May's social care U-turn - Verdict
No one can say anymore that this election is boring. This was a remarkable announcement, because there is no precedent in recent years for a party having to re-write a major manifesto so completely and so quickly during an election campaign.
The best that can be said for May’s move is that, if you are going to have to perform a policy U-turn, it is best to get it over and done with quickly. A day’s embarrassment is well worth putting up with if it results in policy on a major issue ending up in a place where it is defensible and not haemorrhaging votes, which is what the social care policy seemed to be doing. The Tories abandoned one of the biggest items in their budget earlier this year (the increase in national insurance for the self-employed) and, although that led to dire headlines on the day, it did not destroy the Conservative lead over Labour on the issue of economic competence.
It is also worth remembering that dramatic campaign moments (eg, Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy) often have less impact on an election result than observes assume at the time.
That said, it has been an awful morning for May - possibly her worst as prime minister. During the Q&A after her speech she came close to losing her composure, and the footage of her, voice rising, claiming “nothing has changed” (as she confirmed that it has) was an image consultant’s nightmare.
In particularly, she has inflicted serious damage on the “May brand” in three ways.
1 - May does not look so “strong and stable” anymore. Until the manifesto came out, “strong and stable leadership” was almost the entire Conservative campaign. Even today, May was pushing this message strongly. (See 10.34am.) Now it looks far less plausible.
2 - This undermines the Tories’ reputation for financial competence. Imposing a cap on social care costs will significantly increase the costs of social care, probably by a matter of billions per year over the next decade. But we don’t know by how much, because the Tories never gave any indication of how much their plans were expected to raise when they announced them last week, and they are not giving any clue as to what level the cap will be imposed at. The Labour party would be crucified if made policy in such a costings vacuum.
3 - May was remarkably dishonest when she tried to defend her U-turn. After calling an election when she said she wouldn’t, May’s claim to be a straightforward and reliable politician was open to challenge, but today she waded fully into Pinocchio territory. She claimed this morning that she was only having to clarify her position because Labour and Jeremy Corbyn have been making “fake claims” about the manifesto. But this is simply not true; the Labour claims about a “dementia tax” have been based on a tendentious but accurate assumption about what the plans announced last week would mean. (May seemed to imply that a cap on social care costs was implied in what the manifesto said last week, if not stated explicitly, but this is not true; the manifesto said the plans for a floor not a cap on costs - see 11.57am - were “more equitable, within and across the generations, than the proposals following the Dilnot report [Dilnot proposed a cap], which mostly benefited a small number of wealthier people.) May is right to say her manifesto plans would not mean people losing their home while they are alive, and in her head she may be using this to justify her claim that her plans were being misrepresented. But Labour has not been saying people would lose their homes while still alive. - The Guardian