'Black hole' swallows tax pledges
By CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley
 |  Kennedy's ratings rose after his unconvincing performance days after he became a father. |
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 Blair faces toughest battle yet in May 5 parliamentary elections. CNN's Robin Oakley reports.
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ROBIN OAKLEY'S ELECTION BLOG | |
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Home Secretary Charles Clarke likes his food, and it shows, so much so that the tabloid newspapers have taken to calling him "two pizzas" Clarke.
But at least he can take a joke against himself. Reflecting on a question Thursday he replied: "I have two gut feelings on this -- maybe appropriate for a man with a gut the size I have." A little humanity can get you a long way in such a colorless campaign.
Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy can testify to that. After he stumbled over local income tax figures at his manifesto launch, red-eyed with tiredness after the first two days of his baby's life, the British media panned his efforts.
But what happened in the opinion polls? Kennedy's ratings went up, so did those of his party. There was human sympathy for a guy who was going through what the rest of us have been through. And thanks to Kennedy's blunder the Liberal Democrat policies, which they normally have trouble publicizing, have been given a more thorough examination in the British press than they would otherwise have received.
There is one election going on among the chattering classes in Westminster, the political aficionados who attend the press conferences and read the manifestoes, and there is another one being conducted in pubs, clubs and old peoples homes up and down the country, where most spend more time on last night's sitcom rivalry or football match than they do on the contest for votes.
There is deep public disillusion with the political trade and former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd was wise to predict not long ago that the politicians who will appeal most in modern times are those who seem least like politicians.
That is where Kennedy scores. Tony Blair and his Conservative opponent Michael Howard suffer doubly because they are clever lawyers as well as politicians and there is a distrust these days of lawyers too. "Why don't sharks bite lawyers?" the comedians ask. "Professional courtesy" comes the reply.
Actually this campaign has been lacking in good political invective too. Political insults used to be an art form, like the Richard Nixon opponent who declared "Nixon can tell separate lies out of different corners of his mouth at the same time and if he ever caught himself telling the truth he'd pull himself up immediately in case it became a habit."
An exchange between former Labour leader Neil Kinnock and leading Conservative Michael, now Lord, Heseltine comes to mind. Kinnock accused Heseltine of playing in the political gutter. "If I were to be in the gutter" Heseltine snapped back "then you'd still be looking up to me -- from the sewer." British politics is not for the squeamish.
Mind you, other nations can mix it too. Nicolas Sarkozy, now Jacques Chirac's rival for the French presidency but once one of his groupies, was once told that Madame Chirac had described him as a "little s**t" for deserting her husband and backing someone else. "Why little?" he is alleged to have replied with a Gallic shrug.
The most over-worked phrase of this campaign has been "the black hole" into which each party alleges the others' financial plans will fall. It didn't do the Labour government any good then that the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies seemed to support their opponents' claims when it pronounced this week that a new Labour government would need to raise taxes or cut spending by £11 billion in the next parliament to restore Britain's finances to health. Similar indications have come from the OECD and the IMF.
The Tories rushed forward gleefully to insist that this was confirmation of what they had been saying. "Mr. Blair has a gaping hole in his finances which he will have to fill with higher taxes if he wins the election" said Conservative economic spokesman Oliver Letwin. At least, small mercy, he didn't say black hole this time.
All the warnings though have had little effect on the public, with opinion pollsters finding that Labour remains well ahead in terms of public faith in the party to run the economy effectively. There are probably two reasons for that. One is that Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has been taking on the economic doomsayers for years, and so far his forecasts have turned out better than theirs. Secondly, the Institute for Fiscal Studies isn't much impressed by the other parties' offerings either.
It declares that the public are right to be skeptical about the spending and tax promises from all the parties, including Letwin's claim that the Tories could cut government "waste" by £35 billion and the Liberal Democrats' suggestion that they could raise £4.8 billion a year from their proposed 50 percent income tax on those earning more than £100,000 a year.
Most importantly, the IFS says that public spending and taxation will be higher at the end of the next parliament than it is now, irrespective of which party wins on May 5. That is what most people feel in their bones and it colors their attitude to the shallow exchanges between the party leaders.
