The new politics, same as the old politics

Labour Voters and the EU: "Meh".

2011-12-14T18:08:00.000Z

This weeks' big polling news is, of course, that the Tories have a lead in some opinion polls. I thought they would, the headline issue of the day is one on which the voters massively agree with them and disagree with Labour. Fair enough, says I, Labour's position is dippy (so is Cameron's, but at least it's simple) and this won't be the battleground come a general election.

However, caveat. The shift is mostly down to the surge in the Tory vote. Labour are down very slightly. It's also apparently not really about the EU. Here's a graph - vertically you have the percentage of people in a given demographic who want to leave the EU. Horizontally you have the percentage change in the Labour vote with YouGov before and after the "veto". In all three cases I have taken the average of two polls to try and iron out sampling effects.

Weird. Insofar as there is a trend, it actually says that the more likely a demographic group is to want to leave the EU, the better Labour's relative performance with that group has been over the last week.

Labour's vote is down appreciably among 18-24 year olds (a small and volatile sample, mind you) even though they are among the least likely to want to leave the EU. Labour's vote is up among the over-60s, even though they are very likely to want to leave the EU (the most likely demographic YouGov sample apart from 2010 Tory voters, in fact). Ditto the class divide. Labour's vote is up among C2DEs, despite the fact 51% of them would vote to get out. It's down with the middle class, who only back withdrawal to the tune of 38%.

Gender bucks the trend a bit. Women are more likely to want to leave the EU, and more likely to have turned away from Labour this week.

One to watch.

Another day, another wave of criticism for the EU Treaty

2011-12-12T18:58:00.001Z

It's looking like only the European right and the British centre-left are in favour of this thing...

Paul Krugman:

So last week European leaders announced a plan that, on the face of it, was pure nonsense. Faced with a crisis that is mainly about the balance of payments, with fiscal crisis as a secondary consequence, they supposedly committed everyone to severe fiscal austerity, which would guarantee a recession while leaving the real problem unaddressed.

Ben Harris:

Those of us who are progressives and social democrats must affirm our patriotism and our support for the national interest. The fact that the leadership of the Labour Party can say at once that a) austerity is not the way; take longer to cut the deficit and b) that Cameron is wrong not to have agreed an EU Treaty change resulting in automatic penalties for any member state with a deficit exceeding 3% of GDP, is utterly illogical.

François Hollande:

Ce n'est pas la bonne réponse, (...) pour redonner la confiance et pour soutenir la croissance.

Moody's:

The euro fell to the lowest level in two months versus the dollar as Moody’s Investors Service said it will review the ratings of European Union nations after last week’s summit failed to produce decisive steps to end the debt crisis.

David McWilliams:

This deal is bad for Ireland. It is also bad for Europe because it turns the EU from a family of nations into a German protectorate, I’m not too sure I’d vote for that. Would you? But then again, I mightn’t be asked.

EU Budget Proposal as a graph

2011-12-10T16:00:00.000Z

It repelled the mind written down as a number, so here, in a simple graph, is what was proposed this week. Figures are extrapolated from page 47 of the Autumn Statment (here as a pdf).

Other People Write Good Stuff

2011-12-09T19:17:00.002Z

Not me, though I had a little tantrum on Twitter about how the British Left seems to be aligning itself with the European Right today, presumably on the basis that "my enemy's enemy is my friend". Let's be clear, Cameron has done the right thing, even if he did it for the wrong reason.

This treaty is the door slamming shut on European Monetarist Union. It's a recipe for permanent austerity, and a denial of democracy in favour of positing right-wing ideology as a technocratic solution. Added to that, it won't even work.

Here are some wise words from some other people;

Felix Salmon:

Europe’s leaders have set a course that leads directly to a gruesome global recession, before we’ve even recovered from the last one. Europe can’t afford that; America can’t afford that; the world can’t afford that. But the hopes of arriving anywhere else have never been dimmer.

Owen Jones:

Left-wing governments of all hues will be effectively banned by this treaty. If the French or German left return to power in the near future (and they are in a good position to do so), it will be illegal for them to respond to the global economic catastrophe with anything but austerity...

...The Treaty is just the latest attack on European democracy -- and against the European left. So let's stop taunting Cameron, and start working out how we can unite with the European labour movement to stop this total disaster in its tracks.

@Tomsk79: (all the better for thinking he was writting satire, yet getting the truth spot on)

Triumphant EU negotiators are preparing to announce a resolution to the Eurozone crisis which absolutely won't be revealed to be half-baked within a week or so.

The European Debt-Deflation Death Spiral Pact, also known as the "European Suicide Pact", will commit all Eurozone members to a strict austerity regime that will plunge Europe into a deep recession, which will lead to higher borrowing requirements, which will lead to more austerity, which will lead to a deeper recession, and so on until Europe is torn apart by social unrest.

Speaking from her coronation as God-Empress of Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the deal. "The horror of 1920's hyperinflation is burned on our nation's collective memory," she said. "So we must act now to replay the even more disastrous but somehow conveniently forgotten 1930's austerity policies of Heinrich Brüning. Yes, it will lead the EU to its doom, but at least we'll get to wag our fingers at lazy southerners for a few more months."

Paul Krugman:

European stocks are up today, and I have no idea why. I’m with Felix Salmon — this looks like a disastrous meeting. More austerity, more posing of the crisis, wrongly, as being all about fiscal deficits; no mechanism for ECB funding. Somehow southern Europe is supposed to deflate its way to prosperity, while everyone runs a trade surplus, presumably against that potentially habitable planet we’ve discovered 600 light-years away.

Brett Arends:

Their proposal is preposterous. Anything can happen in this life, but it would be remarkable indeed if this idea got off the ground. Anyone pinning their hopes that this will solve the crisis needs to think it through.

Any more?

Rip it up and start again

2011-11-05T11:09:00.003Z

I went to a strange meeting last week. A monthly meeting of mostly political economists from various shades of the left, with guest speakers followed by a discussion. There's room for hangers-on from journalism, trades unions, public services, consultancy and other academic disciplines, and I'm pretty much a regular.

Anyway, the general monthly trend of agreeing impotently with one another and suggesting that maybe Compass might like to produce a pamphlet (I jest, all credit to the Plan B work) was rather shattered this week by two things. Firstly, the topic for the evening was the crisis in the Eurozone, and secondly the meeting began half an hour after Papandreou had announced the since-cancelled referendum.

Leading for the sceptics was Larry Elliott, whose speech pretty much amounted to a Richard Mottram moment on behalf of the Eurozone, with an underlying and entirely justified refrain of "told you so" - ultimately arguing that the Euro must break up, though as a least worst option rather than a panacea. In his support from further to the left was Professor Costas Lapavistas, who argued eloquently that the Euro was always, and is increasingly, a neoliberal project, that it is logically impossible for the ECB to function as a state central bank would to resolve the crisis, and that the best option for Greece is a democratic default and exit from the Euro.

In opposition was Professor Engelbert Stockhammer, who was more purely economic, said he didn't really understand the concept of nations anyway, and said the Euro was entirely salvageable but that it would require deeper integration and an Euro-wide welfare state with voted and automatic transfers to uncompetitive regions on the scale at least of that currently existing in the US.

The room was deeply split, not least because of the presence of people like John Palmer, a member of the Governing Council of the Federal Trust. In a sense, they're both right, but there are two important reasons I come down on the side of Elliott and Lapavistas (well, three, but 'never thought the Euro was a good idea and don't believe the people want what Stockhammer is proposing' goes without saying).

Firstly, the Eurozone of which federalists on the left appear to be dreaming is not on offer. Doesn't exist. Calling for it is a fantasy - Europe is governed from the right, insofar as it is governed at all, and the capture of the mechanisms of bailout and austerity by the rich, and by capital, is close to absolute.

Secondly, I don't want permanent transfers across Europe; I don't think the voters want them, I don't think they're the right way to deal with international inequality, and (even if they are) I think there are still more deserving cases in the world of, to put it bluntly, state charity, than the countries of the Northern Mediterranean. Eritrea springs to mind.

The most commonly cited problem with these transfers is that the EU doesn't have enough popular solidarity to sustain them. Agreed, partly, but they're also wrong in fact as a permanent solution, just as the long-term answer to inequality within the UK should be an active employment and industrial policy, not simply permanently higher public spending (particularly if that spending is in the form of welfare to compensate for the lack of jobs, rather than action to create them) in deprived regions.

All of which is not to say that I have no sympathy for the Greeks. Quite the opposite (and, as goes Greece, so goes the rest of Southern Europe, unless the ECB suddenly becomes what Professor Lapavitsas argues it logically cannot be). Some on the right have argued that Greece chose to borrow too much - largely true, but a loan is not simply a contract. It is in part a bet. Greek debt always had a higher yield, even in the good times, than German. The risk that it would one day be unable to pay never went away, and the choice to take the benefit of that higher yield was the lender's. The down side of the high-yield bet is that you may lose your capital.

The pro-Euro left in the room seemed to take much the same argument as the right; that Greece had to stick to austerity and the ECB/IMF mandated plan as proof of their status as good Europeans, and for the wider defence of the Euro. At this point I am sorry the referendum appears to be off, and angry that blind faith in a project that is half a century out of date trumps faith in, say, logic, jobs, or the work of Keynes. Europe-wide austerity will not bring down Europe's debts. Europe-wide austerity will not save the Euro. Europe-wide austerity will not even, in the long-term, save finance capital from itself. Of course, now "the banks" are "us" in many European countries, the option of democratic default is no longer the neat expropriation from the risk-takers that it could have been, and and attempt to save state finances from ruin necessarily means a massive bung from the taxpayers to those remaining private debtholders. Great.

The Greek referendum would have been a moment of revolt. You don't get to choose when you rise up, circumstances are thrust upon you and you seize them; it seems it will not happen. This is a tragedy for Greece, for Europe, and for the left. But the moment will come, and when it comes, the left need to decide whether they will be locked in their studies writing pamphlets about how a different world is theoretically possible, while letting the kleptocracy immiserate Europe's workers for their dreams and their gain, or in the media, on the streets, and in the polling booths, building one.

Rise up. Rise up. Rise up.

Further reading:

Naked Capitalism: Greece - The Debtor that Roared (more good links in this article)
Sunny Hundal: Why Greece Should Default
Jeremy Warner: (some stuff about the ECB that is useful if you don't follow this closely)
Bloomberg: Italian Bond Yields; live prices if you want to treat the Eurozone debt crisis like a football match.

EU powers: getting ahead of the curve

2011-10-24T18:53:00.000+01:00

I outlined earlier this year why I don't support a referendum on the EU. Which isn't to say that, as someone well to the Eurosceptic end of Labour opinion, I don't want to see the party more supportive of devolving powers back to the nations of Europe, and further within ours. It's not an important issue to many people, but it underlies others, not least trust and confidence in democratic processes, and to those people to whom it matters, it matters a lot. More of them than you think are (or have been, or could be, Labour voters).

I've been happy, by and large, with Ed's handling of this issue, and declaring that Labour MPs were going to be whipped in support of the Government has, I suppose embarrassed Cameron and strengthened the rebels in the knowledge they can vote for a Referendum without actually having one. On balance I'd have preferred a free vote, showing that Next Labour is open to debate and difference - with much the same result anyway as I doubt more than a couple of dozen Labour MPs want a referendum.

What's next, though? Surely this crisis will mean Cameron has to step up his attempts to use the crisis to renegotiate back some powers from the EU. That being the case, the response on Twitter (a bad way to take the political temperature, but also a curiously distracting thing) has been to pick all the best things about the EU and assume he means those. Maybe he does. Frankly I think the time of using the EU to give us social rights for which we apparently can't win the domestic political argument is fading anyway, counter-productive in the long-term just as much as was the abandonment of the fight for liberalism in the US to judges rather than the ballot box.

If Cameron's smart, his headline measures will be iconoclastic, and they won't be what we expect them to be. If Ed is smarter, he'll make the case for the repatriation of those powers first, and get ahead of the political curve. Actually, I think Cameron's PR trick has crumbled since he "won" the election, and he probably is dim enough to 'repatriate' the right to have less maternity leave, or increase mobile roaming charges, or whatever people are scared of. Anyway starter for ten, here are a few powers that Labour might suggest repatriating to change the terms of the debate.

The power to restrict full market competition in postal services. (abrogated at various points but most recently confirmed in Directive 2008/6/EC).
The power to exempt state-funded Health Services from EU procurement rules - something Ed Miliband already raised at PMQs in March of this year.
The power to set minimum standards of employment rights (ooh, that's turned the debate on its head) which in theory we have but which the ECJ have used 96/71/EC to mess around with when they apply to foreign workers posted to other member states.

There is a bigger debate to be had about the rules for cross-border welfare claims which I think we probably need to have as part of rebuilding support for social security, but I think that can wait - we should be generally supportive of the Government on the short-term issue of the Commission's surreal court case. That's a fight that's going to be won anyway, I suspect, most member states agree (though the UK's welfare regime makes it a bigger deal for us than most of big EU states).

It's down to how you look at it

2011-10-18T20:15:00.000+01:00

The Bank of England doesn't have a cumulative inflation target, so this is irrelevant. It should have, but that's a tedious argument. As it is, you write off failure at a point in time, and express confidence that you will succeed in the future. Whatever. Anyway, here are two graphs using the same data to tell two different stories.

Graph 1 - Inflation undershot following the recession, has since caught up and is overshooting slightly now.

Graph 2 - The Coalition has let inflation get out of control, punishing people on fixed incomes or facing average or below-average wage increases.

Hostage to Fortune

2011-10-09T23:24:00.001+01:00

Seeing a lot of people on Twitter declaring François Hollande the winner of the French Socialist Party Primary, and therefore their candidate against Sarkozy in the Presidential election. Now, I'm looking at this as a supporter of Martine Aubry (from the available options, anyway) so I may be a bit biased, but to me it doesn't look sewn up - there's a second round to come, and the results are, roughly, 39% to Hollande, 31% to Aubry, and a chunky 30% to the rest of the field. Some points;

Two million voters. In a party (open, obviously, but still single-party) primary. That's remarkable, I think. It would need to double to equal the Democratic Primary turnout of 2008, but in a country without that tradition, it's serious numbers.
In the last polls before the vote, the scores were more like Hollande in the low 40s, and Aubry in the high 20s. While this outcome isn't far away from that, them both being at "30something" may be psychologically important in terms of spinning whether this is a victory. It's certainly not a crushing one.
Fully 17% of that 30% went to Arnaud Montebourg - well on the left of the Party; Aubry is seen as appreciably to the left of Hollande, so it's likely, if not guaranteed, that she will pick up the larger proportion of those transfers (I say transfers, obviously in a run-off they can stay at home, new people can vote, etc etc).
On the other hand, who knows why people vote the way they do? Might not be "Political". Hollande and Montebourg both represent fairly rural places in their 'day jobs', and they're both men, whereas Aubry is the Mayor of one of France's largest cities, and won in Paris. That may come into play, Aubry is not particularly popular in the South. Equally, in fifth place was the very right-wing (lazy labelling, but you know what I mean) Manuel Valls. He will back Hollande next weekend.
Ségolène Royal got thrashed, really, with not many votes at all. Even so, 7% is not much less than the gap between the two, and she has apparently said that she will be endorsing a candidate. How much does her endorsement help? Don't know. Is she most likely to endorse her ex-husband or his rival? Not sure. Worth pondering as the only eliminated candidate who is, politically, probably in the middle ground between the remaining two.
Only 1% of votes for the confusingly named "Radical Left Party" (who are PS affiliates to the right of the party), so not much of an issue who they choose, but they will formally endorse, almost certainly Hollande, tomorrow.
There's another televised debate before next week's run-off, and as we know from our own elections recently, televised debates can be game-changers. Hollande is arguably the better media performer, but we'll see how it plays out on the night. Incidentally, for fans of Alternative History, the point is well made in this time line.

So anyway, all to play for in my view. It could be a landslide for Hollande, it could be a win for Aubry. It's not over, though. Best guess, Hollande picks up 75% of Valls and PRG voters, Aubry 60% of Royal and Montebourg voters. Add or subtract a bit depending on strength and direction of formal endorsements. Outcome on that basis: 53-47 to Hollande. Margin of error stuff.

Bolivarian Revomewtion...

2011-10-04T18:34:00.000+01:00

Sorry, I'll get my coat.

Original image pinched from here, who probably got it from somewhere else...

Leader's Speech

2011-09-21T21:37:00.000+01:00

I might just post this once a year until it stops being relevant.

Read This Now

2011-09-16T13:59:00.000+01:00

An 'emperor's new clothes' post from Matt Taibbi. Very good.

The influx of i-banking types into the once-boring worlds of commercial bank accounts, home mortgages, and consumer credit has helped turn every part of the financial universe into a casino. That’s why I can’t stand the term "rogue trader," which is always tossed out there when some investment-banker asshole loses a billion dollars betting with someone else’s money.

They’re not "rogue" for the simple reason that making insanely irresponsible decisions with other peoples’ money is exactly the job description of a lot of people on Wall Street. Hell, they don’t call these guys "rogue traders" when they make a billion dollars gambling.

The only thing that differentiates a "rogue" trader like Barings villain Nick Leeson from a Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, John Thain, or someone like AIG’s Joe Cassano, is that those other guys are more senior and their lunatic, catastrophic decisions were authorized (and yes, I know that Cassano wasn’t an investment banker, technically – but he was in financial services).

In the financial press you're called a "rogue trader" if you're some overperspired 28 year-old newbie who bypasses internal audits and quality control to make a disastrous trade that could sink the company. But if you're a well-groomed 60 year-old CEO who uses his authority to ignore quality control and internal audits in order to make disastrous trades that could sink the company, you get a bailout, a bonus, and heroic treatment in an Andrew Ross Sorkin book.

Link.

Calamity Clegg

2011-08-19T12:08:00.000+01:00

This is good

2011-08-03T08:09:00.000+01:00

Blogging will probably be light in August. I appear to be very busy. Happy to have shorter arguments on Twitter as and when anyone wants to pick a fight.

We have outlived the myth of trust

2011-07-28T06:45:00.004+01:00

I like Lisa Nandy a great deal, and I subscribe to much of the analysis she set out in her recent Compass article. However, I have a fundamental problem with one part of it; when she says "Since I have been in Parliament I have become more convinced than ever that politicians must have the courage of their convictions to lead, not to triangulate but to persuade and convince.", she articulates a frustration many of us involved in politics feel. We want to set out our stall as we would ideally wish it to be, to plant the flag, and to call for others to rally behind it.

Consciously or not, Lisa is echoing Margaret Thatcher, who said in a campaign speech during the 1979 election, after she had been accused of shattering the spirit of consensus, "I am a conviction politician. The Old Testament Prophets did not say 'Brothers, I want a consensus'. They said 'This is my faith. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it too, then come with me." - well, if Margaret Thatcher is Moses, then I'm Jeremiah, because for the moment, those days are gone. Here's a graph of how much YouGov, polling for the Economist, found that the public trusted particular groups of people in society.

Politicians are nowhere, here. They haven't earnt the right to a hearing that will enable them to explain in detail what they believe, let alone inspire people to follow them. No party leader has a net positive rating, they all have net negatives in double figures. We just aren't where 'conviction politics' requires us to be.

That doesn't mean I believe in triangulation, either. Looking at where we would like to be, figuring out where we think the public and the other parties are, and finding a way to split the difference, is both arid, and likely to lead to drift, failure, and a loss of control over the narrative. So I must have a third way, right?

Not exactly, but I talk about narrative a lot, and I have thoughts about 'auxiliaries', which may just be a modern version of an agitational demand, but it may not. The task for politicians is not context-free triangulation, but careful selection of ideas, facts, interventions and movements, to build a coherent narrative that describes how they believe things to be, how they believe things came to be thus, how they believe they can be, and how they believe they become that. But it's carpentry, sculpture, not contemporary painting. It's about seeing the grain of the wood, knowing how to rough out the stone, not treating politics as a blank canvas onto which to throw your most brilliant colours.

Some of the greatest political successes are branded as U-turns, or at least as giving in to relentless pressure. Debt cancellation, and moves on climate change, for example - all things Ministers wanted to do, but only felt empowered to do because of the scale of action outside SW1, and by non-politicians. Remember the 'disaster' of Ed joining the anti-cuts rally (the disaster that saw Labour's poll ratings surge, as previously discussed?) - my pet theory is that that was about a politician learning to follow. We talked a lot about Ed 'leading' on phone hacking. He was leading the political class, and leading the government (by the nose) but he wasn't leading the country - he was simply speaking for them.

Did someone once talk about Labour as 'the political wing of the British people', 15 or so years ago? Perhaps an overstatement, and I'm not sure it worked out, but anyway...

Immigration and Dissonance

2011-07-26T07:00:00.017+01:00

I keep prevaricating over whether to write anything at all about this, and worrying that I shall write the wrong thing. I wrote something which I thought was rather good in May 2010 but I don't know how many people have read it. Anyway, recently a friend asked why, given it was a hot topic, I hadn't said anything, and I hate to disappoint a loyal reader. So I decided to write something.

That said it doesn't, in general, feel like a great time to engage with the issue at all - too much anger and sadness around - but then yesterday I had to deal again with the fringe describing me and chums as 'toxic' (their boo-word of choice) not just on immigration, but also on race. Picking a fairly low opportunity to throw back something that was out of context in the first place, to have a go at people they hate for reasons they can't fully explain. It's comradely, the left. Still, I'm not aware I've said much on race (I said some stuff on multiculturalism, I stand by it), and I don't think anyone else much who's been involved with Blue Labour has either. On immigration, there are wildly different views among BL types - Marc Stears for instance is clearly on the liberal end of opinion by any objective standards.

So, last week was a week of dissonance. On Twitter, a load of the political types I correspond with were complaining about, well, you know - the suggestion that immigration should be radically lower for a while, or that its benefits and drawbacks are unevenly spread across society. Over on Facebook on the other hand, several of my friends (floating voters as it happens, though that's beside the point) were complaining that they had recently had massive rent hikes. Apparently it now costs a four-figure sum per month to rent a vaguely decent studio in a fairly crappy bit of North London. I guess that's North London for you - internal migration within the UK has at least as much to do with that as people coming to London from abroad. Quote of the debate, though, was "We're full" - and not from a Tory (or from me, shush). Still, dissonance the first.

Moving on, a lot of noise has been made in the last week by a prominent Labour Parliamentarian, who went on the record as complaining that immigration from the European Union has resulted in unemployment and lack of opportunities for working-class people in the UK. That politician of course, was Diane Abbott, and the noise she has been making this week is to condemn a fellow Labour Parliamentarian for saying, well, much the same thing as she said 15 years ago. She went on to become the Left's standard-bearer in the Leadership election, he is 'toxic'. Go figure. Dissonance the second.

Finally, one of my local party activists wants a no platform policy to stop Maurice Glasman speaking at constituency meetings. This isn't new, he's wanted it since the Progress interview about the need for Labour to engage with EDL supporters and persuade them our way of making things better is preferable to the racist way of making things better. This wouldn't be dissonance in and of itself, except that our branch meetings end up in the pub, and in the pub is, sometimes, a local man who votes for the BNP (when he votes at all). We haven't ostracised him, several of us have spoken to him, he's very chatty. Annoyingly so, sometimes. Personally, I think we're winning him round. He doesn't hate anyone (or, at least, everyone equally), he's just mostly pissed off that he can't get a council house or anywhere decent to rent, or a better job (or, last I heard, job at all). "More people than houses" can be solved two different ways, and 'houses cost more than I earn' can also be played from both ends against the middle. Dissonance the third.

That's the interesting bit (well, relatively) . Now here is "some stuff I think", which will be a great deal duller.

Labour shouldn't talk about immigration if we can help it. Pretty much 'at all'. We need a policy, but it should be a moderate, quiet, policy - especially in opposition. I don't say this because I don't think it's important to get right in practice, but because it won't win us any votes. Debate on immigration has at least two features which will make us less likely to do that. Firstly, we're divided. Secondly, we're very unpopular. On the plus side, most of the public don't think immigration is particularly important to them. On the double-plus side, Cameron appears to have made a promise he has no intention of trying to fulfil (even if he can). It's not in his interests to raise it either (whose is it? Maybe UKIP, and further to the right). I think elections are won not by who has the best policy on aggregate, but by who has the best policy on the issues which dominate the debate. We lead on health, education, and jobs. Let's talk about those. Blue Labour (Maurice, specifically) should talk about immigration even less - it's not their important contribution to the debate, and it plays to the lazy stereotypes of people who just want to knock, while having very little to offer Labour's internal debate (often being outside it anyway). So yes, this blog post should have stopped before it started, but my audience is appreciably smaller.
When we are forced to having a policy, I think there is a deal to be done with the public. Over the last decade we have had unusually high levels of immigration. To a large extent that's to do with EU expansion. To my mind, some of that is immigration 'borrowed from the future' - on the basis that someone from an EU country is more likely to emigrate (ie return home) than a British-born citizen is to emigrate (ie go somewhere completely new) - I have no data on that but it seems intuitively likely - it means a larger number of people than usual will be emigrating over coming years, and a smaller number wanting to come here (or it would mean all that, if the whole continent wasn't about to spiral into perma-austerity). On that basis, I think a period of low net immigration somewhere in line with the pre-2003 norm is not unrealistic - the average country has net immigration of 0, as a matter of logical necessity. With 400,000 people a year leaving the country long-term, that still leaves room for about 1300 a day to arrive, and still give a net annual rate in five figures. During that time, we actively and urgently catch up on the things we failed to do well enough, which you have to do very well, if you are to have a growing population - building houses, protecting low-paid workers, integrating communities, and so on. Then we can talk more objectively. This isn't some radical new departure - last time we had a recession, we lost citizens. In 1992 more people emigrated than arrived. OK, there was an horrific general election result and maybe people fled in despair, but it tells us quite how recently the world was very different.
As it happens and not being one to shy away from controversy, I think in principle that we should revisit EU freedom of movement. I think it's a racist policy which says, in effect, that we will accept unlimited immigration of white Europeans, and necessarily toughens the common external borders in consequence. I don't expect this to happen, and therefore, as above, I don't see it as particularly worth talking about, certainly not in an attempt to get votes. More generally though, I don't think it's right-wing to argue that it should not always be the people who move to the work, quite the opposite. I'm not sure why we assume that in every case immigration is a matter of personal desire, rather than necessity. Sometimes it's one, sometimes the other - but while defending the right of someone to travel two thousand miles from their family and friends to seek work, I wouldn't mind a louder discussion about why there was no rewarding work near them in the first place.
Overoptimism about public opinion is a massive danger. It is nice, and comforting, to tell ourselves that there is a pragmatic majority in favour of a managed but reasonably open immigration policy. Maybe there is, but a poll commissioned by Searchlight will probably find something different from, say, a poll commissioned by MigrationWatch. And so it proves, YouGov polling for them found 39% of the public in favour of zero net immigration, and a further 16% in favour of net emigration. 17% wanted immigration of 100,000 or more, 25% of somewhere between zero and 100,000, and the rest didn't know. The truth is probably somewhere in between those findings, and we should beware of hearing what we want to hear.
Similarly, I fear we underestimate quite how much hard work it is going to be to address some of the consequential problems. To take one example: I am a long-standing and vocal supporter of building more houses. Lots more houses. I even have some good ideas about how to do this. All the same, the amount of new houses we need is on a scale incomparable to the number we have recently been building. By my reckoning, we need about half a million houses a year for the next decade. In 2010, we built just over 100,000. Even at the height of the boom, it wasn't quite 200,000. Sometimes, we talk as if building houses is simply a matter of a Minister for Housing declaring that houses shall be built. That would help, but it's also about finding land, gaining planning permission, designing mixed communities, putting in infrastructure, utilities - a water supply, to pick something that's unlikely to be a political issue this summer, but is some years - and ensuring that there are jobs within travelling distance of those new houses. More houses will help, but if the Daily Mail / Express narrative turns from 'immigrants are taking our houses' to 'immigrants are destroying our countryside' (to say nothing of causing hose pipe bans) it will be just as toxic, in a different way. The English are deeply attached to their fields - we have lots of them, but by OECD standards England has 'no rural regions', and we haven't begun to think through how we sort out population density and distribution - eco-towns were not, as I recall, wildly popular. So when saying "high net immigration would be fine if we did x, y, and z", a little realism about how successfully we can do x, y, and z would be wise when defining how exactly we interpret the word "high".

