The recent elections were pretty bad for the Coalition government and especially the Lib Dems.
In Ipswich their vote collapsed and those Lib Dems who did vote seemed to switch to Labour whilst the majority of Tories stayed at home.
However even in Ipswich the Labour Party can take little comfort from its gains. With 70% of the electorate not bothering to vote, it is clear that the vast majority of voters support none of the above.
Most voters probably continue to support reducing the Public Sector deficit and accept the need for cuts in spending. However they also want to see signs of a return to some kind of economic growth and at least the prospect of a better future. They also want to see that everyone is sharing the pain equally and some of the Coalitions policy decisions such as the scrapping of the 50p tax rate hardly encourage that belief.
However the most depressing picture for most voters is the alternatives now being offered by all the main parties.
The Coalitions relaunch this week was a continuing picture of misery. Both David Cameron and Nick Clegg painted a future of cuts and more cuts. No Let Up in Tough Decisions
David Cameron said “I am afraid we can’t let up on the difficult decisions we have made to cut public spending and to get our deficit under control,” he said. “I know it is hard and difficult but when you have a debt problem the one thing you must not do is to keep adding endlessly to that debt.”
Deputy Nick Clegg said the economy could not be fixed “overnight” and the process could take many years.
By the end of their relaunch anyone could be forgiven from thinking that the future is a black hole of pain and misery.
But voters do not even have the alternative of a bright future from Labour.
As Ed Balls Labour Shadow Chancellor put it in January “My starting point is, I am afraid, we are going to have keep all these cuts. There is a big squeeze happening on budgets across the piece. The squeeze on defence spending, for instance, is £15bn by 2015. We are going to have to start from that being the baseline. At this stage, we can make no commitments to reverse any of that, on spending or on tax. So I am being absolutely clear about that.”
In an excellent blog by Brett Leppard in the Huffington post entitled Labour -What good are they he challenges the myth that Labour are offering a real alternative to the Coalition.
Yes it may be that they would make the cuts more slowly, but as Ed Balls knows only too well the current deficit was caused by the Labour Governments failure to control the economy in the latter years of their Government.
Indeed Ed Balls had intimate knowledge of those failings having spent a decade as Gordon Brown’s chief economic adviser.
So why should people trust Labour to deliver on the economy when they are offering broadly the same economic future as the Coalition.
So for voters, all three parties seem only to be offering a future vision of pain and suffering.
It is little wonder that voters don’t want to vote.
However as we are seeing in Europe as unemployment rockets above 20% in countries like Spain, voters expect their political leadership to offer some future hope of an economic improvement. If Governments in Europe fail both to deal with the deficit and to also offer some prospects of growth then voters will increasingly either refuse to vote or more worryingly switch to extremes like the Neo_Nazi Golden Dawn which polled 7% in Greek Elections at the weekend. Indeed history shows that the Great Depression of the 1930′s was a major factor in the rise of the Nazi party in Germany
It is not enough for the Coalition and the Labour Opposition is say there is no alternative to the cuts.
What is needed is vision and pragmatism of the kind that typified Roosevelt New Deal in 1930′s America which enabled the American economy to escape from the Great Depression.
We need some vision of a better tomorrow, one that offers hope for voters and their families. David Cameron may think he is being honest with the electorate. However his blind faith that only cuts can solve our economic problems is both a dangerous and foolish approach.
We all need a little bit of hope otherwise we will all be reaching for that suicide pill.
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