Opposition leaders rarely if ever treat causality as distinct from blame. This was exemplified by David Cameron’s contention immediately after the run on Northern Rock bank in September 2007: that this was caused by too much public and private debt—a problem fostered by the Brown Government (Elliot and Seager 2007; Harding 2007). Cameron repeated this claim like a mantra throughout the financial crisis, clearly seeing an opportunity not only to blame the government for its part in creating the crisis but to undo the public perception that the Labour Government had managed the economy successfully in the past decade. He therefore claimed that the previous boom had been ‘built on a mountain of debt’ (Cameron quoted in Webster and Elliot 2007).
In the immediate aftermath of the Northern Rock failure, Cameron struggled to make a political impact. In the first week or two after the news broke, Labour advanced from its slim advantage to a double-figure lead in several polls. This government bounce was short-lived, however, and by the second week in October most polling agencies showed the Conservatives in front (UK Polling Report 2009). The Northern Rock issue lingered for months. It was mid-February 2008 by the time the government decided to nationalise the institution, leading Cameron to argue that Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, should resign and that the Brown Government had failed by dithering over the nationalisation (Watt 2008a).
In continuing to promote the message that the Labour Government had done little to restrain debt, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, noted in March 2008 that Brown had failed to prepare the country for possible tough times. Here, Osborne was careful not to suggest that a downturn had begun, merely claiming that there should always be emergency funds in case of one (Riddell 2008a). This allowed the Tories to avoid the appearance of a reckless party that endangered the economy by reducing public confidence. It also allowed them to avoid the risk of appearing economically ignorant by suggesting a major economic slump was on its way when it might not happen. In April, Osborne continued the pressure over the public debt, claiming that the United Kingdom had the largest budget deficit in the developed world. This statement, though perhaps not entirely accurate given the size of the US deficit (Milne 2008b), was an effective one, because it distinguished the UK situation from that of the rest of the developed world. It damaged counterclaims by Brown that the real cause of the financial crisis was the United States. Osborne and Cameron repeated this claim several times over many months, although eventually Osborne altered the phrasing from ‘largest deficit’ in the developed world to ‘worst public finances’ in the developed world (Webster et al. 2009).
The excessive-debt narrative served Cameron and Osborne well for the best part of six months, as the Conservatives continued a steady climb in the polls. From 4 May 2008 to 14 September 2008, in 40 voting-intention polls taken by major polling agencies, the Conservatives led by an average of 19 percentage points. The next week, the crisis reached its climax. The failure of Lehman Brothers in the United States and the ensuing market turmoil sparked a Labour poll revival (UK Polling Report 2009). At this point, the crisis changed in nature, and to help explain the collapse of financial institutions, a secondary causal and blaming tool became prominent. The Conservative leadership used the idea of a failure of financial regulation to blame the government for the financial crisis. Cameron and Osborne continued to make debt the principal issue, most likely because the Tories had little intention of making substantial alterations to the system of financial regulations themselves. Nevertheless, Osborne did take the opportunity to attack Brown for a failure of regulation (Webster and Elliot 2008; Wintour 2008).
On 30 September 2008, Cameron announced an unlikely policy of bipartisanship (Elliot and Wintour 2008). This was apparently in response to the failure of the United States to pass a bank bailout bill through Congress because of ideological party divisions. British bipartisanship was short-lived, lasting a little more than two weeks before the opposition leader began criticising Brown’s crisis response, reverting to the debt narrative and labelling Brown’s solution to the crisis ‘borrowing and borrowing and borrowing’ (Cameron quoted in Stratton 2008). Neither the bipartisan strategy nor the subsequent reversion to the political contest appears to have had any impact on poll results.
Immediately after the September–October turmoil, the Labour Party rallied in the polls and throughout December 2008 they had closed the gap to within single figures (UK Polling Report 2009), prompting talk about Brown calling an early election to profit from the favourable view of his international crisis-management leadership. This also proved short-lived and in the New Year the Tories re-established their double-figure lead. At this time, Cameron unveiled a new blaming strategy. He spent a considerable amount of time calling for Brown to admit to mistakes in his response to the crisis and to apologise for them (Rawnsley 2009). As well as bluntly implying that Brown was culpable for the United Kingdom’s parlous economic situation, this tactic played at a popular characterisation of Brown—that he was chronically unable to admit mistakes. Furthermore, it was a useful way to harness anger felt by those in the electorate who had suffered through the crisis and direct it towards the Prime Minister.
The opposition’s blame frame led to a revival in its fortunes soon after the September 2007 Northern Rock episode. The advanced age of the Labour Government and its willingness to take responsibility for the perceived successes of the British economy in the preceding decade made it an easy target when that economy began to falter. This was especially salient given that the United Kingdom’s situation appeared worse than in many other European nations. The debt message that Cameron and Osborne proffered was simple to understand and consistently applied. Circumstances assisted the Conservative opposition leader, but he still had to apply a plausible and consistent message against a political opponent who was not prepared to accept blame for the crisis.