Here endeth the rant (for now).

Some Old Politics #10

2011-07-25T07:08:00.006+01:00

Chris was collecting Parliamentary Poets on Twitter; I arrived too late with my suggestion of John Strachey, but in doing so I was reminded of my favourite story about Clem Attlee. I always tell it slightly wrong, so here it is directly from Wilson's memoirs, via John Simkin's site.

There is a little-known Attlee story concerning John Strachey, at that time Minister of Food. A Cabinet rule in the manual Questions of Procedure for Ministers forbids any minister from publishing written work, such as a book or press article, without the specific authority of the Prime Minister. This is not usually withheld for a literary or historic work, such as lan MacLeod's Neville Chamberlain.

Strachey telephoned the Prime Minister - he should have gone to see him - "Prime Minister," he said, I see that under the rules I have to get your permission to publish a book. I have written a small collection of poems; there is nothing political or controversial in them. I take it you will agree to my publishing them."

Attlee would have none of it: "Better send them to me." A fortnight later, Strachey had not heard from him, which was unusual since Attlee normally completed his boxes every night and never deferred any correspondence. So Strachey phoned again: "Clem, I take it you've no objection to letting me go ahead and publish those poems I sent you." "Can't publish," said Attlee, and when Strachey asked for his reason: "Don't rhyme, don't scan."

Issues polling update

2011-07-20T07:45:00.001+01:00

Yesterday's YouGov had updated polling on which party people felt was best able to handle a number of important issues.

Here's the Labour lead (red) or deficit (blue) on each issue - I've factored out people who answered "none" or "don't know", but not people who said Lib Dem or Other. All of these were was in every case a smaller number than said Labour or Conservative, with the exception of immigration, where "none" is slightly ahead of Labour.

Blue Labour and Schools - revisited

2011-07-19T07:49:00.002+01:00

Recently on the Blue Labour blog, Jim O’Connell-Lauder and Jamie Audsley set out their assessment of where a Blue Labour perspective on education may lead. In this guest post, Old Andrew (no relation) from the Scenes From The Battleground blog, provides an alternative point of blue, er, sorry, view.

Towards a Blue Labour Agenda on Schools

So far, schools are an area where Blue Labour appears to have been least able to make a contribution to policy. Blue Labour is sceptical of the possibility that the paternalistic middle classes can genuinely meet the interests of the working class through public spending on the part of the state. The British state school system is a public service which is dominated by middle class interests, beliefs and concerns, yet decisive in its power over the interests and aspirations of the working class in a way that is the antithesis of Blue Labour thinking.

However in this case Blue Labour cannot even appeal for rescue to a pre-welfare state tradition of education, because while there may be positive things to be said about the contribution of church schools, workers education societies and other forms of education that existed independently of the state in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century, nobody can suggest that these bodies were not either equally paternalistic or equally inadequate at empowering the mass of the working class.

That said, a scepticism about the existence of a state education system is not a credible position for Blue Labour thinkers either. The middle classes desire education for themselves and are willing to pay for it. The withdrawal of the state from the education system would not create comprehensive community-run civil institutions, it would create a free market in which the lion’s share of the good of education was captured by the well-off with a small amount saved for the most able.

Indeed, perhaps the easiest argument that can be made about a Blue Labour position on education is that it would object to the commodification of education, whether through a free market or a managerialist quasi-market in which parents and children simply become customers of educational service providers. Blue Labour is in a position to suggest an increase in the influence of communities on education, for instance, Maurice Glasman suggested the following administrative changes:

“…what Blue Labour would say is that there should be a third, a third, a third. A third of power with parents, so that the schools are genuinely places where they have power over the education for their children; a third with the teachers so that we can really honour the vocation and expertise of teachers and then a third with the funder, whether that would be the local authority or the state. A third, a third, a third.”

Given the gulf that exists between teachers and governors, and often between parents and the parental representatives on governing bodies, this idea could well be an improvement on the status quo. However, it leaves untouched the difficult issues of schooling: the questions of what should be taught to whom and where. In the absence of Blue Labour having any obvious policy positions on this, we have seen a couple of attempts to navigate a Blue Labour direction in schools policy, where those involved have simply tied themselves to existing masts.

Firstly, in his chapter of “The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox” James Purnell declared (admittedly with some caveats which I have not quoted):

“Mutuality, reciprocity, and organization are good guides to what is insufficient about empowerment. But they do not replace it. For example, they’re not a guide to renewing education policy. In fact, in education, we need to go further in a New Labour direction, not turn around… people should be able to choose a school for their child”

More recently, in their article on the Blue Labour Blog two ex-teachers Jim O’Connell-Lauder and Jamie Audsley argued for a social engineering model of schooling, actually using the phrase “a tool of social justice” and suggesting that individuals (parents, children and even teachers) can, through reforming schools into democratic institutions, be transformed into “democratic citizens”.

This notion of schooling, where the state and its enlightened administrators decide what type of people the masses should become is an extension of the Every Child Matters agenda that became dominant in the later years of the last Labour government, which in turn was simply a new manifestation of the progressive tradition in education, where academic aims are side-lined by political, cultural, social or emotional concerns. It is also in the opposite direction to Blue Labour’s confidence in the existing values of working class communities, and scepticism of middle class liberal values.

So, having set out how little Blue Labour has so far been able to say about education, where do we go from here? At the very least, perhaps the following questions are worth considering (and I make no pretence that these questions don’t heavily reflect my own personal concerns and beliefs about education):

1) How can we ensure that the educational outcomes for working class children are not simply what middle class professionals think are appropriate for “children like these”? Much educational debate, for instance the debate over selection, or over the value of qualifications, assumes that there is a significant class of usually working class “non-academic” children who must be appreciated for being different rather than given greater opportunity to succeed. Not everyone can become a professor at Oxford, but it should not be the role of Labour politicians to cap working class aspirations.

2) How do attempts to “include” badly behaved children in the classroom, regardless of their behaviour, reflect the values of working class communities? If Blue Labour respects the conservatism of working class parents, then there can be little reason for letting a child from a disciplined home environment, where the authority of adults is respected, endure the chaos of a permissive school environment run by middle class liberals where poor behaviour by a child is seen as a social or emotional problem to be treated therapeutically, rather than an attack on the interests of other children.

3) How can Blue Labour change the top-down culture of schools? While some comment has been made about central government initiatives that create paperwork or interfere with school management, very little attention has been given to the way in which classroom teachers are managed. How many teachers in a school should have a management responsibility? How much of a teacher's work should be open to continual scrutiny by managers?

4) How much should teachers and schools be concerning themselves with non-academic aspects of children’s lives? Blue Labour criticises the bureaucratic welfare state, and should be the first critic of schools where the dominant culture brings to mind management consultants trying to frustrate social workers, rather than that of an academic institution.

Great Tweets from History

2011-07-15T09:27:00.001+01:00

1791: Olympe48 @Cordeliers What's this "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" crap? Fraternité?! This revolution is all about patriarchy isn't it? Come on, admit it.

1838: CorkFearg @LovettLovesIt "Chartism"? Are you serious? How's that meant to inspire people? Charts are boring, you need to talk about equality.

1874: EmmiePanks @LydiaHangingChad Fantastic meeting, love your ideas, but suffrage is a terrible name - people will think you want women to suffer. Rebrand!

Keynes responds to Refounding Labour

2011-07-05T08:56:00.004+01:00

Keynes has come back into fashion of late after a few decades in semi-wilderness. People who have probably never read much of what he said variously claim him as one of their own, or blast others for following out-of-date policies they imagine he inspired. He's even been turned into a rap act viewed over two million times. Of course, he was a diverse writer, whose thinking developed in different ways over time. Hence there are Orthodox Keynesians, Neo-Keynesians, Post-Keynesians and New Keynesians, among others.

He was also, for all his service to his country and, by extension, the 1945 Labour Government, a Liberal until the end of his days, though (unlike Beveridge) never stood for office, let alone became an MP. He was not, though, much of a democrat or populist, serving as Director of the British Eugenics Society for seven years. Given how much his views on his key field of expertise are seen as foundational for much of the left, I thought it would be interesting to look at his explanation of why he did not choose to become involved with the Labour Party.

Fortunately, he told us. Well, not us so much as the Liberal Summer School of 1925, in a speech which was published in abridged form; fortunately the original copy survived and therefore we can reconstruct Keynes' submission to Refounding Labour. Skimming over the points of agreement, because clearly we can see what Keynes would love about Labour; that it adheres broadly to a Keynesian model of the economy, not to the odd ideology of expansionary fiscal contraction (he'd have something to say about how that might work in an environment of low demand for credit and near-zero interest rates). Hain asks;

What would you change about the Labour Party? What have we got wrong? How can we approach things differently in the future?

Keynes: I believe that in the future, more than ever, questions about the economic framework of society will be far and away the most important of political issues. I believe that the right solution will involve intellectual and scientific elements which must be above the heads of the vast mass of more or less illiterate voters. Now, in a democracy, every party alike has to depend on this mass of ill-understanding voters, and no party will attain power unless it can win the confidence of these voters by persuading them in a general way either that it intends to promote their interests or that it intends to gratify their passions.

Harsh words. Unfair? Partly. The problem is no longer (if it was then) that the broad mass of voters are 'more or less illiterate', though it's the not wholly different problem that there is massive competition for their time, and politicians are lucky if they can get a hearing with most voters at all, much less a sympathetic one.

Keynes continues;

Nevertheless there are differences between the several parties in the degree to which the party machine is democratised through and through and the preparation of the party programme democratised in its details. In this respect the Conservative Party is in much the best position. The inner ring of the party can almost dictate the details and the technique of policy. Traditionally the management of the Liberal Party was also sufficiently autocratic... The Labour Party, on the other hand, is in a far weaker position. I do not believe that the intellectual elements in the party will ever exercise adequate control.

...[The Labour Party] is a class party, and the class is not my class. If I am going to pursue sectional interests at all, I shall pursue my own. When it comes to the class struggle as such, my local and personal patriotisms, like those of every one else, except certain unpleasant zealous ones, are attached to my own surroundings. I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

But, above all, I do not believe that the intellectual elements in the Labour Party will ever exercise adequate control; too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about; and if—which is not unlikely—the control of the party is seized by an autocratic inner ring, this control will be exercised in the interests of the extreme left wing—the section of the Labour Party which I shall designate the party of catastrophe.

Just as the Conservative Party will always have its diehard wing, so the Labour Party will always be flanked by the Party of Catastrophe—Jacobins, Communists, Bolshevists, whatever you choose to call them. This is the party which hates or despises existing institutions and believes that great good will result merely from overthrowing them—or at least that to overthrow them is the necessary preliminary to any great good. This party can only flourish in an atmosphere of social oppression or as a reaction against the Rule of Die- Hard.

In Great Britain it is, in its extreme form, numerically very weak. Nevertheless its philosophy in a diluted form permeates, in my opinion, the whole Labour Party. However moderate its leaders may be at heart, the Labour Party will always depend for electoral success on making some slight appeal to the widespread passions and jealousies which find their full development in the Party of Catastrophe. I believe that this secret sympathy with the Policy of Catastrophe is the worm which gnaws at the seaworthiness of any constructive vessel which the Labour Party may launch.

The opening section was brought to my mind the other day by a comment thread on Liberal Conspiracy, and by some conversations on Twitter. During the former, the claim was made that "Anything worth saying can be said simply and clearly". This was in the context of criticising Blue Labour, but it has more general application.

I don't think it's true. Everything worth saying should eventually lead to something which can be explained simply. The process of making an aeroplane fly cannot, in my view, be said simply. But "you can get from London to New York in eight hours" can. Keynes - and unwittingly those who argue that we must always talk as if to the most fleeting and uninterested voter - would argue that the complicated discussions must be the preserve of a party elite. I would argue for broadening them out wherever possible, in the way described by Don when he, years ago, talked of the difference between Leaflet Labour and Pamphlet Labour.

This does, though, require a bit of trust and imagination; if every attempt at imagination is going to be met with "well we didn't do that in Government", or any new (old new) way of looking at our values met with "Can't we just be Labour", then it won't work. Equally (and this isn't mainly a post about Blue Labour) if everyone demands that the Leader do what they have decided down the pub after five pints, or refuses to engage with finding out what an idea is because they don't like the name, then we will end up in a situation where "too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about". The left has a habit of getting on the complicated side of arguments; involving people in the formation of those arguments is a good step in making sure that they are solid, and finding ways to present them clearly to a wider public.

As to the "Party of Catastrophe", I think Harold Wilson said it much better, and it's not an argument for a particular political positioning, it's an argument for having more members. This may be familiar to long-time readers as "Some Old Politics #5" from January of this year;

"This Party needs to protect itself against the activities of small groups of inflexible political persuasion, extreme so-called left and in a few cases extreme so-called moderates, having in common only their arrogant dogmatism. These groups, equally the multichromatic coalitionist fringe or groups specifically formed to fight other marauding groups, these groups are not what this Party is about. Infestation of this kind thrives only, and can thrive only, in minuscule local parties."

Where Have All The Good Times Gone?

2011-06-30T07:16:00.000+01:00

I don't wish to dredge of memories of my Blue Labour Songbook post (alright, I do, I really enjoyed putting it together) but I couldn't resist writing up this discovery.

Maurice Glasman talks, among other things, of "blue like the blues" in explaining how we ended up with the PR problem that is the name "Blue Labour", and there was a funny little round of tweets a while ago arguing that it was less Miles Davis, more Ray Davies - sort of "Blue Labour is The Village Green Preservation Society".

What I didn't notice is that at the start of this month, Ray Davies had been interviewed by the Financial Times, and the conversation turned to politics.

How politically committed are you?
I’ve always been politically aware, but I haven’t found a party I could give my allegiance to, though I veer to the left. Politics is becoming a managerial role rather than Churchillian. I’m more passionate about community spirit.

Worried about excessive managerialism? Looking for a party of the left which values community spirit? The man's a poster boy for Blue Labour. Here's a song about class, unemployment, and debt.

Housing

2011-06-29T15:57:00.000+01:00

I done a thing about housing for Progress. It is here.

That Ken/London YouGov poll

2011-06-28T07:45:00.061+01:00

Remember the poll that came out, which said Labour had a huge poll lead in London, but Ken was going to lose to Boris? It's been troubling me, and I've been trying to articulate exactly why. I think it's probably best done with a picture - though remember, of course, all the caveats about subsamples which I mentioned in my recent post still apply.

So, here's what the YouGov poll looks like;

Plausible, I guess. London hasn't always voted with the party trend, and nobody (I mean nobody, 1% of those asked, and 2% of likely voters) is planning to back the Lib Dems in the Mayoral election, those votes must be going somewhere, right?

We can even play the game of breaking it down into subsamples and have a rough guess at who Ken is losing; it seems to be primarily men, the under-40s, and, interestingly, ethnic minorities. Despite the claim in some quarters that Ken's closeness to Islamists is the issue (and I agree it's an issue), Labour polls 41% with white Londoners, and Ken polls 37% - far from explaining the gap. Among black Londoners, Labour gets 92% (!) and Ken 56%.

However, I'm not sure I believe these figures. Here's why; the YouGov poll fieldwork is given as the 7th to the 9th of June. I'm taking that as correct - it doesn't really matter, but I did tweet to ask, because it wasn't published until the 21st for some reason so I thought it may have been the 17th to the 19th. It changes little of the below if it was.

Here's a graph of the YouGov subsample for London in the week around that poll, with the London poll added in, by date of final fieldwork. I'm sorry it's not very clear, but hopefully you can see what I think is the key point.

Boris is definitely outpolling the Conservatives, there can be no doubt about that (thanks in large part to the support of most Liberal Democrats), but Ken is, in fact, polling exactly the same as the London sub-sample of the national YouGov poll. Now, the most likely explanation is that all these polls are 'correct', and there's something else in the YouGov polling that means their London sample is awry - it's older, more middle class, or what have you, than their overall national poll. That this is consistently the case, though, rather than varying from day to day, would worry me.

To play the subsample game a little longer, Labour's London vote according to the London poll is 18.6% higher than its national average. Extrapolating to what we would expect to see in the subsample (this is really voodoo stuff of the worst kind now, but I love data), we see Labour outperforming among the London working class (60% London C2DE, 48% national C2DE), and pensioners (47% of the London over-60s, 37% of over-60s nationally), but underperforming among ex-Lib Dems (37% of 2010 London Lib Dem voters, 40% nationally) and, relatively, with women (49% of London women and 53% of London men, compared with 46% of women nationally and 40% of men).

There are other odd things about the poll - Ken scores 43% among young people in the pure voting intention question, but only 30% in the 'forced choice' which is meant to simulate an SV run-off, which obviously isn't possible Boris goes from 44 to 65, implying that he picks up 162% of second preferences - but I'll stop there.

There's Only Two Maurice Glasmans

2011-06-26T13:06:00.002+01:00

It sometimes feels like I inhabit two parallel universes, and each of them contains a Maurice Glasman. There's the one that, as far as I can perceive and with apologies to Descartes, is the real world. This contains a Maurice who is sensible, radical, and decent. Then occasionally I find myself in the world of the internet, where another Glasman exists - an evil right-wing demon, bending the ear of the Labour Leadership towards policies borrowed mostly from the Republic of Gilead. Nobody has actually seen this Glasman, but they've all heard about him from someone else, and it's definitely true. It must be, they read it in the Daily Mail. Glasman; the personification of an urban myth - he should have his own page on Snopes.

So it was yesterday that I went to Kentish Town, to an Art Uncut event in support of their campaign to make Bono pay his taxes. Among various musicians, comedians and activists, one of the speakers was a certain Lord Glasman. Given the misinformation put about, I was worried how he would be received by the radical young urban left, but in fact his welcome was not just polite, but enthusiastic.

Glasman talked about the limits of charity and Victorian-style philanthropy, the need to apply the lessons of community organising to involvement in Africa, his disappointment that none of the results of Band Aid were delivered to the African trade union movement, or to helping African women organising against their own oppression, and to building Africa's ability to resist global capitalism generally, but all on short-term charitable handouts.

Then I came home, and discovered that while the 'real' Maurice Glasman had been showing solidarity and promoting radicalism in North London, webGlasman had been going around stirring up assaults on the rights of women. In particular, the Daily Mail, and thereby the Labour twittersphere (because the Daily Mail, of course, is a reliable source when it confirms your prejudices, even if it's fashionable to hate it the rest of the time) had picked up on, and expanded on, Helen Goodman MP's bizarre anti-Blue Labour rant.

Apparently, in the Daily Mail world, Lord Glasman has written a book which "includes a glowing passage about the benefits of a ‘patriarchal social order’, including ‘the reproduction of family and social relations, status hierarchies and moral values". I've posted the extract this is about before. The key problems with the Mail article, I think, are that a) they've completely misunderstood it, and b) it's not by Glasman anyway. Of course, he shouldn't take it too much to heart; being "accused of sexism by a key ally of deputy leader Harriet Harman" is the Daily Mail's equivalent of an OBE.

In the words of Maurice Glasman, I don't understand and I need help.

There are different ways of looking at gender which would be consistent with a Blue approach. It's a tendency and a way of looking at politics, not a collective manifesto - but that's a blog for another day. Could anyone other than the Daily Mail read the sentence "These values were an essential element of the dominant class culture" in a publication of the radical left, and think it is "glowing".

Surely only the Daily Mail (yes, and Helen Goodman) could read "Despite the greater independence it has brought women, they have borne the brunt of the changes. The strains placed on women’s unpaid labour and time make family life for many difficult to sustain. Economic participation has brought with it time poverty and work related stress." and assume that what this is putting forward is the proposal that women should stop working.

Rutherford (for it was he, not Glasman, who wrote that chapter) has been thinking about these issues for a long time. In 2001, he wrote "Masculinity lacks the ethical dimension which could provide the moral resources for guiding young men into adulthood. It is a term of the interregnum - the transitional period between the decline of the old and the emergence of the new - and it is ill-equipped to generate new meanings and relationships. Today it has become an ubiquitous discourse which lacks the ability to throw up the important question - what are men to become in a post patriarchal society?", and in 2007 that "The old style political parties with their male rulership, hierarchies, obsessive behaviours and emotionally arid cultures are being shunned by society and at the same time they are in retreat from it. Unreformed they are unlikely to find their roots in a society in which individual self-fulfillment is becoming a dominant ethic of living."

To imply, as Goodman and the Mail have chosen to do, that he (or their cardboard cut out of Glasman, a more headline-grabbing target) are objectively in favour of sexual violence is uncomradely in the first instance, and borderline defamatory in the latter. Politics deserves better.

A terminological inexactitude

2011-06-24T07:07:00.002+01:00

Pet peeve: I find that if you say something which is inadvertently or indirectly open to being seen as sexist or racist, then - especially on the internet - a lot of people will be more than happy to set you straight very quickly. If someone says something which covertly discriminates on wealth grounds, however, people are much less likely to notice.

I'm unashamedly a supporter of the right of people to defend their homes against malevolent intruders, using whatever force seems reasonable to them at the time. It's what a sensible reading of the current law would suggest is already the case, but if it's not clear then I'm equally supportive of changing the law to make it clear.

It's unwise to comment on particular cases until the facts become fully known, but looking at the general principle, David Cameron agrees with me, and says there will be a justice bill to "put beyond doubt that homeowners and small shopkeepers who use reasonable force to defend themselves or their properties will not be prosecuted".

Hang about, what? This isn't new terminology, and I guess it's not surprising coming from David Cameron, but here's a quick reality check: there are lots of people in this country who don't own a home, and lots of people who look after premises other than 'small shops'. I'm not clear at all why it is acceptable to use language which links the right to defend your residence with your form of tenure.

Or, rather, I am. It's because right-wingers see the defence of property rights as the prime directive, and are in the bizarre situation of seeing the presence of masked intruders in someone's home as primarily a crime against their ownership of that home, rather than against their security in their dwelling, regardless of their relationship to it.

The amount of force you can use in defence of your home should be based on the simple fact that it is your home, not the fact that you own it.

Give public Lib Dem membership says Nick Clegg

2011-06-23T13:28:00.000+01:00

Proposals to give the public membership of part-Conservative party the Liberal Democrats have been backed by Nick Clegg.

The idea is that individual voters would benefit from any long-term gains when the party's assets are broken up and sold.

The deputy prime minister said it was important British people were not overlooked after their votes were used to keep the Conservative Party alive.

The Treasury said all options would be considered but some experts have warned the scheme would be difficult to run.

Speaking on a trip to Eurodisney, Mr Clegg said: "Psychologically it is immensely important that the British people feel they have not just been overlooked and ignored.

"Their votes have been used to the tune of millions to keep this Tory Government on a life-support machine and they have absolutely no say at all in what happens when normality is restored. Or now, come to think of it.

"I think, in a sense, as a society we are condemned to take an interest in our voting system. Well, Lib Dem members are. Apparently not many other people."

The idea for so-called people's membership, first suggested in March, was developed by City firm Fifth Avenue Partners with the support of the Lib Dems' Desperate Measures Committee.

Mr Clegg has written to Chancellor George Osborne in support of the proposal.

Under the plan, the 45 million people on the electoral roll would be given free membership of the Liberal Democratic Party.

The membership would only have any value above a "floor vote", equivalent to what the Liberal Democrats polled at the last General Election.

A Treasury spokesman said: "Well that's a bit pointless then, isn't it?".

Source

A very optimistic reading

2011-06-23T07:19:00.003+01:00

Over at LabourList, Rob Marchant says that "On a very optimistic reading, we might just have got away with our involvement in the disastrous March 26th demo. But, even if we did, the British public are unlikely to indulge Labour’s manning the barricades a second time".

Thought it was worth taking a look. It's nice that we have rolling YouGov polls even though there's no election anytime soon. Hope they continue. Anyway, here's the vote share of the two major parties in the week before and after we were involved in the "disastrous demo".

I have labelled the point at which the disaster occurred, and also, because it was mentioned in a couple of news outlets and may have influenced voters, the date of the budget.

There are legitimate arguments about how Labour should engage with the protest movement, and in particular about what the most productive model of co-operation is between Labour and the unions - the overall article isn't particularly bad, I just get fed up at the rewriting of history to make a point...

Is this 'anti-women'?

2011-06-22T23:28:00.007+01:00

Tom the Labour Partisan, no friend of Blue Labour (though frankly not as far from it as he thinks), noted on Twitter yesterday that a number of people had reached his blog by searching for 'Blue Labour anti-women', and asked "Was Glasman repulsively misogynistic as usual?". I've never seen him be that at all, but never mind. What actually happened is that Helen Goodman MP said on Newsnight that Blue Labour was anti-women. She says it in more detail in her pamphlet.

As I suspected, she has picked up on (and I personally think wildly misconstrued) a section in the article by Professor Jonathan Rutherford. The first clue is her description of it as "quite extraordinary". Some things in life genuinely are extraordinary, but sometimes if they seem so on first sight, they merit re-reading. The second, perhaps more substantial, clue is that she goes on to hypothesise about whether Blue Labour wants to repeal the Married Womens Property Act of 1865 (or even 1882 or 1870...) or wants to ban unmarried women from being prescribed contraception (seems intuitively unlikely), or attending university. She's right, of course. We also want to reintroduce slavery, leper colonies, and the divine right of kings.

When political debate degenerates into this sort of hyperbole, it strikes me that something has gone wrong. I thought, since people are engaged in the debate, I'd post what Jonathan actually says in that passage of his article. It's possible that, since I know him, I'm reading it in a different tone of voice from how Helen read it in her head - she seems, for one thing, to be treating the first pararaph as a set of policy proposals, rather than a pen-sketch of one reading of 19th century history. The second is largely descriptive as well, on my reading. Oh well, it's a nice break from arguing (pro, mostly) about all-women shortlists on Twitter.

