With wages stagnant, prices rising and incomes so skewed to the top, it is haughty folly to assume the public is merely confused
Knocked off the news by the death of the man who overthrew apartheid, George Osborne's petrol duty freeze and theatrical tax breaks felt like small beans on Thursday night. That afternoon's taunting of his shadow, Ed Balls, for a puce-faced response in a barracking chamber, did nothing to persuade the country that the Commons is anything other than tribal and trivial. The autumn statement is already half forgotten, and yet there are two reasons why it matters a great deal to British citizens, however disdainful of politics they may be.
The first is the fact (and it is slowly becoming factual) of emergence from the biggest slump in living memory. The second is that a prime minister who once vowed he hadn't entered politics to cut social programmes is now presiding over plans that stretch out austerity so far that the share of public services in the economy is to be rolled back further than at any point since records began, in the late 1940s. Either one of these developments – one might imagine – would have the potential to reset the political dial. But – whether it's because the public has not yet digested all this, or because the implications pull in different directions – Monday's Guardian/ICM poll suggests more stability than change.
A Conservative party that bounces up two points on the month can be reassured that Messrs Cameron and Osborne retain a substantial 16-point lead over Eds Miliband and Balls as the most trusted economic team. This lead is unchanged since August, before Ed Miliband's energy freeze so rattled the government. A recovery that the poll also finds the country believes to be real thus appears to be compensating for Conservative difficulties vis-a-vis Labour on narrower questions of policy. While the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that business investment and exports "have continued to disappoint", the government can also take heart from the fact that the country seems more sanguine than the experts about the lack of rebalancing in the economy. Voters brush off fears that the recovery is being fuelled by a new housing boom, less interested in what sort of growth there may be than in enjoying some part of it.
Here, however, comes the terrific sting in the tail. Despite mostly believing in the recovery, about 70% of Britons claim to be seeing no personal benefit. It might sound like cognitive dissonance to trust the Tories with the economy but Labour on living standards, since the two are so fundamentally linked. Yet with wages stagnant, prices rising and incomes so skewed to the top, it is haughty folly to assume the public is merely confused. Growth of any sort constitutes an economic recovery, but the full political recovery of the Conservatives will not be assured until they figure out how to share the growth around.