Most nights on Broadway right now, you can find the unlikely presence of Queen Elizabeth II–or least Helen Mirren’s incarnation of her–receiving prime ministers from her 63-year reign in “The Audience”. If the show has its wits about it, there will be a new line added shortly for David Cameron, the Queen’s twelfth prime minister. For the current occupant of 10 Downing Street is expected to visit the Queen as soon as this week to tell her that the British general election campaign is about to begin.
If the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout, is anyone to go by, perhaps most Americans will greet this forthcoming prime ministerial audience with a giant yawn. “You’ll find yourself wondering what’s going on, or why you should care, long before intermission,” Mr. Teachout complained about the show. But there’s enough in the election itself to pique American interest, and not just because Britain is among the oldest and closest of U.S. allies.
If we want to get competitive about it, let’s start with the fact that Britain grew faster than any other economy in the G7 last year.. The chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, left it late, but he’s brought the economic and political cycles in sync ready for the election on May 7.
Although low productivity remains a concern, jobs performance in the UK’s flexible labor market has been stunning: the national employment rate stands at 73%, with 30.8 million people in work—a record high. Real wages are rising. Even more important for Mr. Osborne, he’s all but nailed on to meet, and probably even undershoot, his annual deficit forecasts right during the middle of the election campaign.
Cutting the UK deficit has been the chancellor’s signature policy, an approach that had drawn strong criticism in the United States with grim (but wrong) predictions of no GDP growth from the likes of former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. Now Mr Osborne is promising not only to cut the deficit even further, but to deliver a budget surplus by 2018/19.
Seen from the perspective of the United States’ gridlocked politics, what’s remarkable about the UK’s economic strategy is that it has been delivered by two parties—the conservatives and the liberal democrats—working in a stable coalition.
Few predicted in the aftermath of the 2010 election that the partnership would go the full five years of a parliamentary term. Moreover, as some commentators were quick to point out, last week’s budget (the annual statement of revenues and expenditures) tweaked cuts in public spending to help the more centrist liberal democrats. So this was a budget designed to allow the coalition to be renewed if the election result turns out to be inconclusive.
Britain is supposed not to like coalition governments (far too European), but it’s difficult to see how history will judge the current one as anything other than a success. If it turns out that Britain needs another partnership, few voters are likely to complain.
Both the conservatives and the liberal democrats now go to the country hoping they’ve done enough to be rewarded. The Lib Dems calculate that for all the buffetting they’ve taken over the five years, and despite horrible opinion poll numbers, the electorate will recognize the stability they’ve given the country during the global financial crisis.
For the conservatives, the message is even simpler: We inherited an almighty mess, they’ll say, with debt up to our eyeballs caused by 13 years of Labour party profligacy that left us unprepared for the financial crash. (“I’m afraid there is no money,” said the letter left behind by a Labour treasury minister, Liam Byrne, for his successor.) Now the conservative message is that Britain is back on the road to prosperity and a balanced budget, so don’t let the other lot ruin it again.
Some prominent Conservative supporters have criticized the party for putting all their eggs in this economic basket, demanding a broader set of ideas to take to the country.
But the Cameron/Osborne strategy is one that Americans readily understand: “It’s the economy, stupid!”