Deindustrialisation and the growth of a market society have accelerated the long historical decline of the puritan moral economy that underpinned British capitalism. Individual self control, hard work and a willingness to delay or forego reward and gratification provided a social glue and the purposefulness of a national, imperial destiny. These values were an essential element of the dominant class culture that was passed down from father to son. The narrative of a patriarchal social order that they sustained ensured the reproduction of normative family and social relations, status hierarchies and moral values. They transmitted a common life down through the generations – mankind, fraternity, masterful, sons of free men, faith of our fathers. This patrimony has now been fragmented and disrupted by changing cultural attitudes, new patterns of work and the growing independence of women. An inter-generational rupture was most evident in the emergence of the youth and counter-cultures of the the 1960s and the growth of social movements around gay and lesbian liberation, women’s liberation and black identity politics. Francis Fukuyama declared the 1970s to be the period of the ‘Great Disruption’, such was the rate of change in earlier patterns of life. Uneven changes in patrimony have continued ever since at different rates within different classes and with variations of causes.

Despite the greater independence it has brought women, they have borne the brunt of the changes. The strains placed on women’s unpaid labour and time make family life for many difficult to sustain. Economic participation has brought with it time poverty and work related stress. Research shows high levels of mental ill health amongst girls and women. While the pressures on women as employees, carers and housekeepers have intensified, it is men who have been identified as the gender disorientated by the changes. Men’s incomes have stagnated, the old ‘family wage’ has disappeared, and for increasing numbers the traditional role of family breadwinner and head of household is unattainable. The loss of patrimony, the rise of single-parent households, and women’s challenge to men’s traditional roles, have led to recurring moral panics about a crisis in masculinity, family and fatherhood. The 1990s witnessed a growing consensus of opinion in the media and popular literature that men were emotionally inarticulate, socially and personally disoriented and demoralised.

There we go.

Data In The Crosstabs May Appear More Statistically Significant Than They Are

2011-06-22T06:57:00.003+01:00

The vast majority of opinion pollsters now, thankfully, publish the information which underlies their work, and it's therefore possible to look at the detailed data and analyse it. It is also, statistically speaking, a nonsense - almost completely pointless - and yet I spend a lot of my time doing it, because it's interesting.

The reason it is nonsense is weighting. Pollsters have got very good at ensuring that their overall poll is largely representative of the UK population - the right number of men, the right number of women, the right number of middle class people and the right number of working class people (or at least ABC1s and C2DEs). They are much less good at sub-weighting, as you might expect because it's fiendishly difficult. So you could create a 'balanced poll' by interviewing mostly old working class people and young middle class people, and claim it's representative. Of course if one party came up with a policy that was popular with one mix and not the other (say, higher inheritance tax used to support first time buyers) this would mean the polls could swing wildly for no obvious reason.

Statisticians, close your ears now, but given a piece of information which may be wrong by 10% either way, I'll assume that on average it's more likely that either to be right, or thereabouts. If it's random noise, long-term averaging might help. If it's a sampling anomaly, it'll just compound the error.

Having given that caveat, I thought it would be interesting to look at last week's polls - ComRes published a poll based on data from the 15th/16th June, ICM published a poll based on data frp, the 17th to the 19th, and YouGov publish a poll daily during the week on a 2-days-of-polling basis, so I'm going to take their poll published in the Sunday Times, and polled on the 16th and 17th. So we're dealing with roughly the same time period, and the headline party voting intentions aren't all that different, as below.

Pollster	Labour	Tory	Lib Dem
Comres	37	37	11
YouGov	42	37	10
ICM	39	37	12

So the key variable is the Labour vote, and in fact there's not a huge difference even in that. However there is in the cross-tabs. These are least reliable for ICM, who apparently only interviewed 1000 people, of whom 732 people who expressed a voting intention. ComRes interviewed a total of just over 2000, and YouGov just under 2500. Some interesting differences between the pollsters appear in the detailed data.

Example #1: Age. YouGov separates one group into the "over 60s", and gives the Tories a 1% lead. As discussed before, this bumps around, and has been on a downward trend, though 1% is still an outlier to some degree. ICM look at the over 65s, where they give the Tories a 6% lead. ComRes also look at the over-65s, and they find a massive Tory lead in older people, on its own accounting for the difference between the surveys. With them, Tories lead among the over-65s by 52% to 25%, with 13% for the Lib Dems and 5% for UKIP. In revenge, YouGov records a lead for Labour with the under-25s of only 17%, whereas ComRes have it at 33%, and ICM at 36%.

Example #2: Class. Here YouGov simply talk of ABC1 and C2DE - a little unhelpfully I think, C1 and C2 are quite different from the groups immediately below them. They give the Tories a 4% lead in the ABC1 group, and Labour a 17% lead in the C2DE set. ICM and ComRes both disaggregate, showing a similar, but less steep, gradient, from AB, C1, C2, to DE. ICM give this, expressed as a Tory lead, as +9, -2, -12, -16, and ComRes as +10, +2, -3, -11. There is then, a difference of opinion on the Labour share of the C2DE vote. ComRes have it at 39%, ICM at 42%, and YouGov at 47%. YouGov and ICM concur that Labour has 38% of the ABC1 vote, ComRes give us only 34%. some more of the difference identified.

Example #3: Gender. ICM give Labour a 2% lead among men, but a 5% lead among women. ComRes have Labour 1% ahead among men, and 2% behind among women, and YouGov have Labour ahead by 4% in both groups. Margin of error stuff, but illustrative of the risk of extrapolating a 'gender gap' from a single poll, since the two pollsters showing a gender gap show one of only 3%, and more importantly disagree about which direction it is in.

Example #4: Geography. The pollsters tend to cluster the regions differently, and the only geographic scale which tends to be directly comparable across different surveys is Scotland (don't call this a region in front of Scottish party members, they get annoyed, it's a nation). Here too there is divergence - though on a small sample size. YouGov has Labour on 41%, way ahead of the SNP on 26% (and usually does for Westminster voting intentions, even in some polls while the SNP were ahead in the Holyrood election campaign). ICM agrees that Labour is doing well, on 43% in Scotland, but thinks the SNP are doing even better, on 44%. This is mainly at the expense of the Tories, who are on 21% with YouGov, but 8% with ICM. ComRes has the SNP on 38%, Labour down on 31%, and the Tories on 17%.

That'll do for now, I think. Sorry if you were hoping I'd tell you which is the best pollster. For what it's worth, YouGov have the largest sample size, ICM were the most accurate in 2010.

The Request Slot: Gay rights and el Socialismo Azul

2011-06-19T14:32:00.003+01:00

Various traps exist at the interface between theory and ideas, and politics and policy. One of those is that fallen into by many Marxists, which is to assume that the works of the original theorist must be complete for all time, and answer all questions, even when the wider context has changed. Political thought then becomes a process not of analysis and debate, but of exegesis and attempts by different factions to prove that Marx's writings support their position. It's an odd parallel with the way debates sometimes occur in Christianity about moral issues which simply didn't exist 2000 years ago.

What I think would be most dangerous of all for Blue Labour (or, as I am now calling it following an excellent article in a Spanish newspaper, el Socialismo Azul) would be if it became a process of examining the works of Maurice Glasman and attempting to interpret their political message in a way which goes wildly beyond what is actually written. At the same time, it would be worrying if it weren't possible to extract at least something of relevance to a broad range of issues from what is a wide-ranging political perspective.

So when @benrossmackay asked me on Twitter "What does Blue Labour say about gay rights and what is the makeup of the 'family' it emphasises?", I had a number of reactions; things like 'how in the hell should I know', and 'I'm not sure it, insofar as there is an 'it', says anything at all, or has so far', leading gradually to the thought 'I need a bit of time to answer this properly', which, happily, was available. I'm not sure how I became one of the go-to guys for "what Blue Labour thinks", but I guess if you blog about something often enough, and answer questions on Twitter, it happens organically.

Blue Labour is a set of thinkers (and do-ers, by the way) and a way of looking at politics, both historically and at a point in time. It's not an organised faction, still less is it democratically centralist. It's therefore more than likely that if you asked different people who have been associated with Blue Labour, you'd get different answers. As it is, I have struggled to find anything said by anyone associated with Blue Labour about the issue at all. A few people have argued against Blue Labour by saying it's opposed to things like gay rights, but it's not clear where they've got that from.

At the outside, a pro-Blue Councillor on the Radio 4 programme says that people in his area are more concerned by finding work and paying the bills than by gay marriage and all women shortlists. So far, so Maslow. Marc Stears talks of the need to secure social progress from the bottom up, of the passing of an era when it was useful to have "a sense that liberalism belongs to a particular group of people who “know better” and we need to invest them with the power because they’ll do the good things for us". Jonathan Rutherford's article in the Blue Labour e-book says this - dissect it if you wish;

On wider social questions, the tension between New and Blue opens up terrain for Labour to rediscover a morally engaged voice, while not sacrificing its proud tradition of defending civil rights and opposing discrimination. Family policy would start with the
pressures of bringing up children and making ends meet: low wages, long hours and expensive childcare. Marriage would be cherished as a precious institution, though not degraded by using the tax system to promote it. Civil partnerships would be celebrated as
much for the value we place on loving, stable and committed relationships as the blow they strike for gay rights.

More widely, here's where I'm at; I don't pretend to be an expert on this area of policy, so if I inadvertently say something that is seen as offensive, just ignore me, I do it a lot. If I'm being deliberately offensive, it's usually quite obvious.This is merely my take on it. As is traditional in political speechmaking, I've got three main points;

1) At its core Blue Labour is a message about the relationship between people and other people, between subjective and objective value, between labour and capital, and between state, individual, community and society. It sees relationships, and the ability for people to create the good life (and the good life as they define it for themselves, rather than as it is defined for them by the state), as fundamental. It therefore seems to me that it would be inconsistent with Blue Labour to have a politics which got in the way of people for whom the good life was a same-sex relationship being able to fulfil that. It would also emphasise that lived experience is about more than legal rules and decisions made in Westminster.

As Reema Patel argued on the (unofficial, as far as I know, though what would 'official' mean in this context?) Blue Labour blog, "This is about working alongside individuals and communities; it is about a smarter state, one that recognises that what needs to be done to facilitate access to good education or job opportunities might well be very different in the North than in the Home Counties, or for Muslims rather than atheists, or for gay people in Essex rather than gay people in London."

2) Some people don't fully support gay rights. This number can be exaggerated, and it's prone to a caricature by those painting Blue Labour as primarily about "Faith, Family and Flag" (something which it is necessary to keep repeating, Glasman has never said, and was attributed as a description of Blue Labour by someone who may be Blue, but isn't Labour), and a narrow understanding of what it means to get back in touch with working class voters. In fact, the polling evidence doesn't support that position, for example while 21% tell YouGov they oppose civil partnerships, there is barely any class difference; the margin-of-error gap between the 19% of ABC1s opposed and the 23% of C2DE can in all likelihood be wholly accounted for by the higher prevalence of strongly religious groups among the working class. Still, that leaves us with 1 in 5 Labour voters who are turned off by the inclusion of civil partnerships in the list of Labour achievements.

I think what Blue Labour would say here is that it is opposed to an ideological purity test for activists; the Living Wage campaign had religious groups at its heart, and it's fair to say that they probably had differences of opinion on gay rights. It is possible to disagree with them on that, but work with them on the issues of common ground; despite the high-profile altercation with the SWP, I don't recall anyone proposing that the protests against the John Snow pub were illegitimate because they were led by a libertarian. Why he didn't defend people's right to regulate the use of their private property as they saw fit I don't know, but there we are. So if you can be in favour of gay rights, but also in favour of poverty pay, it must logically be possible to be the opposite, and a political movement that says you can only be part of it if you adhere to every orthodoxy is doomed to failure. A minimum of respect for others in the work of the movement, and for the principle of equality, sure, but not an entrance exam for campaigners.

3) Blue Labour would probably want to ask a question about the balance between liberal rights and equality, and substantive rights and equality. Not being an expert, I will go no further than to say it would ask the question - but ask it nonetheless. Did our ability to set up structures which improved the legal framework for gay people and couples in principle run ahead of our ability to incorporate a genuine understanding of the lived experience for gay people in practice? For example, while we were removing Section 28, we were increasing the extent to which university students were means tested on the basis of, and therefore dependent on contributions from, their parents' income. In the post-Macpherson world of 'indirect institutional discrimination', can we look back and say we didn't give enough thought to what that might mean for the gay children of homophobic parents? Similarly, I remember lots of "most gay-friendly company to work for" awards / lists being available in graduate recruitment scheme handbooks, I'm not sure such a list exists down the job centre. Contributions from the better informed are welcome, at the usual place.

Maurice Dancing: more on 1945

2011-06-16T21:09:00.004+01:00

There's a danger this week that this will become the "sticking up for Maurice Glasman" blog of choice. I could write about the areas in which I disagree with him, but frankly disputes about, say, the smoking ban (which I think is great, and he thinks is anti-pleasure), are rather last decade. What I did want to talk about quickly was the art of selective quotation. Earlier today, I read the following tweet from a journalist;

michaelsavage Goodness. Lord Glasman, Ed Mili's Blue Labour chum, thinks 1945 reforms were "a calamity". Not sure Team Ed will agree. http://t.co/cjYq5ds

I'll freely admit that my first thought was "Oh hell, what's Maurice said now?". I've seen him often enough, and read enough of what he writes, to have a handle on his style and the meaning of much of the Blue Labour agenda - and I like it. However, he does enjoy being controversial - 'agitational', as he would call it - and doesn't always choose words with popularity in mind, 'Blue' being a case in point. This wouldn't be the first time I've had to talk about the 1945 problem, either.

So, I had been meaning to look at the video to which this refers, having unfortunately been unable to go to the event itself. Doubly annoying, as Jesse Norman is one of my favourite Tories, representing one of my favourite parts of the country. Follow the link yourself as the whole thing is quite fascinating. If, though, you want to read the comment of Glasman's which was summarised above as "1945 reforms were a calamity", here it is. He's talking about his desire to create intermediate institutions, and the damage done to the English working class between 1832 and the arrival of the early welfare state.

"Ultimately, the only institution which was powerful enough to resist the domination of that force was the state. All our intermediate institutions, with the exception of our universities, and to some extent the Catholic church which did stand stubborn in defiance of the state and the market, ended up with this state market, and while we had a very traditional political culture, we'd lost a huge amount of our lived traditions through that process of commodification and then nationalisation. And what happened with nationalisation is the reason why, despite the huge affections that I have for the National Health Service and other things, the reason why 1945 was such a calamity was that the nationalisation model did not engage with vocation, did not engage with any worker representation within it, was entirely the same kind of utilitarian managerialism - so with the breakdown of the nationalisation model, there was no alternative to Thatcherism".

So, the institutions created by 1945 are ones he holds in great affection, the key problem is that workers weren't sufficiently empowered, and the calamity was that the model adopted sowed the long-term seeds of the Thatcher counter-revolution. A bit different from what one might assume was implied by the tweet, I think, and not unreasonable.

Open to a counter-critique, certainly, but not the tedious "he's right-wing/a tory" that we are still hearing so much of. In fact, he's not a million miles away from some of those who launched an intellectual assault on the state from the left in the 1970s (though, I think, an order of magnitude better on how the problem might be solved).

Some Old Politics #9

2011-06-13T08:03:00.006+01:00

Well, old-ish;

"Never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to ﬁnd in real life. Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain."

from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes

Blue Labour: Glasman "below the line"

2011-06-12T13:16:00.000+01:00

I don't know about you, but I often find that politicians say more interesting things at meetings once they get past the prepared speech (that someone else probably wrote 80% of) and start taking questions from the audience. Now, I have no doubt that Maurice Glasman wrote all of the Guardian article in his name which appeared in response to Billy Bragg's odd outburst against Blue Labour, and to which, among other things, I have enthusiastically linked when people have asked for an explanation of Blue Labour.

What I had not noticed, until just now, is that on the fourth page of comments, he came back (it reads like him, anyway, and I imagine if it was fake someone would have noticed) and addressed a lot of the points which had been made by commenters. I think it's also worth a read, particularly given the constant desire to quote him out of context and dismiss him as either a Trot, a Thatcherite, too intellectual, not intellectual enough (pick one according to taste).

He is blunter about Blue Labour's relationship with (or attitude to) progressivism, and the role he sees in politics for people who are motivated by religious faith. Anyway, here it is;

Quite a few posts, including those that were friendly, expressed concerns about the 'blue' word. The main reason I stick with it is agitational. I think that new labour was much too progressive, as was old labour, under Kinnock and Hattersley. Progressive politics despises tradition, and for that reason cannot engage with loss, grief and dispossession. It has a superficial optimism about the future and is entirely lacking in a sense of sadness and tragedy. Things cannot only get better. Capitalism is progressive, it has a contempt for customs and the meaning of things, and is concerned only with their price. That is why the Billingsgate Porters mean so much to me. The City of London Corporation are the inheritors of enormous wealth, power and privilege. They have endured for a thousand years and progressives cannot comprehend how the most unreformed city in Europe can be the promoters of the dominion of finance capital which demands flexibility from labour and deregulation. They are the political representatives of the banks yet they remain as invisible as their earnings.

So I think that a radical politics must also value meaning and tradition, and I think that Labour politics has a large dose of it, when it is at its best, but we have lost it. New Labour in general has a contempt for the everyday virtues of friendship, solidarity, reciprocity, courage and loyalty preferring progressive abstract concepts like equality, efficiency and fairness. This led to a remorseless, almost Maoist, managerialism that permeated everything. It was all about change but it was really more of the same. By placing all emphasis on abstract ends the workforce were viewed as a problem to be solved at best and as 'forces of conservatism' most of the time. A democratic politics of the common good will also involve building relationships with people who value the forests and the countryside, who care about their families and wish to defy the market which endlessly disrupts their relationships. It will also be framed by a vision of England that will be patriotic, as the good of the country is a common good. Labour is a radical tradition that was built by working people out of their common experience of dispossession and exploitation. It is a far richer mix, and includes Catholic and Protestant christianity, than the progressive mind will admit.

So Labour needed to be reminded of the things that people value. Democratic politics, for me, is how we protect the people and the things that we love from commodification by the market, and also domination by the state. Association, organisation and common action are what we need, around things that people care about.

I have never said, and do not build my politics around, family, faith and flag but each are important to my politics. Family life is a central concern for all people who are not progressive. It demands a loyalty, faithfulness and love that are the cradle of socialism. If at all possible we should love our parents and children, and if we don't, its bad news all round. Capitalism with its stress on individual careers and an unrelational form of self-fulfilment is very disruptive of family life and Labour should resist that by supporting a living wage, by interest rate caps that limit the debt burden, by strengthening local economies that mean that we don't have to live hundreds of miles way from our mum to earn a living.

In my work with London Citizens I learnt a huge among from faith communities about association, a good life and democratic politics. They invented the living wage as a means of strengthening family life and they turned up to support it when the unions didn't, and the same applied to the strangers into citizens campaign that supported citizenship for illegal migrants. I think that Labour is either about a common life or it is liberalism. This means building alliances with people who believe in god. I think that there is a great political tradition of liberty and tradition in England that is unique and I owe this country my life.

The bad news is that none of this is marketing, or cynical positioning but a genuine expression of my politics. I am not surprised by the enemies it has provoked but by how many friends it has made.

If the thing I disagree with most is the use of 'old Labour' as a description of Kinnock and Hattersley (though I think it's as stupid a description of Foot and co, as well, so perhaps it's a phrase better not used at all), he's probably doing ok by me.

The age gap - some issues

2011-06-10T07:21:00.011+01:00

I tend to jinx things by talking about them, and the age gap shot back up yesterday, but Labour maintains its stronger-than-usual performance with the over-60s, on 37% to the Tories' 43% - it was the youth element that meant the gap grew, with Labour grabbing a record (in my time series) 32% lead, on 55% to the Tories' 23%. Probably a blip, but not unwelcome for that.

On the basis that the shift towards Labour in older voters is the more stable part of the trend, I thought it might be interesting to go back to the YouGov polls since the local elections (the period over which the age gap appears to have narrowed overall) and look at changes in which party people support most strongly on each issue; here are the graphs for the over-60s.

There are only three data points in each case, as YouGov ask this once a fortnight, so it's not exactly political science (though of course people often dismiss a 3% lead as "margin of error" without noting that the 'margin of error' means it's as likely to be wrong in the sense of really being 6% as it is to be wrong in the sense of really being a dead heat).

Of course, none of this deals with the relative salience of issues. There is some data on that, which I may look at next week, but from memory it mainly says "older people care more about pensions policy".

So;

YouGov actually say 'law and order', which I think helps the Tories a little bit more than just saying 'crime' would, but not massively.

Not a huge shift - a bit of a loss of confidence in the Tories, probably coinciding with the Ken Clarke fiasco. Labour don't appear to have benefitted from it.

Conservatives heading down from a high base, and Labour up from a low one. This is among older voters who are generally more sympathetic to the Conservatives, so it's not entirely a disaster at this point, or something we shouldn't expect, that the Tories are ahead on it. Narrowing the gap from 17% to 9% is good news, if it continues.

The less said the better, to be honest. Even among Labour voters, only 41% think Labour are the best party on asylum and immigration. The Lib Dems do better, gathering 51% of their own supporters, but of the rest, 28% back the Tories, and 6% Labour. Some progressive coalition you've got there.

Of course, there's no qualitative measure of the data. I have e-mailed YouGov in the past for instance to ask what they mean when they ask "Do you feel the number of asylum seekers has got better or got worse". They don't say since when, or define 'better' and worse. Still though, I don't think it's hard to guess in which direction most people who aren't supporting us feel our policies were mistaken.

The age gap is not much in evidence, perhaps surprisingly. Labour are even more unpopular with the young on asylum/immigration, gathering 14% support, as against the 17% shown here (though so are the Conservatives, with a higher proportion of "don't knows".

A growing Labour lead suggests this was the right issue to go big on this week. The Labour lead is much larger on the NHS among the young, at 25%, which suggests a communication problem, since the old are substantially more left-wing on the NHS, according to the recent YouGov@Cambridge poll.

Crossover on what is likely to be an important issue for the duration of this Parliament - though mainly due to Conservative collapse than a Labour surge.We'll see if that's maintained; I think we should keep on making noise about some headline proposals to get unemployment down, but realistically the narrative on this will mostly be driven by the data.

On not being a progressive

2011-06-08T07:54:00.096+01:00

I doubt I'll shock anyone when I say that I'm not a progressive, or at least that I don't consider myself to be one - apart from anything else it's a conversation that often goes in circles round the 140 characters of Twitter, but one I thought probably deserved a slightly longer write-up. It's also unfortunate (welcome to the Blue Labour debate) that the opposite of progressive is generally seen as conservative, and that this gets confused with Conservative (a party which is certainly not conservative). Clear as mud. Of course I support progressive taxation, but then since our tax system spent most of my life becoming less progressive, that meant I wanted to conserve something.

Anyway. I'm not a progressive because I don't believe change is automatically, or even usually, for the better. GA Cohen explained this with an extended analogy about a college (long, but worth watching). Gladys Knight put it more simply - "as bad as we think they are, these will become the good old days for our children". Of course science and technology advance, but to read across from that and assume that politics (or, perhaps, even society) move in the same way, seems optimistic at best. It appears that, in this if nothing else, I am normal, and it's the progressives who are unusual.

Related to this is a problem across much of the left in particular to assume that the grass is greener on the other side. Since I am a million miles away from that mindset, I don't fully understand it, but it seems to be "Imagine a substantive change you would like; think of an unrelated procedural change; convince yourself that the latter will deliver the former".

So whether it was the revival of radical socialism that was going to come with AV, the flowering of international solidarity we were going to get by joining the Euro, or the mass democratic renewal that will come by electing 80 senators for 15 years each on the basis of regional STV, energy is diverted from campaigning for substantive change, to campaigning for procedural change. Which is not to say that process doesn't matter - the institutions which mediate political debate impact massively on the eventual outcomes, of course. A list of things I waste time being against when there are bigger battles to fight, there.

More importantly, 'progressive' is a word whose meaning shifts according to who is using it. So, when people wanted to cobble-together an anti-Tory Parliamentary alliance after the last General Election, they dubbed it the "progressive coalition". When people want to pretend the left has been disadvantaged primarily by the electoral system rather than by often being less popular, they talk of a 'progressive majority'. When David Cameron wants to sound like a moderate, he talks of Progressive Conservatism. Of course, the "Not left or right, but forward" model of spatial politics was introduced to our discourse by David Icke, but never mind.

I don't make a habit of linking to Lib Dems, but Andrew Emmerson cites a relevant opinion poll, pointing out that in the public mind, "progressive" is devoid of almost all political content. A majority think it is about being "reforming" or "modernising". An appreciable number think it is about being "enterprising" or "advanced". Bringing up the rear are those who believe it means being liberal (16%) or left-wing (7%). On this basis, Cameron's right - the Coalition is progressive too. Blair was particularly progressive - to the point of neophilia, some of the time it felt as though something merely needed to exist for the government to seek to change it. Organisational restructuring, particularly in health, was done, undone, and redone faster than anyone could realistically hope to evaluate its impact.

Still, there's a vacancy for a better word, here. Radical conservatism makes a neat sort of intellectual sense, but is even worse marketing than Blue Labour. People calling themselves progressives (hello the London County Council) have done important and valuable things in the history of the left. But I want things to be better, not different for the sake of it, especially not if it puts us at risk of losing that which is already good. If I'm really lucky, by 2015 that'll be what people think of when they hear the word "Labour".

Is the age gap closing?

2011-06-07T06:19:00.008+01:00

While it's the headline numbers everyone focuses on, there's a wealth of data in each YouGov poll, and helpfully they are very prompt in putting it up. Of course, the more detail you go into, the smaller the sample size, and therefore the larger the margin of error. Nonetheless, there's been a bit of an overall trend in a few recent polls.

Normally, and I think this is true in much of the world, young people are more left-wing than older people. That much is still true in the UK. I won't misattribute Georges Clemenceau's words to Churchill, but you get the general idea. This month though, things are a bit less clear. Here's a 3-day rolling average (to strip out the noise) of, respectively, the Labour Lead among young people (18-24) and the Tory lead among older people (60+).

I'm no statistician, but I'd say they're both broadly on a downward trend over the month. The picture becomes more stark if you add them together to get a "total age gap", and a chart which should in principle be independent of the move between the two parties in the population in general.

This is important of course not only because the older population is growing, but because - try as we might - turnout among younger people is constantly much lower than it is among older people; arguably one of the reasons the Tories somewhat outperformed expectations at the local elections, and why the Lib Dems didn't match their poll ratings at the General Election.

