Xmas, Justice and Vince Cable
A short Xmas day post as I don’t want to seem too obsessive.
First, thanks to Ben for sending me this fascinating polling report. It turns out that the Brown bounce came as a result of a growth in economic confidence after the bank bail out. Given most forecasts for next year this confidence looks perverse (as always, there is a strong contrast between voters’ pessimism about the economy as a whole and confidence about their own family’s prospects). This suggests the bounce , such as it is, may be short lived.
Many people bemoan he commercialisation of Christmas. Perhaps it is the fear of what is coming in 2009 but this year it feels like there has been more emphasis on the values associated with the festival. As the Gods of commercialism fail us, family, friendship and community matter more. The idea of justice permeates the symbolism of Christmas. We see it in our traditional favourites like Dickens and the simple morality tales running through pantomimes. Children are repeatedly told that receiving presents depends upon them having been good. Yet, were we to hear of any parent actually denying their children presents because they had been bad we would consider it almost an act of emotional abuse. Maybe all children are good but more likely this is another example of the gap between our strong adherence to the principles of justice and our weak application of them in real life.
The best example of this in politics is the failure of theLib Dems to benefit from being the one major Party correctly to predict and warn against the credit crunch. If there was any justice Vince Cable’s prescience would now be pulling his party into a strong polling position. But, sadly, for the Lib Dems being right is an over rated virtue in politics. Which isn’t to say the Lib Dems haven’t contributed to their own bad luck.
Arguably, they drew the wrong conclusion from the failure of Ming Campbell’s brief tenure as leader. Campbell’s misfortune, possibly as a result of his earlier illness, was that his demeanour made him seem even older than he was. Assuming that it was his age that was the problem, the Lib Dems decided they should have a young leader but in choosing Nick Clegg they have someone who both lacks gravitas and is too similar to David Cameron to get noticed by the voters (except when he gaffs). We will never know, but I can’t help thinking that had the Lib Dems chosen Cable they would now have a much stronger political brand and poll position.
If Cable had been in change he might have stuck at Lib Dem conference to his core message about the vulnerability of the economy rather than the confusing and unsuccessful attempt by his Party to out do the Conservatives as the party of tax cuts.
So, like many other commentators I give my UK politician of the year award for 2009 to Vince Cable. Sadly, for all the talk of just deserts at Chistmas all this praise won’t get Mr Cable an inch closer to power in 2010.
The Brown bounce – how high can it go?
How long can Brown
Last august when Labour was hitting new lows in the polls and rumours were rife of a plot against Gordon Brown, despairing ministers were willing to vent their spleen at any passing comrade. One I spoke to was dismissive of the view that Brown’s unpopularity was simply a reflection of bad presentation. ’The public may say that don’t like Gordon for superficial reasons’ he said’ but deep down they see him saying one thing and doing the reverse. So, he says he’s for prudence and the long term but he seems to throw money at political problems. He says he’s for a new politics and a big tent but number ten spits out poisonous briefings and he played fast and loose over the election timing. He says he’s for social justice but he puts inheritance tax cuts ahead of child poverty’.
A few days ago walking up Whitehall I met the same minister. He was almost jaunty. As we parted he said ‘who would have thought it? All to play for in 2009′.
The general interpretation of Gordon Brown’s recovery from lost cause to fighting chance is that it is inevitable that we should rest our hopes on the captain when we fear the ship is sinking. But there is more to it than this. As I have said before – drawing on a category form cultural theory - Brown is an instinctive hierarchist. This is a problem in the individualist culture that was until recently dominant. Thus Brown’s often hapless attempts to seem like a perfectly ordinary type of guy and the disjunction between his stated values and political expediency.
But now the world has come back to Brown. We crave hierarchy. Suddenly even bankers and free market enthusiasts are fans of regulation (see Daniel Finkelstein this morning for example). So much do we want someone to be in charge that we would rather give them the benefit of the doubt (a rare stance from voters) than succumb to the fear of chaos. Brown is a confirmed statist at a time when we are more willing than for a generation to admit we need strong government.
Brown has also been helped by the Conservative strategy, enabling Labour to focus on today’s policy differences rather than the the Government’s record, and giving its MPs an external enemy. Last summer when comparing Brown’s plight to that of John Major, I contrasted Labour’s comparative unity and continued desire to win with Major’s hopelessly split Party many of whose key figures cared more about winning the row over Europe than winning at the polls. This strength for Labour has been underlined by Brown’s appointment of Peter Mandelson and the cabinet’s determination to stay in the centre ground, willing to take on the left on issues such as civil liberties, the post office and welfare reform. This is vital to rebut the charge that Labour’s borrow and spend economic strategy is simply a reversion to type.
