It’s well known that most Conservative cabinet ministers supported Barack Obama’s re-election and in an interview in today’s Independent, Tory chairman Grant Shapps borrows one of the US president’s favourite campaign lines.
Shapps tells the paper: “We are in a global race. Britain is on the right track, don’t go back. Don’t give the keys to the guys who crashed the car in the first place. Do you want to go through all this pain again?”
Obama told a Democratic fundraiser in May 2010: “So after they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive! We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch! We just got the car out! We just got the car out!” He used the analogy again at a labour day rally in Milwaukee in September of that year.
It’s a good line, but unfortunately for Shapps it’s not one the Conservatives have any right to use. While the US economy enjoyed a sustained recovery under Obama (with 13 consecutive quarters of growth), the UK fell into a double-dip recession (and is at risk of a triple-dip). To adapt Obama’s analogy, the Tories didn’t drive the car out of the ditch; they drove it back in (you could call it a double-ditch recession).
When Labour left office, the economy was recovering, with growth of 0.4 per cent in Q3 of 2009, 0.4 per cent in Q4, 0.6 per cent in Q1 of 2010 and 0.7 per cent in Q2 (see this table for the full data). Since then, it has stagnated. Over the last year, the US economy has grown by 2.3 per cent, while the UK hasn’t grown at all. As a result, while the US economy is now 2.3 per cent above its pre-recession peak, the UK remains 3.1 per cent below.
If and when Shapps’s party boasts a comparable record, he might be entitled to borrow Obama’s line. But until then, he should gracefully return it to its original owner.
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