Of course they could shoot up tomorrow and render this meaningless - there was one poll in the last week which showed the Tories leading by 20% among the over 60s, but there were four which showed them leading by 3% or less (and a further one splitting the difference at 12%). I certainly think there is some persistent age gap, I'm not expecting the trend to extrapolate to zero, unless the parties start taking some unusual policy positions.

What's going on? I asked Twitter last night and opinions vary. I think it might be Kenneth Clarke (peak media storm, 18th May) and Southern Cross (headline news for the last week or so) as these correlate with the two biggest moves. Alternative explanations have been raised including the higher impact of cuts on older people, or the threats to public sector pensioners.

I'm hoping to revisit later in the week and see if I can extract some more useful data.

This is a local debate, for local people.

2011-05-26T07:10:00.011+01:00

I like internal debate. I think it's healthy. It depresses me that people can't legitimately and honestly disagree about some issues within a political party without the media portraying it as a damaging split, nor indeed often without it leading to the formation of cliques who seek to advance other members based on a narcissism of small differences, rather than recognising talent across the movement.

I might sometimes wish for the neo-Blairites to shut up a bit, but I don't think most of them should leave the party, nor that they aren't entitled to their view (though could phrase it more constructively). Similarly, I think we've been too trigger-happy expelling some people on the left, particularly after there had ceased to be any serious prospect that the party would be "captured" by an entryist political tendency.

However, I think internal debate should be just that. If people who are not part of the party want to offer their interesting and erudite advice about where the party should go, they're welcome to do so - but it is not their choice. It's ours. You only get to say things like "Labour needs to hold fast to its most important values", if there is a possible world in which you are part of the "Labour" you are talking about.

So it is with the Ed Rooksby hatchet job on Glasman which is being reposted and tweeted as the latest attempt to explain why nobody really needs to think about what Blue Labour has been saying. It is, at least, a little better than the Billy Bragg piece - it is guilty only of deliberate distortion, rather than wilful misinterpretation - though all the more poisonous for that. It is, in a hilarious jape, filed under the Guardian story category "The Far Right". Ho ho ho. A Labour Jew, you see, he must be a fascist. We've been here before. I'm not a Glasman worshipper - he can be attention seeking, controversial for the sake of it, and sometimes outright wrong, but there's no doubt in my mind that he's the most interesting, radical, and politically productive thinker we've got at the moment, and in my experience a nice guy.

So to get around the problem that the truth is much better than the author wishes, the story ascribes to Blue Labour things nobody putting it forward has said. Apparently Blue Labour "frequently invokes the white working class". Yet if you google "Blue Labour", "White Working Class", of the top 10 results, 9 are attacking Blue Labour, and one is commentary on it by a Tory. The Rooksby article skips from talking of the e-book, to scare quotes around "white working class", as if quoting directly, but the only use of the word white (apart from in the name of one of the contributors) in the entire book is in what I think is a rather good, and not at all racist, section of Jon Wilson's article;

"The effect of nostalgia might, then, be to disconnect us from the way life is actually lived in the here and now. I wonder if this is how nostalgia functions within branches of big-C Conservative thought
that combine a backward looking Toryism with free market capitalism. A romanticised image of how life used to be is celebrated and used to sanctify present-day institutions. But because the past is invoked as an image separate from present-day life, we can get on with money-making and ruling with no practical respect for the continuities of the past.

It is this nostalgic approach to culture and identity that marks Enoch Powell’s conservatism, which as Jonathan suggests instigated Thatcher’s revolution. A romanticised image of community life in an all-white England was essential to Powell and Thatcher’s politics. That nostalgic past was central to mobilising support; but it made no moral claims on how we should act out our political or economic lives in the present. The result was an amoral politics, and for many a self-hating attitude to their own present-day lives.

Our task should instead to be make the past real. It is to recognise that the traditions that give us dignity and meaning have had a continuous existence, surviving even through their darkest moments.
In embedding our politics in the locally-rooted, settled sense of the common good which Jonathan advocates, it is not enough to simply hark back or invoke. We need to trace the practical lines of continuity, finding not just the common forms of meaning but the practical forms of common life that stretch back into the past."

Similarly multiculturalism rates one mention in the book, with Jonathan Rutherford making what I think is an unanswerable point, which is that if you are a genuine and consistent advocate of a celebratory multiculturalism, you have to come to terms with those people whose cultural identity is "English" and find inclusive ways for that identity to be expressed, or at least ones which allow for the presence of other distinct and overlapping identities.

But setting aside the distortions and half-truths in the article. My main problem with it is that it is pitched as a contribution to Labour's internal debate from someone who is an implacable opponent of Labour - a revolutionary Marxist who avowedly doesn't believe in parliamentary Socialism.

I don't know about you, but I'd be more careful about quoting other people selectively, dishonestly, or out of context, if I wrote things like "It is right that revolutionaries should do everything they can to minimise the chances of chaotic violence and to minimise the chances of a situation coming about in which it is thought that firing squads are 'necessary'." and I'd certainly be more humble in my contributions to internal Labour debate if I had been a George Galloway supporter, and so committed to internal Labour debate that I valued it at £9.99 or below, writing "What I'm saying is that if there is a credible challenge to Blair from the Labour Left I might re-join the Labour Party on a temporary, no-illusions basis. Of course, the key factor here is the cost of membership - one has to get one's priorities right - if it's over a tenner you can forget it."

I've outlined why I don't think we can be "Just Labour", but whether we're Purple, Blue, or something else, we can at least be some sort of Labour, and respect one another's views more than those of self-serving interlopers whose aim is to do our party harm.

The Ken Clarke guide to getting away with it

2011-05-20T11:08:00.001+01:00

Let's imagine you've said something stupid. Something unbearably stupid. Worse, it's clear that you haven't had a slip of the tongue, you are after all an experienced politician and former barrister. It's worse than that - you've accidentally said what you really think. What you need is the Ken Clarke guide to getting off the hook. Follow these simple steps:

1) Issue a non-apology. This is important, and you have to get the nuance exactly right. You have to apologise not for what you said, but for the possibility that anyone was offended by it. Essentially, you're sorry that they are too thick to understand your perfectly reasonable point, not sorry that you are a prehistoric idiot.

2) Get people to criticise you for something you didn't say. If you have said something indefensible, you can get a lot of mileage by pretending that you said something completely different. So if, to pick a hypothetical example, you have said that some categories of rape are "proper, serious rape" - meaning that some are not - it will make life much easier if you can get your friends in the media to suggest that your critics are simply criticising you for saying some categories are more serious than others, rather than your actual statement implying that some are not serious at all. If possible, get journalists so convinced that you said the thing you didn't say that they write articles criticising people who are angry about what you did say for thinking that you said it.

3) Muddy the issue. If you're an experienced politician and a barrister, you might have got good at arguing over the years. You might even realise immediately that you've said something really stupid. You could apologise straight away. Or, better, you could make something up. A good lie would be that rape figures include consensual underage sex. They don't, of course, but once the fiction is out there, people will remember folk-wisdom and schoolyard discussion of "statutory rape" and assume you have a point. Some will be so convinced that they'll go to great lengths trying to prove they weren't mistaken. For what it's worth, the charge of rape is open to the CPS (not compulsory, open) in cases of consensual sex where one partner was 12 or under. Not 15.

4) Look for unlikely allies. If you've been a Europhile Tory, or a tobacco lobbyist, you know that your allies might not always be where you expect. If you've accidentally said that some serious crimes aren't a big deal, and put forward a set of proposals meaning the average prison sentence served for rape would fall to 2 years, you may have to think creatively. One tactic would be to get the Prime Minister to appeal over the heads of the sane, to people on the left who also agree that crime (in general, you know) isn't such a big deal that people should go to prison for it. Ideally, you might want to create a split by changing the subject a third time, and arguing that condemnation of you was primarily based on your policy proposals, not your attitudes. If possible, call it a "lurch to the right", as if it's inherently more socialist to have rapists on the streets than in a prison. If your opponent has supported sensible criminal justice reforms, imply that this commits them for all time to supporting any reforms at all. It's working on the NHS, and cuts, so why not on crime?

5) Laugh. Laughing is brilliant. It'll make you look jovial on the telly. It'll wind up your critics in a way that makes them more likely to look like they're ranting, and it'll disarm the viewers. If you'd said what people are saying you said, surely that would be too serious to laugh about? You're just the jolly man, and this must all have been a big misunderstanding.

If all else fails, point to the alternatives, and make yourself unsackable. Remind the Lib Dems that you'd probably be replaced by a Eurosceptic. Persuade the left to accept a distinction between serious, proper Tories, and the nice sort, like you. You were after all attacked in the tabloids. Are the left saying the tabloids should dictate justice policy?

Blue Labour: A comparison with Blairism.

2011-05-19T07:12:00.008+01:00

Many of the things people said about Blue Labour following the launch of the e-book of ideas on Tuesday were too long to respond to properly on Twitter, though since I was tweeting interesting aspects of the e-book I had a go. Some of them probably deserve a blog-post of their own, and they ranged from the insightful, through the amusing, to the depressing.

The most annoying one, though, was the insistence by some who had heard the name but not troubled to find out anything else that Blue Labour constitutes reheated Blairism. Sure, it's at risk of colonisation from the right of the party, and it certainly has challenging messages for the left as well as the rest, but to my mind it's as far from Blairism as it's possible for a sensible Labour platform to be.

Here are five comparative reasons that Blue Labour isn't Blairism.

1) The Young Country. Even in the era of early Blair which many in Blue Labour feel had a lot to offer, there was a neophilia, and a year zero attitude. The notion that we could be "a young country" was a good rhetorical flourish, but it was a patent absurdity in any real sense. We can be a modern country, we can be a creative country, and we can be a leading country, but we can't be a young country - we are one of the oldest in the world, or depending how you look at it, a group of several of the oldest in the world. That creates a political map full of cloud-topped historical mountains, lush social valleys, and twisting attitudinal caves. Blue Labour looks for a socialism which plans political developments based on that existing map. Blairism too often believed that we could sweep everything away and start again. That is almost quintessentially unBritish. One might, if one were uncharitable, call it Napoleonic. In seeking to be "the political wing of the British people", Blairism posited an unsituated Britain, whose people were little more than the sum of their opinion poll responses. That wasn't good enough.
2) Progressives vs Conservatives. Tied in to the above, Blairism turned into a mania for change, sometimes as a substitute for, rather than a path to, improvement. When Blair said that the 21st century would not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism, he meant it - and he recognised that the forces of conservatism were not only in the Conservative Party - before the speech was over, spin doctors were briefing that he really meant the trade unions. Blue Labour, in contrast, recognises that in and of itself, change is just as likely to be for the worse as for the better. Indeed, factoring in negativity bias, it is likely that most people would choose no change over unpredictable change. Progressives believe in a rational, by which they mean mathematical, attitude to the value of things. Blue Labour believes we should also consider the subjective, and even sentimental, value of things. For those concerned that conservatism is too much like Conservatism, two things should reassure you. Firstly, the Conservatives ceased being conservative sometime in the 1970s - as Jon Cruddas says in the e-book, they are liberal and extreme. Secondly, the point that conservatism must be rescued from Conservatives was made most coherently by GA Cohen (here's a video), and he was a marxist. Good luck finding many of those in the Conservative Party.
3) Free market capitalism vs social capitalism. The economic philosophy of the Blair era was clear - allow people to get as rich as possible, get the government out of their way, and hope that this generated enough money to spend on improved public services without significant tax rises. The minimum wage helped, and inequality grew less quickly than it would have done without tax credits and other reforms, but there remained an inescapable sense that business - which always meant big business and finance capital above all - must have what it wanted, and that the role of the government was to provide better market conditions and a more acceptable workforce. Blue Labour, helped by the turn of the tide of history, entirely rejects that, arguing that as well as humanising the state, Labour's historic mission is to democratise the market, and tame finance capitalism. As Maurice Glasman puts it, the core of Blue Labour is resistance to commodification through democratic organisation - a radical tradition that pursues the common good. That means, among other things, structuring the economy to deliver investment where it delivers the best social returns, as well as simply the best financial returns. It also means recognising finance's massive destructive power, as well as its creative force.
4) Rights and responsibilities. Welfare states tend to conform to type, and while Blairite rhetoric emphasised the link between rights and responsibilities, the cash element of the welfare state remained under tight control through the New Labour era. The assumption was that a focus on the poorest, and on statistical dividing lines on one side of which lay "poverty" and on the other side "non-poverty" would deliver fairer outcomes. Too little was done to drag Britain away from its trend towards an American-style welfare regime. Sadly, while the logic of sharply focused redistribution is seductive, we know that it doesn't work. Welfare states achieve better redistributive outcomes when they have buy-in across social classes - whether because of a Scandinavian progressive universalism, or a Germanic social insurance model. The problem of the left in the Blair era was their desire to see a utopia in the Scandinavian model, which is not a possible future for Britain given our history and social attitudes. Blue Labour urges us to look again at how the German style of welfare could be incorporated into the British model, recognising that it delivers a level of redistribution close to the Scandinavian set-up, but in a way which looks increasingly more in tune with how the British define 'fairness', and for which they may be willing to pay.
5) Technocracy vs Democracy. I was terrified the other day, when I read that Luke Akehurst had suggested that one of the things that should be in the Refounding Labour consultation was 'more evidence-based policy-making'. As it turned out, what he meant was that we should involve more people and listen to them. That's good - I had a vision of reams of data and graphs (don't get me wrong, I love graphs), and experts telling us that policies had to be a particular way for reasons we couldn't quite be expected to understand. Too often, New Labour's response to criticism was to reach for the data. But as anyone who has worked in policy knows, up to a point evidence can be created to support the policy, a process we refer to as "policy-based evidence-making". Blue Labour valued knowledge and information, but it also values opinion and sentiment. The first reaction to those who disagree with us must be to understand what exactly they disagree about, and why, not to reach for a graph. Sometimes that will be the final point in the argument, but it shouldn't be the first. In a sense, Blue Labour, by choosing a confusing name, has failed its own test here, and got stuck on the tetchy, complicated side of the argument.

So, criticise Blue Labour if you want - I'd say it's too complicated and too diverse to be embraced or rejected wholesale by anyone, different people will like and dislike different bits - but do us the courtesy of making that criticism more substantive than "Yuk, it's Blairism".

Eurovision winners by voting system

2011-05-15T02:04:00.001+01:00

Because I have nothing better to do, or at least am avoiding doing it.

Borda Count (both as actually used, and without the 12 point bonus element): Azerbaijan.
Alternative Vote: Azerbaijan (by 20 to 19 in the final round, so not 50% of voters - oops!)
Approval Voting (or an approximation of it): Sweden (with the UK in 4th place under this system)
Supplementary Vote: Italy (with 22 votes to 13 for Bosnia Herzegovina)
First Past the Post: Bosnia Herzegovina (though if it were FPTP several of their backers would probably have voted tactically)
D'Hondt Party List PR: Half of Jedward, the Moldovan Unicyclist, and the French guy, singing Israel's 1992 6th-place entry "Ze Rak Sport". One of my Eurovision favourites, although it's no "My Lovely Horse".

In defence of Polychromatic Labour

2011-05-14T14:35:00.000+01:00

Every few days, someone from the Purple Book mob, or Blue Labour, or Compass, or someone else with a defined opinion, says something interesting about Labour's future on a blog or in the media. Might be right, might be wrong that's not the issue. We are then treated to a chorus on Twitter of "What's with all these colours? Why can't we just be LABOUR!" and it gets retweeted by a bazillion people. No names named, lots of people have said it. Anyway, I thought I'd answer the question.

No, we can't. Or, at least, not yet.

We never have been. For as long as there has been Labour, there have been different visions about what that means and what it should mean. My great aunt (deceased) joined the party in 1924, and could have enumerated the divisions of her lifetime, from the squabbles between ILPers and Fabians at the Labour League of Youth Summer Schools, through Bevanites against Gaitskellites, the organised factions of the Tribune, Campaign, and Solidarity Groups, and finally the mostly artificial division between Blairites, Brownites, and others.

None of those divisions destroyed the party - though some came close. Some of them were unhealthy, some of them created a tension that acted as a spur to creativity and innovation, some of them were almost completely pointless, based around personal rather than political differences. But almost anyone who had said to Bevan, or Gaitskell, that they should "just be Labour" would have been treated as patronising at best, and disingenuous at worst. "Just be Labour" almost always means "Just be my kind of Labour".

You don't have to agree with Blue Labour, or the Purple Bookers, to believe that at this point in the political cycle, we need to think about what our shared beliefs are, what we want to achieve, what does and doesn't work as a means to achieving that, and how that fits into a coherent narrative and is communicated to the voting public between now and the next general election, whenever that turns out to be.

I think it's healthy if people having that debate do so openly, and if there's a convenient shorthand to describe groups of people who largely agree with each other. I don't like the Lib Dem Orange Bookers, to be honest I'm not much of a fan of the Lib Dem Social Liberals, either, but I'm glad of a handle on the internal debate, what it means, and who is associated with which part of it. I have written before about the problems with the Blue Labour branding, despite my warm feelings towards most of the ideas it puts forward. I have no problem with Chuka Umunna's attempt to move Blue Labour forward into a "One Nation Labourism", but I'm not sure it addresses the branding difficulties any better than Blue.

Consider for a moment the alternatives to having those positions. To my mind, all of them are worse. We could;

Not have a wide-ranging discussion about positions which cluster together and the holistic vision for the party, but instead just deal with issues one at a time. Debate our policy on regulation of finance, then our position on employment policy, then our position on welfare reform, then our position on work-life balance, and identify ourselves issue by issue. So I'm not "Blue Labour", I'm "In favour of reciprocal welfare regimes and decentralisation and a more socially rooted model of economic growth and better employment rights". Beyond about five or six policies, this is going to get messy, and at best lead us to present the public with a pick and mix manifesto, not a story about what we are as a party and what we plan for Britain.
Accept that there are coherent philosophical and political tendencies within the debate about Labour's future, but just talk about who has been giving them a voice, rather than try and create a shorthand. So I am not "Blue Labour", I'm "broadly supportive of the sort of things which have been said recently by Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford and Marc Stears and Jon Cruddas". I'd find this a bit tedious, not to say a hostage to fortune, but if it made people happier, we could start doing that. Wouldn't leave much room in 140 characters to set out what I actually think about them, though.
Identify the tendencies with the politicians who articulate them. To me this would be the worst of all possible worlds. It would have been much healthier if Blair and Brown had picked colours than to allow the media to group people into Blairites and Brownites. It both caricatured New Labour as a monolithic group when in fact it always contained different currents within it, frightened MPs into saying something that would make them be perceived as picking the wrong side in the Blair-Brown battle, and allowed Brown to appear as "the alternative" without having to do very much in terms of differentiation to earn that perception. Bad enough in Government, but pointlessly unnecessary in opposition.
Just let the leader decide. If we don't want to have the debate, don't want to admit that we have different positions, and just want to be Labour, then it seems to me that there's only one coherent way that can be achieved. We all shut up. We stop blogging and tweeting other than to reinforce the agreed party line and attack whichever coalition partner we hate most this week. We let Ed Miliband talk to the Blues, the Purples, the Reds and whoever else, at private seminars, and then we wait for him to come down from the mountain with tablets of stone and tell us what the policy is going to be. It's not the worst situation in the world, it's more or less how we reviewed our policies between 1994 and 1997 - but then most people didn't have the internet then, for starters, and there was clearly one dominant broad ideological direction.

What I find most odd is the visceral reaction to colours. For all the ~~stupid nonsense~~distinctive contributions to policy put out over recent years by Compass, Progress, or whoever, hardly anyone ever used to say "Why can't we stop being Compass or Progress and just start being Labour", although God knows there were times when they should have done. They said "Look at this interesting new blog/pamphlet/article, here are the bits I agree/disagree with".

Let's do that instead.

Blue Labour and 1945

2011-05-11T07:28:00.002+01:00

Last night I went to a Progress debate on the question of whether the party has to choose between Blue Labour and New Labour (I think eventually it probably does, Progress are I imagine terrified of that prospect). Maurice Glasman was on particularly good form.

There seems, though, to have been an outbreak of bizarre misinterpretation going on following that meeting. There are all sorts of things arising from it that I'd like to write about, but no real urgency. What does matter is the question of our attitude as a party to 1945. A few points on that;

The specific statement that has set this off was phrased as "1945 was a victory from which Labour never recovered". That phrasing comes with a specific context; it was also made by Phil Collins, who was clearly on the "New" side of the evening's debate. Here's a bit of context on him, and here he is trying to decide for himself whether to attack Blue Labour, or take it over. I've said before, as have others, that the key risk for the left in the party is that New Labour manages to take over Blue Labour because the left don't engage, and that becomes the new majority - this is a case in point.
Regardless of the fact that he clearly doesn't speak for Blue Labour, there is a "1945 problem", and this particular furore demonstrates it well. That the 1945 Government was so successful on its own terms has led to an idolisation of it in Labour debate which can neglect the fact that it isn't, in fact, 1945 any more. Those accusing Blue Labour of nostalgia, take note. Argument by analogy from 1945 can lead to some bizarre proposals in the 21st Century, as well as some good ones.
Glasman's take on this is, I think, more nuanced. He described it this way to the BBC - "1945 was a wonderful achievement of solidarity, but the sting in the tail was that it broke all the mutual solidarity - the ways we took care of each other - and handed them over to the state".
I think that criticism has merit - it may be that it was inevitable, or at least a price worth paying, but it's not something we should ignore - the Morrison's defeat in Cabinet over how to bring the NHS about, or the state administration of the Beveridge settlement for welfare, both brought about a welfare statecraft centred around SW1, and managed by civil servants*. The 1945 generation sought, quite reasonably, to do a lot of good in a hurry with the power they had acquired - that of a majority in a sovereign Parliament. Still, a collective amnesia set in, and over time the welfare state - despite having been created by the political agency of working class mobilisation - became seen as something done to people, or at best for them, not by them.
Even allowing that the specific path chosen in 1945 was right at the time, it turned out in the case of core welfare (ie cash and quasi-cash benefits) not to work out very well in the long-term. Even in the era of full employment, the Beveridge welfare system was far from universal, and numbers on national assistance as opposed to national insurance quickly began to creep back up. Our centralised and technocratic system was then less resilient to the onslaught of neoliberalism than those based on social insurance, or progressive universalism, or the active involvement of trade unions in delivery.

We're not the only country in the world with a welfare state, and while we should be proud of Labour's history, and defend the scale and scope of the UK's welfare settlement against right-wing attacks, it appears to me simply logical to recognise that in terms of what might be specifically termed social security, we have ended up with a system which is less generous, less redistributive, and less popular, than that of many neighbouring countries.

That's not something which suddenly happened after 1979, it was true before then, however much worse Thatcherism may have made it. Unless we deny that, or believe that Britons are innately more mean-spirited than citizens of other nations, we surely have to ask what it was about the way social security was set up in Britain that made it the case. That has to mean, at least among friends, a sensible analysis of what was right, wrong, and right at the time but wrong now, about the 1945 government.

* Incidentally, there's a respected branch of academic literature which says that this all happened because the UK had too many middle class people and not enough farmers, but let's bracket that for now. References available on request.

Blue Labour defended in 600 words

2011-05-10T07:10:00.000+01:00

That was the brief I was given by Liberal Vigil for a guest post, the result of which is here (and reproduced below for the sake of completeness).

Why do I engage with, and in many ways identify with, Blue Labour? Put simply, I believe that Blue Labour is in tune with Britain - our best chance both of gaining power, and of using that power to do lasting good. In addition, as a developing perspective on the future of Labour, it is open terrain - fought over, redefined, and at risk of capture by other ideological currents.

Recently we’ve seen a concerted effort by “Purple Labour” and Blairites to acquire Blue Labour as part of the renewal of their project. I fear that’s something the left will allow to happen, preferring to retain the ideological purity of being “Red Labour” than engage seriously in the battle to set the party’s future direction and policies.

The most obvious area where Blue Labour is in tune with the British, but where neither Labour (New or Old) or the Tories are, is in attitudes to the welfare state. Three quarters of Britons believe the gap between rich and poor is too large. Over half believe that ordinary people don’t get their fair share of our nation’s wealth. Yet only a third believe the government should redistribute money, or spend more on welfare for the poor. The left has been caught between an aspirational revisionism which wants to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about something the British people find objectionable, and an unachievable idealism which believes that from our starting point, there is a realistic journey that takes us to a Scandinavian welfare system.

There is no such journey, but America and Scandinavia are not the world’s only welfare regimes. The more regulatory welfare system found, for instance, in Australia, aims at narrowing the gap between rich and poor before the welfare state even comes into play. The progressive insurance system found in Germanic welfare states achieves both greater buy-in from the middle classes, stronger support in hard times, and yet more redistributive outcomes overall. Reciprocity, and the taming of capital’s relentless drive to widen inequality, are at the core of Blue Labour.

Blue Labour is also a politics of movement, "political" in the widest sense, supporting democratic self-organisation among people who seek to change their lives, their workplaces, and their communities for the better. It seeks not a ‘progressive consensus’, but practical political victories, whether over poverty pay, modern-day enclosure, or privatisation. It supports the good, but also recognises the rights of individuals and communities to define for themselves what good it is that they seek. Blue Labour has no fear of the postcode lottery - where that results from the freedom of individuals and communities to choose differently from one another.

Finally, Blue Labour builds on the British people as they exist, rather than seeking to mould them into the electorate some might wish them to be. Politicians are not trusted, and must earn the right to be heard. One of the left’s weakest points is too often a rampant neophilia, an assumption that change is necessarily for the better. In this, it is fundamentally out of tune with Britain. In stark contrast, when MORI ask people how they feel about the statement “I would like Britain to be the way it used to be”, 61% agree, and only 28% disagree. Agreement is even stronger among the working class than the population overall.

A nostalgia of the right will self-destruct – but how do we respond? Do we assume that people mean a Britain which was whiter and more patriarchal? Or do we build our own nostalgia, capturing for our movement the folk memories of a more equal society, full employment, strong community institutions, thriving local businesses, and social solidarity? Blue Labour says we do the latter, and start to earn people’s trust again.

Well done last Thursday

2011-05-09T07:46:00.001+01:00

That's to everyone involved. Notable that while the media narrative is that Labour gained seats from the Lib Dems, the reality is that we gained 350 seats from the Tories, and 450 from the Lib Dems. It was the Tories gaining 350 from the Lib Dems and a few from Independents that put them ahead on the night.

Here, for interest, is the final Betfair probability chart of the Referendum campaign, with some of the major events labelled.

Well done Cousin Jack

2011-05-04T10:08:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to the NDP on establishing themselves as the left-wing opposition to the Canadian Conservatives in a country which probably does have a progressive majority.

In our context, polling data on the second preferences of those who decided to stick with the Liberals despite the obvious, well-reported, and well-founded NDP surge may be interesting - as would an agreement signed in blood that the Liberals will never go into coalition with the Conservatives. Commiserations to the Bloc - a little unfortunate that the non-Conservative votes pile up reliably in one province, it would help if they were better distributed.

