Anatole Kaletsky: The Old Politics is Dead in the UK, but Where is the New?
[Anatole Kaletsky writes for the Times (UK).]
So what is it about? All the political parties have now launched or previewed their manifestos. Their leaders have given dozens of interviews and speeches. The beancounters have done their assessments, confirming what everybody knew in the first place — that none of the policies and promises come close to adding up.
After a week of campaigning, the polls are exactly where they started, undecided voters remain undecided and boredom is setting in. As the comedian David Mitchell noted, the unpredictability of this election is supposedly what makes it exciting — but, in fact, the closeness and immobility of the polling indicate how little the country cares who wins.
Is this because life in Britain is so perfect that voters cannot think of anything they want the next government to do? The country is less prosperous and contented than at any election since 1992, so complacency can hardly explain today’s indifference — nor can the personal inadequacy of the party leaders, or the supposed disillusionment with politics resulting from the storm in a teacup over parliamentary expenses. Nobody would claim that Clement Attlee or James Callaghan was much more charismatic than Gordon Brown or that John Major and Norman Lamont cut more dashing figures than David Cameron and George Osborne. Yet even these colourless politicians of previous generations managed to get out the vote. As for the supposed disillusionment resulting from financial irregularities and scandals, minor peccadillos over mortgages and duck houses pale into insignificance in comparison with the sale of peerages, dodgy property deals and affairs with Soviet agents, which did nothing to deter voters in decades past....
In short, the almost Manichean dualism between government and markets that has defined British politics at least since the Thatcher era — and arguably since the rise of Labour in the 1920s — no longer makes sense. Instead of believing that markets are always right and governments always wrong (or vice versa), voters now realise that governments and markets can both be catastrophically wrong. While this may seem a depressing and paralysing conclusion, it need not be. In fact, the perception that both markets and governments are prone to error can be empowering, both for politics and business, since the imperfections of both create scope for leadership, initiative and imagination....
Read entire article at Times (UK)
So what is it about? All the political parties have now launched or previewed their manifestos. Their leaders have given dozens of interviews and speeches. The beancounters have done their assessments, confirming what everybody knew in the first place — that none of the policies and promises come close to adding up.
After a week of campaigning, the polls are exactly where they started, undecided voters remain undecided and boredom is setting in. As the comedian David Mitchell noted, the unpredictability of this election is supposedly what makes it exciting — but, in fact, the closeness and immobility of the polling indicate how little the country cares who wins.
Is this because life in Britain is so perfect that voters cannot think of anything they want the next government to do? The country is less prosperous and contented than at any election since 1992, so complacency can hardly explain today’s indifference — nor can the personal inadequacy of the party leaders, or the supposed disillusionment with politics resulting from the storm in a teacup over parliamentary expenses. Nobody would claim that Clement Attlee or James Callaghan was much more charismatic than Gordon Brown or that John Major and Norman Lamont cut more dashing figures than David Cameron and George Osborne. Yet even these colourless politicians of previous generations managed to get out the vote. As for the supposed disillusionment resulting from financial irregularities and scandals, minor peccadillos over mortgages and duck houses pale into insignificance in comparison with the sale of peerages, dodgy property deals and affairs with Soviet agents, which did nothing to deter voters in decades past....
In short, the almost Manichean dualism between government and markets that has defined British politics at least since the Thatcher era — and arguably since the rise of Labour in the 1920s — no longer makes sense. Instead of believing that markets are always right and governments always wrong (or vice versa), voters now realise that governments and markets can both be catastrophically wrong. While this may seem a depressing and paralysing conclusion, it need not be. In fact, the perception that both markets and governments are prone to error can be empowering, both for politics and business, since the imperfections of both create scope for leadership, initiative and imagination....