A year ago the electoral strategies of the two main parties seemed set. The Conservatives would stand as the party of prudence, claiming to have saved Britain from a Greek-style meltdown through austerity measures which, though painful at the time, had eventually borne fruit in the shape of a private sector-led recovery. Labour, meanwhile, would stand as the party for public investment, promising to repair what it saw as the damage wrought by cuts.
Since then, things have got better for the Tories than they could have imagined. Not only did a threatened triple-dip recession fail to materialise, but revisions to economic data concluded that Britain did not even suffer a double dip. While debt is running well ahead and growth is still lower than the forecasts he made in 2010, George Osborne can no longer be accused of causing a recession and can now invite the public to wonder how much larger the deficit would have been had Gordon Brown been allowed to continue trying to spend the country out of debt.
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