Although Jack's great great grandfather was actually from Northamptonshire, not Cornwall, so really it should be more like this.

Anyway.

Back to Class

2011-05-03T08:34:00.002+01:00

A couple of graphs, as people go back to their jobs, about perceptions of class. Both of these are extracted from a survey YouGov conducted in March. First, what class people think they are (from a quixotic range of options, but no worse than the ones sometimes presented).

The lack of correlation between the ABC1 and C2DE categories often used doesn't mean people are wrong, of course - the categories are rather dated. It's reassuring that there is at least some correlation, with ABC1 capturing three times as many middle-middle-class people as C2DE, and 62% of C2DEs thinking they are working class (as do 38% of ABC1s).

Next, where people see themselves on the UK's income distribution. Here, there is an objective comparison. If people are judging their station in life correctly, the black lines on this chart should go in a precisely straight line, from "1" - the poorest 10% of society, to "10", the wealthiest 10%.

I think we can chalk that one up as a fail. Almost nobody believes they are in the wealthiest 20% of society (should be safe to threaten them with more tax, then), but, equally, less than one person in ten believes that they are in the poorest 20% of society, so spending aimed at helping them out will win support only when it actually happens and they realise they are benefiting from it, not when it is announced or proposed.

Meanwhile, a lot of people think they are in the "squeezed middle". In theory, options 4 to 6 should cover just under a third of the population. In fact, 61% of respondents put themselves in this category - 65% of ABC1s, and 55% of C2DEs. Every party's voters scored themselves a bit below average - the average Conservative was 4.87, the average Lib Dem 4.69, and the average Labour voter 4.23. Note that since this is a 1-10 scale, the average should actually be 5.5.

Some Old Politics #8

2011-04-28T16:11:00.000+01:00

A circular was issued in December 1951 telling local education authorities they must reduce their estimated education spending for the coming year by 5 per cent, concentrating in particular on school transport, playgrounds and the youth service. At that time there was still a specific education grant. Central government met a share of local councils' education budgets that it approved. The new Conservative government was saying: we shall not match your spending unless you reduce it in given ways. In February 1952 councils were told to reduce their school building programmes substantially. No proposals would be approved that were designed to relieve overcrowding, replace unsatisfactory schools or enable the old all-age schools to be reorganized. These priorities were to remain in force for many years.

Howard Glennerster - British Social Policy since 1945.

What's driving the AV gender gap?

2011-04-27T09:02:00.017+01:00

According to YouGov 43% of men have decided to support AV next week, but only 29% of women. After removing 'don't knows' this translates to a 6% lead for No among men, and a 30% lead among women.

Are women just less inclined to buy the argument that third best is an improvement on fourth best?

There's very little difference in the "What do you think are the best arguments for AV", with both men and women citing greater proportionality, more local support, and MPs working harder. On the disadvantages, women are somewhat more likely than men to believe that AV is more complicated (35% to 26%) and more expensive (35% to 21%) but not by enough to explain the difference in voting intention.

Both men and women are more likely to support FPTP because of its tried-and-tested nature, and the instinctive fairness of the candidate with most votes winning. Women remain slightly more pro-Tory (39% would vote Tory today, 33% of men), so perhaps trust Cameron a little more, but still not by enough to make a real difference on that scale to the AV figures.

Women are slightly more likely to be "late-breaking" for No. 20% claim to have swung to "No" since January, as against 15% of men, whereas 14% of men and 10% of women have swung to "Yes" since the start of 2011; in both cases that is mostly from undecideds, although "Yes" is doing a little better at winning voters directly from the other side.

In what is probably the most damning news for the chances of the Yes campaign, the age gap has reached new heights among the high-turnout old, and support for AV has failed to consolidate among the young. Apologies for inverting the axes but 'horses for courses' and all that.

The question for electoral reformers must, I suppose, be whether this is the kind of age gap that persists with time, such as voting behaviour, or a signal of a long-term shift in opinion that will bear fruit for them in the future. I would hazard that holding the referendum will entrench some people's opinions for longer than if they had merely held them without acting on them.

Encouragingly, despite the online debate there is very little venality going on among the public. AV is being supported "because it will help the party I usually vote for" by 11% of Tories and Lib Dems, and by 7% of Labour backers.

Returning to the gender gap, it also manifests itself in support for the UN-sponsored action in Libya, with support from a net +9% of men, but opposition among women by the same margin. Women are, as often with YouGov, appreciably more likely to be "Don't Knows", which was the response of 29% of women (to 16% of men).

Some Old Politics #7

2011-04-26T09:01:00.005+01:00

The Government accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war. This Paper outlines the policy which they propose to follow in pursuit of that aim.

...

Once [total expenditure] is allowed to [fall away], a minor decline may rapidly gather momentum and take on the proportions of a major depression. If, for example, there is a decline in the demand for steel for the erection of new buildings, unemployment will first appear among steel workers. The steel workers, in consequence, will have less to spend on food and other consumer goods, so that the demand for consumer goods will fall. This leads to unemployment among the workers in the consumer goods industries who, in turn, find their purchasing power reduced. As a result of this general loss of purchasing power in the community, the demand for new building is still further reduced and the demand for constructional steel falls once again.

The original decline in expenditure produces secondary reactions which themselves aggravate the source of the trouble. This is an over-simplified illustration, but it is sufficient to make it clear that the crucial moment for intervention is at the first onset of the depression. A corrective applied then may arrest the whole decline; once the decline has spread and gathered momentum, interventions on a much greater scale would be required - and at that stage might not be effective.

The Government are prepared to accept in future the responsibility for taking action at the earliest possible stage to arrest a threatened slump. This involves a new approach and a new responsibility for the State. It was at one time believed that every trade depression would automatically bring its own corrective, since prices and wages would fall, the fall in prices would bring about an increase in demand, and employment would thus be restored. Experience has shown, however, that under modern conditions this process of self-recovery, if effective at all, is likely to be extremely prolonged and to be accompanied by widespread distress, particularly in a complex industrial society like our own.

White Paper Cmd. 6527: Employment Policy (May 1944)

Nostalgia? Yes, but on our own terms

2011-04-25T09:54:00.021+01:00

As noted in my most recent post, Mehdi Hasan has challenged Blue Labour to "tone down the nostalgia", arguing that its supporters are looking for a golden age which never existed, and that they idealise the working class. I was reminded of this article yesterday when Twitter suddenly stopped talking about politics, and started talking about the glory days of football, and Sunder Katwala expressed a view of football as something which is still a "powerful store of identity and tradition". The proximate cause, of course, being "United".

My concern with 'toning down the nostalgia' is that if we tone it down, someone else will be able to tone it up. The battle is not about how much nostalgia there is, as if politicians can seriously affect that - it's about how it is articulated, and to whose political advantage it operates. At regular intervals, Ipsos MORI ask people how they feel about the statement "I would like Britain to be the way it used to be". Not only do many more people agree with it than disagree - the number is growing. In 1998 36% agreed, or strongly agreed. By 2002, that had risen to 46%. In 2008, fully 61% of people agreed with the statement. 28% disagree, and 11% aren't sure.

Giving credence to the Blue Labour theory, there's also a significant class vector to the nostalgia factor. Only 48% of AB voters want Britain to be the way it used to be. That rises to 59% among C1s, 67% among C2, and 71% among DE voters. Unsurprisingly, the old are more nostalgic than the young, but all the same, there is agreement for the statement among 45% of under-30s. There is, despite one of the main objections to the past being that there was greater gender inequality, no significant gender gap in the polling. A wish for change to work with the grain of history is suggested by the agreement of 87% of respondents to the statement "Traditions are an important part of society".

So nostalgia is out there, cohabiting with interests, ideologies, personalities, and all the other things that make people understand and articulate how they feel about political issues and ultimately how they vote. The question is, can it be captured for the left, or must it be written off as the terrain of the right? Of course, part of it is the speed of cultural change, but what else? Is it beyond us to transcend Blair's vision of "Britain, a young country again", and look for a future that brings back what was best about the past, as well as what can be best about the future? A resistance to the political dominance of markets and finance capital should be based not only on having a better economic model, but on protecting those things of intrinsic value which narrow economic rationalism destroys.

The narrow nostalgia of the right is doomed to failure - even if immigration is reduced, and multiculturalism is better managed, those whose main problem is simply feeling uncomfortable at hearing unfamiliar languages in the street will go unsatisfied. But those who remember a time when the pay gap between rich and poor was smaller, when unemployment was lower, when communities had more control over what happened around them, when trade union membership was higher, and when local institutions were stronger, what of their nostalgia? It's easy to see gated communities, and sink estates, fat cats and poverty pay, and assume it was always, and must always, be this way. But it wasn't, and it doesn't. Even the New Economics Foundation (no Tories there) think our wellbeing peaked 35 years ago.

MORI also ask "Can most people be trusted?". In 1959, almost 60% of people said yes. By the end of Thatcherism, that figure stood at not much over 40%. In the most recent polling, it is below 30%. Despite this, a large majority of Britons agree that "people from different backgrounds get on well together" - though that belies a class difference, with agreement falling in almost a straight line from 88% in the wealthiest areas to 69% in the poorest. It's not clear how much politicians can do to fix this, but I'm clear that they have to try, and that 'the big society' as currently packaged doesn't cut it.

To argue that we must avoid discussing the importance which community and family ties have to many people, because while they were defining features of the past, "so were disease, poverty, and homelessness" is a cheap debating point, not an argument against a politics of the common good. We shouldn't be afraid, in the words of many a Labour Student manifesto promising more parties, of putting the social back into Socialism - even if that means saying that, sometimes, change is for the worse.

What is it? A Blue Labour Reading List

2011-04-22T13:33:00.003+01:00

No, not a 'best of' from my recent blogs... just a collection of links I have either come across or been pointed to, which I think are important to anyone interested in finding out what Blue Labour is, and to what extent they agree or disagree with it.

Blue - and true to Labour's roots; Glasman's reply to Billy Bragg, and the clearest short statement I have found.
Labour as a Radical Tradition; A longer Glasman piece from the Winter 2010 edition of Soundings, setting out the historical and academic context. (pdf)
The future is conservative; Blue Labour thinker Jonathan Rutherford appeals for a politics of the common good. (pdf)
Memo to Blue Labourites; Mehdi Hasan worries about the impact of saying things used to be better, and caricaturing working class opinions.
Rescuing conservatism from Conservatives; The late Marxist political philosopher GA Cohen outlined a few years ago why modern Conservatives have left behind the concept of 'intrinsic value'. (pdf) - also available as a video lecture.
A country for old men; Jon Cruddas MP rejects both 'progressivism' and 'highest bidder' marketisation, and calls for a distinctive politics with interesting historical antecedents.
The Wrong Sort of Melancholy; Labour Partisan doesn't think Blue Labour is sufficiently working class.
Blue Labour needs a spin doctor; Dan Hodges' covering letter for what I presume is a job application.
Blue Labour on Radio 4; transcript of a documentary presented by Goodhart and featuring Glasman, Stears, Purnell, Hattersley and others.
Labour New and Blue; Phillip Collins attempts to claim Blue Labour for the Blairites. Not sure the synthesis works, but if the Left boycott it, it's what'll happen.
Selling England by the Pound; Cruddas and Rutherford discuss the conflict between markets, identity, and society.

Feel free to add other constructive links into the comments.

Update [24th April] Observer article by Glasman on Blue Labour as a political philosophy and an election-winning project.

Did Compass invent "The Big Society"?

2011-04-21T16:07:00.001+01:00

I've written here about Gordon Brown's commitment in 2007 to something that sounded a lot like a more sensible version of the Big Society, at least in terms of voluntary action and involvement of community and charitable organisations. I was also reminded of another possible intellectual ancestor on the left which David Cameron should acknowledge, when he's not busy using Big Society as an excuse for privatisation and marketisation.

Once upon a time, there was a left-wing think-tank called Catalyst. It became part of Compass in 2006, but before that produced some interesting publications and ran a few events. One of those publications, from 2003, was about the management and control of public services, a predominantly academic piece drawing out the political implications of consumerisation. It was called "Citizen-consumers: New Labour's marketplace democracy". Here's how it is described by Norman Flynn, in his book "Public Sector Management" (2007 edition).

"[There is an] argument that the business-customer relationship is not analogous to a government-citizen relationship and the techniques of sevice design and management and customer satisfaction are inappropriate. An example is Catalyst pamphlet by Catherine Needham who argues that the customer-service relationship build around the passive customer and their experience of the service is inappropriate in a democracy: "Consumerism is a model that prioritises the individual over the community, encourages passivity, downgrades public spaces, weakens accountability, and privatises citizenship".

Her solution is to shift the emphasis from satisfaction to two other elements: customer co-production and voluntarism. Customer co-production, ironically, has been at the heart of service marketing for two decades or so and recognises that the users of services are rarely passive recipients but have to take an active part in the production process. The key to a satisfactory co-production relationship is that the customer has the amount of production to do that they expect and are comfortable with. Voluntarism is seen as an expression of solidarity and belonging, in contrast to the individualism and isolation generated by a customer relationship. Together with active involvement in politics, especially at local level, Needham defines this approach as 'civic republicanism'."

Civic Republicanism. Interesting. As I said on Twitter earlier, in France, Blue Labour is called "The Republican Left". It's one of the disadvantages of being a monarchy, I suppose, and in particular one that has a little border dispute with a neighbouring republic, that the term "Republican" is not really available for other purposes.

The Alternative Vote and the Centre Ground

2011-04-21T08:06:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy was a very frustrated man. Leftwinger Owen Jones set out his fear that AV would lead to more centrism in politics. Sunny felt he was wrong and, in turn, set out why. A number of us in the comments sided with Owen (fair to say that others didn't); so circuitous did this debate become, that one Mr Hundal was obliged to tweet "I still don't believe some lefties are arguing there is less mushy centrism under FPTP than would be under AV".

I set out in January my fears that AV would drag Labour back to the right, so rather than rehash the debate again, I went away, and looked for some evidence. Of course, there is only one major comparable country to the UK which has used AV for any length of time. I did, however, find a pretty good piece of work - a chapter entitled "Preferential Voting and its Political Consequences" - exactly what we had been discussing, in a book called "Elections: Full, Free and Fair".

The book was edited by Marian Sawer, who is now Emeritus Professor at the Political Science School of ANU; the chapter in question was written by Benjamin Reilly, then a Research Fellow at ANU Centre for Development Studies and Associate of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and is now Professor of Policy and Governance at Crawford. It was funded by ANU, the Australian Electoral Commission, Old Parliament House and the Parliamentary Education Office. If I go on, it's to establish that this was a serious academic work, not a political pamphlet.

Here is what Reilly says about preferential voting in Australia. Mostly about the centre ground but, for bonus marks, a bit about coalitions as well. Highlighting (insofar as it shows up in this blog) is mine.

Having been a feature of Australian politics since the early years of this century, preferential voting has become an "embedded" institutional factor in Australian politics, enabling us to examine the effects of preferential voting upon political competition over a long period in a stable political environment. While having been introduced in order to combat the rising labour movement and to counter the effects of vote-splitting between conservative parties, [it] has had a number of significant, if sometimes subtle, influences on the development of Australian party politics. It has (mostly) ensured the election of governments which enjoy the majority support of the electorate. It has sustained the presence of some minor parties, but also constrained tendencies towards party system fragmentation. It has also enabled the development of partnership arrangements between parties - with the long-running coalition between the Liberal and National parties being the most prominent, but not the only, example.

A less examined feature of preferential voting is the way it has pushed the political system away from the extremes and towards the "moderate middle". Indeed, preferential voting for lower house elections has been described as a system for choosing "the least unpopular candidate". As such, it acts as an exemplary case of the way some electoral institutions can promote "centripetal" rather than "centrifugal" political incentives. In this respect, perhaps the most important consequence of the use of preferential voting in Australia is the way in which it has provided the ever-cautious national electorate with the means to punish perceived extremism of any ideology, providing strong incentives for the major parties to keep their focus on the middle ground at all times.

...

However, the real impacts of preferential voting at Australian elections has not been well understood even in Australia itself, with commentators typically viewing it as a "majoritarian" system with effects and results much like first-past-the-post voting. As this chapter will show, this judgment is misconceived, particularly when one examines the impact of preference voting in recent years. Indeed, I will argue in this chapter than an important effect of preferential voting has not been its majoritarian, "winner-take-all" quality but rather its moderating "consensual" influence upon Australian politics. By encouraging parties to look outside their immediate support bases for potential secondary support, preferential voting has tempered some of the more adversarial "zero sum" aspects of Australia's majoritarian electoral politics, making elections above all a search for the political middle ground. These requirements for intra-party bargaining and majority support have influenced the centripetal proclivities of Austrlian party politics... In so doing, preference voting has introduced a significant degree of centripetal and "consensual" practice to what is, on most indicators, a highly adversarial political culture.

It's fine to argue that this is no bad thing, but not to deny that it is a feature of AV.

Ten reasons not to have an In/Out referendum on the EU

2011-04-20T13:09:00.002+01:00

I'm a bit late to this party, but a flurry of discussion took place a couple of months ago, and it seems to me like the debate is still rumbling on. I can certainly see the tactical arguments for Labour committing to a referendum on the EU; it neutralises one of our weakest issues, it divides the Conservative Party, and it implies that we are in 'listening' mode.

You might even expect my Blue Labour side to support this, since the EU is a class issue - the middle class are evenly split on the EU, but the working class want to leave by 54% to 22%. It also seems to be a gender issue - not sure why, but in the same poll 40% of men support EU membership, but only 27% of women. And, indeed, I am on the more Eurosceptic side of the Labour party, insofar as there is such a thing. But I don't support this referendum, and here's why.

1) It would be a terrible campaign. If ever there were an argument against having referendums on issues of low salience where the public start from a position of having relatively little information and direct experience, the AV referendum is that argument. How would a referendum on the EU be any better? Even without it, I have heard exaggerated claims on both sides, from businesspeople lumping in every piece of EU-wide social protection legislation (which we would surely want to keep much of) as a 'cost of membership', to being told on Twitter that if one of the 'big three' countries left the EU, there would be a "roughly 50%" chance of war. We would either have a campaign build on spin, or a proxy campaign on a higher salience issue, such as migration from accession countries.

2) The campaigns would take dishonest positions. The appeal of the centre ground is not limited to elections. Indeed, in a campaign with two options, it is inevitably the place to be. Therefore the official 'out' campaign would try to quieten the most bonkers fringe of UKIP, and claim that what they really want is for us to renegotiate so that our relationship with the EU looks more like the EEC that we thought we had voted to be part of in the 1970s. The 'in' campaign (if they have any sense) would try to quieten the most bonkers fringe of the European Movement, and claim that we have to be fully in so that we can be at the top table campaigning to make the EU look more like the EEC that we thought we had voted to be part of in the 1970s. Pointless.

3) But nobody would get what they wanted. The irony of all this is, of course, that if you present the three options, by far the most popular choice in opinion polls is that the UK should have a relationship with the EU that looks more like the EEC that we thought we had voted to be part of in the 1970s. When asked a three-way question on leaving, being fully involved, or something in between, about 20% vote for one of the two extreme options, while half of those questioned say they support "The UK having a looser arrangement with Europe, maintaining free trade and cooperation in some areas, but taking back powers and ending the supremacy of the European court". I hesitate to suggest having a multi-option referendum under AV, but...

4 + 5) It wouldn't 'lance the boil', or 'settle the issue for a generation'. Quite apart from the acceptability of describing something that is the sincerely held view of million of British voters as 'a boil', I'm not clear why anyone thinks a referendum would lance it. If a 'No' vote is returned in next month's AV referendum, are electoral reformers going to pack up and go home? Did Euroscepticism collapse as a political position for more than about 18 months after the EEC referendum in 1975? There are (small, but obsessive) groups of people on both sides of this debate, and whatever the outcome of a referendum, they will find a way to keep it going. In any event, a vote to leave would result in a renegotiation, and a vote to stay in would only be seen as legitimate until the next new treaty change the nature of the thing in which we had voted to stay.

6) It would publicise UKIP. UKIP used to be a nice little bonkers single-issue party. It isn't any more. It's a serious party (with more than its fair share of nutty members) led by an able politician doing the best he can with what he has to work with. It has a wide-ranging policy platform beyond the EU issue, very little of which is acceptable to the left. Nonetheless, it attracts a fair number of people whose second preference is Labour (albeit far more Tories) and it performs well when it is in the headlines, beating Labour in European elections, for example. While under First Past the Post (if we still have that) we might welcome a split in the vote on the right, it is possible that UKIP could reach 'breakthrough' levels or, more likely, that their rise to double figures in the polls could lead Cameron to panic and shift appreciably to the right to recapture those voters. Undesirable.

7) It would distract from real politics. A complaint about the AV referendum has been that we should be having a referendum on something that really matters. That's usually come from advocates of the EU referendum. I'm happy to conced that the EU matters more, subjectively and objectively, than a minor change to the voting system. However, if we're talking about issue salience, why not have a referendum on austerity, or on banking reform, or the changes to the NHS? Time spent talking about the EU, much like time spent talking about the voting system, is largely time which is not being spent talking about the distribution of wealth, income, power and opportunity within Britain.

8+9) It would alienate the public and damage trust. Who leads the "Labour Out" campaign? Austin Mitchell? For that matter, who leads the "Conservative Out" campaign? The most widely read newspapers would be likely to get behind the campaign for withdrawal, and having supported a referendum - seen by many as a proxy for supporting withdrawal - the support of pretty much the entire political class for the "In" campaign would be seen as a "politicians versus the people" battle - potentially no bad thing for the "Out" campaign, as Denmark have found in the past - to add up the general election vote for pro-EU and anti-EU parties and treat that as evidence of something is an absurdity when a third of the backers of our most federalist party, the Lib Dems, say they would vote to leave. Even after the referendum, as discussed above, it's likely that the winning side would claim it as a vindication of their most extreme position, and therefore shout betrayal when an 'Out' vote merely led to renegotiation, or an "In" vote didn't result in joining the Euro and accepting Schengen. Either way, damaged trust, public no happier.

10) It would annoy me. Having said all of the above, the Labour Party does need to sort out its starry-eyed idealism and recognise that a) being internationalist does not mean support for every international initiative regardless of its merits, b) the EU is deeply unpopular in Britain and we do ourselves no favours by being too closely associated with it and c) the old argument against the 'three circles of power' model of UK influence is being entirely redrawn by the growth in economic and political power of South America and Asia. That means that, if this idiotic referendum were to come to pass, I would find myself obliged to support "Out". Not in the hope that we drift off into the mid-Atlantic, but because a different relationship with the EU would be better for Britain, and better for Labour, and an Out vote would be more likely to produce that than an In vote. It would, however, lead to me wasting a chunk of my life on Twitter being called a racist by decent socialists with whom I probably agree on about 85% of political issues.

Let's not, eh?

Do Punters Think "No" Means An Early Election?

2011-04-19T20:45:00.000+01:00

Correlation doesn't imply causation, and we shouldn't read too much into one piece of information, but here are a couple of interesting graphs from Betfair. First, the implied probability that the Yes campaign will win the AV referendum.

Falling, fairly obviously, given the ICM and YouGov polling data. Now, the implied probability that the Coalition will succeed in not having a General Election until 2015 (or, technically, '2015 or later' to ensure all bases are covered). i.e subtract the number to the left from 100 to get the percentage chance of the Coalition collapsing before their declared date for the next General Election.

Now, it could be something else - one punter hoovering up odds; the simmering policy differences on immigration; whisperings about Clegg's leadership and personal relationship with Cameron after the personal attacks on him by No2AV. Nonetheless, one would normally expect this sort of graph to trend up - the longer the Coalition survives, the less time it has to continue surviving before 2015. It is conspicuously failing to do that.

Nonetheless, the odds of a Yes vote have fallen, and so have the odds of the Coalition surviving until 2015 - and there is a logic to that; without the buffer of AV to keep them in their seats, Lib Dem MPs will be more worried than ever about their growing lack of support - and without Tory second preferences to rely on, those facing Labour in two-way marginals will be more concerned about showing some left-wing leg than keeping their coalition partners sweet.

I await John Rentoul to explain that this is a "question to which the answer is no".

State Redistribution and the Public Opinion Problem

2011-04-18T09:38:00.012+01:00

To me, a narrowing of the gap in power, wealth, and opportunity between those who are poor and those who are rich is the core purpose of a left-wing political movement. In particular, the gap which has no relation to someone's effort, that which is caused by exploitation, by bad luck, ill health, or accident of birth.

If you choose to buy a lottery ticket, that's fine - but when life, itself, becomes a lottery where some have winning tickets, some don't, and nobody got a chance to choose their numbers or whether to play at all, then that's quite a different setup.

But there's a problem, and here's a graph illustrating it. It's the percentage agreeing with each statement (2010 British Social Attitudes Survey, though actually conducted in 2009).

The bad news for the left is that there has been a significant fall in the number of people willing redistributive means. There is still, however, a substantial majority in favour of more equal ends, and a majority view that the current distribution of rewards in society is unjust.

More detail in the accompanying press release; the very interested should also dig out the Fabian / Rowntree / IPPR work from a couple of years ago about public attitudes to inequality. Here's some commentary on it from various perspectives.

The Blue Labour Songbook

2011-04-15T07:01:00.001+01:00

Still not sure whether this is the best thing ever, or completely mad, but what the heck, it's Friday. I thought that if Billy Bragg doesn't get Blue Labour through explanation, perhaps the matter could be addressed in song. The only thing I can recall ever liking about the Liberal Democrats is that their left caucus (Liberator, not the Social Liberal Forum) has a songbook. Where better to look for the voice of a people than in song; if Labour is a radical tradition, then that tradition has always existed in music. So, my top five Blue Labour songs. This is the folk version - maybe I'll do an indie version at a later date. Obviously (especially in at least one case) I'm not claiming the endorsement of the artists for the idea.

#5 Ballad of An Ordinary Man - performed by Christy Moore

Actually written by an Englishman, this song is about the unemployment and inequality of the 1980s. About the little people pushed aside by hard times and economic dislocation, while somehow, the system always seems to manage to provide for the rich. Of those who feel that there should be more reciprocity - anger at the commodification of workers, the treatment of employment as just another transaction, rather than something integral to lives and livelihoods. As relevant following the banking crisis as during Thatcher's recession.

#4 Women of the Working Class - performed by Nottingham Clarion Choir

This might have come higher up if I could have got a better recording, like the version that was sung at the centenary celebration of Ruskin College, with socialist women's choir and mass audience participation. Fair play, though, to socialist choirs around the country, and the work they do in keeping a very niche, but very valuable, traditional alive. This song talks about not necessarily finding political organisation in the places, and the ways, you expect it. Also relevant here - it is not a song about wanting to change society into a utopian vision, it's a song about survival, about community, and about the hope that the future will be no worse, let alone better. United by the struggle, yes, but also united by the past.

