After Labour Loses With Austerity, US Media Tell Them to Move to the Right

USA Today depicts Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron taking part in a selfie. (photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

When conservatives win elections, the US press invariably reports that the lesson for liberals is to move to the right. That’s true not only in domestic elections but overseas ones as well—as with last week’s balloting for the British Parliament, in which the Conservative Party won 36.8 percent of the vote but took 50.8 percent of the seats in the House of Commons.

USA Today‘s Michael Wolff (5/10/15) took this as an opportunity to lecture “leftists” on either side of the Atlantic:

Many popular media notions of what a restless electorate is against (bankers, corporate power, tax dodgers, economic austerity) and what it is for (fundamental change, leveling the powerful, taxing the rich and big social program promises) came a cropper in the British election last week.

Rather than endorsing this leftward shift in politics — a view arguably now animating the Hillary Clinton campaign for president in the US — voters returned the Conservative Party to No. 10 Downing St. with a heretofore unimaginable majority.

It was, in Britain, a conservative revolt, an unwillingness to play loose with hard-won economic stability, or risk the gains, however small, that have been made over the last few years.

The Conservatives painted a picture of a country that was moving steadily forward in place. The Labour opposition painted a picture of a floundering nation that needed to be overhauled and rescued by new spending plans paid for by new tax-the-rich schemes — a view rejected in almost every way.

Only that’s not the picture that the Labour Party painted at all. Far from making “big social program promises,” what Labour actually promised was to balance the budget. The Labour platform—which in Britain, far more than in the US, is a document that actually lays out how parties are expected to govern—begins with this pledge:

Our manifesto begins with the Budget Responsibility Lock we offer the British people. It is the basis for all our plans in this manifesto, because it is by securing our national finances that we are able to secure the family finances of the working people of Britain…:

• Every policy in this manifesto is paid for. Not one commitment requires additional borrowing. We are the first party to make that pledge, and with this manifesto it is delivered….
• A Labour government will cut the deficit every year. The first line of Labour’s first Budget will be: “This Budget cuts the deficit every year.”…
• We will get national debt falling and a surplus on the current budget as soon as possible in the next parliament.

Or as Labour standard-bearer Ed Miliband put it in his personal message in the party manifesto, the “leftist” party was offering “an economy built on strong and secure foundations, where we balance the books.” Its specific pledges included “capping social security spending so that it is properly controlled” and “capping child benefit rises for the next two years.”

While it promised to “reverse the Government’s top-rate tax cut, so that those with incomes over £150,000 contribute a little more to help get the deficit down,” it also vowed to “not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax or national insurance.” Far from taking on “corporate power,” the manifesto declared, “We will back our entrepreneurs and businesses”:

We will tackle rising business costs, by maintaining the most competitive corporation tax rate in the G7, cutting and then freezing business rates for more than 1.5 million small business properties and freezing their energy bills.

In a word, what Labour was promising was austerity—not unlike the Conservatives. That’s why economist Paul Krugman, shortly before the election (Guardian, 4/29/15), noted that “both major parties are in effect promising a new round of austerity that might well hold back a recovery that has, so far, come nowhere near to making up the ground lost during the recession and the initial phase of austerity.”

Noting that “harsh austerity in depressed economies isn’t necessary, and does major damage when it is imposed,” Krugman observed:

It has been astonishing, from a US perspective, to witness the limpness of Labour’s response to the austerity push. Britain’s opposition has been amazingly willing to accept claims that budget deficits are the biggest economic issue facing the nation.

Hey, big spender: The New York Times‘ image of Ed Miliband (photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Krugman, of course, writes a regular column for the New York Times. But the Times‘ news analysis of the British election, by Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle (5/9/15), turned this analysis on its head, blaming Labour’s defeat on its opposition to austerity:

Mr. Miliband bet on a strategy to appeal to Labour’s core voters: After the global crash of 2008, he believed, the electorate would favor an egalitarian party that called for higher taxes on the rich, tighter regulation of business and increased social spending. His agenda was sold by Labour as a responsible alternative to the fiscal austerity imposed on Britain by Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservative-led government of the past five years.

It’s possible that Britain might have favored that party; it certainly didn’t favor the deficit-busting platform that Labour actually ran on. But “move to left” is advice you’re never going to hear from the US corporate press.

 You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com.  USA Today‘s email address is letters@usatoday.com (Twitter:  @USATODAY). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

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