Guido has said this before and he will say it again: if the Tories lose this election a large part of the blame belongs to the former Downing Street pollster Andrew Cooper, who claimed that UKIP were a “flash in the pan”. Here is the evidence in hard data form from YouGov; 5 percentage points of the 2010 Tory vote has gone to UKIP, in exchange for 3 percentage points of the LibDem vote. Pollsters and statisticians can argue about what might have been, the data suggests that the Cameroon positioning which claimed the Conservatives could win from the centre has cost at least 2 percentage points. The number of former LibDems wooed is fewer than the number of former Tories spurned and now voting UKIP.

Cooper’s “peak UKIP” theory does not appear to have been anything more than a theory. This YouGov data, based on re-interviewing 31,210 voters polled in 2010, shows Cooper’s hunch that UKIP were a “flash in the pan” which would fade away and return to the blue column was just a hunch, motivated by an ideological preference for centrist modernisation rather than any campaigning logic. Cooper was once lionised by the metropolitan commentariat – in 2011 Matthew D’Ancona claimed that his “great gift to the Conservative Party has not been liberal ideology, but a pitiless empiricism”. A real judgement based on pitiless empiricism is about to be delivered by the voters. Guido suspects that Cooper’s years as Downing Street’s Director of Strategy will be seen as wasted years when the modernisers’ distaste for conservative instincts was over indulged at the expense of a strategy to both secure the base and gain new voters. An arrogant and recklessly rushed modernisation has fatally split the right-of-centre vote.

The spat between George Osborne and Fraser Nelson over whether or not the deficit has been halved is very much a Westminster bubble affair of little consequence to anyone outside SW1. Interested voters who even understand the difference between the deficit and the debt know that the government’s target to balance the budget in 2015 has been missed by £100 billion or so. As Jonathan Portes over at the Keynesian redoubt of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research gleefully points out, George Osborne has succeeded in implementing the Darling plan, which his own Financial Secretary to the Treasury condemned, for being endorsed only by The Guardian. The Chancellor deserves a degree of Fraser’s ridicule for only managing to execute the very Plan B that Osborne himself once ridiculed as ruinous.

The Tories are arguing, whilst simultaneously carrying the goalposts, that they have managed to halve the deficit in relative terms, relative to GDP. Professional economists seem to think that is a fair method of measuring the deficit. So how are they doing, in relative terms, on other key indicators?

The national debt relative to GDP is up, from 78.4% under Gordon Brown in 2010 to 90.6% last year. It is still rising, which is in the government’s own self-defined terms a big economic failure.

The Tories like to boast that employment is higher now than ever before, as indeed it was every year under the last Labour government, because the population grows. The unemployment rate is relative to the population. That is down impressively from 8% to 6% thanks to IDS, better still the youth unemployment and long term unemployment rates are also down. A trump card in the economic argument.

Per capita GDP was, as Danny Blanchflower and Ed Balls kept pointing out sombrely with smirks on their faces, falling. We were getting, on average, poorer. According to World Bank figures, the answer to Reagan’s famous question for voters “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” is a “yes”, just about. After inflation voters are on average 1.8% better off now than they were in 2010.*

Quantitative Easing on a scary scale has rigged other economic indicators like inflation and interest rates whilst pumping up asset prices. Great if you already owned financial assets or prime London property…

It seems a long-time since The Spectator was eulogising George Osborne as “the true Tory leader“, the enmity towards the Treasury from the Speccie is near constant nowadays. Guido notes that in a Tory leadership election it is almost certain that the magazine will back Boris, a former editor, against Osborne…

*Although for higher income earners – the income bracket usually well disposed towards voting Conservative – Osborne’s Guardianista pleasing fetishising of the Gini coefficient will mean they are probably worse off. Only a genius political strategist like Osborne would bash his core vote hardest.

In the 2010 Labour leadership campaign Ed Balls positioned himself on the tough-love Brownite left and Ed Miliband outflanked via the in-the-comfort zone soft-left. Today Ed Balls in his speech to the London Business School distanced himself from the Labour leader’s anti-business positions and sounded almost Blairite at times. All these things are nuanced, this sounded like a positioning speech for the post-election, post-Miliband Labour Party. We shall see…

Speech highlights:

• Balls, despite saying “the third way did not deliver”, explicitly identifies himself with the Clinton-Blair agenda
  

  “I do not believe that the progressives were wrong in their central belief that a path could be taken between free-market economics and protectionism and isolationism.”

• Attending Bilderberg Conferences has paid off, Balls explicitly accepts the success of neo-liberal globalisation
  

  “… this is my starting point: over the last twenty years, the global economy has fundamentally changed – and changed for the better. As communism collapsed and countries have liberalised their economies, there have been significant reductions in poverty and increases in living standards across Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and now Africa.”

• Straining credibility the former deficit denier now promises spending cuts and a balanced budget
  

  “I have made a binding fiscal commitment that a Labour government will balance the books and deliver a surplus on the current budget and falling national debt as soon as possible in the next Parliament. It will require tough decisions to cut public spending and social security spending, as well as a fairer tax system.”