#3 The World Turned Upside Down - performed by Billy Bragg

You see, he even sings about it. Glasman traces blue Labour back to the fight against enclosure and the rapid and massive expropriation of the common land to the benefit of the merchant and noble classes, and the rise of labour as the only commodity owned by the peasantry, and community their only capital asset. Here, in Rosselson's taken on the Diggers, Bragg gives voice to the foundational concepts of that movement, which resonate today. Self-organisation by the dispossessed, acting on a combination of ideology, interest, faith, and necessity, to claim what they saw as theirs by right. As well as a call for unity, it warns that individuals will be attacked by the powerful when they oppose their interests. I'll avoid a crude parallel between this and contemporary protest - but I will say that I think it should tell us something of the risks for the left when the political class becomes disconnected from the people it represents, whether voters or party workers.

#2 The Child and The Collier - written and performed by Katie Doherty

On the basis that this isn't commercially available anywhere, I've uploaded it. I'm happy to take the rap if I've done the wrong thing. Anyway, another song about mining communities. Maybe because I grew up in the shadow of mills and pits, maybe because my first political memory is the strike, or maybe just because mining communities are emblematic of the organised working class, who knows. Here, Katie (after a spoken intro which is worth listening to, but skip it if you want) sings about people she has met in County Durham. First and foremost, it's a beautiful song. Secondly, it captures a string of important observations about what it is to be from a community, and to be entirely what you are in order to know what you want to be. The SDP theory that people could be kittens in society, but tigers in business, makes no sense if you believe that your work is bound together with your identity, that miners and their work were so bound together that they had black blood, and that the coal contained the lives and souls of men. Family, laughter, place, identity - not much in this world lasts forever, but the things that do are the most important.

#1 Country Life - written and performed by Show of Hands

A fundamentally misunderstood band, who sing unashamedly about identities; I was pleased to discover that they performed on the Hyde Park Stage at the Cuts March at the request of the Musicians' Union. That's exactly where they belong. This song speaks to the neglect and isolation of the English poor across England by all parties, not just the stereotype of the urban housing estate. It spares no-one in its anger, from the Countryside Alliance to the Common Agricultural Policy. It is in song an argument for looking at policies through a prism which is, as Gordon Brown put it, "beyond contracts, markets and exchange", whether that is housing, or post office closures. That the world we live in is not a zero-sum game of efficiency. A home bought for holidays is a home unavailable to a local family. Labour's half-century long retreat in rural areas is not only an inevitable consequence of changing work patterns, but a failure to imagine a rural radicalism, and a housing policy that accepted a move of affordable housing into dense urban developments. At the same time, the "party of the countryside" represent a specific faction within that countryside - if all the people living in poverty in the countryside moved to one place, they'd form a city larger than Birmingham.

Over to you.

Blue Labour and the Branding Problem

2011-04-13T12:11:00.003+01:00

It won't come as a surprise to many who read this blog that, by and large, I consider myself Blue Labour. Much like this referendum campaign, the more people attack the position I hold for stupid reasons, the more certain I am that I'm in the right camp. At the same time, Dan Hodges is right (a sentence you will also only usually hear from me in connection with the referendum campaign) that Blue Labour has a "branding problem".

I'm more worried about the "Blue" than the "Faith, Family and Flag". I perhaps have too much confidence in politically active party members, but I think that they will look beyond cheap caricatures and consider what is actually meant by them in this context. While tainted by association with parties of the right, particularly in the US, trying to use them as cover for an economic agenda which strips away their possibility and meaning, they are to me an encapsulation of social values which Thatcherism came close to destroying. That is:

Faith: A conception that there is more of value in life than economists and statisticians can measure. That our worth as individuals and as a collective is something more than the sum of our outputs, and that the search for meaning in a random and capricious world can be of great comfort. There is massive diversity here, and if Labour, which has allied staunch atheist humanists with those whose Christianity was at the heart of their socialism, can't be a model for plurality and tolerance, then who can?

Family: A specific focus on the need for, and importance of, human relationships in the good life. Family in the widest sense - community, affinity, and belonging. Rejection of a right-wing conception of the individual as atomised rent-seeker, promoting instead a view of human interaction as relational first, transactional second, and contractual last. Understanding why the local post office, or the local pub, where we meet our neighbours matters, even if it isn't generating a benchmark level of return on capital. That's our big society, and it needs the state.

Flag: An acceptance of identity and an attachment to symbolism - that pride exists, whether rational or irrational, in the local and in the national. The view that the nation is a changing group of people, but with a shared destiny, where the outcomes for one are important to us all. Rejecting the notion of "UK plc", and taking pleasure in a left-wing narrative of our island story. Yet "flags" are not just the Union Flag and the St George Cross, but the trade union banners carried on the 26th March, or the local flags flying over civic institutions which begin their journey home to Labour on the 5th May.

Blue, though, is the colour of conservatism, not Thatcherism. Conservatism, in a true sense, must include defending those things which matter to us as people, as communities, and as a nation, from a narrow rationalism which strips them away in the hope of a marginal gain in efficiency. However, it is the colour of the Conservative Party, which is not conservative at all, and that is the association which most people will make. Blue Labour is a politics of class, in the right hands, because the more that binds us together, that harder it is to cheat, to tax avoid, to exploit, and to profiteer.

That said, I've been trying to come up with an alternative branding, and I'm having problems, particularly if one were to become such a dominant trend that it, like "New Labour" became the de facto name of the party. Witness:

Situated Labour: In descriptive terms, this is my favourite. It speaks of a party which takes people as it finds them, and which operates within the political and social context of its nation and its time. It gives a route into a strong political and philosophical tradition on the left, within which I think Blue Labour falls; rejecting Rawls in favour of MacIntyre. It's also, let's be frank, a bit of an undergraduate toss-fest, and unlikely to play very well in the red-tops. Scratch that one, then.

British Labour: Again, there are merits to this in principle. It reclaims community in a way which is intuitive to many of the voters we've lost, starting from national community and building down. It would place Labour as a party in a specific tradition, that of the British Labour Movement, rather than as just another social democratic party like many others. Sadly, it's a non-runner; for starters, how does it relate to Scottish Labour and Welsh Labour? If they keep their identities, why isn't it English Labour? That's before we even get into the vexed question of organisation in Northern Ireland.

Your Labour: Something popular with the private sector in recent years has been to create a sense of ownership by customers. Of course, they're not prepared to go the whole way and become consumer co-ops, so they go for branding. "Your M&S". I don't think this could work in isolation, but the principle behind it is the same as Tony Blair's (slightly silly) claim that New Labour was "the political wing of the British people". If we go down the route of registered supporters, open primaries, and a focus on community organisation, something like it could be a runner. It's not a million miles from the "On Your Side" branding of leaflets up and down the land, after all. It could, though, create a hostage to fortune when we do have to take difficult and unpopular decisions.

Social Labour: Let's scrap meetings and just go for a drink, it'll all be fine. We can wave our hands in the air like we agree with the consensus of the meeting, and attract voters to us by being the coolest party on the block. More seriously, a branding of the party as rooted in the relational model talked about earlier. An alternative would be "Community Labour", particularly when the focus groups start telling us that people are mixed up with Social and Socialist and don't like it - just as Gordon Brown was made to stop threatening to tackle vested interests when the focus groups said it meant them getting less interest on their investments. Of course, that latter sounds like something you'd get for a minor crime.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

AV and the fallacy of composition

2011-04-11T08:55:00.007+01:00

I know, I know. Cheer up, it's nearly over. In only three and a half weeks we will be celebrating a string of Labour gains in local elections, and half of us will be sulking about the change, or absence of change, to be made in the electoral system for 2015 (or, hopefully, earlier). For the moment, however, it's the big issue of debate all around the place - apart from the NHS, but I've got nothing new to offer there, the reforms are plainly contradictory nonsense by and large, with some good elements that could easily be done separately.

So it is that, lately, every time I log on to Liberal Conspiracy - a useful site with a lot to offer in discussion and news, I am assaulted by a new nonsense argument about why AV will lead to a happy land of social justice and participatory democracy, and why Labour people who intend to vote "No" are wrong, and grotesquely ugly freaks. The latest outbreak of nonsense - a meme which has being going round for a while, in fairness - is that if you don't want to change the Labour Leadership Election to First Past The Post, you are a hypocrite.

Of course, there are all sorts of reasons why you might believe that different electoral systems are appropriate for different kinds of election; a few off the top of my head.

A movement is composed of people who have chosen to join, so finding the centre-point of that affinity group is more valuable than finding the centre point of national politics, where there are more likely to be big strategic choices which ultimately have to be resolved one way or another, even if that has to be done by plurality rather than majority. It is also easier to leave the party if you feel it has gone too far in one direction than to leave the country, so parties have a stronger incentive to elect consensus candidates than countries.
People are more likely to be voting across multiple vectors of preference in a leadership election than in a General Election, so AV has more relevance. General elections are almost always fought between established parties with a track record and particular ideological space. People overwhelmingly vote for parties and policies, and individuals second (part of why the "make MPs work harder" is true only at the margins, and potentially in a counterproductive way). In a Leadership election, various personal characteristics matter, hence some Blairites backing Diane Abbott, and some Campaign Group members backing David Miliband.
The above also makes it more likely that candidates close to one another will stand in a Leadership election, leading to a "weird result" under FPTP. FPTP in General Elections encourages similar parties to work together, or stand joint candidates, or merge outright, meaning the public get to vote on a clear manifesto, rather than having to guess what alliances might be made after an election (usually - hung parliaments are only likely when the public really are deeply divided more than two ways).

That said, I wanted to focus on the specific argument put in the piece - that if something is right for electing one person, it must always be right. I think this is a classic example of the Fallacy of Composition - something with which I'm sure you're all familiar from debates about Keynesianism and the Paradox of Thrift. A system which reaches a compromise in each individual constituency in a General Election, can lead to a Parliament where middle of the road candidates predominate, and in which almost no debate would take place.

To illustrate this, I'd like to take you back to a time when the Lib Dems were surging in the polls, and Facebook groups were being set up by people urging us to get them into Government (I hope they're all ever so pleased with their success, by the way). Imagine this had happened. They had been the largest party in a hung parliament, chosen to try and govern briefly as a minority, made some short-term, popular decisions, implemented AV as a "starting point towards a discussion on PR", made a massive number of dodgy bar-charts, and called a second election asking for a clear mandate.

Now suppose in that election Labour failed to recover - losing more support, both from those who had wanted change but been voting tactically against the Tories, and from those genuinely enthused by the new radical mood. The Tories were riven by infighting between those claiming they had lost by being too right-wing and not modernising enough, and those claiming the fluffy message had failed and it was time to get back to basics.

So, on 5th May 2011, the UK goes to the polls for a second general election in twelve months. The share of the vote looks like this;

Fair play to the Liberal Democrats, they have won the election. They don't have half of the vote, but they have a clear plurality, and a significant lead over any other party. They should win, right? They should have a reasonable majority of the seats in Parliament? Unless you believe in pure PR, of course. So, here's what Parliament would look like based on those numbers, according to Electoral Calculus.

Kind of fair. It's rather harsh on the Tories, but that's the nature of the turnout gap, and (to a lesser extent) the old boundaries, as well as there being more Blue-Yellow marginals than Yellow-Red ones. It corresponds to an overall Lib Dem majority of 34. Now, let's just take a look at what that Parliament would look like under AV.

Yikes! The Fallacy of Composition in action. Electing the compromise candidate in so many constituencies has led to a Parliament where a party with 40% of the vote, by being centrist and a regular second preference, has just under 75% of the MPs, and a majority of well over 300; almost twice as big as Tony Blair captured under FPTP in 1997 with a similar share of the national vote.It would be possible to walk from Land's End to Edinburgh without setting foot in a seat which didn't have a Lib Dem MP.

Now, that can't be sensible. It's also not a problem which can arise in a genuine single-post election like Leader of the Labour Party. There is only one seat, therefore the winner, under whatever system, and however close the final tally, necessarily gets 100% of the seats.

When electing an assembly, however, it's possible to have systems which make that less, rather than more, likely. AV is not such a system and, in the words of the Electoral Reform Society, "The Electoral Reform Society regards AV as the best voting system when a single position is being elected. However, as AV is not a proportional system, the Society does not regard it as suitable for the election of a representative body, e.g. a parliament, council, committees, etc"

Of course, there are other ways round it. I think one of the problems in this debate is that not only are we electing a Parliament and a local MP, we are, by proxy, electing a Government. Our constitutional set-up is very much based around this co-mingling, but one way out of the impasse would be a more proportional system for electing Parliament, but a completely separate election for Government, based around a single-party outcome unrelated to the legislative result.

But that's a different debate, for another day.

Someone Else's Graphs - AV harms Labour, doesn't affect Tories

2011-04-08T08:16:00.000+01:00

Completely cheating, today, but this was too good not to post - I have been calling for someone to poll an AV ballot for ages, and finally YouGov and Channel 4 have got together to do something similar. It will be interesting to see how Labour ~~Friends of Nick Clegg~~ Yes respond to this article.

Tories Have Nothing To Fear From AV

An exclusive poll by YouGov for Channel 4 News suggests Britain's main political parties may have seriously misjudged the effect a move to the Alternative Vote system would have on their fortunes at the ballot box. The results, which threaten to turn the debate over changes to Britain's electoral system on on its head, show that Labour would suffer in an AV election while support for the Conservatives would remain the same.

...the new poll, conducted by YouGov president Peter Kellner, suggests the parties' long-standing assumptions about what how AV would affect their election prospects could be ill-founded. Crucially, it challenges the long-held assumption that Lib Dem voters would vote for Labour as a second preference, revealing that these votes are actually swinging to the Conservatives.

Blue Labour and Three Faces of Economics

2011-04-07T23:05:00.006+01:00

Something of a Twitter debate with @chakrabortty earlier, among others. His contention was that "the primary problem with Blue Labour (in as much as it can be spoken of as a project) is a lack of economics". This was in response to me being thoroughly confused at Billy Bragg's attempt to trash something he plainly doesn't understand.

Compare and contrast:

1) The fundamental issue relates to how the burdens are distributed after the economic crash. The City of London Corporation, which is dominated by one interest alone, continues to assert its sovereign will in an arbitrary way. It is labour, the workforce, who must pay the price for the unconstrained folly of finance capital. The crash was caused because there was no constraint on the prerogatives of the money managers who boasted and then lied about their assets and engaged in fantastical acts of leverage, generating the threat of systemic collapse. It is astonishing that they feel strong enough to exercise their unaccountable sovereignty once more without concern for political resistance. We have learned nothing from 2008.

2) Capitalism's most recent leap forward, globalisation, has once again left us at the mercy of the markets. The power of the nation state to govern its own economic affairs has been put into question by multinational conglomerates with no loyalty to any country or continent. Successive governments, deregulating the labour market in the hope of attracting investment, have created an atmosphere of insecurity among a native workforce that has seen their jobs disappear overseas to as employers seek ever-higher profit margins with no regard to the social consequences.

One of those is Glasman, and one of those is Bragg criticising Glasman. I defy you to tell me which is which without googling. Anyway, my argument, was, and remains, that it should be possible to have a political conversation about what the society we want to see would look like, without having a detailed conversation about economics. I agree that at some point practical questions will kick in. I also agree that our vision for a better society will include things which are, broadly, 'economics' - the marginal rates of tax up the income scale, for example, or the balance between direct and indirect tax.

However, I am more concerned by the risk that conversations about economics are used as a veto on political debate; some economists, particularly on the right, are not above using their calling as a trump card, stating as a matter of fact that changes in certain tax rates are impossible, or won't generate revenue, just as they stated equally certainly fifteen years ago that a minimum wage would cause unemployment, or inflation, or both. In this case, the left's vision of a better society came first, and the economics came second.

I don't want to shut economics out of political debate, even if that were possible. I do, however, want there to be a space in which broader questions of 'the good life' can be considered as a separate strand up to a point, before the opportunity is presented to people who understand the maths, or can do a good impression of someone who understand the maths, get the chance to leap in and claim the discussion as their own. Apart from anything else, economics is more given to erudition, or its impersonation, and therefore the more a debate is explicitly about economics, the narrower participation is likely to be.

I think a large part of the disagreement is probably just a difference of opinion about what economics is, or what we mean by it in this specific context. I'd argue at this point for three relevant faces of economics (with due apologies to the relevant academics); I'm sure there are other ways of cutting the cake, or further faces which could be added.

Managerial Economics: The art of technocratic decision-making. The career of the desiccated calculating machine, or the independent central banker. This kind of economics can come to the fore because a decision is genuinely best made by experts away from political intervention, or because there is a gain to be had from persuading the markets that this is being done, or because politicians wish to avoid taking the blame for decisions which are likely from time to time to be unpopular, or turn out to be wrong.
Political Economics: If the right do this, we call it Voodoo economics. If the left do it, we call it evidence-based policymaking. Essentially, it is the process of making a decision about what we think is right, and then finding selective economic models, theories, and data points which back it up. This is important and useful in providing cover for political debates, but doesn't necessarily add a whole lot to the sum of human knowledge. It also risks leaving the emperor naked when the tide goes out, so to speak, as in the National Housing Federation's prediction in 2007 that the average house price in London would rise to £478,000 by 2010 (currently £341,000). Beware consultants bearing graphs.
Social Economics: Or 'political economy', but since I've used the phrase 'political economics', I think that would be confusing. Here, I mean an analysis at the theoretical and / or practical level of the interplay between social and political relations, and the change in those relations, and the totality of the economic system within which those relations exist. Das Kapital was primarily a work of social economics. While it is possible for a political theory to emerge from social economics, I don't think it necessarily has to be that way round.

The question I was trying to address, then, is the extent to which a political movement (or, in the case of Blue Labour, a tendency within a movement) needs to have a handle on how it relates to each of these, and at what stage in its development.

There's also a question of how heterodox you can get and still be doing 'economics' at all; much of Blue Labour is about measuring things which are intangible to all but the most holistic of economists - belonging, pride, community, security, reciprocity, perceived fairness. To bring in hard economics too soon invites the true believers in market progress to jump in - here's Legrain criticising Cruddas and Rutherford, who are close to Glasman (or, perhaps, just criticising something he imagined them to have said).

"It would be a terrible mistake, though, to wrongly blame our economic and social problems on Britain's openness to the rest of the world. Trade with China, foreign investment and Polish workers all boost growth and create jobs".

That's (2), by the way, Political Economics. It may or may not be true, or bits of it may be more or less true than others - but what is indisputably the case is that Legrain very much wants it to be true, even if it isn't.

Oh, and I owe you a graph.

Update: A response from Maurice Glasman to Billy Bragg's article. Pretty good, I think.

Some Old Politics #6

2011-04-07T12:52:00.000+01:00

The Big Society, 1993

Look at our suburbs and small towns and villages - where people, by and large, own their own homes. Here you will find networks of the voluntary associations which tie people into their neighbourhood, from Rotary Clubs to the active PTA to fundraising and Meals on Wheels.

The big problem lies elsewhere. It is from the inner cities, where the state is dominant, that businesses have fled. It is in the inner cities that vandalism is rife and property uncared for. It is here that fear of violent crime makes a misery of old people’s lives.

Socialists seek to explain the difference in terms of affluence. But that simply won’t wash. That explanation is demeaning to people of modest means who contribute much to their communities. It is insulting to those families who may face all the problems of unemployment and yet do not resort to crime.

- John Major’s speech to the Carlton Club, 3rd February 1993.

Not that I'm opposed to strong communities and voluntary action, of course, or even to the underlying concept of the Big Society. I just don't think it's an alternative to an active local public sector, or to political institutions.

For a structured, paid, Labour internship scheme

2011-04-07T07:52:00.001+01:00

No graphs today, maybe later... Anyway, I have been pondering this for a while as a blog post, and even longer as a general principle. It's one of those things I was probably never going to get around to posting if I waited until it was all completely clear in my head, so perhaps better to get it down while it's topical.

I am sympathetic towards the case for paid internships. I strikes me as bizarre that if you pay someone £4 an hour to do a job, it's illegal, but if you pay them £0 an hour, it's fine. I understand that we need to be very careful about not putting people off genuine volunteering, which will always provide the bulk of political activism in the UK, but I do wish political organisations would stop pretending that volunteer roles are actually 'unpaid jobs'.

Turning specifically to Labour and our MPs, though, I think we do need to see some leadership and some action on the issue. I worked for an MP for a few months after I finished university, for travel expenses only; it was, though, part-time, easily accessible from where I lived, and clear that I could leave at any point once I found paying work.

It also wasn't an advertised internship, it was an offer made personally after I applied for a paying job which, rightly, went to someone more experienced. I learnt a great deal, but it was constituency help, not the sort of Parliamentary role that helps people who intend a career in politics to network and get to grips with the Westminster village.

It could be as simple as saying that we carry on as now, but pay interns the minimum wage, or a living wage. From there, only the cost implications need to be considered. There's a good article here setting out the case for change. Personally, though, I'd argue for going further. If the internships are paid, then as well as attracting a broader range of applicants, it's more legitimate for MPs to treat the role as the start of a career and a formal training opportunity, rather than an exchange of non-monetary favours - what is the market value of a Parliamentary pass, anyway?

Some ideas, then;

A formal, 12 to 18-month 'Labour Internship' scheme, paid around a local living wage for wherever the post is based. In practice mostly likely to be for recent graduates, but structured in a way which makes it accessible to those with different life experience.
A rotation of placements rather than a focus on confirming people's belief that what happens in Westminster is what matters; time in the constituency office understanding local problems and getting to grips with casework, or working with the council Labour group, or with a local trade union, or supporting the constituency party.
An option of a range of different working hours, allowing people on the scheme to get involved in the local community, the voluntary party, and/or take on other part-time paid work to supplement their income.
On balance, while this should be locally owned and recruited, it also has to be a scheme which gives someone experience of a new area, not an opportunity for people to stick around their University or CLP on a paid basis, particularly if funding from the Party and Unions is drawn in to support it. As such, measures to reduce living costs would help make it more accessible.
One example; how about an offer of free accommodation during the constituency element of the internship - in many constituencies lots of members have lovely big houses with spare rooms, and being Labour is one of the things that makes moving to a new area easier, as you have some ready-made friends (and in short order some ready-made enemies, unless that's just me).

Feel free to refine it, it's just the sketch of an idea. Now, while you're here, I could use someone to write this blog for me, look after my Twitter, that sort of thing. No salary, you understand, but there totally might be a paying job at the end of it, honest. Applications to the usual place. Must be good with graphs.

Graph Week: Graphs #5 to #8

2011-04-06T07:44:00.020+01:00

Double bonus treat for graph lovers. Two serious ones, two cheeky ones, all data taken from Monday night's YouGov poll. Shouldn't need much explanation.

Now let's see how that would look if it were in a Lib Dem Focus Newsletter.

Next, how Lib Dem voters from 2010 feel about their party, and about the voting system.

Finally for today, Labour's age problem - or the Tories' demographic problem, depending how you look at it.

Graph Week: Graphs #3 and #4

2011-04-05T07:26:00.016+01:00

Everyone's fed up of AV, I know - the sooner we have that referendum out of the way, the better. Still, it's a subject that lends itself to graphs, and this is Graph Week. I therefore present Graph 3, which analyses the Australian Federal Elections which have taken place in my lifetime, to assess the merit of the claim that AV would deliver more progressive election victories.

Outlined in red are the 10 out of 11 elections at which the Labour Party got more votes than any other individual party. Filled in red are the elections after which Labour was part of the Government. As you will see, Labour won the most votes at 10 out of 11 elections, but formed the Government at only 6 out of 11. At one election, in December 1977, Labour got 40% of the vote, but 31% of the seats, while the Liberal Party got 38% of the vote, and 54% of the seats. And that's progress towards a more proportional system, apparently.

In addition, the claim that Australia doesn't have many Hung Parliaments despite using AV is demonstrated as nonsense here - it relies on a special definition of Hung Parliament which doesn't include no party having an overall majority - because three parties regularly form a Coalition. However, that's true in many countries. In reality, it can be seen that 5 of the 11 elections resulted in a Hung Parliament - that the parties called "The Coalition" continued to work together was always predictable, but is not an iron law of nature, as can be seen in some state legislatures.

Imagine at a future election, that the Liberal Democrats are the habitual Coalition partners of the Tories, and never go into coalition with Labour. The result of the election is that Labour get 270 seats, the Tories get 240, the Lib Dems get 65, and others get 25. Would we not call that a Hung Parliament? If not, what is it? The concept of "Coalition Majority" seems to me a contradiction in terms.

Also, I'm rather put out by the Yes Campaign's "Nick Griffin is voting No, what about you?" campaign - not because it's dirty politics, I get that, but because Nick Griffin is voting No because what he really wants is PR - something most Yes campaigners tell me is a very likely consequence of a Yes vote. To assuage my annoyance, here is a graph of the Yes campaign's progress to date on meeting their claim that they have disclosed all of their donors, and published "a list of each and every penny we've received".

Of course by value of donation, they have named the vast majority, but that's not terribly hard when almost all your funding comes from organisations whose purpose is to support your campaign.

To be honest, I'd argue that naming the Electoral Reform Society and Make Votes Count is about as open as the days when Tories used bodies like the Midlands Industrial Council to make donations. Unless we know where that money came from in the first place, it's meaningless.

Otherwise, why could the "No" campaign not simply set up an organisation called "The Anti-AV Society", ask people to donate to that, donate the money onward to "No to AV", and declare that it had published a complete list of donors?

Graph Week: Graphs #1 and #2

2011-04-04T07:11:00.003+01:00

They say a picture paints a thousand words, so this week I intend to post several thousand words. Here's my first contribution. I have heard it said a few times as a Tory/Lib Dem talking point that "92% of the UK's debt is down to Gordon Brown, only 8% is because of the financial crisis".

From what I knew already, this seemed unlikely to me, so I thought I'd look into the growth of UK Government Debt. Even if there's a political debate to be had about what the appropriate level of debt, and deficit, is, it's still better to be speaking based on facts than on imaginary conjecture, right?

So, I have no idea where the 92% figure comes from, but I went to the Office for National Statistics, and found that the UK's Debt in May 2010 was £2,181bn. I was able to discover that excluding the bailout, it was £778.1bn. I was not able to get a figure for May 1997, but there wasn't much change over the course of that year, so I've used the overall figure for the year of £357.6bn.

All that data is in this graph below, showing the proportion of ned debt acquired before 1997, between 1997 and 2010 due to general Government deficit accrual, and the proportion which has been used to finance the bailout of the financial system. As you can see, that lavender coloured slice is slightly more than 8% of the total.

Of course even this flatters history, since older debt was worth more at the time than it is now, thanks to both economic growth and inflation since it was accrued. Because of that I also thought it would be useful to picture the growth of UK Government debt excluding financial sector intervention a) as it actually developed, and b) if it had kept pace with nominal GDP growth. So, here (the black line) is UK Government Debt in £bn. In purple is a model of what debt would have been if it had remained constant relative to nominal GDP - i.e. stayed the same as a share of the national economy.

See how it soars throughout the period of feckless Labour Government? No, me neither.

