Tories "Building the Future" but with not Enough Actual Building.....

The Tories have launched a new slogan, "Building a Britain Fit for the Future", except my understanding is there isn't going to be any actual building.

Yet another wishy-washy mish-mash of rehashed, already launched policies, packaged up into something to talk about during next week's budget. Financial incentives, planning changes, but nothing concrete (if you'll excuse the pun). You can have that one for free, shadow Chancellor.

Labour need to be prepared to counter-strike and knock down each of the Tory's proposal. That means credible and detailed homework from the left to be able to deflate every one of the pumped up policies from the Conservatives.

It would also be nice if Labour put a few shots across the bows of the Tories beforehand, signalling intent to really sink their teeth into the Tories unless there are radical, substantial, new proposals to sort out the housing crisis. Tinkering at the edges or rehashing old news will. not. do.

Hopefully with a few well-placed broadsides from Labour, the Tories can be persuaded against presenting a PR campaign as a budget and get them to produce an actual policy with real targets, a real budget and demonstrable progress against those targets.

What Labour cannot do is just trot out the same old anti-Tory plattitudes, the ones that turn voters off and do nothing to change Tory policy. They have to give detailed and credible opposition and strip the veneer from the Tory plans so the voters can see the lack of detail underneath.

But given the superficiality of politics at the moment, I doubt I'll see any of the above actually happen.

One of those times you really wish you were an MP and able to give such superficial people a slap. (before it gets banned) ;-)

Back here I outlined my thoughts on housing and how the crisis should be managed. Government managed housing stock, outside the remit of local authorities needs to be started. Local authorities we all know are corrupt, with contracts going to friends that had surprisingly well-informed tenders. keeping it central (for once) seems to be the preferred option. From the planning perspective national government involvement means it's easier to quote national interest and make the planning stage eaisier. There are plenty of laws the government can invoke to build new housing, or they can quite quickly release old MOD land for building if necessary.