IF ONLY WE HAD A REAL CHOICE LIKE AMERICA

AMERICA has an enviable choice when it goes to the polls tomorrow. The contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney isn’t just between a Democrat and a Republican: It is between two entirely different visions of the future of the world’s greatest power.

The choice is stark. It is between continuing a journey towards European- style statism and welfarism, which is what Obama is offering if he is re-elected, or reducing the size of the state and encouraging enterprise and individual responsibility, which is at the core of Mr Romney’s programme.

It is also a choice between more social liberalism – such as homosexual marriage – or reverting to a conservatism rooted in Christianity and traditional family values.

It is between an immigration free-for-all, and strict border controls, and between green energy policies, and those that will allow America to compete properly in the world.

The country has not had such a clear-cut choice of opposites since Ronald Reagan won in a landslide in 1984.

Since then there has been little to choose between the beliefs of rival candidates.

To British voters it is an especially enviable choice. We haven’t been offered such clear alternatives since John Major defeated Neil Kinnock in 1992. Our parties, too, have become similar in outlook.

The sad truth is that it becomes increasingly hard to have a debate of the frankness and energy that America is now enjoying.

Even so, such a clear choice for the Americans was not always guaranteed.

Mr Romney has been distanced from the President for one reason above all: His vicepresidential running-mate, Paul Ryan. The 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman was chosen as a high priest of economic rigour, a plain speaker, a man of intellect and a populist who reassured the crucial extreme right-wing Tea Party element in the Republican party.

As chairman of the House of Representatives’ Budget Committee, Mr Ryan is the architect of the Republicans’ deficit reduction plan.

This programme of tax and spending cuts designed to save America from financial oblivion has a radicalism that David Cameron dared not attempt when faced with a comparable economic mess to clear up.

The Ryan plan proposed a $6.2trillion reduction above and beyond that suggested by President Obama, when he belatedly realised the days of high spending were over.

The savings would be achieved by cutting social programmes, notably health care, so beloved of the Democrats.

Mr Obama has used public spending rather as Gordon Brown did when Prime Minister – to create a client state among the poor and dispossessed. Democrats rely upon this clientele to deliver Mr Obama’s second term.

Their attacks on Ryan’s public spending cuts plan have, in recent days, become almost hysterical.

Meanwhile, Romney and Ryan claim that if Mr Obama wins four more years, the total of US debt will reach $20trillion.

For his part, Mr Obama claims that without continued high public spending, unemployment figures or levels of so-called ‘inequalities’ will not come down.

The alternative, according to Romney, is to cut taxes – which will create jobs and promote opportunity. Any rise in taxes will only deter consumption, encourage waste and put more people on the dole.

One argument Mr Ryan is advancing is familiar in Britain: It is about cutting taxes for the rich.

The Republicans unashamedly wish to lower the burden on high earners, because they believe this would encourage the spending and investment that provides work for low-- earners. In contrast, when George Osborne was told by the Treasury that our 50p toprate tax rate was raising no money, and was actually costing the country money through lost jobs and lost revenue, he lacked the courage to cut it back to 40p. He settled for 45p instead.

It is the admirable vigour of policy debates that makes the American presidential election so exciting.

The arguments are refreshingly real, serious and about great issues and not, as in Britain, about different degrees of the liberal statist consensus.

When Mr Obama promised ‘change’ in 2008, what it turned out he meant was redistribution of income to the have-nots by milking the success of the haves.

THIS experiment in socialism and welfarism has brought him severe criticism, because it has done nothing to boost employment, growth or stability. The failure of this experiment – in a country that became great on the back of individualism and enterprise – has deeply motivated the Republicans.

Any British politician who voiced the rightwing opinions of someone like the 1940s and 1950s novelist Ayn Rand (who inspired Mr Ryan and who observed that ‘the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time’) would be hounded out of public life.

The Democrats have sought to do this to Mr Ryan, but his ideas of wealth creation and individualism have millions of supporters still in America.

Those are the people he and Mr Romney are urging to turn out to vote tomorrow.

Because of the clear alternatives, it is one of the most crucial elections in America’s history. If only we, in Britain, could hope for such a dramatic choice when we next go to the polls.