Interesting links for today

2011-03-22T21:27:00.000Z

French Tories split over whether to recommend a Socialist vote in the second round of local election in areas where it's just the Socialists or the National Front. In one division it's just the Communists and the National Front. Wackiest form of second ballot system ever, mind.Creates an incentive for right-wingers to vote Green in the first round in a lot of divisions. It's also possible to get over 50% of the vote in the first round, and not win. The unspoken issue of course is Sarkozy hoping for FN second preferences in areas where they didn't make the run-off
My friend Lillian tries, with fairly limited success, to maintain her claim for ESA. It seems particularly objectionable to me that people aren't told there is an appeals process - as if the welfare state needs rigging in favour of the articulate and informed any more than it already is.
Left Foot Forward tries to build a coalition between Socialists and Eurosceptics to fight NHS reforms. This whole question is probably worth more than a political aside - European welfare states are, by and large, fundamentally different from the British one (and different again from one another, between Scandinavia, core Europe, and the Mediterranean). At some point a question needs asking, something like "To what extent should European Judges, when applying EU law to welfare issues, take into account the political and social culture of the nation to which that particular decision applies?"
Liberal Conspiracy, perhaps following the lead of Compass this week, gives a Liberal Democrat whose eyes are still full of scales (and I'm being generous here I think in assuming they are merely wrong rather than disingenuous liars) the opportunity to spin some fiction about Labour Councils. The case falls apart hilariously in the comments section.
Something cheery to finish with; Tories fall to lowest ever polling figure with upstart pollsters Angus Reid. Referendum remains too close to call either way.

Definitely a trend here

2011-03-18T07:50:00.000Z

Could easily still go either way, but AV's chances seem to be trending downwards at Betfair.

A certain lack of clemency

2011-03-12T13:25:00.002Z

Here is the motion passed by the Lib Dem Spring Conference on NHS reform. Amendment 1 (carried) appears to be the salient part - though reading the initial motion demonstrates quite how brazen and provocative the Leadership were being; if I had been attempting to draft something to rile the grassroots, I'm not sure I could have done much better. Most important paragraph;

Conference recognises however that all of the above policies and aspirations can be achieved without adopting the damaging and unjustified market-based approach that is proposed. Conference regrets that some of the proposed reforms have never been Liberal Democrat policy, did not feature in our manifesto or in the agreed Coalition Programme, which instead called for an end to large-scale top-down reorganisations.

Anyway, much congratulation of grassroots Lib Dems on Twitter, though it remains to be seen how much influence any of this has on Lib Dem MPs and Ministers, still less on the Government. I'll try to put my cynicism aside for a little while, on the 'more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who is saved' principle. It won't last, of course. In the meantime, some things I thought were interesting;

I thought it was a bit much of Andrew George MP in the debate to describe the Liberal Democrats as "architects of the NHS", but I presume all the time they could have spent challenging Cameron has been used to build a Tardis, go back in time, and write Bevan's policies for him. Best attempt to support his claim goes to Lib Dem Voice in 2009, defending the role of the Liberal Party and the Conservatives on the creation of the NHS. Comments to this are interesting too from a number of Labour bloggers.

Speech at Second Reading of the National Health Service Bill by Clement Davies, Leader of the Liberal Party. Two particularly salient passages.

On whether the Conservatives were really in favour of the NHS;

I, like the Parliamentary Secretary, was at a loss to understand what is the position of hon. Members above the Gangway. They say that they are in favour of a national health service and that they wish to establish a comprehensive service. If that is their wish, why do they put down an Amendment, the only object of which is to wreck this Bill? Every one of the reasons given by the right hon. and learned Member for North Croydon (Mr. Willink) were not questions of principle against a comprehensive medical and health service; at best they were Committee points which could be raised during the Committee stage. But the Opposition have seen fit to put down this Amendment and I take it that they are going to carry it to a Division. If they succeed, the country will have to go for a further time without a comprehensive national health service. Let us make no mistake about that. This is a wrecking Amendment, but the extraordinary thing is that somehow or other, they can never get out of a habit, however bad it is.

On whether he saw 'choice' as an important part of health services (summary: he didn't, though it should be noted that the Liberal Policy in 1945 had as one of its key distinguishing features a commitment to patients retaining a choice of GP).

A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the freedom of choice of doctor. In country districts we do not have to take the doctor of our choice, but the one who happens to settle within that rural area. If I may give my own personal experience, the old doctor who saw to my advent into this world sold his practice to A. A sold it to B, B sold it to C, C to D and D to E, and I think it is now F to whom I go when I am in the country. I did not choose him. He was chosen by his predecessor who sold his practice to him. This applies to the whole of the countryside. If I go to an industrial area, even to London, what choice have I of a doctor? What we often see is the plate on a corner house—doctors usually choose a corner house because it is the best site and the most likely to attract—which happens to be nearest to us, and we go there without any knowledge at all of the doctor. Let us be real in this matter.

Here's what the 1945 Liberal Party Manifesto had said. The 'detailed proposals' don't seem to have survived - there might be a copy of them at the LSE, but the pamphlet archive links to something quite different.

People cannot be happy unless they are healthy. The Liberal aim is a social policy which will help to conquer disease by prevention as well as cure, through good housing, improved nutrition, the lifting of strains and worries caused by fear of unemployment, and through intensified medical research. The Liberal Party's detailed proposals for improved health services would leave patients free to choose their doctor, for the general practitioner is an invaluable asset in our social life.

I'll be honest, the general practitioner has never been an invaluable asset in my social life. I do have one close friend who is a GP, but she lives 125 miles away. Maybe I just don't mix in the right circles.

Why is nobody polling an AV ballot?

2011-03-07T18:56:00.000Z

A mild obsession of mine, having raised it more than once on Twitter, but I just don't understand why so much of the AV debate among those who care about outcomes more than processes has to be conducted either in the dark, or based on proxy measures.

Labour Yes have their inconsistent academic saying that it would help Labour, I have YouGov saying that Lib Dems prefer the Tories to Labour by more than 3 to 1, and the last election to show that UKIP (likely to go Tory) outpolled the Greens (likely to go Labour) by somewhere between 3 and 4 times.

Meanwhile, Betfair says the Referendum is a dead heat. The last matched odds suggest a 47.6% probability of a Yes vote. Despite that, since the start of February there have been 30 different national opinion polls, by 6 different pollsters, all of which have asked a voting intention question offering a single choice - an assumption that an election would be under FPTP.

Is it abnormally technologically complex to offer people the top seven or eight parties, and ask them to rank them in order of preference? Obviously there'd be a quirk to resolve with the regional parties. I imagine I would preference the SNP over the Lib Dems, but the option isn't realistically going to be open to me, for example. Apart from that, though, we'd have a rough idea of the way votes would shift.

It wouldn't be a complete answer - some argue that urban and rural Lib Dems are fundamentally different breeds, for example, so that Labour would somehow scoop up second preferences even in the era of Tory-leaning Lib Dems. That's not my experience, but it's still one way a finding that Lib Dems have moved to the right could be argued against as a metric for predicting an AV election result.

Nonetheless, it's absurd that the only electoral calculator to offer an option for predicting the result under AV is forced to rely on a poll from July 2010 - an age ago, in the current context. In an era of ubiquitous polling, it would be surreal if we got to within a month of the referendum with no better evidence than this.

Lib Dem Manifesto to Include "non-promises"

2011-02-19T13:38:00.000Z

A story which was not noticed at the time, published in the Campbell County Gazette, March 2010.

A number of made-up promises such as "scrap fees" or "don't raise VAT" are to be included in the Liberal Democrat Manifesto for the UK General Election. The idea has drawn criticism from political experts who say the approach will confuse those wanting to vote. The UK Policy Studies Association said the plan was "bonkers" as the purpose of a manifesto was to give voters at least some vague idea of your policies and values.

The Liberal Democrats said non-promises were being included to check voters' ability to decode words using a lie detector. This is the political system by which Lib Dems make up any old crap that they think will get people to vote for them, whether they mean it or not. Non-promises were being included to check that voters were not just backing parties with genuine values and commitments, a spokesman for Nick Clegg said.

The proposed new ballot paper will take about 10 minutes to complete.

President of the UK Policy Studies Association David Tweedy said the inclusion of non-promises would be counter productive since most voters expect to make sense of what they read. "The manifesto is trying to control all the different variables so that things like meaning don't get in the way. We think that seems a bit bonkers when the whole purpose of promises is to set out a commitment", he said.

Labour Yes: Stuck in the Past

2011-02-18T12:32:00.002Z

I understand arguments that say the AV debate should be conducted on the level of principle, not party advantage - they're honourable, but unrealistic. Unrealistic because the politically engaged have a view about what they want to happen which will always be coloured by their own self-interest, and because for many of us, concern about real world outcomes is more important than marginal arguments about the relative merits of different processes for achieving those outcomes.

Labour ~~Friends of Nick Clegg~~ Yes, however, are currently managing to combine the worst of all possible worlds. Not stung by being caught out using Matt Qvortup's discredited research on the impact of AV, they have returned with an analysis of the impact AV would have had in elections since 1983 up to last year. They conclude, probably correctly, that AV would usually have damaged the Conservatives at those elections.

Although, of the net loss of 189 Conservative seats over 7 elections, 121 would have been in 1997 and 2001. I like large Labour majorities, but I'm not sure making them larger on those occasions would have been healthy, or met the objectives of most people who are supporting reform.

More importantly, though, it's not the late 20th century any more. Times have moved on, and if we're going to debate this issue at the level of party advantage, so must we. I pointed out last month why the overwhelming majority of available second preferences are to Labour's right, and that has only become more true since then.It's no wonder the Labour Yes blog have now banned comments, their arguments don't stand up to even the simplest scrutiny.

We are sailing ahead in the polls, but even in terms of being the largest party, our 6% lead would be instantly halved by the second preferences of a million UKIP voters. After that, Labour candidates would, across most of the country, be facing a Tory, or a Lib Dem. We know from experience that Tories will fall in behind the Lib Dem candidate, and that can only be more true now than it was before the coalition. Say goodbye to Islington South, Oxford East, and many other seats we fought hard to retain last year. Only 4.9% of Tory supporters in 2010 listed Labour as their second preference.

The Liberal Democrats, particularly between 1992 and 2010, attracted a lot of voters who were left of centre, but wanted to protest against Labour as well as the Tories. Therefore, modelling AV based on history flatters Labour. Even in 2010 when we were unpopular, 43% of Lib Dem voters preferred Labour, with only 28% backing the Tories. That is no longer the case.

Many of those Lib Dem voters have done the sensible thing and come back to Labour as their first preference, explaining much of the collapse in the Lib Dem vote. By July 2010, the balance had already shifted the other way - 36% of Lib Dems backing the Conservatives, and only 32% giving their second preferences to Labour. Meaning Labour would be less likely to win Labour-Tory marginals under AV, as well as Labour-LibDem marginals.

No formal "second choice" polling has ben done since last Summer, though one might expect in the run-up to the referendum it will be, but YouGov do intermittently ask who voters would prefer - a Labour Government, or a Conservative Government, if those were the only choices on offer. The most recent time this was asked that I can find was January. It shows a staggering reversal, with 51% of Liberal Democrats backing the Conservatives, and only 16% backing Labour.

In other words, even if the Lib Dem vote share halves at the next election, AV is a gift of up to 1.2 million votes to David Cameron. Assume 85% of UKIP voters prefer the Tories to Labour, and we would need to win the first round of the election by 2 million votes (bear in mind our 2001 landslide was won with a lead of only 2.4 million) just to draw.

I should for the sake of completeness add that there are 270,000 Green votes available which will probably go mostly to Labour candidates.

How to contradict yourself

2011-02-17T14:46:00.001Z

Janet Daley, writing for the Telegraph today;

"Which brings us to another weakness in the Labour case: reforming welfare and thus encouraging more people into gainful employment actually results in more jobs being created. It is a virtuous circle. Because people who are working have more disposable income (as opposed, for example to dedicated welfare allowances such as housing benefit) and more confidence in the future, they spend more on goods and services – and that spurs growth in the economy which in turn produces more jobs."

Janet Daley, writing for the Telegraph last month;

"The similarity between Barack Obama’s having-it-both-ways State of the Union message and the most recent offerings of our own national leaders is quite startling. The remedy they all seem to propose for economic recovery is not a matter of choosing between debt reduction and public spending: it is to have more of both. Everybody wants to cut the debt and everybody wants to spend more money. Never mind that, as every hapless credit card addict discovers, once you are bankrupt and in debt over your head, every additional pound that you spend has to be borrowed which thus increases your debt, making it more unlikely that you will ever be solvent again. That simple logic of personal finance is not supposed to apply to governments: the Keynesian solution to recession is precisely for the state to spend more money in order to stimulate economic activity. And the growth that results from this injection of public funding is supposed to produce more tax revenues which will in turn allow governments to pay off their debts."

Well, is growth endogenous, or isn't it? I'm open to either argument in principle, but you can't make them both at once.

A sketch of an answer. Part 1: Culture(s)

2011-02-14T07:35:00.004Z

Last week, I asked whether we could respond to David Cameron's multiculturalism speech by attacking the crass timing, location, and some logical nonsenses, or whether we had to engage with the broader substance of the argument, and if so, how. I still haven't reached an answer, but have been having thoughts of the "everything is connected to everything else" kind.

Here's where I've got to so far;

People want to belong; Gordon Brown may have been stroking Labour's members when he talked about an ideology which recognised "values beyond contracts, markets, and exchange", but he was also speaking to something basic in the British people, which says that we are what we are because of how we relate to others, not only because of what we achieve for ourselves. The principle of social solidarity reaches far beyond the left, hence Cameron's clumsy, failed, attempt to capture it for the Big Society.
Belonging isn't along a single scale, or to a single rallying point. We know that cultures overlap, we also know that it's possible to be more than one thing; I can be a Yorkshireman, an Englishman, and a Briton, without having to compromise at the level of self-image about any of those things - I may have to make choices when it comes to support for particular governance structures, but that's not what most people care about in terms of belonging, it's just a squabble among political geeks.
There's no reason why "Muslim" can't be another one of those identities, though for some it isn't. My best friends in sixth form were undoubtedly British, and broadly proud of it. That was just as true of Aisha and Shafiq as it was of Gary and Louise, but it didn't mean they weren't Muslim. If anything, the former were more keen to "be British" - their community was more open then than it is now (which is worrying), but "being British" was seen not only as what they 'ought' to be, but also as a statement that they intended to study where they chose, work where they chose, and marry who they chose. I suppose it helped that they were from relatively well-off Muslim families who had chosen to send their children to the school that was only about 15% Muslim, rather than the one that was around 70%.
There's nothing wrong in principle with setting a 'core minimum' for people who choose to come and live in Britain; norms of behaviour vary from country to country, and from culture to culture, and while it's easy to reduce any argument to absurdity there is clearly a middle point, setting out behaviours which are seen here as unacceptable, or indeed illegal - forced marriage, persecution of homosexuals, what have you, and to reinforce positive expected behaviours, such as learning our common language to a standard that enables participation in society (yes, cutting language class funding is wrong), even if you prefer to use your mother tongue in day to day life.
It's a caricature of liberal progressivism to say that in the fight to make lifestyles which are in fact acceptable become accepted, it lost focus on the fact that some lifestyles are objectively damaging, but it is nonetheless true that the British state, in being unwilling to take a stance on the relative merits of different kinds of good choice people can make has at times been too reticent in taking a stand as between good and bad choices.
There's something unsettling about the decision to focus this all as an argument about Islam or Muslims. There are plenty of communities living in the UK who have members who behave in unacceptable ways, and to demonise one in particular seems more like a political tool than a genuine attempt to move the debate forward.
Large Muslim minorities are often in the least "multicultural" parts of the UK. My experience has been that 'multiculturalism' works better than 'biculturalism', or what Luke Akehurst called "multiple separate and parallel cultures that don't mix". That said, it's not clear what policy prescription Luke's argument leads to. Mass immigration of people from ethnicities that don't currently have a large population in the UK outside London? Forced bussing of half the population of Hackney to Burnley?
If Cameron was going to make a genuinely brave speech, he'd not just have focused on the cheap headlines of attacking Islamism, he'd have said something about elements in London's Haredi community who brainwash their daughters into giving up any higher education aspirations despite their often excellent school results, and pressure them to raise families far larger than anyone can sensibly afford; about [a small minority of] Evangelical churches who preach the threat of witchcraft and through it encourage abuse of children with mental health problems through 'exorcisms'. I'm sure their time will come, though, when the media get bored of Muslims again.
He would also have pointed out how many white English people increasingly behave in ways which don't meet the standards we believe we are setting for ourselves as a community, rather than just taking the easy foil of "of course, we condemn white racists" (do we, always?). If he'd tried really hard, he might have done it in a way that didn't sound like a rich man sneering at oiks. "Paying your taxes" could for example be one of our shared cultural norms.
The context of his speech, and the focus on terrorism, made this inevitable - that should have been a big flashing red light that using it to raise his standard on cultural norms was not a good idea, rather than to steam ahead and do it. His substantive points on the topical issue were correct, if bland and obvious - "Islam and Islamism are not the same thing", "Not all Muslims are extremist terrorists", and so on. Well, that's useful new information to me, at least.
If we are further apart economically and socially, we are further apart culturally. Left Foot Forward, in an article which I think is perhaps a little optimistic in general, do a good job of picking out some examples of Government policy which seem likely to make integration and positive cohabitation more challenging, rather than less. Another example of where the new politics in fact just coincides with the old politics. Of course, if we cared more about political issues such as class, wealth distribution, and opportunity, we may reduce the political space available to debate what clothes people should be allowed to wear in public.

It seems to me that there's an ideological space opening up, a general realignment caused both by the coalition, the defeat, but narrow defeat, of New Labour in the Leadership election, and by the financial crisis receding without the 'old normal' being either restored, or indeed seen by most people as desirable. This isn't going to be at the core of it from the left's perspective, but getting it wrong could damage the credibility of the overall message.

Next (when I can be bothered) nostalgia, and/or Blue Labour.

The Fight for Cornwall is the Fight for England

2011-02-10T07:02:00.004Z

Well, perhaps not quite, but it was encouraging that last night that Labour Lords overwhelmingly supported a rebel Lib Dem's attempts to block the creation of a Parliamentary constituency covering parts of Devon and parts of Cornwall. Lib Dems backing the proposal should be soundly thrashed with a copy of the Liberator Songbook. Cornwall has a distinct identity, and of all the English Counties, is the one which it is most unwise to lump with part of another for representation - as much as a constituency wouldn't cross the Scottish border.

I once had a conversation with Matthew Taylor (not that one), now Lord Taylor of Goss Moor - and asked him what he thought of regional assemblies. He replied that he had no objection in principle but that there wasn't really room for very many of them in a country the size of Cornwall. Of course he was, mostly, joking, but the principle of the political system's recognition of communities, and their representation as communities, as well as merely their representation as arbitrarily sized clusters of people, matters.

If Parliamentary Constituencies don't look anything like the places people feel that they live, they won't be seen as legitimate, and people will be much less likely to talk about "our MP", and much more likely to see them as Westminster's representative on earth, not the local community's representative in Westminster. Conservatives should understand this. Liberal Democrats who are rooted in their communities and have achieved their position largely by understanding this should remember it. For the others, the elite cadre, I can only say that this is another example of my personal bugbear - what happens when procedural liberalism trumps substantive outcomes.

On that, Labour certainly shouldn't be smug. Across a string of policy areas, we preferred working to a theory over learning from a practice in the early stages of policymaking. We, rightly, made the state much more rigorous in looking at data and evidence, but at the same time we allowed that to devalue the experience of voters, service users, and frontline workers, in our eyes. If what they were telling us was going on didn't fit with the data, the default assumption was that they were wrong, and the data must be right.

So, Cornwall, perhaps an outlying example, but emblematic of what I think will become one of the big dividing lines of the new politics (boo, hiss, it's the old politics in disguise, etc) even if the cleavage isn't neat across parties. Our perception of issues like this will affect how we respond to those with a political resonance across the whole country. Is it primarily important that we should have consistent and uniform systems in place everywhere, based on impartial evidence, or is it more important that we should enable people to live as part of that system without having to set aside too much of their identity, building a state which goes with the grain of all the inconsistencies and quirks which make up humanity and community? Or, can we somehow do both?

For example, David Cameron's "Munich Moment". Was his speech badly timed, given the EDL march? Absolutely. Was it badly situated, in the city which gave birth to Nazism? Absolutely. But, was it wrong in a fundamental way? Should we react to it with blanket condemnation, focus on those procedural sins, and hope to reap an electoral reward by retoxifying the Tories as the Nasty Party, or do we have to put forward an alternative point of view which addresses those issues, even if that risks upsetting people who don't agree with the vision we outline?

At this point it is, I think, customary to answer one's own rhetorical question. Maybe later.

Some Old Politics #5

2011-01-31T07:12:00.003Z

Pursuant to the debate about how to run Young Labour (something which sadly ceased to be any of my business in any direct way a very long time ago), I thought this quote from Harold Wilson, Labour's most electorally successful leader, had a lot to commend it.

"This Party needs to protect itself against the activities of small groups of inflexible political persuasion, extreme so-called left and in a few cases extreme so-called moderates, having in common only their arrogant dogmatism. These groups, equally the multichromatic coalitionist fringe or groups specifically formed to fight other marauding groups, these groups are not what this Party is about. Infestation of this kind thrives only, and can thrive only, in minuscule local parties."

Some would argue that he failed on his own terms, but the principle that the way to fight extremist influence within the party is to ensure that it is large, inclusive, and active, rather than to form counter-factions and restrict democratic processes, seems to me to have a lot to commend it.

The only exception I can think of would be circumstances where an entryist faction is very geographically concentrated...

When hashtags go wrong

2011-01-27T07:09:00.000Z

Well, not really, but I posted this on Twitter yesterday evening, and then realised it would work much better as a blogpost. I call it "Lyrics Billy Bragg Should Sing to Apologise for Backing the Lib Dems".

Not a day goes by that I don't sit and wonder why.
I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.
[To Nick Clegg] I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care.
You said this would happen and you were not wrong.
Oh will this torment ever end. [ode to fixed terms]
I woke up this morning to find that we have outlived the myth of trust.

Encore: This Guitar Says Sorry.

Anyway, something from happier times;

This looks interesting #3

2011-01-25T18:44:00.004Z

I've been asked to help promote this. It appears not only interesting, but timely.

How shall we rebuild the British economy?

7-8.30pm Thursday 10 February 2011

Committee Room 10, House of Commons

Speakers: Brendan Barber (General Secretary TUC), John Denham (Shadow Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills), Paul Everitt (Chief Executive, The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Limited), Sir Alan Rudge (Chairman, ERA Foundation), Karel Williams (Director CRESC, Manchester University). Chair: Jon Cruddas MP.

Organised by the New Political Economy Network in association with CRESC, Manchester University Please give plenty of time for getting through security at St Stephens entrance.

Places are limited. To register please email newpolecon@googlemail.com

The end of AV week: Would AV help the BNP?

2011-01-21T06:54:00.005Z

This is an emotive issue, regularly raised by those arguing against actual Proportional Representation, the fear that it would lead to representation for the parties of the far and extreme right. Pure PR at the last election, even assuming no change in voting patterns, would have delivered 12 seats for the BNP, and 20 seats for UKIP. A reasonably strong nationalist bloc in Parliament - for comparison, the SNP and Plaid Cymru combined would have scored 15 seats.

AV, of course, isn't pure PR by any means, and if by "help the BNP", one means "make them more likely to gain seats", the answer is almost certainly that it wouldn't - indeed they themselves support PR rather than AV or FPTP, for that reason. In most cases, the BNP are strongly opposed by those who don't actively support them, failing the 'marmite test' they set themselves, and therefore are less likely to win under a system which requires them to garner lower, as well as first, preferences. Of course, they have failed spectacularly thus far to win any Westminster seats under First Past the Post either; so far, so similar.

If one assumes that most BNP second preferences would transfer to UKIP, then AV might make UKIP slightly more likely to win a seat, particularly if they could find themselves second to the Lib Dems somewhere and attract Conservative second preferences. I'm not especially stressed about that, I think UKIP hold a valid position on the political spectrum, with which I happen to disagree on a number of issues. They polled over three times as many votes as the Green Party in 2010, so it seems somewhat unjust that there is a Green MP but no UKIP MP. For the BNP, I feel no such sympathy.

On the question of whether it would make them more politically influential, the issue is whether politicians would freeze them out, or court their votes. We have some evidence from the last election that politicians of all parties are not averse to the odd dog whistle if they feel they are losing voters in that direction. Adding in AV's alleged tendency to allow more people to express 'true first preferences' rather than vote tactically, and it's possible the BNP vote would be both higher in the first round, and a more tempting prize for candidates competing for the eventual victory, however much we might protest in principle that we "don't want tainted votes".

The last word on this to French Conservative Marc Bayle, whose excellent 1995 book "Le Front national: Ca n'arrive pas qu'aux autres" I commend to all of you who can read French, it's fairly uncomplicated prose. I'm not aware of an English translation, so what follows is my own - original French available on request. He refers to the French "second round" which is a form of AV or, more properly, SV, where the second election is held on a different, later, day, rather than preferences being ranked in a single poll*.

".. for ten years, the dominant impression is that for most political actors, the rebirth of the far right provokes neither deeply-felt emotions, nor any particular anguish. [It provokes merely] tactical self-questioning. "How can I get back those votes which have been stolen by the National Front? How can I recapture 'my voters'? How can I shepherd back to the fold those voters previously faithful, but now led astray into the extremists' fields? How might I, before the second round, capture the votes which the other established parties have lost to the National Front, and which after this inglorious moment, nothing prohibits me from trying to turn to my own profit?".

So really it depends on your definition of help. It would make their voters more influential in the overall result, but probably less likely to elect actual BNP candidates.

* On which note I quite like the Bhutanese electoral system, in which a second round is held in each constituency, pitting against one another not the two highest performing candidates in that constituency, but the candidates of the two highest performing parties nationally. I fear it won't catch on, though.

Would AV shift Labour back to the right?

2011-01-20T07:43:00.007Z

This is the penultimate post of "AV Week", and is addressed to those on the centre-left and left of the party who are in favour of reform, particularly members of Compass. I'm afraid it's a bit long, but I felt that making the point clearly was more important than making the point concisely.

One of the things which has surprised my about this debate has been how many people on the right of the party are prominent in "Labour Yes". I suppose I assumed Blair's lack of enthusiasm for change would be mirrored among "Blairites". I found myself wondering whether, as well as it being their genuinely held belief that we should switch to AV, something about the system might also serve their political obectives too.

As a thought experiment, I would like to consider an average constituency, if a General Election were called right now. I appreciate that I am using figures from a First Past the Post election to compare with a possible AV election in the future, but if anything my point is made stronger by that, since the main claim is that people will express their 'true' preferences, so the vote for minor parties could be higher, not lower.

