Whilst there is outrage amongst many voters at the privatisation of the NHS, it is still unclear whether this is a ‘deal-breaker’. Labour has done well to make the arguments, not helped by the BBC which has been attacked in the social media for its lack of balance by many tweeps. It would be interesting for the BBC to be transparent about the number of complaints which they have received on this matter.
The Conservatives’ reputation as a party of economic credibility is about to blown to smithereens. Projects such as ‘Building Schools for the Future’ were scrapped, and the slow-down in the construction sector at the end of 2010 was toxic to the UK economy. Together with the increase in VAT which saw a temporary influx of tax receipts, consumer demand slumped. It is now widely expected that the UK will soon be announced to be in recession, once the ONS figures are released officially. With exports falling, and the construction sector reporting figures unparalleled since 1963, the Conservatives economic policy, if predictions are correct, will be in tatters.
The rhetoric over Labour’s purported mismanagement of the economy is well known, with false allegations that the UK was about to become bankrupt. Whether these allegations were actually fraudulent requires one to know the mind of George Osborne. Add to this the billions which have spent on the NHS reforms so far, and a lack of clarity as to whether there was a competitive bidding process for the management contracts, as described on Dr Eoin Clarke’s blog “The Green Benches”, there is plenty of scope for Labour to go for the jugular.
In law, you have to show there was a duty-of-care, then there was a breach which caused an event. Here, Labour has to show that the Conservatives were trusted with the economy (nobody cares what the Liberal Democrats believed any more), the Conservatives breached this duty-of-care, which caused the economy to contract for the first time since the General Election. That’s in tort of course. Or else the Conservatives had a contract with the voters over the economy, and in an ideal world the voters now would sue them for the breach of contract.
