People are starting to take a long, hard look at the Tories and they’re increasingly worried about what they see. We’ve felt it on the doorsteps for some months, with voters more sceptical of the Conservative offer than most commentators in Westminster.
We’ve seen it in recent local by-elections, too, where Labour has been winning back council seats. And it’s now being reflected in the opinion polls, which have been narrowing month by month.
The shift in the polls and rising trust ratings for Labour on the economy can be traced back to the Pre-Budget Report in December, when Alistair Darling set out to the country how we will secure the recovery fairly and the clear choice with the Conservatives.
Labour’s approach is to steadily reduce the deficit once the recovery has been secured and halve it in four years, invest in growth and jobs for the future, fair tax rises and protecting frontline investment in schools, hospitals and the police. In sharp contrast, the Tories are still embracing the “Treasury view” of the 1930s and the Thatcherite economics of the 1980s that cutting spending immediately is the only option, and seem willing to put growth and jobs at risk to do so.
People are now looking at this choice and rejecting the Tory decade of austerity. So when David Cameron keeps saying: “Vote for change”, voters are rightly starting to ask what sort of change. And they are asking whether Cameron’s change is a change they and their families can afford.
It’s clear to me that the reason why the Tories – with their Notting Hill crisis meetings last week – are starting to wobble and panic is not just their shrinking poll lead. It’s because they’ve been rumbled. They’ve been found out.
Cameron’s strategy was clear – to talk about change, glide through to the general election without scrutiny and get a mandate by stealth. He hoped that “Time for a change” would be a loud enough cry, without people ever stopping to ask what kind of change.
However, as my opposite number Michael Gove recently said about the need for the Tories to select a few more women, black and minority ethnic candidates to try to give the appearance that the Conservative Party has changed: “Like a conjuror, we’ll get more applause if the audience cannot see exactly how the trick is performed”.
Cameron and the Tories thought they could just coast into office through warm words on camera – and keep their real plans off camera. But the British people are a bit smarter, and rightly more sceptical, than that. They’ve seen the smoke and mirrors. The illusion is slowly being shattered. This strategy of airbrushing and concealment is no longer working.
We saw a great example of this strategy on Sunday when Gove was a guest on the BBC’s Politics Show. Even though I was on the same programme that afternoon, he refused to debate with me.
But the fact is the Tories are finding it increasingly hard to duck the difficult questions. As voters – followed by some parts of the media – have started to ask those questions in recent weeks, the Tories have been found wanting.
We’ve seen it week after week on some of their flagship policies – from marriage tax breaks to how far to cut public spending this year to their free-market schools experiment, which saw standards fall and inequality rise when it was tried in Sweden.
We saw it on Monday this week when the billionaire Tory donor and vice-chairman Lord Ashcroft finally admitted his true tax status that he concealed for 10 years. And, in their desperate attempt to talk our country down and paint Britain as broken, with dodgy statistics on violent crime and teenage pregnancies, the Tories have been well and truly caught out.
So we will keep asking those questions. Why put the recovery at risk by ignoring the international consensus with immediate cuts in spending? Why is cutting inheritance tax for millionaires still their priority? And, as I wrote in this column last month, why do they want to take Sure Start, tax credits and child trust funds away from families on modest and middle incomes?
Of course, we cannot simply rely on the Conservatives collapsing for us to win this election. We have to stand on and defend our record. And we have to set out a positive vision for a fair future – including one-to-one tuition for children falling behind, an education or training place for all young people up to the age of 18 and our one-week cancer guarantee.
But since all these policies are opposed by David Cameron’s Tories, we must set out the choice on the doorsteps, in workplaces and at school gates. Do we secure the recovery or put it at risk? Do we support new industries and future jobs or threaten an age of austerity? Do we protect frontline services such as schools, Sure Start, and the police or do we cut them?
I believe this will be the most important general election in a generation. There is a lot at stake. In the coming weeks, we must step up the fight and set out the choice, because this is an election we can win.
Ed Balls is Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and Labour and Co-operative MP for Normanton
