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Delegates are apparently ecstatic at the latest YouGov poll that shows Labour within two points of the Tories and with a fighting chance of emerging from the General Election as the largest party though not with a majority.

I am not surprised that they are pleased but my reading is that this is not so much down to a sudden embracement of all that is good in Gordon Brown as general disillusionment with the alternative.

There is a long way to go yet before the votes are counted but already this is looking like the hardest fought election in living memory and there is still all to play for. The Leader’s debates may prove to be crucial as will the performance of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. Bring it on!

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I mean, can you believe what the prime minister did with a tangerine? No neither could I. Though the citric idiot thing may have been quite quickwitted actually.

This story has now been taken up by The FT, The Sun, The Beeb (14 odd minutes in) and the Telegraph. It’s also had a nice animation done for it by a Hong Kong news channel.

(Hat tip: Robert Popper)

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Britain can’t afford to keep on spending like there’s no tomorrow – Labour has built a mountain of public debt that must be cleared sooner, rather than later. The consequences of allowing that debt to rise could be devastating for the British economy, as its fragile recovery continues.

But, though there will be cuts, we’re talking about cutting a very large cake and there’s an awful lot you can do with what’s left. What matters now, is priorities.

So the question Welsh voters need to ask is, ‘After you have made your cuts, what will you do with what’s left?’ On this question, the difference between the three parties could not be greater. Welsh voters really do have a genuine choice at this election.

I’m proud to say the Liberal Democrats have squared up to the debt we must tackle. Both Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have been clear on the tough choices we would make, choices that some media observers suggested would cause our party members to rise up in protest. In reality, our members have understood and accepted the need to prioritise while money is tight.

The core value defining our priorities is fairness –using what little money is available to tackle inequalities that have grown under Labour and would surge further under a Tory government.

Our fair tax plans represent the only clear hope of addressing the widening gap between rich and poor. In Wales, around half of children living in poverty, live in working households. That’s a damning indictment of a tax system Labour refuses to fix and the Tories would make more unfair still by cutting taxes for the rich.

By introducing a tax on mansions worth more than £2m and closing loopholes for wealthy tax dodgers, Liberal Democrats could afford to lift over 200,000 Welsh workers out of paying tax altogether and save more than 800,000 workers £700 in income tax a year.

Contrast Nick Clegg’s straight-talking approach with the neatly spun speeches of Cameron and Brown and the real election battle lines becomes clear.

In a recent speech, Gordon Brown outlined all the fantastic things Labour would do if re-elected – but said nothing of how they might pay for any of it. Brown paused only to tell the audience that ‘some departments’ would need to be cut. I suspect, we may never find out what, if anything, he had in mind for the chop.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ philosophy is ‘cut everything, cut big and cut it now.’ The impact of cutting an estimated 12%, across all budgets, beginning immediately would see crucial services in health and education suffer unnecessarily. Quite simply, this approach reveals a complete lack of priorities – and priorities, as I have outlined, reflect values.

No Welsh voter should be seduced by this brazen Labour and Tory electioneering. When I’m out campaigning, everybody I meet tells me they know tough choices must be made – and change is urgently needed.

Look closely and it’s clear Wales is still reeling from a decade of fantasy finance. There are 126,000 unemployed people in Wales, half of who are under 25. House repossessions in Wales surged to 40,000 in 2008 and UK household debt remains the highest in Europe.

Amazingly, Labour and the Tories still see the City of London as panacea, hoping that a new credit free-for-all can start a new boom, this time, with a happy ending.

We all know this flawed over-reliance on the City has had its day. Talking to business in Wales, it’s clear to me that cheap credit glossed over the structural failings in the economy. For this reason, my focus is on making Wales a strong place to do business and the best place to grow your business.

It’s investment in skills and infrastructure that will achieve these aims, but the Labour-Plaid government in the National Assembly has forced a 5% cut on further and higher education institutions, cuts that threaten to devastate our skills base and research expertise, just as we emerge from recession. We would reverse this using as yet unallocated health funding, in the context of a Welsh NHS whose finance chiefs admit £1billion is not being spent effectively.

And just a few weeks ago, my colleague Jenny Randerson, called for the subsidy of flights between Cardiff and Anglesey to be scrapped so as to improve North-South rail links. Why, we asked, subsidise just over 14,000 flights by £84 a ticket at an annual cost of around £1million?

The Welsh Government could switch tracks and subsidise hundreds of thousands of rail tickets, or improve infrastructure instead. They refuse to act and in doing so, continue to favour the few over the many, folly over fairness. It’s a small example of misplaced priorities creating an unfair Wales. Yes, over the next few months, it’s cuts that will dominate debate, but it’s those priorities that will shape our future.

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What’s not on, however, is pillorying him for his poor handwriting when he makes the effort to write to the grieving mother of a soldier killed in action in Afghanistan

Published Dec 6th, a ‘parody’ of a letter from Gordon Brown to Carwyn Jones that begins by mocking his spelling

Dear Carmine

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Today, Gordon Brown decided this was the political territory that he wants the Labour party to inhabit. As MORI put Labour in third place, for the first time since 1982, Gordon Brown firmly positioned himself in the spot of the third party.

I’ve always thought that the accusation levelled at us of ‘not costing our promises’ was at times harsh, although, at least at that time, the ‘not winning the election’ part of it wasn’t. Labour and the Tories bashed heads over what the real choices facing the country were, while we kinda chirped on in the background about what we’d really like to do. Times have changed. We are now setting out a real agenda for government, leading the debate and setting out our stall as an alternative to the red-blue-blue-red circle, the Tories are playing catch-up, admitting there is a debate to be had on spending although not actually telling us their view.