At first glance, the US situation was a contest between two challengers with an outgoing incumbent, making it impossible for one candidate to blame the other for the financial crisis and fruitless to blame the President. Senator Obama, however, managed to blame not just the President, but the broader ideology of his party and thereby include McCain in the blame frame. In a March 2008 address, after the Bear Sterns collapse, Obama blamed the Bush Administration, including its tax cuts for top earners and the war in Iraq—two major policies on which McCain agreed with the President—as causative factors in the crisis. Obama also blamed nameless ‘lobbyists and politicians’ who had dismantled the regulatory framework governing the financial sector (Obama 2008).
In contrast, McCain blamed the behaviour of lenders in financial institutions for the deteriorating economic situation, but also somewhat surprisingly, those who took out loans. His heaviest focus was on financial institutions’ ‘rampant speculation’, but he also suggested that homeowners had engaged in dangerous borrowing (Rohter and Andrews 2008). Unsurprisingly, McCain spent the entire campaign attempting to distance himself from Bush. It was easier for Obama to deliver a clear message of blame towards Bush and the man who followed him with a similar economic philosophy.
In September 2008, after the Lehman Brothers failure, the competition for blame intensified. Obama persisted in denouncing the Bush Administration’s ‘failed philosophy’ (Landler and Stolberg 2008) and equating McCain with Bush on economic policy (Healy 2008; Page 2008). He repeated this message ad nauseam, though conspicuously seeking to moderate the personal attack element inherent in the statement, arguing, ‘I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to’ (Obama quoted in Calmes 2008a).
McCain continued to deflect blame towards the bankers and Wall Street greed (Calmes 2008a). Obama’s strategy of equating his opponent with Bush was clearly hurting McCain. In the last weeks before the election, Bush removed himself almost entirely from the public eye, attending only a handful of relatively minor events. He avoided making policy pronouncements or discussing the state of the economy (Stolberg 2008). The President’s invisibility was clearly a deliberate Republican strategy. A humiliation for Bush, it was a clear sign that the McCain campaign knew it was losing the blame contest. McCain was always going to struggle to win this contest as Obama had the advantage of being able to create an ideological separation between himself and the events that led to the crisis, as well as between himself and the incredibly unpopular President. McCain was not only inextricably linked to the apparently failing ideology and the President, he was unable to find a similar angle with which to blame Obama for the events of the crisis. Neither Obama’s party nor the relatively inexperienced candidate had been in control of the political system for the previous eight years. In these circumstances, only an extraordinary failure of public performance could have seen Obama lose the blame contest.
Superficially, it seems highly unusual that in Germany a weakened social democratic party was virtually unable to blame a governing centre-right party nearing the end of its term. As noted above, the nature of the grand coalition government, the fact that the SPD controlled the finance ministry throughout that government and the party’s recent alignment with the neo-liberal consensus meant that if there was blame to be apportioned to a political party in Germany, the SPD was more likely to be receiving it than dispensing it. For the SPD under Beck and later Steinmeier to blame the government that it was a part of would risk having its charges reflect poorly on itself. Merkel and the CDU could rebuff any specific public complaints about the government’s response to the crisis with the contention that the junior governing partner should have raised its concerns in cabinet. Furthermore, the leaders could not blame Finance Minister Steinbrück, who was instrumental in announcing and defending government economic and financial policy, but was also a senior member of the SPD.
The SPD still had the capacity to make political headway during the crisis but these achievements were unlikely to be won in the public sphere unless Merkel failed in her response to the crisis. This last possibility would have been more likely had the SPD contested the severity-framing contest. For then party leader Beck to dispute the significance of the crisis, however, would have invited criticism that he was diminishing public confidence in the economy.
The German causal and blame frame that emerged early in the crisis was a consensus position, with Merkel and Steinbrück each blaming the United States for the crisis. Merkel claimed that it was a result of the United States’ resistance to stricter regulations on its financial sector (Deutsche Welle 2008b). Steinbrück concurred with this exogenised frame: ‘The United States is the source of the crisis, and it is the focus of the crisis’ (Der Spiegel 2008b); ‘More than anything, the finance market is an American problem’ (Der Spiegel 2008c).
Eventually, with Steinmeier as chancellor candidate, the SPD began to blame the ideological commitments of the CDU/CSU parties, claiming, ‘The rule of radical market ideology that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan has ended with a loud bang…This new time that is dawning now must become our time—the time of social democracy’ (Steinmeier quoted in Moore 2008). While the SPD’s shift to the left appears to have been a cynical and opportunistic exercise in crisis exploitation, the advantages of the move away from the free market are to be found in greater party unity rather than in a newfound capacity to win the blame contest. Unlike Obama, who was successfully able to blame his opponent by blaming his ideology, Steinmeier and his party had recently been committed to a neo-liberal economic program.