The Big Idea

Conventional wisdom has it that Gordon Brown will wait until the last possible moment to go to the country, on the basis that he waited so long to take on the Premiership (Blair having repeatedly welched on his Granita promise) that he will not willingly jeopardise it in an election he is unlikely to win.

I've long wondered whether this is necessarily the case: he looks tired, he has repeatedly misjudged the seriousness of the credit crunch and its consequences and, as I've hinted previously in this blog, I think there are times when parties are actually quite keen to lose plebiscites in order to allow other parties to carry the can of making politically unpopular but economically necessary decisions.

If there's truth to this hypothesis, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw a General Election this year - quite possibly on the same date as the European and local votes to be held simultaneously on 4 June. OK, this is an unlikely scenario - I'd guess the bookies would offer very long odds on it coming to pass. But I imagine that the Conservative Party has contingency plans in place, just in case.

Given the (admittedly small) chance of a General Election in less than four months' time, I'm surprised that we've so far seen relatively little from the blue corner that could be described as an easily communicated, catchy, media-friendly 'big idea'. While 'responsible capitalism' is a sound principle on which to manage the economy, and is an interesting debating point for the chattering classes, it's no election slogan.

My guess is that we can probably win on the basis of public dissatisfaction with the mismanagement of the economy alone, but having a Big Idea will help safeguard that win - especially given that recent years have seen demographic changes that mean we need to surpass Labour's share of the national vote by at least six percent to win the biggest number of seats, let alone obtain an overall majority. More to the point, if the public understands and buys into this Big Idea, and is behind us in what we're setting out to do, there's a much higher chance that the electorate will remain on side during what will inevitably be a very difficult period. According to a report in today's Sunday Times, public spending will have to be slashed by up to £100 billion by 2020 - AND the higher rate of tax will have to rise to 50p in the Pound.

Clearly, the UK economy is very badly broken, so the Big Idea needs, above all else, to communicate our ability and commitment to fix it. But the public outrage over Alfie Patten and Chantelle Steadman, the children who conceived a baby at the ages of 12 and 14 respectively, only to sell their story to the tabloids, together with the ongoing dismay felt by the majority of Britons at the perverse incentives created by the benefits system, the increasing financial pressures on those who prefer to stand on their own two feet, the two-tier system that sees public sector spending soar and its workers cushioned by a culture of complacency while being feather-bedded by generous pensions and the revolving door between the Government, public sector and pro-Labour business leaders, policy reversals and contradictory messages over drugs, the loss of control over immigration, worring levels of gang-based youth crime in urban areas, all demonstrate that the electorate believes that the country is broken in other ways, too.

And the links between the broken economy and the other aspects of our country that are also broken are manifest. As a result of the economic crisis brought about by the current administration's complacency, taxpayers will be forced to shoulder a burden for a generation. No politician with a conscience should be able to face the electorate and expect them to take on that liability unless he or she has done everything in his or her power to ensure that the load is spread as widely as possible. That means that life will have to get a lot harder for the elective unemployed, with the benefits and housing system reinvented to incentivise endeavour and penalise Shameless-style work-dodging. Equally, the days of the public sector final salary pension - including MPs' - must draw to a close, as must the many sinecures funded by local authorities and quangos.

In the business world, it's normal to talk about RoI - return on investment. In the years to come, the same test will have to be used before spending even the smallest amount of taxpayers' money, if we are to reduce the gargantuan debt created by New Labour without impoverishing those most in need. It's often said that if one gives a starving man a fish, he eats well tonight; whereas if one gives him a fishing rod and teaches him to fish, he'll eat well forever more. The risk is that an indebted Britain shashes public spending across the board, including, to continue the analogy, the provision of fishing rods and angling courses for those most in need. Instead, we should forge ahead with those initiatives - albeit provided on the most efficient basis possible, by a mix of the voluntary and public sectors, rather than on a top-down basis by lavishly funded quangos headed by the great and the good, and delivered by a surfeit of public sector agency workers able to retire in their 50s on gold-plated pensions, supported by armies of diversity and sustainability officers.

'Fixing broken Britain' is a simple, easily communicated concept that brings together the overriding economic imperative and the many areas in which New Labour has been shown to have failed the electorate. Iain Duncan Smith flirted with the same slogan during his leadership but, in those better times, the public hadn't yet come to recognise the full extent to which both the economy and British society had been fractured by New Labour, and focus groups were telling Conservative strategists that it had to distance itself from Thatcher-era moralism: out with 'the nasty party, in with chinos, organic skinny lattes and, ultimately, hugging hoodies.

That was then; this is now. Today, the public recognises that we live in desperate times and that decisive action is required if the country is to regain its economic strength and a functioning social structure. They don't want nice, they want effective, and trustworthy. I therefore hope that, behind the scenes, David Cameron's team is working on bringing together its policy initiatives under the 'broken Britain' theme. I'm sure that it's the key to winning the next election.