Big news from Blighty: With just two and a half weeks until the May 7th election, the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, a politician who, not long ago, was being lampooned as “Edweird” and “Red Ed,” is now the favorite to become Britain’s next Prime Minister. At the online-betting sites, which are very popular in the U.K., Miliband is odds-on to replace David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

No one is expecting Labour to win an over-all majority in the House of Commons, mind you, and Miliband is only slightly favored over Cameron. At least in public, senior Conservatives are still expressing optimism that the prospect of Miliband entering 10 Downing Street will generate a last-minute swing in favor of the government. But a long series of opinion polls have shown the two major parties more or less tied, with about a third of the vote each. If that trend holds up until May 7th, the electoral map will almost certainly insure that Labour emerges as the largest party in parliament. Miliband could then form a coalition with the Scottish National Party or the Liberal Democrats, if the latter agrees to switch allegiances. He might also establish a minority government that looks to put together voting majorities on a bill-by-bill basis.

To constitutional historians, psephologists, and electoral-reform advocates, the uncertain situation, which reflects a generation-long decline in support for the two major parties, is a source of great excitement. To many ordinary Britons, it looks like a bit of a mess. But whatever happens in the next couple of weeks, one thing is certain: there will be no fundamental retreat from the austerity policies that Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have inflicted on the British economy for the past five years. Desperate to shed Labour’s reputation as a party that overspent wildly in the run-up to the Great Recession, Miliband and his sidekick, Ed Balls, Labour’s economics spokesman, are promising to cut the budget deficit every year and to balance the books in the next Parliament, even if it means raising taxes to do so. They are marketing this set of policies as a “budget responsibility lock.”

Indeed, far from lambasting Cameron and Osborne for starving the British economy of public investment—according to some estimates, it has fallen by almost half since the government took office in 2010—and confining the country to a low-growth trap, Miliband and Balls are accusing the Tories of fiscal profligacy for unveiling a series of last-minute spending boosts, including one for the National Health Service, that they claim are unfunded. “You can’t fund the N.H.S. with an I.O.U.,” Miliband said at a campaign appearance last week. “Every promise we make is paid for. That is the difference between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.”

To be sure, the two major parties’ budget plans aren’t identical. The government has promised to eliminate the deficit, which is currently running at about four per cent of G.D.P., by 2017-18, while Labour is giving itself until 2020-21 to meet that target. But, in insisting that his party’s spending plans would be “paid for without a single penny of extra borrowing,” Miliband has effectively conceded that Labour has lost the political argument over using Keynesian policies to boost the U.K.’s economy. Even as some erstwhile skeptics, such as the folks at the International Monetary Fund, have discovered the arguments for employing the public treasury to offset persistent weakness in private-sector investment, the country of the Master’s birth has largely abandoned his teachings.

I should emphasize that I am talking about the politics of the issue, not the economics. An illuminating article by Tim Harford in the Financial Times over the weekend made it clear that many British economists favor taking advantage of record-low interest rates to borrow money, rebuild Britain’s crumbling infrastructure, and invest in sustainable energy sources. That is a traditional Keynesian position, but one that the public doesn’t appear to support. Focus groups have showed that the promise of eliminating the deficit was one of the most popular elements of Labour’s manifesto, which was released last week. Despite the fact that the deficit has fallen by more than half, relative to G.D.P., since 2010, many Britons still think that their country is going broke, a proposition for which there is virtually no evidence. And many of the same voters still blame the last Labour government, which was led by Gordon Brown, for mismanaging public finances.

In these dire circumstances, it is easy to see why Miliband and Balls, rather than trying to educate the public about fiscal multipliers, the paradox of thrift, and other staples of Keynesian economics, chose to adopt the political strategy of “if you can beat them, join them.” In seeking to rebrand Labour as the party of fiscal responsibility, they have undercut the main accusation that the Tory press makes against them. “Clearly the Tory charge that Labour and its leader, Ed Miliband, were not to be trusted on spending and borrowing has hit home,” Simon Jenkins, one of Britain’s most astute political commentators, wrote in The Guardian last week. “Labour’s manifesto is an in-your-face rebuttal. Miliband has at least got the point. And no one even dares to breathe the word austerity.”

But, in signalling its break with Keynes, the Labour Party has not undergone a big shift to the right, and it would also be a mistake to conclude that its progressive tax-and-spend policies have been discredited. To the contrary, in eschewing the free lunches (or cheap lunches) that deficit financing might offer, Miliband and Labour have nonetheless adopted an explicitly redistributive policy agenda. They propose to tax the rich in order to pay for initiatives like expanding day care, reducing university-tuition fees, and hiring tens of thousands more doctors and nurses for the N.H.S. While Keynes was being unceremoniously booted out the front door of Labour’s headquarters, Thomas Piketty was being ushered in through the side entrance.

In its manifesto, Labour promised to raise the top income-tax rate from forty-five per cent to fifty per cent. (The income threshold for being subjected to this tax would be about two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year.) Labour also pledged to introduce a “mansion tax” on houses valued at more than three million dollars, of which there are many in London, in particular. And the Party promised to crack down on wealthy people who live in the United Kingdom but claim official residence elsewhere, to avoid paying their full share of British taxes—the so-called non-doms, as in non-domiciled.

Opinion polls suggest that the idea of cracking down on rich tax avoiders, who include some of Britain’s top business leaders, is particularly popular. It was after Miliband announced the new policy, a couple of weeks ago, that Labour first moved ahead in the polls. But the other two tax proposals, and the way that Labour is selling them, are equally important. Rather than just announcing the new taxes in isolation, the Party is saying explicitly what the monies they raise would be used for.

In pledging to restore the top tax rate to fifty per cent—the current government had lowered it—Labour said that it would use the proceeds to cut the tax rate paid by low earners to ten per cent. According to a poll carried out by YouGov last week, fifty-nine per cent of the public supports this policy and twenty-seven per cent opposes it. In announcing that it would introduce a new tax on luxury homes, Labour said that it would pay for new nurses and doctors in the N.H.S. Sixty-one per cent of voters said they liked this proposal; twenty-seven per cent said they didn’t. It’s worth pointing out that some of the Conservative Party’s policy proposals also proved popular in the poll, particularly its ideas to relieve people who earn minimum wage of having to pay income tax, and to place a limit on the total value of welfare benefits that a household can receive in a year. But, YouGov concluded, over all, “British people give better marks to Labour’s policy offerings.”

There may be a message here for other countries, the United States included. Although British voters are suspicious of deficit financing and welfare spending, they seem to welcome the prospect of redistributive policies that target the rich and benefit those on modest incomes in identifiable ways that are spelled out in advance. As I argued over the weekend, something similar might well be true in this country.