The art of the magician, so they say, is distraction. Divert the eye of the audience with one hand and all kinds of mischief are available to the other. And if that's true of magic, it's truer still of politics. To adapt the slogan selling the new film Man on a Ledge, a big deception requires a big distraction.
Take these two apparently contradictory facts. This week saw proof that Britain is no longer merely suffering from anaemic growth but actual contraction, a shrinkage of 0.2%. One more dose of this, and we will be in official recession. And yet a day earlier the Guardian/ICM poll showed the Conservatives surging into a five-point lead over Labour, their highest rating for nearly two years. Even the coalition's junior partners, the Liberal Democrats, saw a modest uptick.
Part of the explanation for this lies in Labour weakness. But relevant too is a trick that has long been part of US politics and which has now, it seems, reached our shores.
Here's how it works over there, a phenomenon charted best by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas? For several decades, at least since Nixon, the right has persuaded middle- and lower-income Americans to vote against their own economic self-interest, by diverting their attention to "values" issues such as affirmative action, abortion or the sanctity of the flag. Upending the old rule that people vote with their wallets, Republicans understood that cultural anxieties – artfully stoked – could shift voters' allegiances, even if that came at those voters' expense.
So in 2004, it was clearly in the interest of a coalminer in West Virginia or a manual worker in Ohio to vote Democratic: John Kerry's plans on pensions, safety at work, healthcare and tax would have helped them. But those states backed George W Bush, partly through appeals to patriotism and, especially in Ohio, fear of gay marriage.
Thus are millions of middle Americans recruited as footsoldiers into an army that, once in power, does the bidding of those at the very top. Once in office, thanks to those Ohio workers, Bush passed tax cuts that, by one estimate, benefited the richest 1% of Americans to the tune of $708bn. It is what the Americans call a bait-and-switch: get the voters riled up about gays or Barack Obama's birth certificate, so that you can get to work shovelling cash from the poor to the rich.
Frank has now updated his thesis with a new book, Pity the Billionaire. It argues that the Tea Party right has sought to channel Americans' fury at the post-2008 economic crisis not at its rightful target – Wall Street – but at Washington, casting "big government" as the villain. If only Washington were less intrusive and cut red tape, if only it spent less, then all would be well. So it is that the man on the dole ends up demanding action that helps not him, but the CEO on his yacht.
All this probably sounds alien to our politics. We congratulate ourselves that no mainstream politician here would try to distract the electorate by stirring subterranean racism or homophobia. True enough. And yet the coalition deploys some bait-and-switch of its own, albeit adapted for the British terrain. It's working, too.
Thus the memorable political conflict of this week was not over that contraction in GDP, which should have registered as devastating proof that the government's economic strategy is not working. It was over plans to cap benefits at £26,000. The timing may have been a function of the House of Lords' timetable, but the strategy of the cap itself is clear. Rather than training its guns on the masters of high finance who caused the crash and had to be bailed out with billions in taxpayers' cash – the scroungers at the top – the government is channelling our rage towards those on benefits, the "scroungers" at the bottom. If it hadn't been for Stephen Hester and that pesky £1m bonus, it would have been a great success.
That Tea Party move has been imported too, though translated into British English. Here too the right argues, though less crudely, that governments not markets are to blame for the crisis. That is the implication of constantly damning Labour for "leaving us in this mess", as if Lehman Brothers never toppled and as if the deficit ballooned because the last government paid too many nurses, rather than because tax revenues collapsed here the same way they collapsed everywhere else. That is the implication, too, of the Tory promises to make it easier for employers to sack staff or to relax the rules on health and safety, as if our current economic fate is the fault of an overzealous state rather than of an epic failure of the free market.
Most striking of all, because so Republican, is the Conservatives' increasing use of what the Americans would call cultural or values questions to divert the public gaze away from the economic catastrophe. The Tories have used not race or gay rights but nationalism. Their current poll lead began with the bounce Cameron gained by apparently standing up to Europe with his December veto. He began 2012 casting himself as the union's defender against Alex Salmond and the rebellious Scots.
And as if to recall the latter-day Boudica herself, Downing Street briefed that last week's meeting of the National Security Council was devoted entirely to discussion of the Falkland Islands.
Bashing benefit claimants and waving the flag gets the polls numbers up – and all the while the economy tanks and the banks get to keep paying out bonuses. It works like a charm.
The irony is that the trick is being adopted here just as it's losing some of its magic in the US. A new study found that conflict between the rich and the rest has replaced race and immigration in voters' minds as the key tension in American society. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich won in South Carolina partly by slamming Mitt Romney as a super-rich asset stripper. President Obama's populist state of the union address this week suggests he recognises this shift and now believes that redressing the country's wild economic imbalance is a vote winner. The same could be true in Britain, but first the opposition has to expose what the magicians are up to – and break their spell.