“Right vs wrong, not right vs left”

Politics has changed. The Prime Minister is no longer given the benefit of the doubt. So U-turns are no longer seen as pragmatic responses to public opinion but as evidence of incompetence. So I wrote in The Independent on Sunday today, and by happy chance the Sunday Times YouGov poll provides the numbers:

Asked about the recent U-turns 50% think this is a sign of weakness or incompetence, while 33% see it as a sign the government is willing to listen. This is a significant shift from when YouGov asked a similar question a year ago and people were pretty evenly split between the two answers

However, this shift is not yet mortal for the Conservatives, I suggest, and by another happy chance another pollster, this time Andrew Cooper of No 10 (pictured), pops up to provide the slides:

These numbers were indicative of ‘mid-term grumbles’ rather than anything more serious. The presentation, which he [Cooper] will be giving to all Conservative MPs over the next few months, highlighted the fact that Margaret Thatcher had far worse numbers at the equivalent moment in her first two terms and still went on to win the elections that followed. He urged the MPs to remember that the almost constant poll leads enjoyed by Tony Blair were the exception, not the rule. He also emphasised that Cameron remains ahead of Miliband on the question of who would be the best PM.

Mind you, it is all very well for me to say it; I am not so sure that Cameron’s own pollster ought to be spreading complacency quite so cheerfully.

Still, among the reasons for the Prime Minister to be cheerful are that the Labour Party seems to be engaged in opposition for opposition’s sake.

As I say in my article, the thinness of the alternative offered by Ed Miliband is disguised by the apparently large difference between Government and Opposition on the question of public borrowing. The contrast between George Osborne’s austerity and Ed Balls’s Krugman-Keynesianism seems vivid and ideological. Nasty right-wing Tory sellout Macdonaldism from the 1930s versus all that is holy and decent about Attlee, Beveridge and Keynes’s neveragainism of 1945.

Except that this dualism is fake. I cited Tony Blair; here, in my blogpost-as-footnote, is the quotation, on the subject of deficit reduction, from A Journey:

This is a judgement that is, if you like, one of right vs wrong, not right vs left. There is a need to balance the opposite impacts of deficit reduction: less overall demand, because of a contraction of government spending, on the one hand; more confidence among consumers and businesses due to reining in the deficits on the other.

At the next election the voters are more likely to decide that both the main parties have failed to get this balance right – first Labour by borrowing in the boom and then the Tory-led government by cutting too deeply – than that Osborne has got it wrong so it is time for Balls to have a go.

That is what is wrong with the “incumbents being thrown out all over Europe” thesis with which some Tories are scaring themselves. In Britain, we threw our incumbents out two years ago.

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• Pacificweather

  Blair had them all shot. If you know of one in hiding let me know. I could do with a 1960s conversation.

• Alec78

  70 billion, I believe, which is more than twice that of the welfare cuts (25 billion), the benefit frauds (1 billion) and what it would cost for all university education to be free to UK citizens (5 billion). Got money left over to fund a thorough 5 year skills-based industry training programme for 16+, and take the whole country out to dinner twice a year!

  Where will be the competitive edge of the free market, they’ll say, when everyone is happy in their work, making things, or working for the state, or working for themselves, having reasonable pensions for all etc? Crime rates will fall, everyone will have homes of one kind or another. All for the sake of a few people paying what they are due in tax. A crisis of private greed turned into a crisis of public spending, so that the greedy ones don’t have to change anything they do.

• BC

  Why are you quoting Blair on this subject?  He is firmly on the neo-liberal right and confirms it in his book – as if he needed to prove it after a decade of continuing and even extending the Thatcher project . 

  The fact remains that those who champion the view that the current crisis was caused by an unbalanced budget and can only be resolved after correcting that problem (like Blair and Darling) are firmly on the neo-liberal right.  Those who hold the view that the deficit is a symptom rather than a cause of the problem and that attempting to balance the budget is suicidal folly are, if not quite “left” then at least less to the right.    Your argument is unproven.

• BC

  I think he means that there is no serious argument between the neo-liberal incompetents who caused the crisis and the neo-liberal incompetents who want to make it worse.

• Pacificweather

  Afghanistan invaded 1843. One man survived. Afghanistan invaded 1873. Caused a bit on damage an left again. Afghanistan invaded 1980. Did a great deal of damage and destabilised the country and left again. Afghanistan invaded 2001. Did some damage, will leave in 2014. History might not repeat itself but tired old empires do it all the time.

• Sailor25

  Your “inflated salary” was being paid for with debt therefore the shops that are now going to the wall but where making money from your salary where actually being propped up by taxpayer debt. Now of course sadly the current nature of the economy means some companies are so big and integral to the economy that allowing them to fail would be catastrophic i.e the Banks that does not however mean that wholesale borrowing in order to pay people so they can spend the borrowed money in shops is a good idea.
   
  The principle of austerity is that to continue to use debt to pay “inflated salary’s” in order to prop up the economy is simply storing trouble for the future. This leaves one option which is to cut back and consolidate. This will inevitably mean that less healthy and productive companies go bust but overall the economy will be better for it in the future.

• mightymark

  “This will inevitably mean that less healthy and productive companies go bust but overall the economy will be better for it in the future.”

  This is the problem I wrestle with – why? how? Again, I can’t see the mechanism. Australia is apparently doing well. Does recovery rest perhaps on the revival of this successful but small economy?

  Also, the free market theory on which I take it your answer is basd assumes free and fair competition yet we know that the BRIC bloc which is now such an important component of world demand is highly protectionist. The upshot seems to be therefore that they protect their industries in fields where we let companies go bust. So those companies are ready to take advantage of any revival of demand – and ours aren’t. We surrender yet more industries to imports.

  Let me be clear – I am a free market man. I’m just not sure that the rest off the world is any more and I worry that we are the patsies in all this

• http://twitter.com/crehillfanclub Arthur Watt

  The only interview you will be getting soon Rehill, is with the North Wales Constabulary.