Seemingly we are all feeling "rich and secure" here in the UK. A Labour win in the election a shoe in. i.e. no change in interest rate, though there will be talk of lowering in six months or so. This article posted increases my suspicion that most in the UK do not have a clue about what stirs the economy, or do they care right now. They just swallow up all the B/S and feel happy. pb.
timesonline.co.uk
The general election will be fought and won on the beaches of St Lucia
Mary Ann Sieghart
FOR YEARS, I had wanted to go to St Lucia. It was so mountainous, so tropical, so beautiful — but so expensive. Each time we considered it, we ended up somewhere cheaper.
Then finally, in November, we swallowed hard and went. And it was on the flight that I realised that Labour was certain to win the next election. After all our financial disquiet, I was amazed to find that our cabin was full of young, prosperous, working-class passengers. I was also delighted. These were people who, ten years ago, would have been flying to Malaga. Now, they were spending four or five times as much on their holiday. The cheapest low-season week in St Lucia with Virgin Holidays costs £719.
No wonder Tony Blair talked yesterday of “personal prosperity for all”. For rising real incomes and secure jobs have turned much of the population into potential or actual Caribbean jetsetters. An OECD survey this week showed Britain climbing even farther up the league table of living standards. In 1999, we were 17th; now we are 11th. Our GDP per head is higher than that of France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden.
And no wonder that voters show no great desire to oust Labour from power. The Government may not be particularly popular, and the Prime Minister not particularly liked, but if people are feeling rich and secure, why would they want to throw the governing party out of office?
MORI has been asking voters since the 1970s which are the most important issues facing Britain. And the poll archives tell a fascinating story. In the late 1970s, inflation eclipsed all other ills, with up to 80 per cent of people considering it one of the most important issues. Margaret Thatcher brought it down to single figures, and now it rates just 2 per cent.
But it is unemployment that has shown the most recent, and dramatic, fall as a source of public anxiety. For 20 years, between 1979 and 1999, with just a small lapse in the late 1980s, unemployment was far and away the public’s biggest worry. In March 1986, for instance, 86 per cent of people cited unemployment; the next biggest issue was crime, with just 17 per cent.
When Labour first won power, unemployment was still one of the top three issues, mentioned by 39 per cent of voters, along with education and health. Now it scores a measly 6 per cent, and it has not risen above 10 per cent for more than two years.
Do voters give the Government credit for having brought back full employment? Mr Blair clearly hopes that they will, and has covered the country with jaunty pink posters telling us that unemployment is at its lowest since 1976. Our Populus poll last month found people evenly split over whether Gordon Brown should take the credit for Britain’s economy doing well or not — but by a large margin, they agreed that the economy was thriving.
And that is all that really matters. For at the moment, people feel prosperous and reasonably confident that their prosperity will last. They believe that if they lose their job, they can find another, and that interest rates will remain relatively low. They have almost forgotten about inflation. In these circumstances, they have little reason to rage against their Government.
This is reflected in MORI’s findings. No issue is particularly important to voters at present. Only foreign affairs (Iraq) sits at 47 per cent; nothing else scores more highly than 32 per cent (the NHS). And Iraq is an issue on which the Tories are indistinguishable from Labour.
The old bugbears have disappeared: trade unions, inflation and unemployment. The new bugbears — health and education — are nothing like as important to the electorate as they were five years ago. Broadly, voters seem pretty content — and probably more concerned with their next holiday in St Lucia than with the impending general election.
So is there anything the Tories can do? No. Though they dare not admit it publicly, many have been itching for house prices to collapse, anything that will disturb people’s economic cheer. In the face of an unprecedented 50 successive quarters of economic growth — a sustained boom longer than any of our competitors has achieved — the Conservatives have been reduced to issuing flesh-creeping warnings of doom. The debt bubble will burst, we have been told, or the black hole will swallow us all up. The trouble is that the Tories have predicted economic disaster so many times, and been proved wrong, that voters are reluctant to believe them.
There is another electorate, though, for whom the state of the economy over the next few years may matter. And that is the Labour members, MPs, MEPs and trade unionists who will choose the next leader of the Labour Party. If Mr Brown remains Chancellor after the election, he will have to pray that Britain’s twelve-and-a-half-year boom continues, for a recession could seriously dent his chances of taking over from Mr Blair.
Even if there is no downturn, the Chancellor will have to take some unpopular tax and spending decisions during the next Parliament to rein in public borrowing. Does Mr Brown really want to fight a popularity contest while that is going on?
He already knows how accidents of timing can produce unwelcome results. Had John Smith died a year or two earlier, Mr Brown would probably have beaten Mr Blair to the leadership. It was the Chancellor’s misfortune that the election took place just as he was making the party face up to unpalatable economic truths.
If, after the next election, Mr Brown were to move to the Foreign Office, he would be remembered as the most successful Chancellor of modern times, with an unbroken record of growth. Demanding instead to stay on at the Treasury is starting to look not just stubborn but self-defeating too.
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