The Labour Party’s election slogan is typically Gordon Brown, although some say John Prescott “composed” it years ago. Could anything be worse?

The LibDem effort is scarcely better, something about change that works for you. Useless beyond words.

So the Conservative masterpiece needs to be just that. Here are some parameters:

1. Looks to the future without using the word “future”.
2. Condemns the past 13 years without seeming to do so.
3. Totally positive.
4. Simple and snappy.
5. Stays in the memory.
6. Taken in at a glance.
7. An implied invitation to participate.

Surely an impossible task?

As a public service, Syntagma has reached deep into the little grey cellbox to produce this:

I was once a professional copywriter in the City, and wrote that famous slogan for BT’s Telex:

It was just unfortunate that telex was replaced a few months later by the fax machine. Ah, well, you can’t win them all.

Harriet Harman must be pleased. Her Equality Bill appears to be having a profound effect on David Cameron — if not the Pope.

Cameron’s apparent loss of strength in recent weeks, his dithering and wobbling on major issues, is creating a level playing field at the top of British politics.

None of us knows what will happen on polling day. My best guess is that the current closeness in the numbers — pointing to a hung Parliament — is wrong for one simple reason. On the day, many supporters of other parties, don’t-knows and stay-at-homes, will swing behind the Conservatives just to get Gordon Brown out.

I may be wrong, but I have a strong hunch it will happen. Of course, the effect may not be enough, especially if Cameron goes into the campaign proper looking like a frightened fawn in a car’s headlights.

People vote for strong leaders, more so in times of acute stress. Watching clips of Tony Blair in recent weeks reminds us that, although he is a fluffier and weaker character than Cameron, he was relentlessly emphatic in his declarations. Despite the chaos and turmoil in Number 10 during his premiership, he always looked in charge front-of-house.

Cameron needs to show just that now. Take the recent shimmy backwards over deficit cuts: “There will be no swingeing cuts at first.” Weakness personified, and possibly his biggest mistake so far.

He might have said: “You can be sure we will deal firmly with the deficit, but until we’ve seen the state of the books in office, and made an assessment of the economy as a whole at that time, we can’t begin writing a detailed Budget.”

Voters do understand honesty and plain common sense. Brown would jeer from the sidelines, but the message will have got through.

David Cameron’s unredeemed “cast-iron guarantee” over the Lisbon Treaty has also inflicted enormous damage on the Tory leader. As Syntagma has written many times, a simple pledge to negotiate a trade-only agreement with Brussels would cauterize that wound and bring over many UKIP votes at the election.

At present in Parliament, Douglas Carswell MP is moving a Bill for a referendum on quitting the EU. He should be supported by his colleagues. Best get it over now or this subject will haunt the leadership after a year or two of government. Some people don’t go into politics to watch the handover of their country to a foreign power.

Such a move would also be in the best interests of the country and make deep cuts in public spending without impacting on services in the UK. It’s a win-win decision and would confer on Cameron a sense of strength and purpose.

As for the rest, a careful building of the manifesto will suffice. He only needs one big symbolic policy, that neither Brown nor Clegg can match, to lift his profile far above theirs.

I once watched an adobe house being built in a day. It had one central support, a giant tree trunk planted firmly in the ground. Around it were attached supporting poles producing a kind of grand tepee. Wattle was intertwined into the supports, followed by dollops of adobe, or mud. It looked quite grand when it was finished and was, I’m told, very cosy in winter, and cool in summer.

It could be a template for the Conservative election campaign. At present, there’s lots of wattle and small sticks around, a few supporting lathes have crept in, together with a pile of mud. No central trunk is yet visible. This house does not look viable as it stands.

Time is getting short. David Cameron needs to play his big card before he loses any more impetus. The more the polls narrow, the more confident Labour looks and the less Prime Ministerial the Tory leader.

The trunk I’m suggesting is unanswerable by the other parties, so can safely be launched early. It would transform the election overnight. The numbers would swing back towards the Conservatives, and the more criticism Cameron was subjected to, the more it would play into his hands.

More than that, the declaration would confer strength and much-needed trustworthiness on the Tory leader. I know from talking to people that his abandonment of the pledge to take the question of Europe to the country has shattered his credibility in many of the minds he will need to win.

