From the hushed atmosphere of the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ basement lair in Bloomsbury, central London, the broad outlines of next month’s general election appeared crystal clear, laid out in red, blue and yellow lines on a kaleidoscope of charts. Britain’s public sector deficit, running at about 10% of national income when the coalition came to power five years ago, has been halved. All the major parties want to reduce it further, but the Conservatives plan to do so more rapidly – they would make much deeper, “unspecified” cuts to public spending.
Yet the IFS, so often the voice of common sense during this drawn-out election campaign, castigated all the major parties for leaving voters “in the dark” about what kind of future they could expect over the next five years.
The number-crunchers in chief were making a relatively narrow point, about the absence of detailed tax-and-spending spreadsheets in the back of the parties’ manifestos, tucked away behind the pictures of beaming mums, nurses and apprentices.
For all their bluster about “budget responsibility locks”, Labour have given very little detail about precisely how much they expect to borrow over the next five years, while the Conservatives’ plans rely on deep cuts to welfare bills and Whitehall budgets that they have wilfully failed to outline.
But step out of the IFS’s dimly lit basement and into the spring sunshine, leaving the line graphs behind, and there’s a much broader point about the paucity of the national debate that has accompanied the current campaign.
We live in a country where young people are leaving university burdened with tens of thousands of pounds of debt and unable even to aspire to buying their own home. Where the strains of an ageing population and the possibilities of 21st-century medicine are coming together to create an inexorable rise in health and social care costs. Where the productivity of our workforce – the keystone of any nation’s prosperity – is lamentably poor. And where food banks are flourishing and living standards for average households are only just beginning to recover to pre-crisis levels, after the longest decline in at least a century.
There are tough questions we must ask ourselves, many of which are not susceptible to the five-year political timetable, and certainly not to the tit-for-tat of a few days’ frantic coalition talks.
What kind of minimum decent standard of living do we believe Britain should be able to provide for its citizens? How do we ensure that everyone has a roof over their heads? How can we afford to maintain the cherished National Health Service – and if we can’t, how are we going to decide how to ration care to those who most need it? How can Britain, which has run a trade deficit continually since 1998, pay its way in the world? How do we adapt to the way in which new technologies are radically disrupting existing industries and displacing thousands of jobs?
Meeting many of these challenges may require rejecting some long-held beliefs: nibbling away at the green belt to build enough homes for people to live in, for example, or introducing charging into more parts of the NHS to keep the doors open for everyone. It may also require taxes to rise.
Even from the narrow point of view of reducing the deficit, something even the anti-austerity Greens and SNP aspire to, rebuilding Britain’s economic model, still far too reliant on credit-fuelled consumer spending and London-based financial services, would arguably achieve as much as the most aggressive austerity programme.
Yet the parties spend much of the time locked in a dry-as-dust debate about who is going to cut what when.
And there’s not even much detail about that. The Conservatives admit that their plans involve significant cut, but by giving few details of where they will find the cash, and larding their speeches with laudatory references to people who “do the right thing” and go out to work, they promulgate the utterly bogus idea that the social security budget can be slashed, simply by cutting benefits for people who spend their waking hours watching daytime TV with the blinds down.
In reality, with pensioners’ benefits off limits, it will be extremely hard to find the £12bn in cuts the Conservatives are looking for without dipping into the pockets of the millions of working poor whose income is topped up with tax credits.
Labour does at least admit that taxes may have to rise to fund its plans – but only on a select group of the super-wealthy. Those earning over £150,000 a year will be subject to the 50p top rate, while the owners of £2m-plus homes will face a “mansion tax”, whose very name is as pejorative and divisive as some of the worst Tory rhetoric about “skivers”.
In other words, for the majority of voters, left and right, it’s OK: someone else will pay.
From a historical perspective, it’s easy to understand how we got here. Labour is deeply marked by the loss of the 1992 general election, when the party had set out, as they saw it, relatively modest proposals for tax increases and were accused of readying a “tax bombshell” to drop on the unsuspecting British public.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, have been extremely successful in arguing that Labour’s profligacy somehow led to the crash and it suits them just fine to suggest that austerity is the sine qua non of a successful economic policy. Indeed, the Conservative manifesto states baldly: “Failing to control our debt would be more than an economic failing; it would be a moral failing.” No: it’s a financial failing, no more, no less.
Facing up to the radical choices Britain faces should be a collective endeavour, but it must start with an honest – and modest – assessment of what we can achieve together and the values we share.
At his best, when he promises to build a Britain that works for working people, Ed Miliband has flashes of just such a mix of pragmatism and heart and as the IFS’s number-wizards pointed out, there is more clear blue water between the parties’ plans than at any time since at least 1992.
But Labour and the Tories have spent so much of this campaign fighting endless hand-to-hand combat over deficit cuts that they have lost sight of the true purpose of the battle... to find a political party with policies that can improve the lives of everyone in Britain.