Four out of the last six general elections have been called after a four year term. So Labour could defend a spring 2009 eelection as being perfectly normal (anyway, once the election is called the row over timing is only ever a one day story, especially as the opposition parties have themselves called for an early election). If I were forced to predict an outcome of such an election I would plump for a hung Parliament with the Conservatives winning several seats in the South but failing to make significant inroads elsewhere.
Given the underlying problems of being a third term Government, the recession and the largely successful de-toxification of the Tory brand this may be the best Labour can expect. But would Gordon go for it? In a perceptive piece reminding us that Brown pulled out of a fight with Blair in 1994 and worked hard to deter challengers in 2007, Iain Martin of the Telegraph asks ‘Is Gordon Brown frightened of elections?’. It is highly unlikely that between now and June 2010 Labour will have anything that looks like a safe lead. It would take a combination of strategic certainty and political daring to call an early election when behind in the polls. There are few people capable of convincing a naturally cautious Prime Minister of such a case – but one of them is now his closest political advisor.
grtqes
Economic crisis and party fortunes – has Cameron got it right?
The Conservatives are still favourites to win the next election. But, as I said yesterday, things are closer and more uncertain than anyone would have predicted a few months ago. There is no question thus far that the economic crisis has been good for Labour and bad for the Tories. This too was unpredictable. There is no simple correlation between the state of the economy and the ruling party’s fortunes; parties can win in bad times, as the Conservatives demonstrated in 1992. But thinking about moments when stories of economic crisis have dominated the news; devaluation in the pound in November 1967, taking an emergency loan from the IMF in September 1976, and leaving the ERM in September 1992, each has damaged the Government’s standing and each been followed by its defeat at the subsequent General Election.
In all three of these examples plenty of other things went wrong for the ruling party between the point of crisis and the election, and there is an important difference between a short term emergency and a longer term downturn, but there is little in recent history to suggest Governments benefit from economic turmoil (a good thing too given the obvious moral hazard of bad times leading to good polls).
Despite being implicated in the creating the conditions for the crisis, Gordon Brown has been pretty successful in portraying himself as being the kind of leader we need right now. But his team have also been helped by the Conservatives’ decision to open up a clear policy divide on the handling of the crisis. In 1992 John Smith established a lead for Labour which persisted largely unchanged up to 1997. Yet Labour had been a supporter of ERM membership and it didn’t offer any serious economic alternative to the short term measures forced on Major and Lamont. Instead Smith focussed on competence, charging the Tories with being dithering and divided, charges that stuck.
In contrast David Cameron has chosen to argue for a different policy approach. Labour has been able to portray the Conservative alternative as ‘do nothing’, which, I understand, is an attack that is working in Labour focus groups.
There appeared to be a clear switch in Cameron’s strategy marked by his ‘moral responsibility’ speech in Glasgow East in July. Having successfully decontaminated the Conservative brand in his first thirty months, from that point on the focus has been on highlighting what is distinctive abour the Tory approach. But in choosing to differentiate on the economy and public spending the Conservatives appear to setting themselves against the international consensus. They may have more work to do to defend their stance in the new year when is seems that President Obama (someone with whom the Tories have generally been keen to identify) will launch exactly the kind of public spending splurge the Conservatives are seen to oppose in the UK.
The Independent reports this morning that voters have shifted their priorities decisively from public spending to tax cuts. In the medium term as the public sector retrenchment and rising tax levels kick in there will be plenty for the Conservatives to get their teeth into. But now as millions prepare for a Xmas dinner that has more of the feel of a last supper, the issue is how to get through the next six months.
In choosing to oppose the Government on the substance of policy, and not just competence, Osborne and Cameron have displayed political courage. If they win the next election it will be easier for them to argue that they have a mandate for diffcult decisions, echoes here of Thatcher and the economics of the corner shop. But first they have to win that election aganst a Labour Party whose strategists seem keen to splash about in the clear blue water of economic policy.
Voter volatility, party fortunes and the uncertainties of 2009
Like millions of others (some though choice, some through necessity) I am on holiday for two weeks. But I will keep posting. This week a theme will be the current party political scene. Next week I hope to ask what might be the key planks of a new progressive platform, built from the ruins of free market neo-liberal hegemony.
Surprisingly perhaps, the time when a social change is actually occurring may also be when it is least discussed. There is no shortage of speculation about future trends, and soon after something significant happens we start reading its history. But during change itself we can’t see the wood for the trees.
