This was meant to be an election about the economy. It has been nothing of the sort. At most, it has been an election about the deficit. The two men in the running to be Britain’s next prime minister have vied with each other to show off their fiscal toughness. Ed Miliband pledges to “balance the books”, while David Cameron promises a healthy budget surplus by 2019. Both courses depend upon painful cuts; both leaders boast of their ability to make them. During this campaign, other issues of how this country is to earn a living have flared into life – zero hours, London’s reliance on non-doms and footloose international capital – before dying away to leave that constant hum about cuts.
This is akin to having a massive leak coming through the ceiling and obsessing about the damage to the carpet. The £90bn overdraft racked up by the government last year is a function of the economy’s problems, not the cause of them. A fair summary of the state Britons are in was given in 2010 by a self-declared progressive politician: “For many years we have been heading in the wrong direction. Our economy has become more and more unbalanced, with our fortunes hitched to a few industries in one corner of the country, while we let other sectors like manufacturing slide.” That was, of course, David Cameron, in his first prime ministerial speech on the economy. He and George Osborne have focused instead on reducing the deficit. They have failed on their own terms and they have failed Britain, which is almost as ill-prepared for the next financial crisis as it was for the last one.
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