I think the main danger in misinterpreting David Cameron’s speech, written by Clare Foges and colleagues of the Conservative Party (including presumably David Cameron), is to do so without viewing it from the perspective of a potential Tory voter.

Individuals who are ardent Conservative voters, one assumes, are not distracted by factual inaccuracies in the narrative (such as how many people on housing benefit are unemployed, or how much borrowing this current government is doing). Certain things might have stuck in the minds of potential voters, such as the idea of an unemployed person in a bedsit queue-jumping in the housing ballot ahead of a person who’d dedicated his or her life for decades. To such people, the prevalence of benefit fraud is immaterial. Cameron tried to produce a narrative of the rich being punished for being successful, in his characteristically patronising explanation of how income tax works for Miliband’s benefit. A caller on Iain Dale’s show last night on lbc considered that he might vote for the Conservative Party, having voted for decades for Labour. He felt that his ambitions as a worker had not been recognised by the Labour Party, and was sick of it. Rather than blaming Cameron and his team for tapping into this ‘aspiration’, Labour runs a genuine risk of pursuing evidence-based politics while simultaneously failing to capture the sentiment and feelings of workers of this country.

How this situation has come about is interesting, but it is patently obvious that it has not come about overnight. Cameron indeed would be right in thinking that such a voter is not overly concerned about what Prof Michael Sandel or Prof Jim Hacker have to say about public good or predistribution particularly; the mental masturbation over intellectual sociological ideas might lead to an even greater disconnect between Labour and its missing voters. It is clearly of concern that there are millions of voters who cannot remember why they did not vote in the 2010 general election, but it is fair to say, probably, that not all of them produced a protest vote on account of the expenses scandal. While talk of whether Andrew Mitchell will survive is of immense interest to the Westminster village, it is curiously not the allegation that he may have said “fucking” or “pleb” that is the problem with the focus groups, but the fact that the Conservative Party do not consider themselves at one with the general public.

This is why Cameron’s pitch was effective, as it was ‘levelling’ with the public in a way that they largely comprehend. Labour has its own arguments why it increased public spending, but it seems that there is no appetite for such a technical debate; however much Labour wishes to debate it, the Labour Party are generally not trusted with the public finances. While ‘One Nation’ talk might be appealing, even after the forty-sixth repeat, if Labour cannot be trusted to be in control of the public purse, the most they can hope for is a Lib-Lab pact. The dynamics of a potential future Lib-Lab pact are interesting, in that the vast majority of Labour voters would not wish to enter into a pact with Nick Clegg still at the helm of the Liberal Democrat party. It becomes 50/50 if it’s any leader but Nick Clegg, and still most Labour voters stubbornly feel that Labour politicians are better at running the economy than the Liberal Democrats. It can be tempting for Labour members to think that the NHS is a ‘make or break’ issue, but this policy has been evolving for some time, especially under New Labour, with the emergence of NHS Foundation Trusts and clinical commissioning. Labour voters are not likely to get angry over the pay packets of private directors of healthcare companies at the ballot box, but are more likely to resent the Health and Social Care Act if quality is seen to suffer. While the NHS remains branded as an unitary NHS, this is unlikely to be the case, and the Conservatives can justifiably continue, perhaps, with their strategy of either not mentioning it, or describing it as a ‘modernisation strategy’.

The legal aid cuts might be a more productive way for Labour to reach out to the strivers. For example, due to the managed decline of law centres on the high street, access-to-justice for housing, immigration, asylum, welfare benefits, and employment advice, inter alia, is compromised. This is hardly in the best interests of strivers? Strivers are unlikely to be impressed by trading off their rights not to be unfairly dismissed for some shares in a company which cannot produce a dividend unless it has distributable profits. It might be that strivers do not particularly care whether the Human Rights Act is abolished or not, although its abolition might help to return a Conservative government. Individuals may be inclined to think that so long as he or she is not affected by torture, privacy, or freedom of expression issues, they are unlikely to be touched by the Human Rights Act, especially if legal aid for such matters is abolished. Cameron has also perhaps succeeded in painting the Conservative Party as firmly footed in the “real world”. There are two major issues for why Ed Miliband has trouble on this: the spending of Labour “even during the good times”, and the thirst by Miliband for the application of sociological theories which have yet to be tested in practice. The empirical evidence for ‘Nudge’ of course has never been compelling, but there is a sense that the standards that Conservatives apply for themselves are not the ones they apply to Labour.

So it comes to something when David Cameron calls trade union leaders “snobs”, but no amount of hatred for inverted snobbery will deliver Miliband a landslide for the 2015 general election. Practical problems emerge if Ed Balls signs up for an austerity agenda indistinguishable from the Conservatives, not least in the sense that workers will wonder why on earth they are still supporting Labour. Miliband does not want to be seen in the lap of ‘vested interests’ codeword for ‘trade unions’, but likewise he has not embraced a redistributive tax system targetting the very highest earners yet. Trade union members contribute up to 40% of the funding of the Labour Party, but, like the debate on public purse handling, Miliband is unlikely to sway the minds of voters on this. It is not improved aspiration from the middle class and centre that will win Miliband the 2015 general election, but it will be working class leaving Labour in droves in finding their aspirations unaddressed. One term oppositions are extremely rare, and Labour finds itself in a difficult position in perhaps having to rely on the Liberal Democrats to form a government having spent the last five years in slagging them off. Cameron’s speech yesterday was full of statements all good lefties would have found contemptible, but it was clever in that it was sufficiently practical (for example, not mentioning the ‘bash a burglar’ policy) that it did offer a course for government. As others have pointed out, this is not a speech that Cameron can ever give in future, if he fails to deliver. The starting gun for the 2015 general election has most definitely been fired, and the first ‘hurdle’ takes the form of the OBR assessment in a few weeks time about the UK deficit. Cameron has given himself in a sense a suspended sentence, but there are strict conditions for his future behaviour.