Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Has Clegg split the Labour high-command?

So I guess that May 4th 2010 will officially go down as the day the electoral message of the Labour Party went from desperate begging for another chance to utterly surreal calls of pure contradiction.

On the one hand, we've had Ed Balls speaking in a coded way suggesting that keeping the Tory out in a Lib-Con marginal is more important that voting Labour, a theme echoed by Peter Hain under which lies the essential Tory message on the Hung parliament of "Vote Clegg, Get Brown".

Then on the other hand, when questioned, Gordon Brown contradicts Ed Balls saying "a vote for the liberals may allow the conservatives to be elected" - in other words, like so many of Labour's leaflets across the country, "Vote Clegg, Get Cameron".

So what we have is talk of tactical voting that represents a complete tactical blunder by Labour, because they're now pushing two completely contradictory lines, one of which just happens to be the consistent Tory line about what a vote for Clegg.

Frankly, it's just getting silly, but more so, it suggests that there may actually be a split in the Labour's electoral strategy at the top now as they battle to try and figure out how they deal with the Lib Dems - much in the same way the Tories had trouble figuring out how to deal with Tony Blair.

It's ironic of course that the Labour message about the Lib Dems now appears to be in line with the general message that the Lib Dems push, i.e a different message for different places.

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