Labour changes the narrative

The Guardian reported yesterday on Labour’s new post-G20 strategy.

Ministers agreed that they needed to deliver three key messages before the budget. These are: that the budget will mark the moment when Alistair Darling will have to downgrade his forecasts for economic growth and upgrade his forecasts for government borrowing; that expectations of a recovery off the back of the G20 summit will have to be lowered.

and

A series of statistics will be unleashed to try to prove that Cameron's "do-nothing" approach - he opposed last year's fiscal stimulus - would have compounded the recession.

Darling started to roll the strategy out in a Sunday Times interview and with Marr:

The depth of the recession here and across the world is far greater than people were predicting last year.

We will see a much more severe depth of downturn and that will have an effect on countries across the world.

All very well and some would say it is about time Darling downgraded his forecasts.  There is more to this than meets the eye, especially with tactical Gordon pulling the strings.  Is Brown deliberately lowering expectations only to produce a a few surprise nuggets on budget day?  You bet he is.

Labour has to move on and attempt to change the narrative.  Time is not their side in the quest to improve the political weather.  Their pursuit of Cameron will be relentless from now on.  He can’t say he hasn't been warned.

The possibility of Brown going to the country soon has not been killed off.  In his interview with Adam Boulton he said:

I am not going to get into talk about dates. Our first priority is jobs, it's homes and it's businesses.

Brown has bounced back many times, and he is not going to let the public relations success of the G20 pass him by.  Both he and Mandy have developed this new strategy and are on manoeuvres.  The question at present is what are these exactly?  Brown is not a dead man walking yet.