New Labour revisited

It is all becoming clear.  Each night carefully prepared packets of morsels are to be released by the Tories that will hopefully dominate the news bulletins and the headlines the following morning.

The two served up today are on incapacity benefit and a plan for student loans to fund an extra 10,000 university places.  Through greeted teeth, even Alastair Campbell is impressed:

The BBC lead-in was bang on message for VacuDave [naughty] tonight, leading its bulletins with talk of his 'big, bold plans for welfare reform'.….Well done Dave and his spin team then for getting this thought as a major news item.….His big success has been media management.

These announcements don't amount to much but keep the “set out in detail” pressure group at bay.  However, the “smile, nod, wave and say very little” brigade will win though, as Chris Grayling explains:

Mr Grayling sought to quell expectations regarding Tory spending plans on the eve of the party's autumn conference.

"What you won't get from us is a long detailed shopping list of change," he said, citing a lack of access to the books.

This ran against George Osborne's statement the public would "have answers" from the Tories on the jobs crisis and the debt crisis in the following week.

Then we have get this from ConservativeHome:

David Cameron needs a TV moment on the deficit….We need a clip from within David Cameron's speech that will be replayed on TV in the years to come as the truth-telling when David Cameron made it clear what was coming.

All this is straight out of the New Labour copy book of “How to do It’.  Will it work?

We are about to find out if history can in fact repeat itself.