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British political cycle ends with no vista
“This was a profoundly unhistoric election,” said historian David Starkey. “There was no real choice.”
What lies ahead is austerity without a vista, but crucial choices about where to cut public spending and raise taxes may be delayed or obscured by a long wrangle over electoral reform.
After World War Two, Britain threw itself energetically into building a modern welfare state based on a mixed economy with a big public sector.
In the cruel words of then US Secretary of State Dean Acherson, Britain lost an empire but had not yet found a role. It sought to preserve international influence chiefly as junior partner to the United States and, belatedly and reluctantly, as a member of the European Community.
In the late 1970s, an electorate disenchanted with endless strikes, high taxes and economic muddle turned its back on social democracy and voted for personal enrichment.
That launched Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s radical shake-up of the economy. She privatized most state firms, broke the grip of the trade unions, sold off public housing, deregulated markets and cut taxes.
Her foreign policy mixed defiant nationalism, recapturing the remote Falkland (Malvinas) Islands from Argentina and fighting for British financial interests in Europe, with close partnership with the United States in the Cold War.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, the wheel turned again and Britons exasperated by the backward state of their schools, hospitals and trains chose to spend more of their new national wealth on education, health and transport.
That swept Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair to power with a mandate to modernise Britain’s creaking public services without reversing the Thatcherite economic disposition. It was the age of “cool Britannia”, when London became a magnetic multicultural metropolis and City financial sector bonuses fuelled a seemingly endless property boom.
His foreign policy was boldly interventionist in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. But despite his declared intention, Blair failed to overcome Britain’s semi-detachment from the European Union, and expended his political capital instead on an unpopular war in Iraq.
The global financial crash of 2008 brought that era to a spectacular end, felling some of Britain’s swaggering banks and leaving others clinging to a life-raft of state aid.
The bank rescues and the ensuing recession -- the deepest since the 1930s Great Depression -- caused an explosion in the public debt and budget deficit. That economic meltdown and a sordid scandal over parliamentarians’ expenses, set the backdrop for Thursday’s general election.
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