Telegraph is the Torygraph again with this Conservative propaganda
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Version 0 of 1. The Daily Telegraph is the Daily Torygraph all over again. Today’s front page resembles a Conservative campaign poster with a huge headline announcing that 100 very rich people are urging much poorer people not to vote Labour. The “coalition” of business executives have written “an exclusive letter to the Telegraph” in which they claim a Labour government would “threaten jobs and deter investment” in the UK. Instead, they applaud the economic policies of the Conservative party and praise David Cameron and George Osborne for deciding to cut corporation tax. The newspaper, light blue for a long period of this administration, is deepest blue again with this Conservative propaganda. It calls the letter “the biggest ever endorsement by business leaders of a political party” and claims it “will further undermine the economic credibility of Ed Miliband... and Ed Balls”. And, in a leading article, it claims that the letter “has punctured Labour’s somewhat frantic efforts to demonstrate that they are a business-friendly party... it makes clear they no longer trust the party under Ed Miliband to have the best interests of wealth-creating companies at heart”. The Telegraph is not alone in rallying to the blue flag. We are barely into this campaign and the fear of Labour has galvanised the right-wing press in a way not seen since its 1992 jitters over a possible election victory by Neil Kinnock. Gone is the tentative sympathy for Ukip along with its central issues, immigration and the European Union. They can wait. For the moment, it’s the economy stupid. Ed Miliband would be a disaster for British business, booms the op-ed headline in the Daily Express. Next to it is a leading article, Tories’ economic boost, citing “official data showing economic growth was higher last year than initially thought”. which is “comforting for a party staking its future on its reputation for economic competence”. The Times, in praise of the government’s “honest” austerity programme, argues that “Britain is outperforming its competitors in the G7... with growth of 2.8% in 2014”. So Osborne “deserves congratulation for his fortitude’. He refused to relax his spending restraint “and the economic recovery is thus to his credit”. With household disposable income having risen above the level it reached before the economic downturn, says the Times, it “undermines Labour’s critique of the recovery”. The Telegraph’s leader, quoting with approval the same GDP figures from the Office for National Statistics, thinks it “nothing other than good news for the coalition parties”. It predicts that the Tories are “limbering up to hit Labour with a repeat of their 1992 ‘tax and spending’ bombshell campaign” and concludes: “The point is no one really knows what Labour would do. It is this uncertainty and the party’s track record for mismanaging the public finances that has alarmed business leaders, just as it should alarm the country”. The Daily Mail also points to the “auspicious” GDP figures. “It’s as if all David Cameron’s Christmases have come at once”, it says. The best news “is that families and pensioners now have marginally more to spend than when the coalition came to power. “At a stroke, this demolishes the last, wobbly plank in Labour’s platform – the endlessly repeated claim, based on figures already a year old, that Britons are ‘£1,600 a year worse off’ than in 2010”. The Mail calls Miliband “a callow quasi-Marxist, who has never worked in the real world and has no notion of how jobs are created or how businesses must compete globally to survive”. But there is something of a sting in the tail for Cameron: “This paper finds it baffling how anyone – young or old, rich or poor, employed or looking for a job – should even consider putting Britain’s economy back into the hands of the union-dominated Left that has repeatedly destroyed it. Heaven knows, it’s a straightforward enough message. When will the Tories muster the passion to get it across?” The Sun, in a spread headlined The Blue Brothers over an “exclusive” joint interview with long-time “pals” Cameron and Osborne, carries an editorial attacking “Red Ed” (the cliché that refuses to lie down). It says Miliband and his shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, suffered a blow with the release of the latest figures on the economy. “They desperately wish the economy wasn’t doing so well,” argues the Sun, “because negativity is all they’ve got to offer”. But the Financial Times sounds a warning note about the campaign being drowned in “dodgy data”. “If the start is anything to go by”, it says, “the next five weeks will be a weary slog through a swamp of misleading assertions and numbers taken out of context”. It chides the Conservatives for its “ham-fisted attempt to replicate their 1992 ‘tax bombshell’ campaign” by claiming that taxes would rise by £3,000 per working household under Labour. The FT says: “This figure fails even the most basic tests of plausibility. Quick examination by the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed multiple sleights of hand, including the arbitrary accumulation of four years’ putative tax into one, and positing a fiscal target that Labour would not need to hit”. The paper of business calls this “wilful obfuscation” but it also takes Labour to task for building an electoral strategy based on “scaremongering about creeping privatisation of the NHS”. |