What lies ahead in Year for Change..?

So YEAR FOR CHANGE is the Conservative Party's best shot when it comes to kicking off an election campaign, with less than six months until Britain gets the chance to boot out Brown.

Alistair Campbell's blog carries an interesting appraisal: "There is nothing on it to say it is an ad for the Tories, and I can hear now the discussion among the ad execs and the party strategists that led to it. 'We need a teaser, something that just whets the appetitite for the big campaign to come.' 'People don't like politics and politicians, so we need something that is pro-Tory but non-political.' 'The brand is change - popular. Not Tories - not popular. That has to come next.' Yeah right."

People are crying out for change, so in a stating the bleeding obvious kind of way, the Townie Tory ad execs are bang on-message.

But out in the real world, people want to know what changes they're going to get and what difference they're going to make to their lives.

How will smaller government work..? What firm measures will need to be taken on the economy..?

It doesn't seem a lot to ask, you might well think, bearing in mind the mess the country's in.

Then again it doesn't take a strategy genius to work out why firm policies seem a little thin on the ground at the moment.

Ken Clarke's gone on record today about tax increases, more or less admitting the VAT increase is a reality. There's no two ways about it, the country's teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the money's got to come from somewhere.

Promising there'll be no cuts in the NHS means there'll have to be cuts elsewhere or an increased tax grab.

You can understand the Townie's reticence when it comes to fiscal policy. Admitting a raft of tax increases now would leave an open goal for a Labour's Tax Bombshell style counter attack, akin to the one which sunk Kinnock in 1992 - despite the pollsters believing John Major was cruising for a bruising.

Whichever party gets elected will have so little wriggle room on the economy that tax increases of one kind or another are inevitable.

Rather than shy away from the hard truth, shouldn't a government in waiting kick off a YEAR FOR CHANGE by coming clean on just how bad things are and what it's going to do to change them if it gets elected..?