Adrian Hamilton: Recovery cannot begin until house prices bottom out

November 20, 2008 on 12:34 pm | In News |

We don’t have the money to fund recovery without outside investors.

How can he get away with it? While David Cameron laboriously carries out a U-turn on taxes, the Prime Minister positively somersaults over every position he has ever held and yet seems to get only stronger in the opinion polls.

Adrian Hamilton, The Independent - Thursday, 20 November 2008

He has abandoned all his golden rules, embraced unfunded tax cuts as the panacea for our recessionary woes and declared the whole thing a global problem in which we are but guiltless victims.

Meanwhile, poor old Cameron has to do his manoeuvres in full public glare before an audience who never saw the point of his much-vaunted commitment to keeping Labour’s spending plans in the first place, and are just as unmoved by his reversal of it now.

The blunt answer to the question is political skill. True, world events have given Brown cover for his policy reversals. But his real adeptness has been the way he has been able to turn events to his own advantage, playing to his strength as a man full of measures to meet the occasion and his ability – too often underestimated – to paint his opponent into a corner.

In the early stages, it was pinioning the Tories (although not the Lib Dems, it should be said) into the position of being ignorant of the world scale of the crisis. Now it is to put Cameron into the role of a man who, in assaulting reckless spending, is showing himself opposed to helping the poor and the weak.

It is hard politics but it is good politics, in that it has at least thrown up a real argument about policy rather than shadow-boxing over image. Full Article