Election should be about new ideas, not fiddling with a flawed system

FOR a country that feels under an election siege that has run for the best part of a year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown's formal visit to the Queen for the dissolution of parliament will bring some relief that an end to a marathon campaign is now finally in sight.

The arguments have been so well rehearsed, the soundbites so worn and the studio discussions so predictable that there seems little prospect between now and election day of any of the main parties having anything new or interesting to say.

Yet for all the predictability of the arguments, a central puzzle remains. Why is it that the Conservative opposition is not further ahead in the opinion polls, given the public mood of weariness, the manifest return of boom and bust, appalling levels of public debt and deficit, the evident failure of a miasma of "eye-catching initiatives" to work in the manner promised and the personal unpopularity of a Prime Minister, as disliked among many of his colleagues as on the Opposition benches?

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It is certainly true that the Conservative campaign has been maladroit in several instances and uninspiring in the main. It has not fully capitalised on the public mood for change. A languorous vapidity has at times infected it. It has struggled to strike a popular chord with voters and to provide that energising spark, that urgency of mission without which a sense of momentum cannot be built and carried through to victory.

However, with the its proposal to scrap Labour's proposed rise in National Insurance contributions for those earning less than 45,400 a year, the Conservatives have hit the equivalent of a dartboard treble. It has established itself as the party of job creation as well as public economy. It has secured widespread backing from business leaders to the evident discomfort of the Business Secretary Lord Mandelson. And its directness and relevance to voters' pockets has clearly connected.

Labour, meanwhile, has struggled to make its counterpoints on "unaffordability" stick, given the effect the proposal would have in staunching the increase in out-of-work benefits and other welfare costs that would result from the full tax hike, and Labour's own reliance on public sector savings and efficiencies.

A key lesson for the Conservatives here as they approach the final weeks of campaigning is to play to their acknowledged credentials and to their traditional values as a lower-tax party, and to respect the merits of simplicity in getting this message across. It cuts through Labour's lengthy litany of tax credits and training places and that numbing minutiae of micro measures born of sound-bite, headline-hunting activism which voters have heard so often and of which they have grown weary.

A general election should be about game-changing ideas, a debate about new direction, not an exchange of managerial detail on how to fine-tune or fiddle with a flawed model. Big ideas simply put helped to secure the resounding victories of Labour in 1997 and of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Drawing the lesson from these should be the priority for any party which genuinely believes in itself.