My MEP friends from other countries can’t understand it. “Please explain what’s happening in Britain,” they say. “One party wrecks the economy and the other party fixes it. Why isn’t the second party ten points ahead?”
You may be wondering the same thing. So am I; and so, though they hate to admit it, are almost all Britain’s political observers.
Five years ago, Gordon Brown’s Labour government ran the highest deficit in Europe. It racked up debts (this is the really unforgiveable bit) while the economy was growing. When the crash hit, a little before the 2010 general election, Britain was braced for a Greek-style collapse. The leader of the Liberals in the European Parliament, former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, told us that we would soon be on our knees begging to be allowed to join the euro. (How’s that working out for you, by the way, Guy?)
Five years on, what has happened? Under a Conservative-led coalition, Britain hasn’t just edged back from the precipice — it has built the kind of recovery that European countries can only dream of. Ours is the fastest-growing economy in the G7. We have, incredibly, created more jobs over the past five years than the other 27 members of the EU put together: 2 million new jobs in a nation of 64 million.
When David Cameron formed his coalition in 2010, commentators warned of the scary “Tory cuts” that were coming. Well, here they are: taxes down, deficit down, fuel prices down, unemployment down, household bills down, mortgages down, crime down.
And yet, to the puzzlement of pollsters, pundits and politicians, the opinion polls haven’t budged. In the final days of the campaign, the two main parties, Labour and Conservative, remain neck-and-neck at around 34 percent each. So what’s going on?
I’m partial, obviously. We’re all subject to what psychologists call “self-serving biases”. We think that ours is the only objective way to make sense of the world, and struggle to understand why others don’t always see what we see. In truth, plenty of people are permanently and temperamentally anti-conservative. Where I see growing prosperity, they see a racket for the rich. Where I see falling crime, they see fiddled figures. Where I see tax cuts, they imagine a plot against the public sector.
Let’s allow that a chunk of any electorate is, in the literal sense, beyond argument. We’re still left with the mystery of the becalmed polls. Why are the undecideds, the swing voters, not breaking toward the party that ended the recession? Especially when they see the same people running the party that caused it? Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, and Ed Balls, his shadow chancellor of the exchequer, worked for Gordon Brown throughout his wastrel years in office; both men deny that Labour let spending or borrowing get out of control.
True, there are long-term factors working against the Conservatives. One is the rapid expansion of the most solidly anti-Tory demographic, namely ethnic minorities. David Cameron has made colossal efforts to appeal to minority communities, but not being white remains the single surest predictor of not voting Conservative. At the last election, my party won the support of only 11 percent of ethnic minority Britons and, while this might be turned around in the long term, it won’t be turned around by Thursday.
Another factor is the split on the Right. The UK Independence Party is polling at around 13 percent, and most of its supporters say they would otherwise vote Conservative. The first-past-the-post voting system savagely punishes such divisions. The smaller party fails to win more than two or three seats; but it prevents the larger from winning dozens.
Oddly enough, though, I think the biggest problem for the Conservatives is that the recovery has come too early. Five years ago, most voters knew that the country had been on a binge and needed to diet. It was one of those rare moments in politics when you could make the case for austerity to a sympathetic audience. Now, as incomes rise and the recovery roars ahead, many feel they can let their belts out again.
It’s the eternal problem for right-of-centre parties the world over. Voters tend to send for us when the other side has made a hash of things, and to dismiss us the moment we seem to have fixed the problem. It puts us at something of a disadvantage, because it means that, while Leftists tend to inherit falling deficits, we usually inherit bloated, adipose state sectors. We are, so to speak, a purgative. And while people recognize that purges can be necessary, they are rarely popular.
The odd thing is that, even in its own terms, such public complacency is misplaced. The crisis is far from over. Although the deficit has been halved since the last election, the national debt has doubled. The Eurozone countries, which take nearly half our exports, are still not growing, and the prospect of a sovereign default in Greece is very real. Recovery is not assured.
But to spell these things out makes one come across as even less appealing. How much easier, how much more upbeat, to tell voters that the problem is not too much debt, but too much austerity. Deep down, you know it’s nonsense. But you also know that, in the end, it won’t be you who cleans up the mess, but a new Rightist government. It always is.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
