Lesser of Two Evils
Everyone and their uncle is trying to predict the outcome of the 2015 general election, a hopeless task in many ways given the volatility of the electorate, but Janan Ganesh writing in The Financial Times makes a strong case that voters may just plump for the lesser of two evils.
All the opinion polls confirm that Labour is still not trusted on the economy, perhaps because the New Labour project ended in such tragedy with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister openly undermining his own Chancellor, Alistair Darling, who was widely seen as being straight with the country when he said that public spending cuts 'worse than the Thatcher era' would be required to balance the nation's books.
The notion that the UK has to 'live within its means' has a powerful appeal to most people because they can relate to the argument that an ever increasing mountain of debt is simply passed the problem on to future generations.
And while there is a perfectly good Keynsian economic response to this conundrum which proclaims the benefits of 'spending to invest' during a recession, the plain fact is that far too many voters are cynical about the ability of Westminster politicians to rise to this particular challenge.
Labour is stuck in the political doghouse
By Janan Ganesh - The Financial Times
It is possible to ridicule the Tories’ missed targets, and still favour them over the shabby alternative A
government can run one of two campaigns for re-election. It can boast of hands-down success in realising its vision and count on voters to do the sensible thing. Margaret Thatcher’s strutting victory in 1987 was a case in point. Or, if its record and the national mood are ambiguous, it can claim worthwhile progress that a change of government might undo. The Labour party’s last election win in 2005 was a classic of the genre.
When he became Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer four years ago, George Osborne thought he would now be honing the first type of campaign for May’s general election. Instead, he is fine tuning the second. He has economic growth worth bragging about, a rare perk for a European finance minister nowadays. He has also made the spending cuts he promised without the country turning into a medieval wasteland. This is a deeper intellectual wound to the left than we currently understand; it will change the terms of debate about the proper size of the state long after Mr Osborne has gone.
But two things have lagged behind his vaunted economic recovery: tax receipts and real incomes. A deficit that was supposed to be near extinction by now remains crushing, and households do not feel well-off. The Conservatives cannot tout themselves to voters as either unbending fiscal hawks or as guarantors of Everyman’s prosperity.
They will have to talk up the implausibility of their opponents instead. The first type of re-election campaign ignores the opposition; the second counts on them being lousy. The spectacle of Mr Osborne’s Autumn Statement on Wednessday revealed less about him than the Labour party. Here was an eminently attackable government cruising languidly through a parliamentary statement doused in bad news. By the end of the response given by Ed Balls, his opposite number, Mr Osborne evoked a boxer with an exposed chin sauntering through the 12th round without a mark on him.
Labour has not come close to living down its reputation for soft-headed profligacy. The party could have reacted humbly to its ejection from power with its second-lowest vote share in a century. It could have confessed that running a deficit after more than a decade of uninterrupted growth was a mistake, motivated by a big-hearted wish to improve public services. It might have promised some cuts to leftwing causes to prove its chastened seriousness. This is the “concede and move on” route out of the doghouse, and it is the quickest available.
Instead, the party wasted four years defending an economic record that Britons had already judged to be atrocious. “The voters are wrong about this” is not a parody of Labour’s attitude, it is a real sentence uttered by a Labour adviser. The opposition has not earned a hearing for its critique of the government. That critique has some force. Even if Mr Balls did not hurt Mr Osborne, he poked holes in the Autumn Statement in his newly tempered style. He can present Mr Osborne’s principal announcement, a revised system of stamp duty, as a plagiarised and adapted version of his own tax on expensive homes. It is not obvious, however, that anybody is listening.
So while the Autumn Statement will be parsed for populist symbolism — the strikes on banks and corporations, the pitch to aspirant homeowners, the building projects in marginal constituencies — Mr Osborne’s political work was largely done when Labour refused a reckoning with its own past at the start of this parliament. The recovery has helped the Tories but voters already favoured them to manage the economy even when growth was anaemic.
None of this assures victory in May: in some polls, the Conservatives led Labour on perceived economic competence on the eve of their rout in 1997. It just means that a Tory loss this time will have less to do with the economy than with reservations about their character and motives that have never gone away. The party’s inability to soften its hard image, Labour’s inability to show it can govern sanely — these are the parallel failures that shape our politics.
