UK - Labour and Conservative healthcare contrast

The new government has been unveiling some of its policies, but largely remained coy about revealing information about spending plans, as Nick Robinson says here. An interesting revelation about health-care policy from Andrew Lansley the new Health Secretary of State in a recent speech; essentially the new government will be scrapping some of the new Labour targets (specifically the 4-hour waiting-time target at A&E, which is supposed to have some severe negative impacts).

Useful for anyone contemplating some of the key differences between new Labour and the Lib-Con government.

When there is something more concrete about the measures to cut the deficit, I'll post, but suffice to say this piece by Robert Peston about the international lessons for the UK, and this one by Stephanie Flanders about how bad news on the economy has played into the government's hands have much for us to ponder upon. Whether any party has done enough in the run up to the election to spell out how severe the cuts will have to be, is anybody's guess. Does the coalition government have enough of a mandate to pursue its policy in this area? We'll see. Check out my previous post about the deficit-mandate-manifesto issue and George Osborne here.

In addition to the above, the Labour Party leadership battle rumbles on. I'm not convinced that there has been enough debate to enable the Labour party to move on after the Blair-Brown years, or that enough profound lessons have been learned. Is the next leader of the Labour party the next William Hague or Michael Foot? Let's watch out for those debates.

Elections: Mandate and Manifesto

Gordon Brown has finally called the date of the General Election, and unusually its not clear who the winner will be because there is a significant possibility that neither of the big parties will have enough seats in Westminster to win an overall majority. I'm not going to be doing a blow-by-blow account of the political arguments as this is not that sort of blog, and besides to use Jon Pienaar's description in a recent podcast, the news-cycle is not 24-hour marathon but a 30-minute sprint; interested parties rebutt each-others' claims rapidly during the day, so that a story changes very rapidly as the hours go by.

This election is useful for G&P students in many ways (obviously), and highlights the important power that the Prime Minister has in deciding when to call the election. Generally, PMs choose the time which they believe would be most likely to produce a favourable result. In Brown's case he was on the verge of calling an election in October 2007 because it was felt he would benefit from being a fresh face. The fact he didn't because of unfavourable polling data has been, and will continue to be, debated at some length (for example here in the Right-leaning Spectator and here in the left-leaning Guardian. Ultimately he decided not go for an election in 2007 (2 1/2 years before he needed to) because he was worried about the result, with a hope that the future would improve the situation for him and his party.

A big story in this election has been the state of the government finances and the arguments about what each party would do (the BBC's Stephanie Flanders has a very interesting piece here); there has to be a mandate from the people based on a manifesto commitment empowering the winning party to cut government spending (amongst other things) in order to reduce the massive budget deficit which exists. In an interview in October 2009 with the Today Programme, George Osborne mentioned just this very point (click the button below to hear a short audio clip):

today_20091007-111...

Useful in any question about elections, the manifesto, or mandate. Each party is trying to say that they would have a mandate from the people to govern and improve the public finances, but the other parties wouldn't because they are not being honest.