After enduring five years of some of the deepest spending cuts in Britain’s modern history — with budgets for police, the arts and early-childhood development slashed — voters have the chance to ease the pain as the economy recovers.
But rather than pull back on austerity, the famously ascetic British appear ready to double down.
Although polls show that the Conservative Party — one of the two partners in the governing coalition — and its main opposition, Labor, remain locked in a dead heat with just over a month to go before the next general election, surveys give the Conservatives a wide lead on the question of who is trusted to run the economy.
And the Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, have made no secret that their economic agenda for a second term looks much the same as the first. They plan to plunge the knife even deeper in areas where defenders say the cuts long ago stopped stripping away fat and began to strike bone.
The public’s willingness to go along with at least several more years of austerity, even as Britain’s overall economic picture brightens, reflects just how heavily the hangover of the global financial crisis continues to be felt in this country. Nearly eight years after the descent began, voters remain scarred by the prospect of a national treasury bled dry by rampant government spending.
“The general economic approach of ‘We need to bring down spending’ is something that voters of all colors have bought into,” said Joe Twyman, head of political and social research at . “There’s a recognition that we just spent too much money.”
The antidote, first pitched by Cameron during his winning 2010 campaign, was to dramatically scale back. Governments across Europe did the same as German-style fiscal rectitude came to be seen as a cure-all for a boom-years binge.
After years of severe cuts, countries in southern Europe appear to be rejecting the medicine, with a radical leftist party winning election in Greece in January on a platform of ending austerity and another vying to do the same in Spain in a vote due this year.
But in Britain, where the cuts have been deep by national historical standards but relatively mild compared with southern Europe’s, there is no sign of a widespread backlash.
Even the Labor Party, which has branded Cameron’s plans for additional cuts “extreme,” has said it will not reverse austerity measures already enacted and in fact will continue to trim — just not as aggressively as the Tories, as the Conservatives are otherwise known. Smaller parties — including the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists — have passionately criticized austerity, but their followings remain niche.
“Labor doesn’t want to give the Conservatives a stick with which to beat them,” Twyman said. “In Britain, we just don’t have an effective, popular anti-austerity party.”
That’s despite the fact that many economists question the wisdom of rather than borrow at a time when interest rates remain exceptionally low and the recovery is still fragile.
In a survey of leading British economists conducted last month by the Center for Macroeconomics, a substantial majority said the government’s austerity-focused policies have . Several suggested a more balanced approach including stimulus, similar to the strategy pursued in the United States.
At the local level, the cuts have hit in the form of closed libraries and children’s centers, as well as fewer support services for the most vulnerable, .
Police departments, too, have felt the strain, with the outgoing head of Britain’s police chiefs’ association recently saying that further cuts would make it impossible for security forces to protect the public from crime and the rising threat of homegrown terrorism. The former chief, Hugh Orde, that police budgets had been slashed by 26 percent, taking 35,000 officers off the streets.
Retired military leaders have also spoken out, saying the country is on the verge of on the global stage and could soon become a far less valuable partner to the United States.
But the outcry has not been as loud as one might expect, in part because key spending areas, including education and health, have been insulated from the cuts.
“The services that most people use most of the time are the ones that have been relatively protected,” said Paul Johnson, director of the , a nonpartisan think tank. “From a political point of view, the cuts have been quite carefully crafted.”
But Johnson said that much of the low-hanging fruit is already gone, meaning that if the Tories win another five years in office, it will be far more difficult to carry out austerity without provoking the public’s ire.
Cameron, for instance, has said that to put the treasury in the black by 2019, he intends to slash about $18 billion from the welfare budget, which includes assistance to the poor, the elderly and the disabled. But he has not spelled out exactly where he will cut, and Johnson said there are no obvious answers.
“It’s really tough to find those kinds of savings in that kind of time,” he said.
When Cameron ran in 2010, he faulted the incumbent Labor government for running up a massive deficit and vowed to eliminate it within five years. But because the economy grew more anemically than predicted, he is only about halfway to his target, with this year’s deficit stuck at about $135 billion.
But with the economy growing at a healthy pace and unemployment falling, the prime minister has asked voters to stick with him and allow him to complete the job, urging them to choose “competence over chaos.”
His government has set out plans for several more years of deep cuts before spending is ramped up dramatically just before voters again go to the polls in 2020. The plan, described as “a rollercoaster” by the impartial Office for Budget Responsibility, represents a far more hawkish attack on the deficit than anything Labor has proposed.
Although Labor leader Ed Miliband has vowed to “balance the books” within five years, his party has said it would keep borrowing to pay for investment spending. That could give Labor the latitude to ease austerity even if it doesn’t reverse it.
The potential difference between the two parties’ plans, Johnson said, “is bigger than in any election I can remember.”
And yet it is not big enough for several parties that have traditionally been marginal players in British elections but could hold the balance of power after the vote if no party gets a majority, as polls predict.
The Scottish National Party’s role could be particularly vital, and party leader Nicola Sturgeon used her presence at an Thursday night to lead a charge against the sort of austerity regime that she said both Cameron and Miliband embody.
“You can vote for the same old parties and get the same old politics, more cuts and more misguided policies,” she told viewers. “Or you can vote for something different, better and more progressive.”
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