Brits on austerity: Can we have some more, sir?

Poll: Tories more trusted on economy

LONDON — After enduring five years of some of the deepest spending cuts in Britain’s modern history — with budgets for police, the arts and earlychildhood development slashed — voters have the chance to ease the pain as the economy recovers.

But rather than pull back on austerity, the famously ascetic British appear ready to double down.

Although polls show that the Conservative Party — one of the two partners in the governing coalition — and its main opposition, Labor, remain locked in a dead heat with just more than a month to go before the general election, surveys give the Conservatives a wide lead on the question of who is trusted to run the economy.

And the Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, have made no secret that their economic agenda for a second term looks much the same as the first. They plan to plunge the knife even deeper in areas where defenders say the cuts long ago stopped stripping away fat and began to strike bone.

The public’s willingness to go along with at least several more years of austerity, even as Britain’s overall economic picture brightens, reflects just how heavily the hangover of the global financial crisis continues to be felt. Nearly eight years after the descent began, voters remain scarred by the prospect of a national treasury bled dry by government spending.

The antidote, first pitched by Cameron during his winning 2010 campaign, was to dramatically scale back.

Even the Labor Party, which has branded Cameron’s plans for additional cuts extreme, has said it will not reverse austerity measures already enacted and in fact will continue to trim — just not as aggressively as the Tories, as the Conservatives are otherwise known. Smaller parties, including the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, have passionately criticized austerity, but their followings remain niche.

Many economists question the wisdom of continuing to cut rather than borrow at a time when interest rates remain exceptionally low and the recovery is still fragile. In a survey of leading British economists conducted by the Center for Macroeconomics, a substantial majority said the government’s austerity-focused policies have hurt the recovery rather than helped. Several suggested a more balanced approach, including stimulus, similar to the strategy pursued in the United States.

At the local level, the cuts have hit in the form of closed libraries and children’s centers, as well as fewer support services for the most vulnerable, including refugees and other migrants. Police departments, too, have felt the strain.

But the outcry has not been as loud as one might expect, in part because key spending areas, including education and health, have been insulated from cuts.

“The services that most people use most of the time are the ones that have been relatively protected,” said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. “From a political point of view, the cuts have been quite carefully crafted.”

But Johnson said that much of the low-hanging fruit is already gone, meaning that if the Tories win another five years in office, it will be far more difficult to carry out austerity without provoking the public’s ire.

Although Labor leader Ed Miliband has vowed to “balance the books” within five years, his party has said it would keep borrowing to pay for investment spending.