At the last election, the "average" constituency, in terms of score for candidates who stood, among parties who stood at least 100 candidates, was as follows.

Tory: 16,963
Labour: 13,644
Lib Dem: 10,835
BNP: 1,667
UKIP: 1,609
Green: 921
English Democrat: 606

Applying YouGov's recent poll data to the above, in terms of how 2010 voters say they would vote now, gives us the following numbers for the main parties: I appreciate it looks odd that when Labour is marginally ahead in the polls it should be behind in the average constituency, but remember that higher turnout in Tory areas means Labour does not need as many votes in the 'average' constituency to win the same number of seats.

Tory: 18,013
Labour: 17,207
Lib Dem: 1,609

For the minor parties, I am going to presume that their vote is unchanged, but halve the BNP vote on the assumption that the constituencies in which they stood were the ones in which they anticipated the strongest performance, and therefore there would be diminishing marginal vote returns to standing in further seats. The Greens gain 433 as fully 4% of ex-LibDems intend to vote for them. So:

UKIP: 1,609
Green: 1,354
BNP: 843
EngDem: 606

Of the 1609 Lib Dems, 850 would vote Tory if pushed into a two-party choice, 320 would vote Labour, the rest genuinely have no idea. Let's look at that as a graph moving from left to right, because graphs are cool. I'm going to allow, though personally have my doubts, that the Greens are to the left of Labour. The resulting chart looks like this:

Not very promising, in terms of the number of votes which are to our left, and the number which are to our right. Overwhelmingly, English constituencies which are 'winnable' for Labour are a battle between us and the Tories, or us and the Lib Dems. What happens in each of these scenarios? Clearly, if the Lib Dems are in contention on the first round, then unless we can find a way to persuade Tories to give us their second preference, or abstain, we lose. It seems unlikely that they will abandon their coalition partners.

More interestingly, the seats where the two main parties are the ones in contention, us and the Tories. Let's look at the graph another way, so we can find the "AV winning post" of 20620.

From this we can see that not only would Labour have to pick up all Green voters and attract all Lib Dem left-leaners and doubters to win the average constituency, it would have to attract Tory-leaning Lib Dems, and some Tories - or else fish in the murkier waters of BNP, ED, and UKIP second preferences. If we accept the 'relative turnout' issue above, then success could come with just a tiny number of Tory voters, but of course if they are the main opposition, that would have to be via direct defections, not second preferences.

To make the point more starkly, it is possible to eliminate the Labour and Tory votes, and look solely at where second preference votes are available in a Tory-Labour marginal, to determine our likely political strategy.

Here the situation worsens again. To win the "average" constituency against the Tories, in a tied first round, the second preferences of Greens and left-leaning Lib Dems would take us barely a quarter of the way there. We would need the second preferences of all remaining Lib Dems, including those who currently lean to the Tories, and some voters from further right (my assumption that UKIP are to the left of the ED and BNP may not hold here since more of them are disaffected Tories likely to 'return home'.

What is Labour's sensible political strategy here? Worryingly, for those of us who are relieved at the party's return to the centre-left, the answer is troubling. Those green voters are mostly 'in the bag'. They may worry that Labour remains too right-wing on some issues, or insufficiently committed to environmentalism, but few of them are likely to vote for a Thatcherite party crammed full of global warming deniers.

The remaining left-inclined Lib Dems, equally, seem unlikely to be pushed to the Coalition by a move to the right. The votes of coalition-inclined Lib Dems, however, and those giving their first preference to parties Right of the Tories, are going to be very difficult to pick up. Of course, if there really is a "progressive majority", we're fine. It just appears to be in hiding.

At the moment, we can plead purity, and state that we don't want votes from the far right, and allow them to be isolated - expressive, but impotent. That's easier to say under the current system than it might be when several thousand votes in the average constituency are floating around looking for the highest bidder. Of that, a little more tomorrow. And then AV week is, I promise you, over.

Does AV give some voters extra votes?

2011-01-19T07:37:00.007Z

Post 2 in this week's series on AV. Yesterday was "Why AV fails on its own terms", and the example below should be read in conjuction with that post.

No to AV Claim #1: AV gives some voters 'extra votes'. I think this is a challenging criticism, and one which is sometimes debated at too superficial a level. Certainly, I take the point that every voter does still have one vote, but that in some cases it transfers because that voter's preferred candidate is eliminated, but for others it is the same person in every "round". I guess this is why forms of AV are sometimes called "instant run-off voting", to make it clear that they are theoretically the same as having a later 'second ballot'.

Nonetheless, the criticism makes a certain amount of instinctive sense - one voter has expressed their preference, their first choice, their view about how their area should be represented. Another voter says they want something different. They can't have that, so they say they'd like something else instead. Eventually, in some AV elections, they build a coalition of minorities. That's an argument though, at too instinctive a level to debate in a genuine way, it's a matter of belief about the nature of choice and the meaning of a vote, more than about working electoral systems.

Why, then, does the criticism still feel like it has an instinctive force? Going back to the example from yesterday, there is a more real way in which we can conceptualise losing party voters as having more votes than others. The Condorcet problem referenced earlier. In order to determine whether there is a "Condorcet winner", which is what AV advocates purportedly wish to do, it would be necessary to ask voters a short series of questions, namely;

1. Do you prefer Pink to Purple?
2. Do you prefer Pink to Cyan?
3. Do you prefer Purple to Cyan?

Now let's look at who has 'voted' (by which I mean expressed a preference and had that preference counted in the results) in each of those polls.

A. Pink Voters: They have voted in questions 1 and 2 in round 1 - by voting for Pink, they have answer "yes", and "yes". They have not voted in question 3, and therefore have had 2 of a possible 3 Condorcet votes.
B. Purple Voters: They have voted in questions 1 and 3 in round 1 - by voting for Purple, they have answered "no" and "yes". They have not voted in question 2, and therefore have had 2 of a possible 3 Condorcet votes.
C. Cyan voters: They have voted in questions 2 and 3 in round 1 - by voting for Cyan, they have answered "no" and "no". In addition, round 3 asks them question 1, and by voting for Purple, they have answered "yes". They have therefore had 3 of a possible 3 Condorcet votes, and been allowed to express their opinion more fully than Purple and Pink voters.

Sorry if your head hurts. I will refrain from scaling up to what happens if you have more than three candidates. Suffice it to say, it doesn't get better. I think this is a fairly technical discussion, and not a particularly strong argument against AV, but the speed with which AV advocates dismiss people who raise it as "not understanding AV" made me want to explain why I think it does have at least some validity.

Why AV fails on its own terms

2011-01-18T07:03:00.006Z

I'm afraid it's AV week at The Old Politics, so those of you already bored of that debate may want to tune out for a little while. Late last year we had "would AV help Labour?", a post rendered timely by YouGov polling on preferred government, and showing that over half of Lib Dems would prefer the Tories, and under a quarter would prefer Labour.

Today we have "Does AV guarantee the Real Winner really wins?". Later in the week, subject to time and energy, will be "Does AV give some voters extra votes?", "What would AV do to Labour's political strategy" and, if I am really bored, "Would AV help the far right?".

So, a starter for today! I've seen a number of claims made by the "Yes" campaign which, as far as I can tell, don't stand up to scrutiny, and one criticism from the "No" side which is dismissed by the "Yes" campaign, but which I think does have a validity, albeit a subtler one, even within an AV framework.

Hypothesis: There are three candidates for election; The Pink Party, the Purple Party, and the Cyan Party. The Pink Party candidate receives 5000 votes. The Purple Party candidate receives 3000 votes, and the Cyan Party candidate receives 2500 votes.

Under FPTP, the Pink Party candidate wins.

We know, however, that Cyan voters prefer Purple to Pink, although Purple voters prefer Pink to Cyan, and Pink voters prefer Cyan to Purple. Therefore in a second round of AV voting, the Purple candidate overtakes the Pink candidate, and wins the election by 5500 to 5000.

AV Claim #1: Under AV, there is not a majority who would have preferred someone else to the winning candidate. Not true - in the above scenario, the Purple candidate has won, although if voters had been offered a choice between the Purple candidate and the Cyan candidate, the Cyan candidate would have won in a landslide, by 7500 votes to 3000 votes, as opposed to the narrow victory scored by the Purple candidate over the pink candidate. In the language of electoral systems geeks, AV "fails Condorcet".

AV Claim #2: AV eliminates the need for tactical voting. Even the Electoral Reform Society, who should know better, have been caught putting this argument around. However, consider the voters of the Pink Party in the above election. If 600 of them tactically 'defect' and support the Cyan party - then the result changes radically; Purple is eliminated, their votes transfer to Pink, and Pink defeats Cyan by 7400 to 3100. Tactical voting under AV can mean voting for your least preferred candidate. Maybe it should be called 'strategic voting'.

Of course if we posit a fringe party in the above election, receiving a few dozen votes, then under First Past the Post it's true that they either have to accept that their vote is purely expressive, whereas under AV they get an expressive vote and then a subsequent, potentially effective, vote. The question then is simply the extent to which we perceive insufficient influence for people with fringe views as one of the more serious problems in our political system.

Milibullseye

2011-01-14T23:48:00.000Z

Again - I like Ed, I voted for Ed, I still strongly support Ed. I know people have a variety of views about the direction of our party, and a range of opinions about the qualities of the people who lead it, but I wanted to put on record that I think this is spot on.

Thirteen years in government saw us too often defending an economy that squeezed too many on middle and low incomes. We will learn the correct lessons of the financial crisis so we can offer Britain a new economy. We will become the voice and hope of those who feel squeezed by an economic system that promised to liberate them.

On occasions we put too much faith in the wisdom of the centralised state, and on others, in the power of an unfettered market. We must now stand up clearly for our values of equality and social justice. We must also rediscover some of our lost traditions: mutualism, localism and solidarity. The Living wage was a policy that arose out of the community-organising movement. It is being implemented by local authorities, argued for by trade unions and citizen campaigners, rooted in people's lives and their capacity to make change happen.

And if we are to bring the progressive majority together, we must also be more open to other traditions, such as liberty. Labour, at its best, has always drawn inspiration from outside the party. William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes, both lifelong Liberals, dug the foundations on which the Attlee government was built.

Labour also needs to understand that in an era of free-market fundamentalism, we are the party best placed to argue for conserving institutions and relationships people value. From post office branch closures to the impact of out-of-town retail development on high streets, we need to be a party that supports communities.

If the policies we come out with reflect those principles, influences and ideas, then I'll be a lot happier with the policy review than I feared at the outset.

A rising yellow tide

2011-01-14T21:07:00.001Z

Yesterday (or this morning) was excellent. The Lib Dems got trounced, but not so badly that I lost the £30 I had bet on them gaining at least 25% of the vote. It would of course have been worth it if I'd lost, but never mind. Double-digit figure swings from Coalition to Labour in not only Oldham, but the two local Council by-elections yesterday; Cornwall a Labour victory, Norfolk not so much, but still a surge in the vote. Well done to all concerned.

I would like to say I had been cheering myself up further playing with Left Foot Forward's "Lib Dem Seat Predictor". Sadly because I'm one of nature's pessimists, what I have in fact done is engineered it such that you can calculate what would have happened at the last election if Tories had been able to give their second preferences to the Lib Dems, or chosen to vote for them tactically anyway, and in each case had done so in the same proportion as appears to have been the case in Oldham - i.e. 55% of the actual 2010 Tory Vote.

My examples so far are that it ditches Emily Thornberry out of Parliament - notwithstanding the magnificent local campaign in Islington South and Finsbury, such a result would have turned a Labour majority of 3,569 into a Lib Dem majority of 1,078. It would have turned a narrow loss for Labour in Bradford East into a landslide for the Lib Dems, with Terry Rooney missing out not by 365 votes, but by 6,338.

Well, anyway, you see where I'm going with this. Hopefully the Lib Dems will be starting from a lower base next time, and Labour a higher one. Still, though...

Some Old Politics #3 and #4

2011-01-12T23:06:00.002Z

Two for the price of none, today. Firstly just a memory - Nick Robinson quotes Eric Illsley on expenses as saying "In all the 22 years I have been a member of the House it has been regarded as an allowance... It was never set against expenses and members did not, in the majority of instances have to prove any expenditure in order to claim the allowance".

Undoubtedly true, though of course "we were all at it" doesn't make the abuse of a corrupt system any more acceptable. I do recall, though, our local Tory-supporting free paper, in 1995, accusing my MP of being, in their words, "greedy", for having voted for a pay rise. They contrasted her with our nearby Tory MP, who had not voted for the increase.

This happened to be the day of a CLP meeting, and nobody much cared about the paper in question, but I thought she'd want to see what they were saying about her, so I showed her in the bar afterwards. She explained to me that the Conservative position involved no pay rise, but a larger increase in allowances and mileage costs and so forth, so would in fact, since they were simply proxy income not something to meet actual costs, result in a bigger pay rise. That was, however, "the complicated side of the argument".

Secondly, I appreciate that anyone over 30 knows that the story about how politics was pure and unsullied before Tony Blair introduced the culture of sofa government and spin is a nonsense, and if they repeat it it's because they are being disingenuous, from the left or the right, but I came across this and thought it was a nice little summary and worth repeating.

Thus a modification of the notion of Prime Ministerial Government is the PM clique view, which emphasises the importance of a small coterie of senior ministers, civil servants, and advisers. This group is not necessarily drawn from within the core executive and certainly will not encompass all core executive members. Mrs Thatcher's premiership, for example, was characterised by extensive use of individual advisers on economic and foreign affairs, speech writers, advertisers, PR specialists, a strong reliance on the Political Office at No. 10, and centralisation of Whitehall press and information services under her Press Secretary, Bernard Ingham.

Professor Michael Winter, Rural Politics, 1996

John Rentoul should at least be consistent

2011-01-09T14:27:00.003Z

I get it. John hates Ed. He hates anyone who isn't Tony, or at least who doesn't love Tony the way he loves Tony. If you want to hate Ed, fair enough. I rather like him, but I don't demand that everyone should; loyalty cuts both ways but it would be a very boring world if it were expected of journalists, even assuming that John identifies himself as a Labour supporter these days anyway - he seems on a journey to backing the National Liberals in 2015.

However, if you are determined to hate Ed, it would do a great deal to advance your case if you were to hate him for a consistent set of reasons, rather than pick anything that might be turned into a criticism, and agree with it, even if it's the diametric opposite of the reasons you had given no more than a few hours previously. For example, John tells us this morning that it is dangerous for Labour to win in Oldham, because it would lead to confidence in Ed's policy position, whereas in fact

"The [Sensible Centrist Voter] knows that Gordon Brown increased public spending during a boom. He did it while he was prime minister, and Tony Blair's memoir records that he did it before he became prime minister, possibly with a view to an early general election in 2008. Blair announced a Fundamental Savings Review in February 2006 to restrain the growth of public spending, but it was "fought every inch of the way" by Brown, abetted by Ed Miliband, who was at the time struggling to fill Ed Balls's shoes as the Chancellor's economic adviser.

As Philip Collins, one of Blair's former advisers, put it last week, the accusation against Ed Miliband "is not that spending 'caused' the deficit, but that he was driving too fast, with no insurance, when there was a crash".

Miliband needs a better line, one that has more credibility by virtue of being true. Which would be that he was sorry that Labour continued to spend too much (probably better not to add, "or tax too little") when it would have been prudent to provide a cushion for an adverse turn in the global economy."

Personally, I take that point - though I'm in the "tax too little" camp. It's interesting that it is often used as an argument, though, by the same people who complain about Labour being unwilling to state now what cuts they would make to reduce the deficit. Which cuts should we have made after 2005, then? At a time when the Conservatives were promising to match our public spending plans, is it really credible that the "Sensible Centrist Voter" about which Mr Rentoul fantasised would have wanted us to outflank them to the right?

Fast forward to this afternoon, and John is full of praise for John Prescott's "realistic assessment of the new leader’s team". It appears that John is ~~tired and emotional on a cruise~~a little angry. Why is he angry? What does he suggest is the problem with the Leader and Shadow Cabinet?

"To be frank they better start like Red Ed didn’t. He’s actually disowning our record. It’s a damn good record. I’m proud of it. I’m proud to have belonged to a government that got more people back to work, more people into the hospitals, a better education system. You’ve got to say that you did something good in that period".

1997 to 2010 was a period of neither unalloyed joy nor constant disappointment - anyone who tries to paint it as either is probably allowing their factional ideology to rule their head. However, I'd be interested to learn from John (or, I suppose, from John), what paid for these hospitals, this job creation, and these improvements to the education system, if it wasn't Labour's extra spending.

I fear the answer is going to be that progress was achieved through the culture of targets and bureaucratic terrorism, rather than a heap of extra cash. If so, I'd happily bet that mistrust of professionals and a detachment from real world outcomes in favour of misleading performance data were bigger turn-offs for the Sensible Centrist Voter than our public sector investment and action to mitigate the recession.

Here endeth the rant.

Five reasons it's OK to attack the Lib Dems

2011-01-07T08:07:00.003Z

It's becoming a fashionable meme in the party to say something like "Attacking the Lib Dems is all well and good, but we should be focused on the Tories". I've seen it from bloggers, and I've seen it from MPs. It was a popular sentiment on Twitter last night, perhaps out of some sympathy that their 7% rating should arrive just in time for Nick Clegg's birthday.

It's not new, and it manages to survive changing political reality. It sprang up in 1997 as a tacit acceptance of tactical voting. It re-emerged during the 2010 campaign as some Cabinet members worried they might need Lib Dem support to stay in Government (worked out well, chaps). Recently, it has sometimes been a veiled criticism of Ed Miliband, suggesting that he is sometimes going for the "easy target", not taking the fight to the "real enemy". It also survives among those who cannot accept that the Lib Dems as a "progressive alternative" no longer exist.

Now, it's true that of our top 100 target seats on current boundaries, only 12 are currently Liberal Democrat-held, and I'm certainly not suggesting that we shouldn't be trying to take back seats lost to the Tories. However I believe that, at this point in the electoral cycle and in this set of political circumstances, it's right to target at least half our fire on the ~~treasonous yellow gits~~Liberal Democrats - and in particular on their leadership. On the occasion of the Lib Dems collapsing to their lowest rating in an opinion poll since before I was a teenager, here are my top five reasons why.

1) There is a simple message already for 2010 Lib Dem voters. They have not got what they wanted. Labour's position now is clearly closer to the rhetoric of the 2010 Lib Dem campaign than the Lib Dems post-coalition, and we have already attracted 37% of Lib Dem supporters from May, and a number of Councillors, but there's more to do. Conservative voters are far more likely to think they have got what they voted for, and are therefore still, to an extent, in "honeymoon". 92% of 2010 Tory voters currently plan to stick with them.

2) Seats we currently hold are at risk under AV. I am a committed "No", voter, but we may be fighting under a different electoral system. Despite claims that AV stops tactical voting, it is obviously beneficial to Labour for the Tories to come 2nd in a seat we hold, rather than the Lib Dems. Coalition notwithstanding, Tories are likely to give their lower preferences to Lib Dems in greater numbers than vice versa - 85% of Tories approve of the Government, only 51% of Lib Dems (poll figures in this post are all YouGov).

3) A vote gained from the Liberal Democrats is still a vote gained. In the 88 seats where the Lib Dems are not out in front, a vote gained from a supporter of the 1st placed party is of course twice as "useful" as a vote gained from another party or a former non-voter. However if it takes twice as much effort to turn a Tory to Labour as it does to convert a repentant Lib Dem, or turn out a Labour-sympathising non-voter, then the latter is a better investment of limited time and resources.

4) Rogue Lib Dems are more likely to inflict damaging defeats on the Government than rogue Tories. Because the Lib Dems are now so much further from what they truly believe, and because that is closer to Labour, where Parliamentary battles will be won, it will be by attracting Lib Dem MPs in the majority of cases, and possibly even defections. A challenge to Nick Clegg's leadership in a year's time feels possible, especially if the AV referendum is lost. David Cameron, however, looks safe from his backbenchers.

5) That said, the more pressure can be applied on the Lib Dem leadership, the more David Cameron may feel he has to offer concessions so Clegg has something to show his party, and his party has something to show their voters. Probably better policy, and enraged right-wing Tory backbenchers; what's not to like? It should also make them more opposed to the talk of mergers and formal pacts. While I would love a coupon election, not least because only having two parties polling over 3% would kill the electoral reform debate, it might not go well for us.

All of which does come with a couple of notes of caution, namely;

1) Attacking the Lib Dems doesn't mean not attacking the Tories, and Ed was absolutely right to brand the whole lot of them deficit deceivers. At the moment, though, attacks on the Tories should be based on specific examples of incompetence and heartlessness, and based around setting the "mood music". Since Tory voters overwhelmingly think they have got what they wanted, they are willing to stick with it - after all, Labour had 13 years to try out our way of doing things. To an extent, we therefore have to wait for the Government to fail on its own terms - the double dip as austerity bites; the crisis in the NHS that Cameron promised not to cut, and so on. When that happens, Labour being established as the only strong, real, alternative will pay dividends.

2) Appealing to former Lib Dems doesn't always mean what Labour supporters think it means. We all know people who defected to the Lib Dems because Labour was too right wing, too illiberal, and who mostly feel pretty stupid now. That's a biased sample. 71% of Lib Dems support control orders, 44% believe we should use evidence obtained through torture, 48% believe one of Tony Blair's biggest failings was allowing unacceptably high levels of immigration, 33% want Britain out of the EU, 83% support compulsory unpaid labour for the long-term unemployed, and 88% back forced labour in prisons.

As you were.

Pay the Piper - Call the Tune?

2010-12-30T00:30:00.004Z

I wouldn't dream of questioning anyone's academic or political integrity, but I can't help noticing something of a... tailoring of the message being delivered based on the audience being addressed, by referendums expert Dr Matt Qvortup. He tells Labour Yes, that;

"AV is Labour’s best chance of ousting the Conservative-led government and for appealing to disgruntled Liberal Democrat voters who regret that their parties opted for an alliance with David Cameron rather than a partnership with the Labour Party."

I'm not really clear how that's true, to be honest. I would have thought Labour's best chance would be to attract those voters and turn them into first choice Labour supporters, rather than assume they will stick with Clegg and scrabble around for their second preference. It seems to me intuitive that those who are sticking with Clegg are probably mostly happy with the coalition, and their second preferences are likely to break for the Tories in Labour-Tory marginals. YouGov has them doing so by 60% for the Tories to 26% for Labour.

Anyway, that aside, here's what the same Dr Matt Qvortup tells the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies;

"The most talked about system, the so-called Alternative Vote System, currently operates in London. This system is mainly known from Australia, where it has secured the dominance of Conservative parties for much of the 20th Century. Apart from a period in the 1980s, the Liberal Party (Australia's Conservatives) had a majority with the National Party from the Second World War to the early 1970 and again from the mid 1990s to 2007. In the latter period, the Government led by John Howard introduced quite radical reforms of economic and social legislation which were every bit as radical as what had been enacted in the United Kingdom.

The reason that this was possible was due to Howard successfully appealing not only to the Naional Party, the Liberals' traditional allies, but also to Australian Democrats, a now defunct party which shared many of the characteristics of the Liberal Democrats....there is nothing that suggests that electoral reform harms conservative parties' electoral chances, nor is there much evidence to suggest that the chances of enacting centre-right policies is reduced. Electoral reform might pose a much greater threat to Labour than to the Tories. It is an opportunity not a threat."

Clear as mud, then.

Another year older and deeper in debt

2010-12-21T12:28:00.005Z

In December 2009, it emerged that the Government had borrowed £20.3bn the previous month. This was later revised down to £17.4bn, but just in case anyone was thinking "reasonable Keynesian fiscal stimulus given that we're still in recession", George Osborne was on hand to play rentaquote.

”The record public borrowing figures equates to almost £1,000 for every family this month alone. Now we’re all paying for Labour’s failure to fix the roof when the sun was shining – and after last week’s PBR [pre-Budget report], we know they have no credible plan to get this debt under control”

In December 2010, it emerged that the Government had borrowed £23.3bn the previous month - partly due to "the weakest revenue growth in almost a year" - a sign that austerity is damaging the wider economy. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, does not appear to have said anything yet.

So, there are actual things going on out in the real world, while shell-shocked neo-Blairites complain that they aren't being whipped hard enough in support of policies positions they don't hold. Or, er, something. It's a bit hard to tell.

Insofar as Ed Miliband is being quiet (somewhat hard to disentangle paternity leave and the editorial choices of a rightwing media from political strategy), I rather hope it's because he's writing a Secret Speech. Or just mugging up on the canonical one. Running the Labour Leadership as a genuine team has only got us to over 40% in the polls, shortly after an election in which we slumped to under 30%, so clearly he's the new IDS. Yawn.

Labour walks into the Pickles trap?

2010-12-14T20:15:00.000Z

There has been widespread anger already this week at the revelation that Councils in the poorest areas of the country will lose the largest slice of their Government funding. Here's some news: it's not true. Or, at least, not in any way it is politically sensible to focus on.

The appearance that this is happening is given by the Government's decision to announce the cuts as a percentage of spending, not a percentage of the Government's grant. Since almost all Councils are losing between about 10 and 15% of the Government grant, aggregating the data in this way enables the Government to come up with a much smaller number. That is has never been done at a time of increasing central government funding for Councils should give pause for thought.

To pick a hypothetical example, a Council which relies on central Government for 80% of its funding and faces a 10% cut in grant, is only facing an 8% cut, according to the Government. A Council which relies on central Government for only 30% of its funding, and faces a 15% cut, is told that 15% is actually a mere 4.5%.

A convenient fiction, and one which necessarily leads to the correlation between deprivation and cuts, since funding is already heavily weighted to deprivation, so the same number effectively appears on both sides of the equation - of course, any graph will correlate if there is a common factor on the x-axis and the y-axis.

Sadly, many Labour activists seem to have taken the bait and played into Eric Pickles' "divide and conquer" strategy. The lessons of Operation Toehold are not being learnt. Activists blindly retweet that Tower Hamlets faces an 8.9% cut, while West Sussex faces a cut of less than 1%. In fact, West Sussex faces a cut of between 7.6% and 14.3%, depending exactly how you measure it, and Tower Hamlets a cut of between 10.5% and 13.6%. We are flattering the Government in absolute terms, as well as relative ones, by using their bogus figures.

Why are they doing this? Partly to make cuts look less severe across the country, but partly because there aren't elections in London next year, but there are in shire Districts where Labour will be mounting its first serious challenge for a decade, and whose results will shape a lot of the coming political narrative.

Comrades in Crawley, until recently a Labour Parliamentary seat, must stand a good chance of making serious inroads into the Conservative majority on the Council. When their funding is being slashed (and on top of that, Crawley District faces cuts of around the 13% mark), it will be a matter of glee for local blue and yellow Tory activists to find London Labour members arguing that they should have suffered more, to protect deprived areas (as if there is uniform wealth outside deprived areas).

We should be fighting the cuts as a united front, not giving in to the temptation of setting one part of the country against another.