In this month's Prospect: what they don’t say

The British election campaign has been myopic, transfixed by the arithmetic of the budget. Anatole Kaletsky may overstate the case that the deficit doesn’t matter; but he’s entirely right that the focus has drowned out bigger questions, as radio interviews turn into a scuffle over whether a plan is “fully costed.” Meanwhile, the campaign for the US presidential election in 2016 is just warming up, but it is likely to be too partisan and personal to engage with detail. So far, the debate amounts to “Can Hillary lose?”

In Britain, no party is addressing the hard questions, or the big ones. We offer one answer that no one dares give: work till 70. Urging people to work longer, while delaying the state pension, would make more difference to the deficit than a forest of small but painful changes. Peter Kellner and David Willetts make this point forcefully. Indeed, George Osborne has already found that, in edging up the pension age once. On both sides of the Atlantic, we see the pain that follows making giant slabs of spending untouchable while pursuing savage cuts to smaller but less politically sensitive ones.

As Kellner points out, some of the cuts to welfare are very popular. That is often because people wildly overestimate the extent of “scrounging.” It would be better to challenge the disproportionate benefits to older citizens. Raising the state pension age is the right response to a real phenomenon—the continued rise in longevity. As Philip Ball points out, there is a hovering risk that antibiotics, which added 20 years to the average lifespan when they emerged, could become useless; but he also shows that people are ingenious and beginning to find an answer.

These are still not, though, the biggest questions facing our societies. On the right, Michael Gove, former Education Secretary, has done the best recent job, in his mission statement on behalf of the dispossessed, to answer the question of what is the point of going into politics at all. On the left, Ed Miliband has said too little about the role that education might play in raising productivity, and hence wages. The scrap on all sides about the defence budget does not ask how or when to project western values abroad. Marc Weller and Paul Wolfowitz both urge us not to give up on intervention, despite Iraq and Afghanistan (and see Robert Fry’s letter). James Harkin gives us good reason why, in the case of the Yazidis, which has been called the worst case of enslavement this century. Lucy Wadham shows how French schools clash with the country’s old ideals.

Our 50 World Thinkers of 2015 do tackle these questions, as you’d expect. The winner, Thomas Piketty, has forced his account of how inequalities reinforce themselves into the centre of world political debate, on both sides of the aisle; Nigel Farage says inequality is high in his concerns too. As politicians tackle this, they should—as our cover does—consider inequalities between generations too.

And between regions. Our Blueprint for Britain series shows that at least some profound change is on us whether we want it or not. A shame that, in this election, no one dares say it.