Is there any discussion about the overall ideologies of the parties?
I feel that this side of things has been really lacking. I don;t feel that there is any coverage of the underlying ideological drive between the main parties (whether this is stated by the parties or not). It seems to be far more about personalities and sometimes fairly minor policy announcements. Often the things that really make a difference to peoples lives are not on the manifestos - wars, pandemics, other natural disasters etc. You want to know how the party leaders and their core team are going to be able to deal (or not) with such things that could affect you far more than a tweak to the tax code. I see relatively little looking at this sort of thing though.
Did the voters at any time consciously get to choose to cut back all sorts of programs in exchange for presumably no tax increases or even tax cuts?
It was something )as a general approach) pushed by all the main parties in the run up to the 2010 election - but they all managed to avoid actually talking about it in any detail. It was kind of the elephant in the room that people knew was coming, but didn't know what form it would take.
The way they pushed a lot of the responsibility for implementation onto local councils reminded me a bit of how the Tories originally marketed the Poll Tax - as a way of hitting back at reckless local authorities.
This article hints at the scale of it. They all had some specified and some unspecified cuts. I think the reality though was that there was relatively little scope for how unspecified cuts could be distributed. Once you had ring-fenced certain budgets and looked at essential services that could not be cut further, there is a limit to what could be done.
news.bbc.co.uk
This set of charts gives a good indication of what was specified or unspecified, but is IMHO an absolutely dreadful representation as a comparison of policy, as each circle is kept at an identical size.
Here's my very quick attempt to better represent it based on that data.
IMHO a big problem was how it was portrayed - Cameron described it as an end to an age of irresponsibility - as though the financial crisis had been caused by pay rises to nurses etc and not by reckless decisions made by banks globally. OTOH, Labour is keen to forget that they had similar ideas for big cuts to help reduce the deficit at that time.
Was Osborne a popular figure when he was Chancellor or since? Did Cameron, Osborne and to a lesser extent Clegg lean into austerity at the time?
I don't think he was ever that popular (maybe among the party faithful he was).
He always came across as wealthy and entitled. That said, I've heard long interviews with him where he comes across very differently. I've also seen people who follow him closely saying he id very adept at changing who he is (or at least who he wants people to think he is). Up until 2016, I think he thought he was set to be the next PM after Cameron and since then I feel that a lot has been looking at ways that he can build a legacy - something positive that he can be remembered for.
