic public relations disaster.

In the third week of campaigning, the simmering row over ditching their prisons expansion policy which they made in December last year, spilled over again with Conservative splits about using prison hulks instead of giving up on the notion that “prison works” altogether.

Also about this time, Ken Clarke indicated the Tories would raise VAT to 20% if they won the general election, though I doubt we’ll see the Tories be honest enough to put it in their manifesto. Whilst not a promise, it of course flies in the face of comments made by Andrew Lansley last year that the Conservatives “have no such plans“.

The Tories saved the best for last, when they started “wobbling around” on spending cuts. On Thursday they promised cuts even if it created a double-dip recession, and have now seemingly backed away after unfavorable polls were published.

Cameron’s front bench is still the most inexperienced team ever, and it shows. Their “draft manifestos” are very appropriately named, but sometime soon they’re going to have to have some firm policies.