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The Cameron government: Crisis? What crisis? | The Economist
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What crisis?</h3> <h1 class="rubric">The West’s most radical government is in trouble. It needs to rediscover its boldness and honesty</h1> <p class="ec-article-info"> May 12th 2012 | from the print edition </p> <div id="block-ec_components-share_inline_header" class="block block-ec_components"> <div class="content clearfix"> <div class="share_inline_header"><ul class="clearfix"><li class="share-inline-header-facebook first" data-ec-omniture-frame="top_fb"><fb:like href="http://www.economist.com/node/21554515" send="false" layout="button_count" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like></li> <li class="share-inline-header-twitter even last" data-ec-omniture-frame="top_twitter"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120516201401/http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-related="theeconomist" data-url="https://web.archive.org/web/20120516201401/http://econ.st/LVDq66" data-counturl="http://www.economist.com/node/21554515">Tweet</a></li> </ul></div> </div> </div> <div class="ec-article-content clear"> <p> <div class="content-image-full"> <img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20120516201401im_/http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/images/2012/05/articles/main/20120512_ldp001_0.jpg" alt="" title="" class="imagecache imagecache-full-width" width="595" height="335"/> </div></p> <p>TWO years ago this week David Cameron and Nick Clegg launched their coalition government in a sun-dappled Downing Street garden, at a joint press conference so filled with smiles, jokes and shared glances that it was compared to a gay wedding. On May 8th Britain’s Conservative prime minister and his Liberal Democrat deputy renewed their coalition vows in a tractor factory. There were few jokes. The work of government was “hard”, Mr Cameron told stony-faced workers.</p> <p>Two-thirds of voters now disapprove of Mr Cameron’s performance and three-quarters disdain Mr Clegg’s. In local elections on May 3rd their parties lost hundreds of council seats, mostly to the opposition Labour Party: when Boris Johnson, the Tory mayor of London, bucked the trend and kept his job, that prompted gossip that he would be a better leader. Britain’s economy has dipped back into recession. A judicial inquiry into the press has revealed a shamefully cosy relationship between Conservative leaders and newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. The government, and the prime minister in particular, are described as “out of touch” and told to “get a grip”—and that is just to quote Conservatives in Parliament.</p> <div class="related-items"> <strong>In this section</strong><ul class="related-item-list special-report"><li class="0 first"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/node/21554530">Europe’s Achilles heel</a></li> <li class="1"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/node/21554526">Clever steps at the border</a></li> <li class="2"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/node/21554527">An opportunity for an opportunist</a></li> <li class="3"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/node/21554528">Something to watch over us</a></li> <li class="4 last"><span class="current-article "><span class="related-current-indicator">»</span>Crisis? What crisis?</span></li> </ul><div class="bottom-links"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/rights">Reprints</a></div><hr class="related-item-separator"/><strong>Related topics</strong><div class="item-list"><ul class="related-item-list"><li class="first"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/topics/nick-clegg" class="related-inline-topics">Nick Clegg</a></li> <li class="even"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/topics/conservative-party-britain" class="related-inline-topics">Conservative Party (Britain)</a></li> <li><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/topics/politics" class="related-inline-topics">Politics</a></li> <li class="even"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/topics/european-politics" class="related-inline-topics">European politics</a></li> <li class="last"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/topics/british-politics" class="related-inline-topics">British politics</a></li> </ul></div> </div> <p>What has gone wrong? Less than at first appears. Mid-term slumps happen. Margaret Thatcher’s government once trailed Labour by 24 percentage points. Mr Cameron lags by around ten points. Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, is still unpopular and his party has yet to regain economic credibility shredded during the financial crisis. Above all, Mr Cameron’s government has still got most of the big things right. Both for the country’s sake and for his own, the prime minister needs to refocus his government on the clear, bold message that he began with.