This is an election winner, especially with the eurozone splitting into two warring camps as we speak. Every mention of this policy would bolster support for the party.

We keep our promises, he could rightfully chant throughout the election campaign. Brown would be on the back foot all the way to ignominious defeat.

John Evans

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Gordon Brown appeared on Andrew Marr’s programme this morning in a slightly new mode. He spoke in a slangy lowland Scots accent, replete with glottal stops and chummy vernacular. If this is his core-vote strategy, things must be much worse than we thought.

It may also serve the purpose of creating yet another dividing line between ordinary Gordon and the well-spoken Conservatives.

One aspect of his usual performance remained: his speak-by-numbers approach to answering questions. He often sounds as if he’s using a foreign-language phrase book, every clause and sentence lifted wholesale from the manual and awkwardly bolted together.

As a rough guess, I’d say there were at least a couple of dozen downright lies in the half-hour interview. Claim after questionable claim spewed out of his mocking, pudding-like face. He no longer cares that everyone believes he’s a liar — he’s known it for years.

Overall, he confirmed his place in the political ecosystem: as a lowly technical details man.

In the run-up to last year’s London G20 summit, he slipped into tech-mode during Prime Minister’s Questions, no doubt to confuse David Cameron. He listed various protocols and formulations of the kind used by the army of international “sherpas” to prepare the ground for their masters. It was a “neo-classical endogenous growth theory” moment.

Sherpas are second-tier civil servants specializing in some branch of governmental procedure. They are confined to the back-rooms so as not to steal the thunder of the bigwig politicians who arrive at summits just to wrap up the package for public consumption.

Gordon Brown is a sherpa and nothing more. He has been promoted several notches above his level of competence. It shows. It always has.

As so often happens in British politics now, few spoke up until he had blunderingly wrecked the country.

And the agony goes on until late spring.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown Free Zone

After our glorious “barbecue summer”, we are now one-third of the way through our “mild winter”, and entering “one of the warmest years on record”. At least according to the once-admired UK Met Office.

Are there no fine British institutions left that the Labour government has not destroyed? By forcing every decision into an ideological straitjacket, they have perverted the functioning of whole tiers of our national life.

Politics exists for “the resolution of conflict”, not for micromanaging voters’ behaviour. “Progressive” means dumbed-down Marxist equality by stealth or decree. Harriet Harman is its poster image.

When David Cameron says the Conservatives are a progressive party he should be aware he’s leading it down the road to perdition.

Another marketing ploy? Well, those who will not vote Tory don’t know what it means, while those that will are thoroughly sick of the word and its malign effect on their lives.

Do drop it, Dave.

Conrad Black, writing in The Spectator from a prison cell in Coleman, Florida, has this commentary on the financial and economic crises:

“The Americans borrowed trillions of dollars from China and Japan, to buy trillions of dollars of non-essential goods from China and Japan while officially requiring trillions more to be squandered in worthless mortgages. With the exception of a couple of obscure contrarian economists, no one saw it coming.”

Quite! Give that man a key.

The NHS has had its budget trebled in 10 years. As a result, more people have declared themselves sick, with no discernible increase in outcomes.

In fact, the NHS is a very sick institution itself. Anyone passing through its portals is in real danger of picking up a virulent disease, or dying of neglect or avoidable error.

Money has not cured the NHS of its death spiral for the simple reason that the elements at fault within it have multiplied several-fold thanks to the massive input of extra funding. The people running it believe in the very things that are killing it. They are blind to its potential strengths. More money is choking and squeezing its effectiveness.

On the fringes, government agencies run expensive ads telling people to go to their GP for minor complaints — just in case. Aren’t GP’s surgeries crowded enough with coughers and snifflers? As a means of spreading disease, they are ideal incubators.

Other “public-service” ads spread fear and trembling about a raft of serious conditions. The current one showing a woman having a stroke, with a burning hole in her head, is offensive and beyond negativity. My mother died of a series of strokes, as have many others, so this intrusion into our consciousness is cruel and unnecessary.

We know these ads are there just to burnish the reputation of ministers: “Look what we are doing for you!”. However, they almost certainly have the opposite effect. It’s known that folk who concentrate on an illness out of fear or expectation of getting it, are more likely to succumb than others who believe they are healthy.

