Spot the Difference!

A vital ingredient of any political system fit for purpose is having a significant amount of policy difference between major parties so that the options placed before the electorate are clearly distinct and represent important alternative choices that would lead to different trajectories and outcomes for society.
But these days I’m reminded of those games in newspapers where you get drawings that look the same in major respects but have some very minor differences of detail. Just like politics today! You can hardly get a tissue paper between the policies of the three main parties. For example, in terms of economic strategy none will contradict the cutting and austerity approach inflicted on the country – mainly on the less well-off parts of it - even though this policy plainly and demonstrably does not work even on the government’s previously stated terms. At least two of the main parties actually believe in austerity as an economic policy. The third believes that the idea of cutting has been sold to the general public and they are now afraid to gainsay this and come forward with genuine alternative basically Keynesian policies.
There is thus effectively an informal political cartel forever looking over their shoulders and using the same focus group approach equally devoid of insight, vision, courage or even an awareness of economic history. As one commentator so vividly expressed it one can imagine a modern variant of martin Luther King’s speech: “I have a dream – a dream to do pretty much what the other lot have been doing…”. No wonder electoral participation rates have been going down and hence also the rise of a fourth party threatening the upper political class in Westminster that at least is different but in the wrong ways.
This last aside, what does it really matter who gets elected nowadays if the policy choices are austerity, austerity or austerity? And of course it will continue not to work. Austerity pushes the domestic economy down and as other countries, being each other's export markets, also pile on the misery it is no use looking abroad for salvation. That only works if other economies with whom you do much trade have different, more sensible and effective policies on which a free ride can be taken - as for example with Canada some time ago when the US was booming. That isn't the case now, as European economies all want domestic cutbacks and export led recoveries.
So we have national and international economic prescriptions equivalent to the 18th century medical 'cures' of leeches and bleeding. If the patient isn't recovering then bleed some more – as we shall see in the upcoming spending review. And if the patient does perk up a bit that is, of course, due to your policies.
The big worry is that short of a catastrophic upheaval here and elsewhere there is no evident solution to all of this - not even in the medium term. Elections need to matter, the common good should be to the fore, a basic financial morality should prevail and loyalty to community and country should permeate our economic and business activities as well as our social life.
That is the essential change that we need to see - along with an unwinding of globalisation a stop to the evisceration of our industries and the re-creation of jobs.
And yes, this could be done if the will was there in major western economies. The mutation of economic and political processes that appeal to the contemporary elite has taken deep hold, but both are human creations not laws of nature as Smith, Marx and various toxic ideologues would have us believe. The economic, social and political worlds are what we choose to make them - and we can make a different and much more attractive picture if enough of us choose to do so.