The Tory Lesson for America Voters Choose Economic Growth Over Income Redistribution.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-conservatives-big-british-win-1431106908
Polling has always been as much art as science, as David Cameron’s decisive victory in Britain’s general election reminds us. For months polls had shown a dead heat between the incumbent Prime Minister and his Labour Party challenger. Yet Mr. Cameron emerged Friday with the first Tory majority in Parliament since John Major was swept from office in 1997.
This is a political opportunity for Mr. Cameron, who was forced into an unwieldy coalition with the left-of-center Liberal Democrats when he came to office in 2010. This time Conservatives took 331 seats in the 650-seat parliament, a gain of 28. Labour lost 25 seats, and the Lib Dems were left politically for dead, losing all but eight of their previous 57 seats. The night’s only other winner was the Scottish National Party, which won 56 seats by routing Labour from its old northern strongholds.
In giving Conservatives a new majority, voters rewarded an impressive economic record. Five years of Tory policies, such as a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 20% from 28% and a welfare reform that shifted more people into work have produced record employment participation rates and by far the fastest growth of any large European economy. Keynesian critics in the U.S. and U.K. derided this as “austerity,” but tax cuts and limits on government spending have been vindicated.
The Tories also benefited from the intellectual and political collapse of their main rivals in the Labour Party. Labour leader Ed Miliband ran a 1970s redistributionist campaign against the “rich,” promising a mansion tax, higher top personal income-tax rate, dramatically higher public spending, and even rent controls. Voters heard the echoes of 1970s class warfare and decided that they could do without another winter of discontent.
Labour’s defeat was abetted in Scotland by a resurgent and far-left Scottish National Party (SNP), which won all but three Scottish seats in Westminster. That vote represents a conviction in the north that everyone else in the U.K. will gladly and indefinitely be net donors to a generous Scottish welfare state. They may be in for disappointment, although managing Scottish separatism remains a challenge for Mr. Cameron.
The story on the right is the poor showing of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), which last year won two parliamentary seats in successive by-elections, and had been poised to pick up several more on Thursday. It ended up with one. While it won 13% of the vote, enough disaffected Tories among UKIP’s base appear to have returned to the fold to avoid handing a victory to parties of the left.
UKIP’s legacy will live on less helpfully in the anti-immigration stance Mr. Cameron has taken to appease UKIP supporters, and more helpfully in the referendum on Britain’s European Union membership Mr. Cameron has promised for 2017. That vote should be a clarifying exercise for Brits and their politicians alike, and it’s a good start that a single leader has a sufficient parliamentary majority to be solely responsible for treaty renegotiations with the EU and the referendum campaign.
Mr. Cameron’s broader challenge now is to build on reform to widen economic prosperity and recapture the imagination of an electorate that clearly understands Old Labour isn’t the answer but still needs convincing that Conservatives are. The lesson from Britain for U.S. conservatives is to focus on policies that expand the economic pie and reform the broken parts of government. Voters want growth more than redistribution.
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