The coalition wants this week to be all about the GDP figures, out on Friday. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, Downing Street is confident that they’ll show the economy is continuing to grow at a relatively decent clip and is already working out how to make political out of that. They have, as Simon Walters reports, already prepared a video mocking Labour’s claims that the coalition’s polices would lead to a million more people on the dole.
Ed Miliband’s circle expects that the GDP numbers will again be positive. But they take the view that as long as prices are increasing faster than wages, squeezing voters’ living standards, economic growth won’t mean much politically. This is why every time the Tories talk about the growing economy, Labour tries to change the subject to living standards—to the question of whether voters are feeling better off or not.
The election-defining question in British politics is whether the link between growth and living standards is as broken as Ed Miliband says it is. If it is, then one can see how Labour can win even if the economy continues to grow between now and 2015. But if it is not, then one has to assume that the Tories—who have halved Labour’s poll lead in the last 12 months—will reap enough of a political dividend from the recovery for Cameron to return to Number 10.
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