The NHS is now in the business of creating illness, not ameliorating it. It’s become a fat, dirty, disease factory.

With spending cuts the order of the day, the NHS has more fat on its bones than is good for it. It should not be “protected” but slimmed down into a much more effective organization. Split up and offering a basic, no-frills service, it would have a chance of being really useful rather than a pain in the nation’s neck and a burden on its pocket.

The genuine cuttable fat in government lies in schools and hospitals and the quangos that circle them like vultures. If we spare them the knife, they will never regain health and competence.

And another government will have failed the country, the genuinely sick, and under-educated.

Edward Heath, it’s reported, almost went to the IMF for a loan in 1974, beating Labour’s Denis Healey to the thought by two years. The socialists have borne the approbrium of that humiliating act ever since.

Not surprisingly, Healey is crowing and telling the Tories to shut up about his involvement. While he’s at it, he could call on Brown and Balls to button it over a wide range of issues dishonestly megaphoned.

Heath ran a bizarre economic policy that swung from prudent to reckless in a couple of years — ring any bells? The result over the 1970s is what you get when the two main parties have the same economic policies.

If you can’t tell the difference between them, they’ll wreck the country in precisely the same way.

A bit more from Jason Calacanis, writing in Syntagma during 2006. This is mainly about bloggers’ pay:

Bloggers can do 2-4 posts an hour from what I’ve learned. If someone is an expert on the subject they can do more in fact.

So, if the number is $4/5 a post and folks do three posts an hour on average, you’re looking at $12-15 an hour. That’s $480 to $600 a week for a 40 hour week which is $25/30k a year. For part time work from home $12-15 an hour isn’t so bad, especially if you’re writing about something you love (most of our bloggers were writing their blogs for free before they joined WIN [Weblogs Inc]).

Now, our bloggers are making much more money than this right now, but we started in that same range.

The problem is that the journalists writing about blogging are established and living in NYC/SF/LA and making $50-80k a year. For them the idea of starting over again at $30k a year is horrible and bloggers are being taken advantage of. However, when I was running Silicon Alley Reporter people started at Conde Nast at $25-30k!

You don’t hear the bloggers complaining because for them they are getting paid to write about their hobby–their passion.

Getting paid to write about the movies if you’re a movie fan with a day job is amazing… getting paid to write about movies if you’re A.O. Scott at the NYT is what you expect.

I wonder how many bloggers are making even that kind of money at the start of 2010.

John Evans

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Remember those stop-loss computer programs that were all the rage in the City and on Wall Street some years ago?

Ingenious really. When a share index hit pre-set levels, screens would go beserk: BUY, BUY, BUY or SELL, SELL, SELL.

The problem was, every broker had identical software. When various points were reached, everyone in the share-dealing firmament would buy or sell. The result was huge spikes up, followed by vertiginous drops down. The market charts became one vast zig-zag of frantic activity.

Somehow the authorities got over that so that sanity returned. Graphs became more like the wolds of Kent than alien mountain ranges.

Something similar happened to your diarist back when long-distance running was the height of fashion. I wrote some software for marathon runners which used mathematical formulations to set training routines, and even predict the time each runner would achieve in the actual race. The programs sold in Boots and W.H. Smith. The great European record holder Bruce Tulloh sponsored one of them.

There was a flaw in the code, though — there always is! A kindly professional software engineer wrote to inform me that in an either/or situation, the “neither of the above” result, which was by far the most likely outcome, rested on a single numeral. He pointed out that hardly anyone would hit this knife-edge number despite its importance.

The more I read about the computer models used to verify so-called catastrophic man-made global warming (or cooling), the more I get the sense that the “neither of the above” category has been squeezed out of existence in the same way.

We are told that all the software used by the Met Office, NASA, the University of East Anglia (how did they muscle in?), and other “authorities” around the planet, use code that “always predicts global warming” and is set always to produce the notorious “hockey stick” graphic result.

Frankly, I would ban “modelling” software and require all “scientists” to work the damn stuff out for themselves.

Syntagma’s Christmas Reads

It’s good to see that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has a new book out. Even better that it’s on one of my favourite authors: Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. This is my top tip for year end. I just hope Amazon gets it to Syntagma Towers in time.

