Ever blander UK politics makes for a cheerful prospect

The English language can perform great feats of elasticity but we must never allow “new” to serve as a synonym for “good”.

Progressive rock and brutalist architecture taught us that something can be original and atrocious at the same time. Contrary to the cult of innovation — that hollow carnival of Ted conferences and bullish techno-waffle — novelty is not an end in itself.

Understand these grouchy old truths, and there is no reason to be depressed about the intellectual staleness of Britain’s general election campaign. Only one thing is clear in this unpredictable contest, with its fine margins and many moving parts: our politicians are clean out of ideas. Their policies are not just not new, they are proudly revivalist.

In recent days, the governing Conservatives have indicated that they will cut inheritance tax and tighten the rules on trade union strikes. Whatever there is to be said for these ideas, the first was conceived eight years ago and the second could be a stray from the party’s 1983 election manifesto. The Tories have become incapable of saying anything you would not expect of them.

Contesting them for votes and predictability is a Labour party that excavates the 1970s for corporatist ideas and waters them down for an electorate that, it grudgingly accepts, does not want to go back there. Fiddly little interventions in prices and wages are promised. The party also wants a new Living Standards Index to challenge the statistical hegemony of gross domestic product.

David Cameron, the Tory prime minister, suggested something similarly inconsequential in opposition. When a politician proposes a new metric, he is letting you know the intellectual cupboard is bare.

We are witnessing the political equivalent of the Great Stagnation that is supposedly gumming up technological progress. It is easy to feel sorrow and search for something to blame. Perhaps the narrowness of our politicians’ backgrounds — the same educations, the same apprenticeships as government advisers — is catching up with them (and us). They are book-smart but unimaginative. They know their way around policy but cannot think outside the Whitehall orthodoxies in which they were reared like young Jesuits.

There is a sunnier way of looking at this. The intellectual torpor of the election is a sign of Britain’s relative success and stability. Politicians are not struggling to come up with big new ideas because of writer’s block but because, in a highly evolved country that gets most things right, there are not many big new ideas to be had. There is only the ancient work of fiscal adjustment, to bring state spending in line with revenues. The rest is tinkering. Public-spirited politicians would immerse themselves in the tinkering. Small reforms in health care and education can improve lives and life chances, even as they bore journalists and irk public sector vested interests.

Francis Fukuyama, the American scholar, still endures scorn for equating the end of the Cold War with a wider consensus on how to order human affairs. But in many western democracies, “history” really did “end”. For a quarter of a century since Margaret Thatcher quit as prime minister, Britons have wanted the same thing: a liberal economy under a mildly redistributive state. Where exactly to draw the border between the two things is a point of departure between left and right, but their arguments take place within slender parameters. There are scores of chaotic nations that would exchange their thrilling politics for the incrementalist drudgery of making a rich and safe country a little richer and safer.

Mr Cameron, so English and so Tory in his suspicion of ideas, is at ease atop a polity that has reached something of an intellectual plateau. More telling is that Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is adjusting to it too. He used to talk a big game about remaking capitalism but his policies are becoming modest to the point of bathos. This is not because he is stupid but because he is clever. He must sense that, whatever his own enthusiasms, voters want their country tweaked, not turned upside down. His cruellest trick has been to gull his more excitable followers into believing that his election will bring a great left turn from the Thatcher settlement, propelled by sizzling new ideas.

Last week, researchers discovered a new antibiotic with vast medical potential. And Tesco, a supermarket chain that itself transformed retail in the 1990s, announced a retrenchment in the face of nimbler competition. Science and business still have the power to stun with their creativity and periodic upheavals. Our politics is blander, and that is no tragedy.

— Financial Times