As the dust settles after the June 4th election results political debate inevitably returns to the issues that most worry members of the public. While constitutional reform, alternative voting systems and our attitude to the European Union will be issues that fascinate the commentators in our national newspapers it is jobs, prices, pensions, taxes and services such as health, education and law and order that will really decide the next election.

You don’t need to be Mystic Meg to predict how the next election will go because it will boil down to this: If the economy recovers and the Government is shown to have done the right things in the face of opposition from the Conservative Party then Labour will win, but, if recovery is slow and it looks like Mr.Cameron was right then the Conservatives will win.

So, here are a few reasons for Labour voters to be cheerful.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the UK government’s response to the global financial crisis has been "bold and wide-ranging." It added that "aggressive action" by the government "succeeded in containing the crisis." Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist had this to say about the economic crisis and the UK’s response "Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up … the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government."

None of this means the economic crisis is over and there are some new risks on the horizon, including worrying signs that the price of oil is increasing again. But, the indicators are good and many banks and financial think tanks are saying that the UK economy has already started to recover, with some even saying that the UK will lead the world out of recession. Locally, there are signs that business in the South East is no-longer contracting and optimism is beginning to return.

Which brings us back to the battle ground for the next election. Would Britain have recovered so rapidly without Government intervention? No-one except the most loyal Conservative voter seriously believes so.

And, what of the future? The Conservatives have promised an end to ‘wage subsidies’ if they win the election, which means taking Working Tax Credits away from the nearly five million families currently receiving them and going back to the bad old days when people were better off on the dole than in work. They have also said that they want to protect the NHS but they ‘expect it to do more with less’ and they openly admit that they want to cut the budgets of schools, universities, the police and public transport by a tenth. I seriously doubt that these are ideas that will win favour other than with the rich who might benefit from Tory tax cuts paid for by the rest of us.

Which adds up to this. The election results on June 4th were bad for Labour but as the economy gets stronger so will support for the Government. And the more that people look at the alternatives, the faster that support will grow.