THE ATLANTIC
Overnight, the stunning exit polls and early results predicting a major Conservative Party victory in the British general election gave way to a triumphant final tally for Prime Minister David Cameron’s party. According to a BBC forecast, “the Conservatives will end up [with] 331 seats in the House of Commons,” crossing the threshold for a majority in the 650-seat parliament.
On Thursday morning, when voting first began, the final pre-election polls showed a neck-and-neck race between Conservatives (or Tories) and the Labour Party, leading some to anticipate that no party would win an outright majority for the second straight election and that it would take days or weeks to figure out who would lead the British government.
Instead, by Friday morning, Cameron was on his way to Buckingham Palace to be invited to form a government by Queen Elizabeth II, and most of Cameron’s rivals—Ed Miliband (Labour), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats), and Nigel Farage (UKIP)—had resigned their leadership posts.
"I think this is the sweetest victory of all," Cameron said on Thursday evening, after becoming the first Conservative prime minister to win re-election since Margaret Thatcher—and leading the party to its first majority in parliament since 1992. Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party proved the only party to match pre-election prognostications, scoring 56 seats to become the third-largest party in Parliament.
At an event in Glasgow, SNP head Nicola Sturgeon told supporters, “I think the results we may be about to see unfold in Scotland tonight show that the anti-austerity message that the SNP put at the heart of this campaign has resonated across Scotland.”
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| Nicola Sturgeon, votes with her husband Peter Murrell in Glasgow, Scotland. | Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images |
NY TIMES
The vote was a stunning disappointment for the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Ed Miliband, who had shifted the party away from the more centrist strategy it pursued in the late 1990s and early 2000s under Tony Blair. [His resignation opens ]up a new debate over the party’s direction.
Labour, was nearly wiped out in Scotland by the surging Scottish National Party and did more poorly than pre-election opinion polls had suggested it would in the rest of Britain. Several of Mr. Miliband’s top lieutenants lost their seats.
The campaign had centered primarily on domestic issues, including the budget austerity imposed by the Conservatives and funding for the National Health Service, but Mr. Cameron had also played up fears that a Labour government, reliant on support from the Scottish nationalists, would drive the country leftward and risk the nation being splintered.
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| Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, offered his resignation on Friday a day after Thursday’s general election. By Reuters on Publish Date May 8, 2015. Photo by Facundo Arrizabalaga/European Pressphoto Agency. |
PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES
“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” I’ve always loved that quote, and have tried to apply it to my own writing. But I have to admit that in the long slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis — a slump that we had both the tools and the knowledge to end quickly, but didn’t — the unthinking were quite successful in fending off unwelcome thoughts.
And nowhere was the triumph of inanity more complete than in Keynes’s homeland, which is going to the polls as I write this. Britain’s election should be a referendum on a failed economic doctrine, but it isn’t, because nobody with influence is challenging transparently false claims and bad ideas.
Before I bash the Brits, however, let me admit that we’ve done pretty badly ourselves.
It began very early. President Obama inherited an economy in free fall; what we needed, above all, was more spending to support demand. Yet much of Mr. Obama’s inaugural address was given over to boilerplate about the need to make hard choices, which was the last thing we needed right then.
It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.
So I guess we shouldn’t be too harsh on Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, for failing to challenge the economic nonsense peddled by the Conservatives. Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth. But it has still been deeply disheartening to watch.
What nonsense am I talking about? Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.
Sure enough, Dan Balz writes about Britain in the Washington Post, in what I think is supposed to be a news analysis rather than an opinion piece, and states the mediamacro narrative as simply the truth about Britain, with nary a hint even that anyone disagrees with the story.
Now, every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong. Pre-crisis Britain wasn’t fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose as a result of the crisis. The crisis, which was a global phenomenon, was driven by runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency. And Britain, which returned to growth only after a pause in the austerity drive, has made up none of the ground it lost during the coalition’s first two years.
Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win. But why?
Mr. Wren-Lewis suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. If U.S. experience is any guide, my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)
Still, it’s quite amazing. The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.
But hard thinking has been virtually excluded from British public discourse. As a result, we just have to hope that whoever ends up running Britain’s economy isn’t as foolish as he pretends to be.