Politics: Why a double dip won’t save Ed Miliband

It wasn’t meant to be this way. The Tories used to joke that after a year and a half in office they would be the most unpopular government in history. Instead, they find themselves five points ahead in the polls. To their surprise, and Labour’s consternation, they are in a far stronger position now than they were at the last election.

To understand what’s going on, look no further than this week’s vote on welfare reform. It epitomised three of the most important trends in British politics: the addition of a harder edge to the Tory modernising agenda, the strategic confusion afflicting Labour, and the disconnect between the Lib Dem leaders and their party. Together, these trends help explain why the Tories are ahead even as the economy is contracting. At the next election, they may well deliver a Conservative majority.

The Tory failure to win outright in 2010 weighed heavily on George Osborne, the party’s chief electoral strategist. In office, he has continued to plan for electoral success, but he has changed his strategy. The focus on wooing Liberal Democrat voters with liberal stances on cultural issues, civil liberties and the environment has been replaced with a more direct effort to attract Labour supporters. Osborne has pushed a number of American-style ‘wedge issues’, designed to split the Labour leadership from sections of its electoral support. One of these is the benefits cap that he announced at the first post-election Tory conference. Osborne declared that it would mean that ‘no family on out-of-work benefits will get more than the average family gets by going out to work’. This will save money, but it will also, he hopes, tap into the public’s anger at the standard of living enjoyed by some of those who don’t work. To ensure that his cap was politically watertight, he excluded the disabled, war widows and the working poor.