British prime minister David Cameron has opened the United Kingdom’s “most important general election in a generation” with a bitter personal attack on Labour’s Ed Miliband.
Delivering an early signal that Election 2015 could be the most vicious in decades, Mr Cameron insisted that a Conservative majority was “within reach”, even though none of the opinion polls offer such comfort.
Just hours after he had left a Buckingham Palace meeting with Queen Elizabeth, Mr Cameron gave an early signal of his key targets, visiting a key Wiltshire seat that he hopes to seize from the Liberal Democrats.
‘Not fit’
Earlier, he had told a party rally Mr Miliband was “not fit to run our country“: “Leadership does matter. I don’t claim that I’ve got every call right or that I’m the perfect prime minister.”
Everything now depends on the campaign. For months, Conservative MPs have been told by Mr Cameron’s Australian strategist, Lynton Crosbie, that polls were about to shift dramatically in their favour, but the turn has not come.
In the last two days, one opinion poll has put Labour four points ahead, while another gave the result to the Conservatives by the same margin, though nearly all polls predict that neither will get a majority.
Mr Cameron has to get momentum quickly into the Conservative campaign to quell doubters’ fears, or else face rumblings from backbenchers who have never warmed to him.
Following his return after meeting the Queen, Mr Cameron claimed Labour would levy £3,000 in extra taxes on families – a charge quickly questioned by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Both parties, with degrees of enthusiasm, have signed up for £30 billion worth of annual spending cuts – though the Conservatives have refused to detail where £12 billion in savings from the welfare budget would come from.
Meanwhile, Labour has failed to rebut charges – ones that damaged the party heavily in the 2010 campaign – that it intends to increase national insurance charges, which would cost all workers £4 billion a year. Mr Cameron is bidding to capitalise on early signs that workers’ wages are rising and on their doubts about the Labour leader: “Britain is back on her feet again and needs strong leadership,” he said.
Interestingly, Mr Miliband chose to put the UK’s future in the European Union front and centre of his opening speech of the campaign, saying a Conservative victory presents a “clear and present danger”.
Research shows that British voters dislike the EU once reminded of it, but, curiously, they rarely list it as one of their uppermost concerns when asked to produce their own list of gripes. The UK’s future lies in the EU, he said: “There could be nothing worse for our country or for our great exporting businesses than playing political games with our membership of the EU.
“In the past five years our place in the EU has become less and less secure.
“He used to say he would campaign to keep Britain in Europe. But now he won’t rule out campaigning to leave.”
The Labour judgment is based on a belief that voters early in the campaign will give credit to a leader saying unpopular things, if they are convinced that he genuinely believes it.
On this point, Mr Miliband qualifies, since he has repeatedly rejected demands from within his own ranks that they should match Mr Cameron’s pledge of a mid-term referendum on EU membership.