By RUPERT DARWALL
Tomorrow’s British election is on course to be only the third time in 31 years that the country has changed its government. Margaret Thatcher swept the Conservatives into power in 1979 and Tony Blair ushered in a period of Labour Party control in 1997. Yet an election that to many appeared a certain victory for David Cameron and the Conservatives turned out to be an unexpected roller coaster of a ride.
Through the autumn of last year, the Conservatives maintained a low, double-digit lead. After they launched their pre-election campaign at the beginning of the year, their lead started to shrink. During the campaign proper, it dipped to as low as two or three points, too slender to give Mr. Cameron a strong working majority in the House of Commons.
The explanation goes back to the party’s reaction to their third election defeat. Following the 2005 election, the Conservatives selected David Cameron to lead them on a slogan of “change to win.” Under him, the Conservatives were rebranded, repositioned and disassociated from the economic policies of the Thatcher era.
With Labour’s Gordon Brown recording the lowest approval ratings of any prime minister since the second world war, Mr. Cameron’s theme of change seemed to be in tune with what voters were saying. It turned out not to be quite as straightforward. As Tony Blair remarked right at the start of this election campaign, “time for a change” is the most vacuous slogan in politics.
Two weeks later, on April 15, the vacuum was filled. In the first of three prime ministerial debates, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg’s performance led viewers to conclude that he, rather than Mr. Cameron, was the more credible change candidate. Of the three men on stage, he was the freshest; Liberal Democrat Party poll ratings surged, overtaking Labour and eating into Conservative support. British elections, normally dominated by two parties, deliver fairly predictable results. But with three parties running neck and neck, British politics appeared headed into a terra incognita of hung parliaments and coalition government.
Mr. Clegg’s Liberal Democrats reacted like the British troops in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. Having seized the high ground, they didn’t know what to do next. Instead of telling voters what a Liberal Democrat Britain would look like, Mr. Clegg speculated about potential coalition partners and repeated his party’s age-old demand for proportional representation. He thus demonstrated that if any party hadn’t changed in 50 years, it was the Liberal Democrats.
In the third debate last week, if Mr. Clegg didn’t just say once that he had a “plan,” he said it five times. Saying you have lots of “plans” is a sure indication you have no real sense of the direction you want the country to go. While Mr. Brown confined himself to telling viewers why they shouldn’t vote for the other two, Mr. Cameron found his stride as a pragmatic conservative, defending a partial rollback of Labour’s increase in the National Insurance levy (a tax similar to Social Security), defending his proposed cut in inheritance tax, and talking about the need for value for money from public services and welfare reform: “[I]f you don’t accept work, you can’t go on claiming benefits.” If he’d begun the campaign like that, the only question would have been the size of the Conservative majority.
The one sure loser from the campaign is Gordon Brown. On Monday, he gave a barnstorming speech in London. “It’s the people in the crowd who make history,” Mr. Brown boomed from the podium. Perhaps the irony was lost on him. When the 66-year-old, Labour-voting Gillian Duffy heard that her party’s leader was just across the road, she decided to complain to him about the national debt. She was worried for her children and grandchildren; the debt would mean “tax, tax, tax” for the next 20 years she said afterwards.
As the world now knows, even though Mrs. Duffy said she’d vote for him—and after telling her she was a good woman—Mr. Brown turned on a staffer, saying the encounter had been a disaster. Later he explained that he’d been angry. Why? Mrs. Duffy had confronted him with the central fact of his economic record. Since 2000, public spending in Britain has grown faster as a share of GDP than any other country in the 28-member OECD—up 17 percentage points to 53% of GDP, compared to 15 points for Ireland and 10 points for Iceland. By comparison, Spain’s grew by eight points and Greece by three points. If Gordon Brown had matched spending with tax increases, Labour would not have been re-elected twice.
Haunted by the consequences of his reckless fiscal policy, Mr. Brown’s pathological denial of responsibility is proving to be his final disservice to his country. It has given the election an air of unreality, enabling the other parties to evade facing up to the depths of Britain’s economic problems and not preparing voters for the scale of cuts in public spending needed to stabilize government borrowing.
The implications become even more horrendous if the credit crisis means that Britain’s productive capacity and future growth is impaired. Anemic growth could tip Britain into a debt trap, with an ever-growing deficit that would require even deeper spending cuts or more taxes.
An election fought on fairness—in which the Conservatives have guaranteed spending increases on health care and overseas aid, as well as increasing state pensions more quickly by linking them to the growth in earnings rather than prices—is not likely to deliver the decisive change in economic policy Britain needs. Whatever the outcome, Mr. Brown’s legacy will cast a long shadow.
Mr. Darwall’s book, “Global Warming: A Short History” will be published by Quartet later this year. He has been a special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