Available free from The Taxpayers’ Alliance, 83 Victoria Street, London, SW1H 0HW, Ten Years On: Britain Without the European Union by Dr Lee Rotherham, is well worth a peruse, if you crave politics over Christmas.

If you’re interested in durability, time warps, extensibility, longevity, life, you might try: The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? by a denizen of this parish. Just click the button, but hurry time’s getting very short — for delivery, I mean.

I wish someone wrote decent novels these days. One can’t always rely on the latest Dan Brown or old John Buchans. Can anyone recommend a good fact and thought-filled piece of fiction to pass the time over the holidays?

Oh well, I’ll just have to write one myself.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown Free Zone

We’ve written many times here that when the good times are rolling, policymakers become blind to the obvious. They appear incapable of seeing the flaws in their mental infrastructure.

Similarly, during hard times, as now, they are petulantly reluctant to face the facts arrayed before their eyes.

The Pre-Budget Report was a blatant example of premeditative anti-social behaviour. Its cast of characters included a brow-beaten Chancellor unable to follow his deepest instincts in the face of intimidation by his desperate boss. Is honest weakness preferable to thuggish culpability? Probably, but the outcomes are the same.

We also witnessed a putative Prime Minister who smirked throughout the ritual reading of the PBR, imagining he was getting one over on everyone else. It’s hard to imagine who would ever vote for such a man.

This morning we had Brown sidekick Ed Balls on Andrew Marr delivering pop-eyed attempts at sincerity when, to a man and woman, the show’s informed viewers knew precisely that he was pulling the contents of a wool warehouse over their eyes. As an exercise in futility it would take some beating.

One longed for Mayor Boris Johnson — also on the show — to mount a coup from London City Hall. Crisp thinking and a positive, unquenchable spirit is what the country needs now.

My thanks to those kindly souls who advised me not to move to the Isle of Man, following my piece midweek.

It emerges that such a move is not to be undertaken lightly and would probably not deliver the hoped for improvements.

I’m told one can keep Brussels at arm’s length by ignoring everything the collectariat says — as do the French, Germans, Italians and Spanish. British leaders, I’m advised, regard it as a privilege to be bossed about by foreigners.

I hope the new Tory Government will prove them wrong on that one.

March 25 is now the hot tip as the date of the General Election. Apparently, Gordon Brown is quivering with excitement at what he perceives to be a narrowing of opinion into Hung Parliament territory. Add to that the desperate poverty of the Labour party in comparison to the “stuffed with cash” Conservatives, and you have powerful motivations to go early.

However, Brown is a ditherer and can change his mind in a minute. Quite what the 17-point lead for the Tories in one of today’s papers will do for his resolve is anyone’s guess.

Syntagma’s Advice to Brown
The government you lead is disintegrating in a swamp of lies and sleeze. It’s hard to see how it can cling on to power next year. Things will only get worse as time goes on. Many of the third-party votes accumulating in the opinion polls are almost certainly notional and will swing behind the Conservatives on polling day just to get rid of you, Gordon.

Go early, go fast, and get out. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the mind that created them.”

These are the dog days before the festive season begins in all its shallow earnestness. Works and office parties are already taking their toll on bleary-eyed commuters, while shopping in this time of austerity is not producing streets full of happy bunnies.

In fact, it doesn’t feel much like Christmas at all. Folk are wary of sending out cards or presents by post because of threats of strikes and the usual chaos. So far, I’ve only had one — from the Royal Mail. Cheeky blighters!

I’m recycling last year’s cards, but only because I ordered three times too many. If you’re on my list, expect the return of a snowy Buckingham Palace with the Horse Guards trooping down the Mall. It’s worth a reprise, I think.

Our chums at the Met Office — just down the road from here — are forecasting a mild winter, but not before an eviscerating cold spell gets us in the mood. They also expect another a barbecue summer. Despite having the memory of an elephant, I can’t quite remember one of those. Ah, yes, in Perth, Australia, last time I was there.

Science becomes more like science fiction every year.

John Evans

HURRY: Last Chance to buy The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face by John Evans in time for Christmas.

Buy now by clicking on the discount button at the top of the sidebar, or from Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com.

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