As the latest Tory poll lead stretches again after the conference season to 17% (44% as against 27%), a Tory victory in an election which couold be called as early as the last week of March seems to many inevitable. It isn’t. It’s not just that the Tories have a mountain to climb – they need to win 127 seats even to get a majority of 1. It isn’t either that a change of policy that set the social democratic pulses of the Labour Party racing could do the trick – making the bankers pay for their greed and arrogance, a massive programme of job creation to shrink the budget deficit rather than hugely painful and less effective cuts in public expenditure, stopping the constant slide into privatisation and market fundamentalism, building affordable houses for the 1.8 million households on the waiting list, and redistributing from the ultra-rich to the millions in child poverty and pensioner poverty. It would do the trick, but New Labour who have hi-jacked the party will never do that. But there is another way that could still succeed.

That is to tell the truth, loudly and clearly, over and over again, about Tory intentions once they get power. The evidence for this is not New Labour spin, but Osborne’s own words triumphally proclaimed at the Tory party conference las month. Just like the constant Tory repetition of the so-called Labour tax bombshell in 1992, Labour should endlessly play on the fear that Osborne’s own words generate. The fear of 5 million public sector workers who are going to be subjected to a pay freeze. The fear of the millions on incapacity benefit that they will be forced either to take a benefit cut or be forced into work they cannot do. The fear of those who will be deprived of tax credits on which they have always previously relied. The fear of those in ill-health who are going to be forced to work another year before they can get their pension. The fear of those who will lose their jobs in the promised cull of Whitehall posts.
And that is only for starters. The IFS estimated that all these cuts would only amount to some £23bn against a total budget deficit of £175bn. Since the Tories are openly pledged to slice the deficit quickly to a much smaller size, that can only mean that the job cuts, the pay cuts, the programme cuts are going to be hugely greater than they have so far let on if they were to win. Fear is a potent motivator, especially when it is driven, not by opponents’ allegations which are never credible, but by their own loudly asserted intentions. If the Labour Party machine focussed on this, truthfully and relentlessly, for the next 6 months, this election is still wide open.

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