Unconvinced by Brown’s pledges

Am in Beeston, Nottingham for the unveiling of Labour’s pledge card. The pledges – you can see them here – are a mixture of the unquantifiable, pretty general and reheated. The point here is that the “pledge” concept that worked in 1997 to some extent is largely redundant in an era of collapsed trust.

This is just another way to get the economy in the faces of the voters. There have been a series of polls suggesting that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are more trusted than David Cameron and George Osborne on the economy. Despite the worst recession since the war, the Tories have not convincingly dealt a killer blow to Labour’s reputation for economic competence in the way the ERM crisis did for the Tories. The card, dominated by economic pledges, is a way of trying to exloit that and get the economy at the front of voters’ minds.

Gordon Brown has just launched it with a shorter and punchier than usual speech. The only change the Tories offered was a change of advertising agency, he said. He said the Tories would bring an age of austerity but he would deliver an era of shared prosperity. Given the deficit, and on the day the Telegraph revealed the thoughts of some health authorities on job and bed cuts ahead, that may be pushing it a bit. The Guardian said the pledge card looked like a muesli ad – sun rise over arable – and so it does.

As for Alistair Darling, it’s not entirely clear whether he was tipped off that the Guardian interview endorsement of the man Gordon Brown tried to sack in favour of Ed Balls was actually coming. But Mr Brown’s inner team decided that the question would keep coming, who will be your Chancellor if you win (not least in Monday’s Channel 4 “Ask the Chancellors“) and had to be put to bed.