Everything hinges on which flaw matters more to voters. The general trend of the polls suggests they are cleaving to security rather than change. It was no coincidence that Mr Osborne, whose icy mien seems genetically engineered to deliver bad news, talked of troubles stalking the global economy. It is perfectly possible to disbelieve the Tories’ pledged tax cuts, ridicule their missed fiscal targets, doubt their sympathy for the working poor — and still favour them over the shabby alternative in an unquiet world. For this, Labour has nobody else to blame.
government can run one of two campaigns for re-election. It can boast of hands-down success in realising its vision and count on voters to do the sensible thing. Margaret Thatcher’s strutting victory in 1987 was a case in point. Or, if its record and the national mood are ambiguous, it can claim worthwhile progress that a change of government might undo. The Labour party’s last election win in 2005 was a classic of the genre.
When he became Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer four years ago, George Osborne thought he would now be honing the first type of campaign for May’s general election. Instead, he is fine tuning the second. He has economic growth worth bragging about, a rare perk for a European finance minister nowadays. He has also made the spending cuts he promised without the country turning into a medieval wasteland. This is a deeper intellectual wound to the left than we currently understand; it will change the terms of debate about the proper size of the state long after Mr Osborne has gone.
But two things have lagged behind his vaunted economic recovery: tax receipts and real incomes. A deficit that was supposed to be near extinction by now remains crushing, and households do not feel well-off. The Conservatives cannot tout themselves to voters as either unbending fiscal hawks or as guarantors of Everyman’s prosperity.
They will have to talk up the implausibility of their opponents instead. The first type of re-election campaign ignores the opposition; the second counts on them being lousy. The spectacle of Mr Osborne’s Autumn Statement on Wednessday revealed less about him than the Labour party. Here was an eminently attackable government cruising languidly through a parliamentary statement doused in bad news. By the end of the response given by Ed Balls, his opposite number, Mr Osborne evoked a boxer with an exposed chin sauntering through the 12th round without a mark on him.
Labour has not come close to living down its reputation for soft-headed profligacy. The party could have reacted humbly to its ejection from power with its second-lowest vote share in a century. It could have confessed that running a deficit after more than a decade of uninterrupted growth was a mistake, motivated by a big-hearted wish to improve public services. It might have promised some cuts to leftwing causes to prove its chastened seriousness. This is the “concede and move on” route out of the doghouse, and it is the quickest available.
Instead, the party wasted four years defending an economic record that Britons had already judged to be atrocious. “The voters are wrong about this” is not a parody of Labour’s attitude, it is a real sentence uttered by a Labour adviser. The opposition has not earned a hearing for its critique of the government. That critique has some force. Even if Mr Balls did not hurt Mr Osborne, he poked holes in the Autumn Statement in his newly tempered style. He can present Mr Osborne’s principal announcement, a revised system of stamp duty, as a plagiarised and adapted version of his own tax on expensive homes. It is not obvious, however, that anybody is listening.
So while the Autumn Statement will be parsed for populist symbolism — the strikes on banks and corporations, the pitch to aspirant homeowners, the building projects in marginal constituencies — Mr Osborne’s political work was largely done when Labour refused a reckoning with its own past at the start of this parliament. The recovery has helped the Tories but voters already favoured them to manage the economy even when growth was anaemic.
None of this assures victory in May: in some polls, the Conservatives led Labour on perceived economic competence on the eve of their rout in 1997. It just means that a Tory loss this time will have less to do with the economy than with reservations about their character and motives that have never gone away. The party’s inability to soften its hard image, Labour’s inability to show it can govern sanely — these are the parallel failures that shape our politics.
Everything hinges on which flaw matters more to voters. The general trend of the polls suggests they are cleaving to security rather than change. It was no coincidence that Mr Osborne, whose icy mien seems genetically engineered to deliver bad news, talked of troubles stalking the global economy. It is perfectly possible to disbelieve the Tories’ pledged tax cuts, ridicule their missed fiscal targets, doubt their sympathy for the working poor — and still favour them over the shabby alternative in an unquiet world. For this, Labour has nobody else to blame.
