Go go Cameron!

The Guardian, believe it or not, is championing the success of Cameron in the polls. The results are as follows:

Conservatives 40% (+3)
Labour 32% (no change)
Lib Dems 18% (-4)

On the face of it good news for the Tories, bad news for the Lib Dems blah blah blah blah blah. No doubt you can find detailed analysis for these poll results, but it won't be here. Mainly because polls are often hugely inaccurate, but also because there is a real difference between how people would vote if they were in a polling booth today and what they tell a pollster. Nonetheless, I have a couple of points to make. Mainly based around these two paragraphs:

"Despite recent publicity about Conservative defections to Ukip, and fears inside the party that Mr Cameron's remodelling of Conservative policy could alienate traditional support on the right, only 14% of Tory supporters say they might back Ukip instead.

"Asked to name one or more other parties that they might support, Conservatives are much more likely to choose the Liberal Democrats or the Greens: 32% of Tories say they might vote Lib Dem and 19% say Green."

I'll declare my own bias with this - I am against Cameron, and whilst I have not defected to UKIP (yet) I have departed from the good ship Tory for the duration of Cameron's stewardship. But I would also would ask The Guardian to declare their bias - after all, the Cameronistas do appear to be embracing the values of The Guardian's Cunt in Chief. It helps them if Cameron's lurch towards the left appears popular, just as I will be looking for ways to prove that this success is built on unstable, and worryingly short-term, foundations.

See, the 14% of Tory voters who might defect to UKIP should be far more worrying to Cameron than the 32% who might go to the Lib Dems. The 32% are the classic floating voters - the Tories need to win some of those votes to boot Labour out of office, but they also need the 14% of those who may defect from the right. It is the latter who have kept the Tory party as the opposition in the dark days of 1997 and 2001 - to alienate them now might cost the party a General Election victory next time out, but also divide the party catastrohically - at a time when, mainly owing to the sterling work of Howard in the two years immediately prior to the 2005 General Election, the party is at it's most united since the late 1980's. The right of the party have stood by the Conservatives at time when it appeared the party was doomed to electoral oblivion - to lose that 14% now will cost the party dearly in the long term. The floating voters will float to and from the Tories - but lose the core votes, and the party is just a fragile alliance of everchanging centrists, who can collapse the party at any time they want.

There is a counter argument that says the wandering 14% from the right will always return to the Tories, and the fact that I have not gone the whole hog and defected to UKIP indicates that there is some validity in this idea(there is a post brewing in my head that explains exactly why I cannot make the full move to UKIP at the moment). But this does not change my fundamental worry about Cameron - yes, he has been successful, but at what price? I harp on and on and on about this, but there is no point in winning the next election if we are simply swapping one Nu-Labourite government for another Nu-Labourite government. 18 months ago I would have celebrated the above poll results - now, with the castrated version of the Tory party that Cameron leads, it fills me with despair. I see a Cameron victory as an extension of Blairism - another government with a surplus of *style* and a complete dearth of policy.