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Voters accept the old story that Labour wrecks the economy, and Tories destroy society. The coalition may do both
The pendulum is getting a bit creaky. There was a time, back in the 60s and 70s, when it seemed to swing with metronomic regularity, power alternating between Labour and the Tories at roughly five-yearly intervals. Since 1979 though, the tempo has slowed drastically. The Conservatives held office for 18 years before the pendulum swung back to Labour, only for Labour to stay put for 13 years after that, narrowly dislodged by a vote that forced the Tories into coalition.
This is about more than the passage of time. There is a narrative to this cycle too – one that contains both danger and opportunity for the politicians. Each of the two main parties pushes one half of this narrative while rejecting the other.
Put together, this is the story they tell. Conservative governments come in to clear up the economic mess left by Labour; Labour then repairs the social damage left by the Tories. Take 1979, when Margaret Thatcher arrived to end a dysfunctional decade that had culminated in Labour's winter of discontent. According to the narrative, Thatcherism resuscitated the economy – but at a devastating social cost.
By 1997 the public realm was so badly run down that it needed Labour to mend the torn social fabric of the country – to build the schools and hospitals that had been so badly neglected. But in the process Labour wrecked the economy again, leaving an economic mess in 2010 that had to be cleared up by the Tories. And round and round it goes: Labour ruin the finances, the Conservatives ruin the fabric and each has to come in to repair the damage caused by the other. Call it the pendulum narrative.
It's rarely set out like that because both main parties, while happy to dish out the blame, dislike taking it. But it informs, even dominates, their thinking. George Osborne used to declare that Labour governments always end the same way – the economy in tatters, drenched in red ink – and the coalition has not tired of that refrain. Indeed, it pushes it daily, with relentless discipline. Clegg was at it again on Tuesday, telling the one-time "bigoted woman" Gillian Duffy in Rochdale: "We've got to sort out the mess that we inherited from the previous lot." I'm sure that if the toast burns in the Clegg household, even the kids know it was Gordon Brown, not Papa, who burned it.
But the other half of the story holds great peril for the government. The decision to eliminate the deficit within a single parliament has led to a programme of cuts that seems designed to prove the pendulum narrative – in which Tory-led governments end up trashing the social landscape – ahead of schedule. Usually, one former Downing Street adviser notes, it's towards the end of a government's life that it reverts to type. This time, he says, "the Tories are doing it from day one," closing libraries and Sure Start centres, cutting educational allowances and slashing arts budgets – shrinking and shrivelling the public realm. Now Labour can throw Osborne's taunt back at him. This is how Tory governments always end – and how they begin, too.
Of course this is not how David Cameron would have planned it. He would have liked to have mirrored New Labour's initial approach to governing. Determined to exorcise the old ghosts, Brown and Blair arrived in 1997 wearing voluntary hair shirts, sticking for two years to Tory spending limits, diverting any excess cash into paying down the national debt. Prudence was designed to dispel the old Labour identification with Profligacy.
The Cameron equivalent would have been two years of compassionate conservatism, largesse directed at teachers and nurses designed to bury the Tories' status as the nasty party. But the decision to focus monomaniacally on the deficit has denied them that option. Instead all that painstaking work on brand decontamination has been discarded as the Tories in government return to traditional form and wield the axe.
What can they do about it? How can they avoid leaving such social devastation that they speed up the usual cycle, hastening their 1997 moment – the day when the country turns to Labour to restore the battered public sphere?
Both coalition partners are already thinking about that, looking ahead to the second half of the parliament when, they hope, the painful work of deficit reduction will be nearly done and there will be some room for manoeuvre. In 2012 Lib Dems and Tories will renegotiate their coalition agreement – "renew their vows" is how one coalition insider puts it – with a view to ending their five-year term on a higher note, talking about regional investment, tax reform or the pupil premium, rather than slash and burn. Danny Alexander and Oliver Letwin are leading the advance thinking on "mid-term and beyond" and have, I'm told, already made one presentation on the topic to Cameron and Clegg.
Lib Dems hope the model will be their work on social mobility – which, they boast, has proper mechanisms to ensure, and yardsticks to measure, progress – rather than the Tories' pet project, the "big society". "How will we know in 2015 if society has got bigger?" mocks a well-placed source. The challenge set by the pendulum narrative for the coalition is clear enough: they must persuade the public they have repaired the economy without wrecking society. But it leaves Labour with a weighty task, too. It has to break the assumption that it ruined the public finances and so cannot be trusted with the economy. How to do that is the subject of vigorous debate at the highest levels of the party.
There are some we'd once have called Blairites who believe the only answer is a full mea culpa. Labour should admit it messed up, they say; only then will the party gain a public hearing. Others say that would be suicidal, that once you've confessed to driving the car into the ditch no one will give you the keys again. Even if – especially if – economic times are tough, they won't be allowed anywhere near power.
The other view, which so far is prevailing, concedes a limited apology for regulating the banks too lightly but no more. That's sensible, and fits with the facts. It's not Labour profligacy that caused the deficit – if the last government was spending too much why did the Tories promise, until summer 2008, to match its largesse? What's more, the books on the nation's current account were set to balance over the cycle before the crash hit. As David Miliband used to put it, this was a problem caused "on Wall Street, not Downing Street".
Labour needs to become as tireless at making this case as the coalition is at repeating, ad nauseam, that it "inherited this mess". Only then can Labour hope to disrupt the pattern that, if the past is any guide, would keep them out of office for a generation.
There is another possibility. That the current wave of economic bad news – with the latest retail sales the lowest since records began in 1996 , along with rock-bottom consumer confidence – persists and gets worse. In which case the coalition will have swung the pendulum both ways, ruining both the economy and society in a single term. If that happens the coalition partners won't be renewing their vows but saying the last rites.