FT.com: Voters expect Osborne to stay his course (Janan Ganesh, February 25, 2013)

The reality is that at some indistinct stage in this parliament voters, in a very British way, resigned themselves to economic torpor for the foreseeable future. The regular focus groups that are conducted by Downing Street paint a picture of an electorate that is bleak about the economy, yes, but so bleak that they don't believe things would much improve under an alternative policy.

The clamour for Mr Osborne to adopt greater or lesser degrees of austerity is essentially an elite conversation; the public are busy hunkering down for years of slow growth and squeezed living standards that they regard as more or less inevitable. They don't like it, much less do they approve of the government, but they feel none of the "do-somethingism" that exercises the political classes. The economy strikes voters as lousy but not especially fixable - and there is a world of political difference between the two.