As the UK’s general election campaign reaches its final stages, the outcome is still up in the air.

burningpants attended a fund manager’s briefing on the election last week and one clear message was that recent polling is pointing to a hung parliament, with no overall majority for the Conservatives. However, polling experts say a large proportion of the public are yet to decide who to vote for, so there is still scope for a definite result.

If a hung parliament does occur, Conservative leader David Camerson will surely regret agreeing to let the Liberal Democrats have equal status in the leaders’ TV debates. This massively benefited Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who gained an 8% overnight surge in support, as viewers warmed to his ‘a plague on both their houses’ attacks on the two main parties.

The Lib Dems also seem to have benefited from the desire among the voters to punish both of the main parties for MPs’ expenses and to also see a change in traditional politics.

For Labour’s Gordon Brown, the big regret is undoubtedly his ‘bigot’ blunder, when he forgot that a radio mike was still recording his comments as he departed from an encounter with an ordinary voter who had the temerity to raise the issue of immigration. As one newspaper headline put it, She went out for some bread and came back with Brown toast.

While the TV debates and Brown’s gaffe have defined the campaign so far, there is a general agreement that the parties have said too little on how they will address the problem of the UK’s huge budget deficit.

According to experts, this will require either brutal cuts to public spending or severe tax hikes if it is to be sorted. If it is not, the example of Greece shows how the financial markets will treat a country judged not to be taking its financial issues seriously enough.

For the politicians, addressing this topic is not a vote-winner, as the Conservatives found a year ago when they raised the issues of cuts and the austerity Britain will need.

Better to win first and then take action is the favoured approach. Unfortunately this has deprived the British public of a debate that it ought to have had, on the relative merits of, say, increasing VAT to 20% or more, versus income tax rises, or whether it would be better to freeze public sector pay or make sweeping job cuts.

While this election campaign has been fiercely fought, as far as the economy is concerned, it has had the flavour of a phoney war.

When a new government is in office it will face its real battle; restoring public finances in a relatively short time-scale while not totally alienating the electorate.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, reportedly said that whoever wins the next election will become so unpopular that their party will be out of power for a generation afterwards.

So perhaps a hung parliament and a coalition government of some form might not be a bad outcome, even for the most ambitious party leader.

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