New economic analysis talks not of Westminster's fight over thinning turf but of change as something we do for ourselves
You'll be pleased to hear that I've figured out why David Cameron's plans sound like a throwback to the 60s, and Labour's response sounds like a set of compromises urging nothing more than restraint. (Retrench, but only back to the 90s; demonise the poor, but don't starve them.)
It's because there is a set of assumptions, and it's almost impossible to have grown up under Margaret Thatcher and beyond without sharing them. First, growth worked out really well for most of us. Second, "radical" is a byword for "worse". If it's a radical idea for the environment, it will mean not going on holiday or using your car; if it's radical for the economy, it will mean more redistribution, less ambition; if it's radical for society then it just moves us farther away from some unidentified time in the past when it wasn't broken. If we tried, just as an experiment, to look at the reality of growth – that it mainly benefited only a few of us, and if it had a broader gift, it was more one of national gaiety than anything else – then we might be able to consider change a bit more cheerfully.
The presumed link between growth and wages was severed before the financial crisis. In the five years running up to 2008 the UK economy grew by about 10%, yet median wages flatlined. Earnings went up at the top, and in the middle one's perception of affluence came not from wages but from a stake in a booming housing market. At the bottom, prosperity was delivered by a welfare system designed to mitigate low wages. Never mind "that wasn't sustainable" (Vince Cable's argument), it wasn't satisfying. It fostered inequality, rewarded unreasonable risks taken at the top, left the bottom feeling beholden and the middle insecure.
Turning to the sparkling infrastructure, the shiny new hospitals – the Tory narrative has it that we borrowed on a national credit card and couldn't pay back (again, it was "unsustainable"). In fact we could have afforded it if we'd actually paid for it. The PFI deals fleeced us, and it was the boom that destroyed vigilance among policymakers – not just in health but in a huge swath of public sector service delivery.
It is against that backdrop, rather than the Westminster tug-of-war over ever-decreasing territory, that we can consider new ideas. The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has produced a Plan C, comprising six strategies to set against the possibility that the economy will remain stagnant. If you agree with any of the six papers, I can guarantee that you won't agree with all of them. The important thing is to recast the prospect of change – not as a depressing necessity, not as something to do for our grandchildren, but as a gift, something to do for ourselves.
Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, counsels a total revolution in perspectives on tax, from applying VAT to food, books and housing (my soul balks – but he points out that the affluent spend more on these than the poor, and changing income tax while never restructuring VAT creates the very inequality these exemptions were devised to avoid). He quietly broaches the tax breaks afforded to pensioners, but does focus on the accumulated public spending on pensioners in a way that reminds us how narrow mainstream politics has become.
Despite the fact that two thirds of welfare spending is on pensioners and only one third on working-age benefit claimants, it is the latter category that suffers political scapegoating. There's a moral fixity in the welfare debate – feckless unemployed bad, noble pensioners good – that debases the principle of social security. It was intended as a protection against hardship.
Gavin Kelly of the Resolution Foundation makes a compelling case not just for better provision of childcare (everybody is in favour of this; like building social housing, it is a favourite lever for everyone except for the people who are actually pulling the levers). But he also points towards Germany for an indication of how encouraging companies to take fewer hours, rather than make workers redundant, can have a significant impact on the inequalities created by systemic unemployment.
A culture of part-time work is contested ground – the Work Foundation has pointed out that a scarcity of hours can cause hardship as surely as a scarcity of jobs can. Nevertheless, the conversation as it stands now – there are plenty of jobs to go round, we just have to be less lazy, more mobile and more xenophobic, and it will all be fine – fuels nothing but resentment and nostalgia. "The aim," Kelly writes, "is a better distribution of the pain of adjustment to weak demand, with fewer long-term casualties."
We're back in the territory of the allocation of pain. If you never admit its possibility, it falls inexorably on the weakest, and that rebounds destructively on the rest. But what if we could just admit that, previously, pleasure was bestowed mainly on a few? Then an even-eyed distribution of pain might not look that painful. It might look like an improvement.
There are other ideas in this series I agree with not at all (you can read the first two at http://www.thersa.org/projects/time-for-a-plan-c): yet what they all do is what Westminster seemingly cannot do – conceive of a country in which growth will not miraculously return and maybe wasn't so miraculous in the first place.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams