On the doorstep for the local elections the common refrain is: it’s time for a change
Spend just a few minutes on the campaign trail for next week’s local elections and it suddenly becomes clear why Labour MPs got into such a mutinous mood. When they happily voted through Gordon Brown’s abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax last year, it was argued that having 5.3 million pay a little more was worth it in order to be able to say that the basic rate of income tax had fallen. No one foresaw what is now clear: just how badly this ruse would go down with the public.
The first half-hour I spend with Tory activists in Salford gives a taste of the anger. ‘I’m a pensioner, for God’s sake, why does he take more of what little I have?’ asks one householder. ‘I’ve had enough of Mr Brown’s financial tricks,’ says a lady outside a florist. ‘He says this won’t affect anyone but that’s untrue, this will hit one in five families,’ says the manager of the Spar shop. All of them pledge to vote Conservative for the first time, in an area where David Cameron needs votes the most.
The Tories can scarcely believe their luck. Here is a tax bomb, planted under the lowpaid and primed to detonate just ahead of the 1 May election. And all an unintended consequence of a manoeuvre in Gordon Brown’s final Budget. ‘At least the poll tax was deliberate,’ one activist chortled to me. Mr Brown’s complicated compensation offered on Wednesday may have assuaged Labour rebels. But it will not salve the anger on the doorsteps. The result may well be the Tories taking North Tyneside and Bury councils next week, with the possibility of a council or two in Wales.
So much attention is focusing on the Ken v. Boris battle in London that the English and Welsh local elections have almost been forgotten. But not by Mr Cameron. To win the next general election he needs to take scores of seats in the north, and sees these contests as a useful drill to get the local apparatus battle-ready. In the last few weeks, target areas have been carpet-bombed with shadow Cabinet members. The Tory activists I meet proudly list the recent visitors to Greater Manchester: Alan Duncan, Francis Maude, Theresa Villiers and Mr Cameron himself.
Dispatching so many frontbenchers certainly is a sign of commitment. But it is one largely lost on the people of Salford, who (as activists admit) could not pick out most shadow Cabinet members from a police line-up. I am accompanying the indefatigable Chris Grayling, who has not quite reached the status of household name. When he explains he is ‘part of David Cameron’s shadow Cabinet’, this normally draws a blank stare, as if he were referring to a 1950s tribute band. But, crucially, the Conservative rosette is a welcome one.
The most common phrase I heard on the doorsteps was ‘time for a change’. The loudest voice of support for the new Tories comes from Naeem Mirza, a Muslim who beckons over the activists to the building site he is working on. ‘People used to think they were for the rich but I say — read the manifesto. They have Asian councillors.’ Had his niqab-clad sister not appeared to bring him his packed lunch, I would have suspected he was a Tory plant. He could have sprung straight from one of Mr Cameron’s dreams.
The streets we are walking are hardly the rougher ’hoods of Greater Manchester. As Mr Grayling puts it: ‘Look at this area, why on earth is this Labour?’ I later meet Bob Bibby, Bury council leader, who says the newly built estates are only now turning into Tory-friendly territory. ‘Our saying used to be “new estate, new Labour”,’ he says. ‘Blair was never really hated in the north, he always kept these places. But not now. There is no attachment to Brown.’ The biggest opposition I see Mr Grayling encounter is from the likely abstainers. One young woman puts it succinctly. ‘One politician says this, another says that, nothing changes.’ Other voters on the doorstep pose a straightforward consumer proposition: what would the Tories do for me, personally? The absence of a clear, snappy answer to this question is, in my view, one of Mr Cameron’s main liabilities at present. But for now, the best way to clinch a Conservative vote is to ask whether voters are affected by Mr Brown’s ‘10p tax’.
Tory central office has produced a brutally effective leaflet spelling out how voters ‘will be hit by Gordon Brown’s tax on hard-pressed families’. Bar staff: £67 more. Typists: £110 more. Road-sweepers: £49 more. Shop cashiers: £227 more. The Prime Minister, the leaflet says, is ‘kicking people when they are down’. Tory activists cannot get enough copies of this leaflet. The effect on the doorsteps is simply devastating.
Mr Brown’s surrender to his backbenchers is too complex to take any sting out of this attack. And in sending a message to his MPs that the laddie is for turning, he will invite several more such rebellions. If today’s opinion polls were tomorrow’s election results (admittedly a big ‘if’), a quarter of Labour MPs would lose their seats. Many had no proper job before politics, and are wondering what they would do after it. In such circumstances, a sense of self-preservation eclipses the sense of loyalty to the party leader.
Mr Brown is not entirely without luck. A very small number of councils are up for grabs this time around, so damage will be limited. He is also defending a low base. Since 1997 Labour has gone from having 48 per cent of council seats to 28 per cent — a figure unlikely to get much smaller. In the expectations-lowering game which always precedes elections, the scenarios the Tories now talk about involve winning just 80 wards (against 911 last year) with Labour taking about 100 and the Liberal Democrats losing about 100.
But for Mr Cameron, the real objective is to make ready a fully staffed party machine — replacing the atrophied apparatus. He is almost there. The Tories will next week be the only party to fight every ward in Yorkshire. It has more candidates in the north-west than Labour. There will be just one more set of local elections, next year, before the real test of a general election. And then Mr Cameron will see just how far he can depend on his new friends in the north.
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