The rest of the speech dwells on traditional Labour solutions, more training and education, a mea culpa over (the lack of) EU immigration transitional controls in government, plus some sleight of hand over corporation tax.  To back up the new endlessly repeated Balls “pro-business, just not business as usual” soundbite he also advanced the idea of an industrial policy incentivising long term investment, this time with tax breaks for long term equity investors. Can’t wait to see how the Owen Jones left welcomes the idea of more expensive corporate welfare for stock market investors…

Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize-winning economist is in Oxford until mid-June as the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor in Development and Business.

The liberal Princeton/NY Times professor just delivered his inaugural lecture asking the question (the almost-rhetorical question) Do We Face Secular Stagnation?

It follows on from his books The Age of Diminished Expectation, the Return of Depression Economics and articles like Is Capitalism Too Productive? The Myth of Asia’s Miracle and – suggested title – What Are You Laughing At, Can’t You See the State We’re In?

His proposition is that the glory days are behind us, that each recession has been harder to get out of than the last, that we will have extended periods of low-to-no growth, and that under-employment will create “dreary lives” for large numbers of people – because politicians will not listen to him and his $300bn job-creation schemes.

If Labour can get him onto a stage with Ed Miliband, the election will be in the bag. For the Tories.

He talked about the impulses to “austerity” saying that it’s as though governments want to engineer a gratuitous recession in order to have a pre-election year boom, “like the Government has done here” (cosy laughter from the full-to-overflow hall).

Small, bearded, charming, Prof Krugman looks like the oceanographer in Jaws. Remember, that clever fellow, expert in his field, ran up and down the beach warning the pleasure-seekers there was a giant shark out there waiting to devour them.

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Today is Holy Thursday, when the Queen traditionally offers alms known as Maundy money to deserving senior citizens. Scholars say “Maundy” comes from Jesus; “Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos”, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you”. Monarchs by tradition also washed the feet of the poor as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Jesus also said that “You will always have the poor with you and can help them whenever you want.” Which brings Guido to foodbanks and socialism.

Socialists believe in the perfectibility of man, a doctrine going back to Rousseau, that people are capable of achieving perfection on earth through social means, without the grace of God. Unlike Jesus they don’t believe that the poor will always necessarily be with us. Foodbanks are mostly run by charities, many Christian inspired. The genuine anger from the left at the expansion of foodbanks is matched only by their incomprehension that some think their growth is a good thing and a sign that Christianity survives in an increasingly secular Britain. Christian help for the poor is an imperative given to them by their faith… 

If like many socialists you believe society can be perfected, foodbanks are a sign of society’s failure. If like most Christians you believe the poor will always be with us, then foodbanks are the successful application of the teachings of Jesus. Guido doesn’t believe in socialism or the perfectibility of man, so sees the expansion of foodbanks as a good thing for the poor. Politically Labour are trying to capitalise on foodbanks, whereas in America Obama rolls up his sleeves and has photo ops helping out at foodbanks. It seems to Guido that Labour either should come out and say openly that they want to see higher welfare transfer payments to the poor or do some real community organising and help out at foodbanks rather than just moan about them. Happy Easter…

Chancellor Zero is no more. Growth is back, even the neo-Keynesians at the FT and the wonks at the IMF can’t deny that the UK expanded faster than the rest of the G7 last year and will probably do the same this year. George Osborne is in Washington today to gloat that

“despite warnings from some that our determined pursuit of our economic plan made that impossible. All of this demonstrates that fiscal consolidation and economic recovery go together, and undermines the pessimistic prognosis that only further fiscal stimulus can drive sustainable growth. Indeed that is precisely the wrong prescription for our economies…”

Ed Balls got it wrong is the core message. Labour will point to per capita GDP which is still 10% lower than it was in 2007 – that will be a second term objective for the Chancellor. Balls will less convincingly say George has missed his deficit target, less convincing because Labour would have missed it by more and opposed almost every measure needed to reduce the deficit. The neo-Keynesian argument that higher unemployment would increase the welfare bill and thus the deficit has been proven to be wrong. Unemployment is down from what it was under Gordon Brown, with the warnings from the likes of David Blanchflower of 4 to 5 million unemployed having turned out to be political hyperbole that has fatally damaged his career as a sage. That “expansionary fiscal contraction” that left-wing wonks and economists said would never come is entering a third year…

Leading left-wing wonk and wannabe Labour MP Will Straw argued in 2011 that Britain’s economy faced the risk of a Japanese-style “lost decade” and that “expansionary fiscal contraction” was a “voodoo theory”, and even that “there was no such thing as an expansionary fiscal contraction”. In 2011 Guido argued the point at length with Will on the BBC’s Daily Politics:

Having failed at the time to get an on-air apology from Will for his role in Gordon Brown’s Treasury, three years later he must now accept that he was wrong about a lost decade and wrong that there was no such thing as an expansionary fiscal contraction. Over to you Will – as growth is expected to hit 3% you have a second chance to offer an apology…