The Tory plan to crash the economy  The idea that George Osborne
is a part-time chancellor with a second job (Osborne reeling as
economy enters the disaster zone, 26 July) misses the point.
Osborne is a full-time party strategist and he has made running
the economy a subsidiary part of that role. In 1979, the
Conservative party successfully exploited the crisis of the
"winter of discontent" to pin economic failure on to the Labour
party, project social democratic measures as illegitimate and
create a political hegemony that lasted nearly two decades.  The
Conservatives' attempt to repeat the trick in 2010 faced two
problems. First, it was the bankers, not the unions, that the
public identified as the villains of the piece, and the
Conservative party needs bankers in the same way that drunkards
need breweries. Second, Alistair Darling's mix of deficit
reduction and Keynesian economics was working.  To create a
crisis that would produce another Conservative hegemony required
Labour's promising economic approach