Labour know that they can’t win the election by telling the truth or debating where the axe will fall with us. But they seem to think that if they lie, it won’t matter because they still probably won’t win, and if they lie enough, they might somehow win, and then deal with the consequences afterwards. It’s the sort of immature politics you expect not just from a third party, but from a fringe party.

Lets look at the reality. The Treasury admit that cuts will have to be made, yet what has Gordon announced today:

More investment in schools
£1 Billion innovation fund
250,000 green jobs
10,000 skilled internships
Halving the deficit in four years
Restoring the pensions/earnings link
Increased child benefit and tax credit
Free childcare for two year olds

By the end of it, I was expecting ‘a white Christmas every year’ and ‘free cheese, beer and a puppy for every household’. It is just as deliverable. Maybe doubling the budget on Gnomes as well.

Some of these are good policies (the real lot, not the bollocks I made up, if you can tell the difference), ones I would support and love to see go through. But only if they can be paid for. And what did Gordon say about paying for these? Some vague notion of ’raising tax at the top’, again good, but that won’t pay for everything. Can you promise us that there will be no tax rise for low and middle earners? Because that will do far more damage to the country than you’ve managed so far.

After ten years in government, the Labour party have the sheer gall to clap electoral reform, Lords reform and the dropping of ID cards? What ! We’ve been banging that drum for years and you’ve been ignoring us. Yet suddenly Gordon puts it in his speech like some sort of Scottish Messiah and you’re suddenly converts.

And this ‘in the next Parliament’ thing. I remember seeing that before. You promised that you would not introduce top-up fees, and then claimed you only meant in the next Parliament. So don’t expect us to be fooled this time. We know you still want to introduce ID cards and that you are trying to put them off because you can’t afford them. We know as soon as you can you’ll bring them back. Don’t try to claim you are protecting civil liberties because you are lying. And this time people won’t fall for it.

And what the bloody hell is this rubbish about putting 16/17 year old mothers in supervised accommodation? That’s just nuts! He claims it is unfair that they are able to get council houses while other people can’t. Is that your answer to the housing crisis Gordon? Rounding up school girls? Here’s a better idea: BUILD MORE SOCIAL HOUSING. And if you can’t afford that, and that is understandable at the moment, then help to encourage more empty properties back into use, use public land more effectively and make sure councils, as well as developers, are able to use the planning system as effectively as possible.

I guess it doesn’t matter what Gordon said today. He won’t have a chance to implement it. I know that, you know that, his policy advisors know that, his party knows that and even he knows that.

There were a few good things in his speech, I know they are good, because we proposed them, and once again, he stole them.

In all likelihood Labour will get a hammering this Spring. And that is fine with me. If Labour want to act like a third party, while we step up and become the responsible opposition to Tory spin, then the electors will start to consider exactly where their vote should go. That MORI poll showed us this could already be happening, and we pick up votes as the election continues. It’s could be a bright Spring for the Liberal Democrats, in both Wales and the rest of the UK, and a dark, dark time for Labour.

And after Brown’s performance today, I’ve realised something. They deserve it.

(This post is not the view of the Welsh Liberal Democrats. It is the view of Matt O’Grady, who isn‘t important enough for any sort of title or explanation as to who he is. He probably isn’t sure what he actually wrote at the beginning of the post due to a short attention span, so it‘s barely even his view.)

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In it she hits out at both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives for pointing out how the Gordon Brown’s mismanagement of the economy means that there will have to be severe cuts in public spending over the next few years. This is despite the fact that the Prime Minister himself has acknowledged that Labour too will have to cut public spending and that this too may include some treasured projects that impact upon Wales.

Personally, I think Clegg may have been too brutal in his use of the word ‘savage’ but let us not kid ourselves, that is an accurate description of what is likely to happen whoever wins power. As Jenny Randerson put it when describing Labour’s plans in the Assembly Plenary yesterday: ‘how would you describe the 9.3 per cent cut in the UK budget that we now know is coming? I cannot think of a better word to describe it than ‘savage’. That is the reality of the result of putting many billions of pounds into the coffers of the bankers.’

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All this is a distraction, and seeks to pull a thin veil over what is really going on in Welsh lives and communities. If you look at two other key indicators, it clearly shows that Wales’ job market is teetering on the brink of serious and irreversible problems.

The employment rate, which measures the actual numbers of people in real jobs as opposed to the numbers registered as officially unemployed fell by nearly a whole percentage point in the last quarter. This leaves Wales as the UK “region” with the fourth worst employment rate behind Northern Ireland, London and the North East of England. Meanwhile, those who are economically active (meaning they are over sixteen and contributing to GDP) has fallen by 0.8% leaving Wales the third worst place in the UK.

What is clear when these figures are taken together is that behind the simplistic spin and the sentiment that Welsh unemployment is coming down, there is a very bleak picture in Wales. There are now 437 thousand Welsh people of working age who are economically inactive, almost a quarter of the population. That is a whole five percent of the population higher than the UK average.

Since the dark days of Thatcherism, Wales has been at the bottom of the pile for employment, and I know that Labour and Plaid will blame the Tories for the negativity of the picture. While the scars of Thatcherism will take decades to heal, the Labour party must take responsibility for the fact that after a decade of record public spending, Wales is still at the bottom of most UK economic indicators. Until we see a marked change in attitude, until we see Government that accepts the future of economic prosperity in this country lies in the creation of quality private sector jobs and investment, until we see real change at the top, Wales will continue to be the poor-man of Europe, life expectancy here will continue to fall behind and the health and well-being of our children will continue to suffer.

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With thanks to Liberal Democrat Voice for this extract from a recent Question Time.

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