It's too soon to put the party back into UK politics

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 13 Απριλίου 2015 - 15:55

Battersea power station, that upturned snooker table in south London, once filled the cover of a Pink Floyd record. Five years ago almost to the day, David Cameron, then Conservative party leader, used this setting to launch an election manifesto as esoteric as any prog rock concept album. "An invitation to join the government of Britain" proposed a devolution of power from the state to citizens. It was bold and stimulating. It also misjudged a national mood hardened by recession and dire fiscal straits.

Britons craved security. The Conservatives gave them dreamy effusions. The opposite has been true of late: Britons want assurances of a sunnier life after austerity, and the Tories offered brute economic logic. Or at least that was the received explanation for the party's stasis in the polls. And it was loud enough to make the Tories adjust their election campaign.

Now Mr Cameron, the prime minister, is citing happier reasons to vote for him: more money for the National Health Service and increases in various tax thresholds, including inheritance and income. There will be more in the manifesto he launches this week.

Some of these goodies are funded, some are not. Either way, the rhetorical emphasis has moved beyond austerity. The same is true of the Labour opposition, whose manifesto contains a commitment to fiscal discipline that jars with the top notes of the party's campaign. Labour has promised to reduce university fees and gone along with the idea that budget balance can be achieved by squeezing only the rich. Both parties are ruling out obvious revenue-raising taxes. Neither is specifying government cuts with any exactness.

This is an election campaign that befits a country with a small fiscal deficit. Sadly, Britain is not that country. It will borrow about £90bn this year. The most obvious cuts and tax rises have already been made, leaving some excruciating work ahead under either party's consolidation plan. And that work might take place in the context of a slowing world economy.

The trickiest historical period to analyse is always the immediate past. Perspective only comes with time. But it is possible that what happened in Britain in the past five years qualifies as a minor miracle. The country endured the most sustained fiscal tightening since the second world war with no revolt or disorder. There were strikes but nothing systemic; the government was unpopular but never close to collapse. We take this for granted now but nobody did in 2010, least of all Mr Cameron.

There is more to this than timeless British common sense. Voters muddled along, grumbling but never rebelling, because they were given fair warning at the last election. Neither party promised anything generous and the Tories said they would hold down public sector pay, among other things. Such candour cost them votes but also prepared the country psychologically, and made it easier to govern.

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>This feels like a less grown-up election. At precisely the moment that politicians should be shoring up public resolve, they have lapsed into the competitive bidding of a conventional campaign. The problem is not any failure on their part to devise a route back to fiscal sanity: both parties, and the Liberal Democrats too, have deficit-reduction plans that reasonable people can compare and choose from.

The problem is their preference for talking about the cheery stuff instead. The public mood is shaped more by rhetoric and themes than by hard policy, and the rhetoric of this campaign is that of post-austerity politics. We are running the 2020 election in 2015.

Another point of contrast with the last election is the prominence of rebels and radicals. In the seven-way televised debate this month, the leaders of the Scottish National party, the Greens and Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru spoke of the deficit as some fuddy-duddy notion that can be transcended with a mix of passion and imagination. Voters tiring of austerity - and surveys suggest there are lots of them - are being encouraged to dream by parties that were less visible five years ago. They will be live on television again this Thursday.

Whoever governs beyond May will have to cut spending and probably raise taxes too. They might have to rely on the parliamentary votes of parties that appear to reject fiscal consolidation in principle. If Labour forms the government, some of the party's own MPs will stir. And underlying all of this will be an electorate only hazily forewarned of the ugly work to be done. In this parliament, Britain showed the political will to begin weaning itself off borrowing. Do not assume it will last.

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