Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
Elections have but one iron law: listen for what the politicos are not saying. Follow it, and you hear a roaring silence at the centre of this campaign. For all that Dave and Ed have jousted with interviewers and made pledges on platforms, there are three big questions that neither would-be prime minister will talk about. Yet the questions are existential, and the answers to them will matter not merely for the next parliament, but far beyond.
The three questions can be summed up as: How are we meant to live? Where are we meant to live? And who is meant to live here?
In this month’s war of words, these are the real undiscussables, the issues and the people painted out by all the main parties. Where will post-crash Britain’s income come from? How will we house everybody? And will mainstream politicians allow migrants and those receiving social security the same rights and basic human value as those sanctified hard-working families? Let me go through those questions.
How are we meant to live?
This election was meant to be all about the economy. Instead, it has been all about the deficit. Cameron and Miliband squabble over who has the most firm yet appropriate grip on the state-spending axe. This isn’t economics: it is accountancy. Yet both main parties try to pass it off as economic policy. Look at Labour’s manifesto: the very first pledge is that it will “cut the deficit every year”. Squirrelled away in there is a promise of a British investment bank and more regional banks. But a line is all those get, while “balancing the books” merits higher priority than the NHS.
Given how little politicians talk about growth, you might think it was no longer a problem – that after a few rocky years, Britain had finally got its groove back. Not so. If you fancy a fright, flick through three major reports published by the IMF last week. First, its World Economic Outlook warned all rich countries that “potential growth is likely to be lower than it was before the crisis”. For those not fluent in Washington that basically means: sorry, boys, those boom times ain’t coming back.
Second, its financial stability report observed that British households had proportionately the biggest debt mountain of all major capitalist economies – more than the Americans, more than the Greeks. By 2020, the IMF reckons, we’ll have the second biggest loan burden, just behind the crisis-hit Portuguese (see table 1.1 here).
Finally, the IMF’s fiscal monitor rubbished politicians’ claims that they will wipe out the deficit by the end of this decade – yes, the very same boasts we’ve been hearing so much this past fortnight. Part of its scepticism is because it doubts the UK will grow as much as is hoped.
On hearing the last announcement, Cameron immediately took to the rolling-news channels to say he much preferred the projections made by Britain’s own Office for Budget Responsibility to the IMF’s. Well, I’ve got bad news for him: the OBR may, if anything, be more pessimistic than the Fund.
Right at the back of the outlook it published just before Christmas, the OBR asked a simple question: what if Britain’s weak productivity – with more workers doing less – continued? The economists’ answer was that growth would drop so sharply (see table 5.7 here) that it would feel almost as bad as a recession, year after year, all the way to 2020. For each of the past seven years British productivity has just kept dropping. The OBR’s nightmare scenario looks more than plausible.
Ever since the crash, politicians and policymakers have been waiting for the economy to get back to the way it was before. It is now dawning on the economists that this probably won’t happen – that we are entering a new era in which our incomes will be a permanent disappointment. The question for Cameron and Miliband is: what are you going to do about it? It’s a question they keep ducking.
Where are we meant to live?
Both Dave and Ed accept that there’s a housing crisis; neither have any actual solutions to offer. Labour promises that 200,000 houses will be built every year – without providing any detail on how they’ll be paid for or built or whether they’ll be social, private or (that toxic euphemism) affordable. This is more modest than the 230,000 homes a year promised by Gordon Brown, but just as vague and just as certain not to happen. The Tories merely want to privatise more social housing– this time, property they don’t even own, but which belongs to housing associations. What either plan adds up to for anyone under 35 and either living at home or paying over the odds for a crap flatshare is basically: get stuffed.
Who is meant to live here?
Brecht jokingly called on the government to dissolve the people and elect another. Our politicians are actually doing it. We know which voters they like: the squeezed middle (Ed); alarm-clock Britain (Nick), the strivers (Dave). The voters who don’t pass muster are those on benefits and immigrants. Labour flogs a racist mug, while the Tories send a racist van round London. The divide is not just rhetorical: the coalition has smacked working-age families on benefits. People with disabilities – and therefore with limited access to the jobs market – have been hit worst of all. The Centre for Welfare Reform calculates that, under this coalition, those with severe disabilities have taken a financial hit 19 times greaterthan the average.
Why aren’t politicians answering these existential questions? They’re certainly smart enough to do so. But democratic leaders have parted ways with their voters – literally. Membership of the main parties has dropped sharply over the past three decades, so that there are now more vegans in Britain than members of the Conservative party. What’s replaced mass democracy is big donors and a professional political elite. It no longer pays for politicians to think hard about fair growth or build more houses, because to do so would antagonise the big corporates or the big media, or deter those middle-class and retired voters who actually do turn out to the polling stations.
This is the definition of a democratic crisis: when the narrowness of a country’s politics means it can no longer deal with the serious problems that face it. Look past the television debates and the battle buses and this is where we are.
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