UK election: it was mediamacro wot won it

After the UK general election in 1992, which the Conservatives won to the surprise of many, the Murdoch owned tabloid newspaper the Sun splashed the headline “It's The Sun Wot Won It’. The headline is infamous enough to have its own Wikipedia entry. A few days ago I wrote what I hope was a calm, considered and rather academic post on the concept of mediamacro, following my posts on specific mediamacro myths, and I talked in abstract about the dangers it posed. Here I want to be more concrete.

Since the 2010 elections, YouGov has asked the following question: “Here is a list of problems facing the country. Could you say for each of them which political party you think would handle the problem best?” This is a simple table comparing the Labour lead in this poll just after the 2010 elections and today.

Issue	Lab lead 6/7 June 2010	26/27 April 2015	Difference
NHS	-1	14	+15
Immigration	-26	-6	+20
Law and Order	-21	-12	+9
Education	-4	6	+10
Taxation	-10	-8	+2
Unemployment	-7	-4	+3
Economy in General	-11	-18	-7

Source YouGov

Ignoring the normal academic caveats, the message is clear: the only topic on which the Conservatives are doing better today than shortly after they won the last election is their handling of the economy in general.

Yet when you look at any standard criteria of economic performance, the economy has done terribly during the coalition’s term of office. There is no doubt about this: numbers from GDP per head to real wages all tell a similar story. Average living standards have not increased, which means that they have fallen for many, a result which is almost unprecedented over a five year period. How much of this is the result of government policy is debatable, but that is not a debate that you see in the media. What you see in the media is an obsession with the government’s budget deficit, and on that criterion the coalition has left the economy in a better state than when it came in. So the only way to explain these poll results is that people have internalised the media’s obsession with the deficit.

Now normally you would ask how on earth something like the budget deficit could trump standards of living when judging economic performance. This is where the mediamacro myth of Labour profligacy is so important. One of the lasting images of this election was the man in the recent Leaders Question Time who accused Miliband of lying when he said that the global financial crisis rather than Labour profligacy had caused the deficit. (Second clip here.) He just knew that the last government had bankrupted the economy, and it appears many in the audience did too. And who could blame them: coalition politicians go unchallenged when they say it, and lots of newspapers repeat the line endlessly as fact.

It is a myth, pure and simple, but an important myth, because it places the blame for stagnant or falling living standards during the coalition government on their opponents. They created the mess the coalition had to clear up, and that was bound to be painful for a time. I’ve watched people who comment on this blog try to twist and turn figures in a desperate attempt to keep the myth alive. I’ve experienced being rubbished in the partisan media for trying to expose this myth. But in mediamacro this Question Time confrontation is described as an awkward moment for Miliband, rather than just the ranting of a bloke who had never looked at the numbers. I cannot recall any major coalition politician being seriously challenged for promulgating this myth.   

It is strange watching all this happen. I know that having written one of only 2 or 3 academic papers on Labour’s fiscal record does not guarantee what I say is correct, but it certainly gives me confidence that I am not talking rubbish. I write what I can, talk to any journalists who ask, trying to get the facts across. Facts like the deficit before the global financial crisis was only within a typical forecast error of its sustainable level. Facts like the debt to GDP ratio before the Great Recession was below the level Labour inherited.

Yet I know that this message will never be received, however indirectly, by the angry man in that debate, or by most of that audience. Perhaps some do not want to know the facts, but if they did, they are very unlikely to hear them. Instead they will get propaganda from most newspapers, and ‘views on the shape of the earth differ’ type comments from the TV, whose journalists are desperate not to appear to take sides. For that reason, if the coalition government remains in power after this election (or if the Conservatives win outright), then the title of this post will have rather more justification than the Sun’s original headline. [1]

[1] Although perhaps I should not be too rude about the Sun’s claim. Recent research suggests that readers of the Sun are considerably more trusting of the media than those who prefer other papers.