The Nature Of Conservatism-- An Awesome U.K. Election Video

Most observers would agree that lackluster would be an accurate assessment of Labour's performance in the U.K. elections. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is expected to start going for the jugular of his reactionary opponents in the Conservative Party. He may very well wind up in a precarious coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Hopefully the video above is an indication of how they will finish out the campaign-- and a hint to Democrats about how to go after conservatives in this country as well.

[W]e can expect to hear more emotive language from the prime minister in coming days. He will conduct more impromptu question and answer sessions with members of the public in their workplaces, and-- as one adviser put it "do more campaign things" such as walkabouts where he isn't simply surrounded by supporters-- in short we can expect to see him fight a bit more.

But Labour's problems exist below the surface too.

Ask Gordon Brown publicly about the prime ministerial debates and he says they are "energising." But privately he thinks they have sucked the oxygen from the rest of the campaign and he is frustrated by what he sees a media obsession with personality, not policy.

And that creates difficulties for his current approach. One senior minister told me that the first two weeks of the campaign had largely solidified Labour's core vote; another that the core vote is about 80 per cent solid. But while many of the 'don't knows', the floating voters, haven't floated towards David Cameron, they haven't floated towards Labour either.

...There are those in cabinet who say variously "Labour has to up its progressive offer" or as another put it more simply "create an anti-Tory alliance." In practice that means talking far more (though not exclusively) about where Labour and the Lib Dems agree and less about where they disagree.

The thinking is therefore if, say, the Conservatives get 35 per cent of the vote and Labour, say, 32-- but Labour ends up with more seats-- and the Lib Dems get maybe 29 or 30 per cent, then Labour could claim some sort of mandate for a progressive alliance to keep the Conservatives out of power.

But other voices say actually Labour should do the opposite and attack the Lib Dems far more before polling day.

For now, Gordon Brown has found a third way on this.

He is setting out clearly the differences as well as areas of agreement with Nick Clegg. He wants to tell Labour voters who might be ready to dally with the Lib Dems that Nick Clegg's party isn't progressive-- ie left wing-- on issues such as child tax credits so please don't defect.

But he also wants to sound positive on a few issues as a way of persuading some Lib Dem voters to back Labour on 6 May to stop the Tories getting a majority.

But Gordon Brown's big hope-- and to be fair, his expectation-- is the election now moves on to policy.

Meanwhile the Tories are desperately trying to destroy the Liberal Democrats as an alternative for voters who want change in a general sense but not change in a backward sense towards what everyone knows could be a real nightmare for the country. So far the Conservative smear machine hasn't gained any traction outside of the party faithful, and it really does look as though the U.K. is getting ready to ditch the two-party system.

The best that now looks possible for the Tories is to form a minority government with a vote share so poor that it will not provide a proper mandate. The very, very best would be a tiny Tory majority. Much darker scenarios haunt senior Conservatives. It is quite plausible that they could find themselves in opposition again and, worse, facing a Labour-Lib coalition that introduces proportional representation. David Cameron continues to inveigh against a hung parliament, but it is telling that he did not rule out forming a coalition with the Lib Dems-- a possibility he would have laughed at a month ago... Many Conservatives fear that a Lab-Lib deal on PR [proportional representation] could exclude them from power forever. It would certainly mean that it is almost impossible to envisage how they could ever again form a government on their own.

...The Tories are paying for coming to this election with a sense of entitlement to power. Labour, too, was arrogantly complacent, odd though that may seem when we are talking about a party with a very unpopular leader who has presided over the worst recession since 1945. Most of Labour's senior ranks expected to lose, but they still assumed that they were entitled to ownership of progressive Britain and could demand its votes for Labour if only on the uninspiring grounds that this would limit the size of a Tory victory. Gordon Brown has found it hard to conceal his bewilderment that he is having to debate with a Lib Dem, never mind that the Lib Dem should be pushing him into third place.

The Conservatives, for all the superficial modernity of their marketing, are staging an essentially traditional form of gridded campaign and finding, just like their friends in the Tory press, that the old playbooks no longer work. The opinion polls gyrate from day to day, but one message from them is clear and consistent. At some collective, unconscious level, the nation has decided that it does not trust either Labour or the Tories to clean up politics if one of them is allowed to govern alone. Nor does it trust either of them to take sole responsibility for the economy, taxation and public services.