</p> <p><strong>Less pride and prejudice</strong></p> <p>There are all sorts of areas where this newspaper disagrees with the government—its petulant attitude to Europe, its banker-bashing, its failure to prize immigrants. But the coalition came to power with two admirably clear plans. On the economy, it argued that the state had been spending too freely, and thus embarked on a courageous course of deficit-reduction. More generally, it recognised that the state needed to be radically trimmed and set about a thoroughgoing reform of education, welfare, policing, pensions and much more besides. Broadly speaking, the economic part of its agenda remains more successful than the public-sector reforms (see <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/node/21554567">article</a>).</p> <p>That may seem an odd case to make, given the double-dip recession. Yet a look at the euro zone’s problems is salutary. First, it provides an excuse of sorts: with the governments in Britain’s main export market bent on committing financial suicide several times over (see <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/node/21554537" target="_self">article</a>), it is not surprising Britain has suffered. Second, even though Britain’s finances were in a worse state than those of most euro-zone countries, the policy of cutting the deficit has retained the support of investors—and thus helped keep bond rates low. We would prefer it if fewer of the cuts were on capital spending and there was greater emphasis on deregulation. But clarity has won the argument with voters, who recognise cuts are inevitable and still prefer the austere Tories to free-spending Labour.</p> <p>A similar sense of purpose is evident in only two of the government’s public-sector reforms: schools and welfare. In both cases the government has clearly spelled out that it inherited an unsustainable and flawed system. The education secretary, Michael Gove, has repeatedly said that too many state schools are not good enough and that public examinations have been dumbed down. His peer on welfare, Iain Duncan Smith, has explained that making limitless payments to the work-shy makes no sense. With schools, the Tories’ answer has been more diversity and competition. With welfare, they have tried to ensure that cash goes only to those who really need it.</p> <p><strong>Better persuasion needed</strong></p> <p>The coalition has been far less straightforward, and less successful, when making the case for reform in other areas. A proposed shake-up of the National Health Service (NHS) was, at heart, an attempt to tackle soaring costs and improve quality by promoting competition and by getting trusted family doctors to do more rationing. But the message was muddled. The Tories vowed before the 2010 election to ring-fence NHS spending—telling voters, in effect, that the status quo was affordable. That made it a shock when ministers unveiled a huge restructuring after the election, defended with complex arguments about patient choice and bureaucratic structures.</p> <p>Then there was the sorry saga of the Big Society. The plan to find alternatives to an overweening state in the provision of public services made sense only if profitmaking firms were fully part of the mix. But it was presented as all about volunteers and charities, which did not add up to voters too harried to run local libraries. Another decent idea, introducing elected mayors, has also been killed by obfuscation. When it comes to reform, honesty pays—something Mrs Thatcher understood.</p> <p>The Tory right blames the confusion on the coalition and those nervous, left-leaning Lib Dems. That is largely unfair: the NHS reforms were over-complex long before the Lib Dems started watering them down, and Mr Clegg has not wavered on deficit reduction and welfare curbs. It is also irrelevant. The Tories are in a coalition: much better to be frank about the (relatively few) compromises that position involves than to try to pretend that Lib Dem policies like Lords reform are somehow Tory ones. Voters know that marriage involves trade-offs.</p> <p>The greatest worry is not the coalition, but Mr Cameron himself. A delegator by nature, he has stuck by the same tight circle of long-standing aides, even as the number of gaffes has risen. He needs people with better political antennae. More deeply, the competing instincts that run through his government—on the one hand, a bold, impatient desire to fix the state, on the other a deep, almost genetic comfort with life at the apex of the British Establishment—co-exist within the prime minister himself. Hard government requires hard decisions. So far trimming and too-clever-by-half evasions have been found out every time, while radical clarity has paid off. Mr Cameron has had his warning; he should learn from it.</p> </div> <p class="ec-article-info"> from the print edition | Leaders </p> </div> <!-- /#ec-article-body --> <div id="article-region-bottom"> <div id="block-ec_components-share_inline_footer" class="block block-ec_components"> <div class="content clearfix"> <div class="share_inline_footer"><ul class="clearfix"><li class="pt-recommend first"><a href="/web/20120516201401/http://www.economist.com/node/21554515/recommend" rel="nofollow" class="recommend" title="Recommend this content" data-ec-omniture="recommend_article">Recommend</a><div class="rec-count"><span>61</span></div></li> <li class="share-inline-footer-facebook even" data-ec-omniture-frame="footer_fb"><fb:like href="http://www.economist.com/node/21554515" send="false" layout="button_count" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like></li> <li class="share-inline-footer-twitter" data-ec-omniture-frame="footer_twitter"><a 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