Because of the controversy over the forecast cuts to spending on public services, which various commentators and think-tanks as well as the OBR portray as spine chilling, there is no sustained Tory post budget bounce appearing in the polls. The odd advance here and there, but others are pushing Labour a point or so ahead. Essentially nothing has changed; the two main parties are neck and neck and the voters seem willing, a good many of them anyway, to scatter their votes across a wide ark of minor parties, making the outcome beyond even guessing at this point. So Labour could still win? Yes it could if it were both clever and bold. It could achieve a major surge which would break the log jam holding Labour in tandem with the Tories. And the surprising thing is it could be a break out at its perceived weakest point. The point from which the Tory strategists would least expect a major game changing attack. The economy.
Essentially the two big parties are neck and neck in large part because to ordinary people there is little to distinguish them on policy. There are differences, but at the edges. There is no big ideological divide as of old between capital and labour, state ownership versus private enterprise, suits against overalls. This is best illustrated by the fact that Darling, the outgoing Chancellor, in 2010 had a programme of fewer cuts and more borrowing and the incoming Osborne followed a much more austere policy of major cuts and less borrowing. Yet in the end Osborne has wound up after five years at exactly the place Darling was headed for, which Osborne had denounced as inadequate.
Everyone knows the Tories are up there for business, the professions and the City, while Labour champions the squeezed middle, the lower paid and the real economy in which most people live and work. Yet the Tories appear more efficient at looking after their own through the ever growing size and power of the financial sector.
What Labour lacks post Thatcher is something which will give them an ideological edge and an idea which can offer transformation to the living standards of the majority, by rebalancing the economy away from assets to people, whose efforts deliver a surge in manufacturing and home grown industries from electronic to space with pots and pans in between, which will curb imports, repatriate jobs and expand exports. Driving it all must be enormous infrastructure renewal and an initial target of one million affordable local authority homes to rent. The consequential increases in tax revenue and reduction in benefit costs, especially housing benefit, are mouth watering, but the problem is that to fire it up, borrowing levels would become too exotic to be credible.
But just suppose Labour could come forward with a programme which could do all this without borrowing. Is that a dream? No it is a real possibility. There is a new idea based upon previous practices used in WWI and WWII, adapted for electronic money, which if adopted by Labour, could not only give it a renewal of its inspiration and mission, but could also deliver a clear victory in the general election in May. Click here to find out how Dynamic Quantitative Easing can deliver the key to a better future.