In election campaigns, economic growth and recovery can normally be expected to benefit the party in power. Yet this is not happening in 2015. For the past five years, of course, Britain has had two parties in power, not one. Nevertheless the counter-intuitive conclusion still holds. Of the two coalition parties, the Liberal Democrats are currently fighting for survival. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have pulled lever after lever for the past two years in an attempt to turn economic recovery into votes, but without much success.
The first week of the 2015 election campaign has been dominated by the sound of Conservative leaders pulling these once-effective levers. The business leaders’ letter backing the Tories is one of the hallowed events of the election calendar and duly appeared last week in the Daily Telegraph. On Sunday came another ritual, when David Cameron and George Osborne dangled the possibility of raised tax thresholds, while each refused to rule out the possibility that the Tories would reduce the top rate of income tax to 40%. On Monday, with ministers trumpeting tax changes for the millions and the electorally cossetted over-55s encouraged to invest their pension pots in sports cars and buy-to-let property, the giveaway levers are again working overtime.
As yet, however, the strategy has brought the Tories few rewards. This is not because the strategy is necessarily wrong-headed in all respects. It does not help Labour for Ed Miliband to be depicted as untrustworthy with the economy. And even the most socially responsible squeezed middle voters might be tempted to prefer a tax cut or a windfall, rather than a tax rise or a costly annuity. Remember, too, that the majority of voters now are middle-class not working-class, as they were 50 years ago. In the 21st century, Shelley’s “Ye are many, they are few” does not resonate quite as it did.
Even so, this has not benefited the Tories. Instead, every time that Mr Cameron or Mr Osborne says he is pulling a lever for the benefit of middle Britain, the reaction is a collective counting of the spoons. The business chiefs’ anti-Labour letter last week exemplified that. It may have made a few voters pause about Mr Miliband. But it should have made most of them ask why an endorsement from the rich, powerful and privileged, today’s equivalent of “the hard-faced men who ... had done well out of the war” could be relied upon in any way at all.
Some Labour strategists think this divide is a big advantage. Mr Miliband can give the impression that he likes the idea of having this election framed as a them-and-us contest, a fight between, as he sees it, the parties of the bosses and of the workers. He appears to think that Labour, with its one-nation rhetoric and its untested hunch that voters have opted for change rather than security, is bound to be the winner.
This may prove correct in a month’s time. Many will wish that to be the case. But saying it is so does not make it so. Until now, these resentments and suspicions have done more to fuel the rise of the insurgent parties than to boost Labour’s numbers at the expense of the Tories. The polls in the Sunday papers had the two main parties still neck and neck, with neither of them on more than 34%. Suggestions that either Labour or the Tories can meaningfully be called the party of the workers remain wide of the mark.
The deeper reminder from the week’s skirmishes is that Britain’s conversation about business remains pathetically crude. British business leaders too often see their task purely in terms of balance sheets and deregulation. These are important subjects, but business responsibilities like corporate justice, sustainability, pay frameworks and good governance, all of which are integral parts of the business conversation in other parts of Europe, play little part here. The letter to the Telegraph was shocking more because of the many questions it ignored, than for what it actually said. Britain will only have a strong and sustainable recovery if business and government work together for national goals. Neither of the main parties has crafted a wholly persuasive case on that agenda yet, though Labour’s is more thoughtful than that of the Tories. The larger moral and philosophical failure, though, rests with British business itself. Last week’s letter was part of the problem not the solution.
