LONDON LETTER:Britain's general election is still a year away, but the terms of political engagement have changed utterly, writes FRANK MILLAR
‘DARKNESS LIES ahead, whoever wins”. That editorial comment just about summed-up the sinking feeling yesterday as Britons recoiled in horror at the certainty now of tax rises and swingeing spending cuts right through the life of the next parliament and beyond.
The general election may still be a year away but, already, the terms of political engagement have been dramatically altered.
Conservative leader and putative prime minister in waiting David Cameron need no longer sweat in face of scepticism about his plan to square the tax cuts-versus-public spending debate by promising to share the proceeds of growth.
The cupboard, as shadow chancellor George Osborne said last October, is quite literally bare. The bank is broke, and the only choices for Britain’s next government will be how to rein back spending, restore the public finances and rebuild the country after the final collapse of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s earlier forecasts about the impact and duration of the recession, Britain’s ability to withstand it, and the speed of her recovery.
Even the expert pundits seemed shocked as Alistair Darling came clean at last about unprecedented debt expected to peak at 79 per cent of GDP in 2013-14. And fearful, too, lest his latest projections for economic growth beginning later this year and fast-rising to 3.5 per cent again prove wildly optimistic, leaving his successor to extricate himself from an even deeper black hole and the UK’s credit rating under critical scrutiny.
The recently restored shadow business secretary, Kenneth Clarke, had previously made light of earlier suggestions by Osborne and Conservative leader David Cameron that Darling might eventually be forced to “do a Denis Healey” and seek a bailout from the IMF.
But Cameron didn’t appear to be entirely joking when he again alluded to Britain’s experience under the last Labour government when delivering his bare-knuckled reply to the chancellor’s statement on Wednesday afternoon.
“This prime minister has certainly got himself into the history books,” Cameron declared of Brown: “He’s written a whole chapter in red ink: ‘Labour’s decade of Debt’.”
The headline writers certainly saw red as they proclaimed “the death of New Labour” and the “return of class war”, signalled, in the view of their newspapers, by the Brown/Darling decision to ditch their last manifesto promise and fast-forward the planned tax hit on those earning more than £150, 000 a year with a new top rate of 50 per cent. The prime minister denied it was anything of the sort yesterday, while Lord Mandelson – one of the co-architects of New Labour – rallied to the cause, insisting voters would eventually reward the government for taking the “tough decisions” of the kind Tony Blair always liked talking about.
A year is an incredibly long time in politics. In the immediate aftermath of the budget statement, however, Lord Mandelson’s bullish prediction sounded like something destined for one of Darling’s favoured wind farms.
“Alistair in Wonderland” and “Darling’s fantasy world”, meanwhile, characterised a widespread disbelief that the economy will grow by 1.25 per cent next year and a full 3.5 per cent in the three years after that. Even the chancellor’s admission that the economy would contract by 3.5 per cent this year survived only for as long as it took the IMF to offer its own variant, suggesting Mr Darling was still inclining on the optimistic side of things. And any hope Labour had entertained that its “soak the rich” plan would divert attention from Darling’s spending plans were shattered on the realisation that zero growth in public spending by 2013 heralds cutbacks predicted to be more severe than under Thatcher.
Almost 30 years after her first general election victory in 1979, the sense of an imminent return to Conservative government is not confined to David Cameron’s supporters. “The last Labour government gave us the ‘Winter of Discontent’. This Labour government has given us the ‘Decade of Debt’,” the Tory leader charged: “The last Labour government left the dead unburied. This one leaves the debts unpaid. They sit there, running out of money, running out of moral authority, running out of time. You have to ask what on earth is the point of another 14 months of this government of the living dead?” Yet, as the shrewd Benedict Brogan reminded yesterday, even after that ‘Winter of Discontent’, with the rubbish piled on the streets and the dead left unburied, Mrs Thatcher’s first 44-seat majority hardly represented a landslide.
Governments are hard to shift. Britain’s skewered electoral system makes the Tory task that much harder. And while much of the country may nod in assent when he declares this government’s claim to economic competence “over, finished”, the opinion polls do not tell us that the same can yet be said of Cameron’s current role as leader of the opposition. He still has to “seal the deal”, and his supporters will be expecting him to do it quickly now.