Thus it is with voter volatility. In the seventies and eighties the gradual abandonment by voters of family and class based loyalties was a much discussed topic. Labour’s advances into the newly emerging white collar class in the sixties and the Thatcher’s capturing of the southern working class were examples of a more complex and changeable electoral map.
Finding long term trends is made more difficult by the confounding variable of short term party fortunes. Memories can be short. When I first started paying attention to politics, in the late sixties and seventies, the assumption was that Labour and Conservative took it in turns to try (and fail) to arrest Britain’s economic decline. If the current crisis turns out to be the beginning of a longer term weakening of the UK’s performance perhaps we will go back to parties taking in turns to win elections.
After 18 years of Conservative Government and, at least, twelve years of Labour rule we have fallen into the habit of assuming that party fortunes ebb and flow in long tides. So when Gordon Brown was twenty five points behind last summer there was much talk of Labour being out of power for a generation.
But there can surely be no doubting the biggest political trend of the last eighteen months; voter volatility. Very few people predicted that Gordon Brown would get the bounce that took him to the verge of an early election in September ’07, virtually no one predicted that this would be followed just a few months later by Labour plumbing unprecedented depths in opinion polls and by-elections, and absolutely no one guessed that the one thing Brown needed to get him back into electoral contention was an economic recession. At present, not only do party standings vary hugely from poll to poll but there isn’t even agreement about the direction of change. Yesterday’s Observer put much emphasis on the Brown recovery, even though the day earlier a Telegraph-commissioned poll had the Conservative lead back up to a healthy eight points.
There could be several overlapping explanations for these wild swings. It might simply be that the Parties are well matched. Voters find it hard to like Brown but want his experience and perceived solidity in a crisis; Cameron is easier to get on with but isn’t convincing when events, not his spin doctors, are setting the agenda. Could it also be that both leaders are less appealing when they are on top and more impressive when they are in fight back mode?
But these factors only matter because so many voters are so willing so often to change their preferences. In the teeth of the most severe economic downturn for eighty years, despite the persistence of social need, with a world facing monumentous choices it seems we decide our party affiliations at a similar intellectual depth – but much less pleasure – than we opted for Tom Chambers over Rachel Stevens (given that Stevens had been the long term favourite, how long before a Number Ten spin doctors dubs Gordon Brown the Tom Chambers of party politics?)
Party strategists – always required to be upbeat in their public assessments – will tell you there is something more profound taking place below the surface. Conservatives believe that the desire for change and the antipathy to Gordon Brown are the fundamentals. Labour in contrast claims Brown has been rehabilitated while Cameron is only a couple of unconvincing performances short of becoming the Conservative Neil Kinnock; ‘just not up to the job, old boy’ as a Tory relative told me correctly predicting Labour’s 1992 debacle.
Having, arguably, had only two big pendulum swing between 1979 and 2006 (in 1982/3 and 1993/4) we have had three in the last eighteen months. Who is to say there won’t be more in the next eighteen months? No one can be sure who will win the next election, and all things considered, this is pretty good news for Labour.
Peter Mandelson – industrial policy and public service reform
Speaking here on Wednesday night Peter Mandelson made the case for an activist industrial policy. The question, he argued, was not whether Government policy engages with industry – inevitably, in a hundred and one ways, it does – it is whether that engagement is appropriate and effective. Peter put particular emphasis on looking in the round at how Government shapes the environment for business. It was a comprehensive and subtle speech and I hope that business voices will take up Peter’s invitation to debate these issues constructively.
Since the speech, the Government has intimated that it would be willing to provide support to the ailing UK car industry, probably in the form of long term loans. Government can’t avoid judgements about what are strategic industries. This was underlined by the contrast between the responses to the car industry and the collapse of Woolworths; ‘something must be done’ in the former case; ’bowing to the inevitable’ in the latter. Governments have to pick winners in the sense of identifying those industries which are strategically important, which genuinely need help now and which have a strong chance of being able to prosper in the longer term. What Government has to avoid is picking losers, or as Peter put it, losers picking Government.
But if money is to be made available to back industry I hope it won’t just be big sums for big companies and sectors. The Government should also be creating a major investment fund for social enterprises, especially those focussed on the urgent task of a fundamental re-imagining of core public services. More specifically, we need innovation that enables the public sector to deliver better outcomes with the same (or fewer) resources, by better mobilising the capacity of civic society. As I said to Peter on Wednesday, achieving a step change in public service productivity is vital not only to public welfare but also to national competitiveness.
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