Wednesday, May 08, 2013 

The cavalcade of idiocy rolls on.

If there's one day a year when it's impossible not to be proud to be British, it has to be on the state opening of parliament.  No other democracy can lay claim to such an awe-inspiring spectacle: the grandeur, the opulence, the incomprehensible and the entirely risible.  We might be behind most other countries when it comes to small things like having a democratically elected second chamber, but who needs a senate when you have a ceremony which involves a gentleman with a black rod entertaining the head of state? And what could be more quintessentially British than asking a 87-year-old woman to put on her finest rags, plonk a regal hat on her head that weighs about the same as a small bag of potatoes and then read out the political equivalent of a ridiculously vague shopping list, only rather than being on paper the list is inscribed on goatskin vellum? The European parliament can't even begin to hold a candle to the mother of them all.

To drop the irritating sarcasm, there can't be a better example of what can only be described as the cretinous decision to carry on with the state opening in its current form regardless of Brenda's advancing age than how even Fergie is deciding to jack it in at the end of the season.  He's 71, for comparison's sake. If we can't just dispense with the entire stupidity, then surely Charles can take the place of his mother, as is happening at the next meeting of the Commonwealth.  He is after all ever so keen to prepare for his kingship; let him announce how his mummy's government "is committed to a fairer society where aspiration and responsibility are rewarded".

Chaz would doubtless approve of the tone of the speech, if not with some of the policies (it's doubtful he approves of HS2).  If you thought George Osborne had overdone it a bit in the budget with the nonsense about how it was all for those "who want to work hard and get on", then it's probably best to avoid a television tonight, as those responsible for writing Queenie's sermon went off the deep end.  Hard work this and hard work that; those who do will be properly rewarded, not with a living wage of course, or a cut in VAT, or anything that might actually help with the cost of living, but indirectly through the continuing crackdowns on those not doing "the right thing".  Never mind, sheer aspiration and responsibility will get you there in the end.  Look at the example set by Dave's inner circle, all there purely on merit, achievement and hard graft.  What more inspiration do you need?

As for the proposed bills themselves, they're a mixture of the piss weak and the stuff that's been talked about for months already.  There's very little to object to in either the care bill, which introduces the Dilnot proposals, albeit with the cap set higher than he advised, or the pensions reform act, although we can quibble about why those who've never had it so good will be getting a further increase when everyone of working age suffers.  More objectionable are the "offender rehabilitation" bill, which will see the probation service part-privatised and those sentenced to under 12 months coming under supervision for the first time, which isn't necessarily a good thing when it's the likes of G4S and A4E that'll be "helping" them not to reoffend, and the latest in a long line of crime/anti-social behaviour acts, which looks set to further infringe on the rights of teenagers to be seen in a public place, while also holding whole families responsible for the actions of one member.

Then we have the immigration bill.  It's come to something when someone so closely associated with Cameron as Ian Birrell is denouncing this latest piece of nonsense in the most virulent of terms, but such is the point we've reached thanks to the panic over UKIP.  How many times does it need to be said that immigrants pay far more in than they take out, or that you can't make things harsher for those who few who are claiming benefits without doing the same for those born here?  For a government supposedly dedicated to reducing the burden of red tape, it has no qualms about imposing more on private landlords, who will somehow be required to check whether those renting aren't here illegally, without explaining how this will work in practice.  Are landlords meant to be the newest arm of the Home Office? Doesn't making illegal immigrants homeless increase the potential problem rather than reduce it? We can't deport every single one, as the Liberal Democrats said at the last election.  Even more concerning is the potential limit of 6 months JSA for those resident elsewhere in the EU if they can't prove they have a chance of finding a job.  Something so obviously discriminatory can't possibly be legal, unless as mentioned above it was introduced across the board.

Whether it's a good thing or not that neither the introduction of a minimum price for alcohol or requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packets made it in is debatable.  I've long doubted something so easily dodged as making strong booze more expensive would work in practice, although evidence suggests it's had an impact in Canada.  Nor have I ever believed that the packs cigarettes come in somehow persuade people to start smoking, yet if the industry is so vehemently opposed to it then perhaps there's something there after all.  Much as I loathe the hypocrisy behind making smokers pariahs when the government benefits so massively through heavily taxing them, and the cigarette model is the obvious one when it comes to decriminalising drugs, it's exceptionally difficult to feel the pain of those who in the end profit from giving people cancer. Politically, dropping both probably makes sense for Cameron.

Does it though for Clegg? This is an overwhelmingly Tory set of bills, with very little indeed for Nick or the Lib Dems to boast about.  Clegg has also failed to fully kill off the "snooper's charter", which can still be resurrected and doubtless will be considering the lobbying of late from the security services.  As this is also likely to be the last Queen's speech before the election, it provides a dismal summary of just what they've achieved in the coalition.  As for the Tories, today just reinforced how they intend to fight the election: by blaming the continuing dire state of the economy on Labour.  Everything that's still deemed to be wrong or unreformed will be Labour's fault, and all they'll do if you let them back in will be to borrow more.  The party that demands everyone else take responsibility continues to accept none itself.

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5/08/2013 10:07:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, May 03, 2013 

Surprise at the surprise.

The one thing about the supposed UKIP breakthrough in yesterday's local elections that surprises is just how it seems to have taken politicians and commentators by, err, surprise.  I mean, who could have possibly guessed that if you essentially say you agree with the party on immigration, Europe and welfare and let them get away with repeatedly abusing statistics, linking Romanians explicitly to crime and generally scaremongering in the most irresponsible way possible that they'll win over your supporters who see you seemingly not doing much about these things?  Who knew that if you dismissed them as loonies, however accurate that description is for some of its supporters, that it would simply come across as ignoring legitimate concerns? Why does it come as a shock that at a time when wages are stagnating and the cost of living is going up, with all three main parties offering either austerity or austerity-lite, that an upstart fourth party gains support regardless of its own economic policies?

Before we get into the caveats and wider perspective, it's also hardly surprising that a populist fourth party has finally established itself considering the media we have.  The Daily Express and Daily Mail are basically UKIP supporting papers (the Sun is also to a lesser extent, it's just far more comfortable with the country in 2013), it's just that their editorials urge votes for the Tories.  Both constantly fulminate against the "abuse" of human rights laws, 'elf 'n' safety, the EU, the welfare state, immigrants and modern life in general.  Neither can properly pick out when exactly it was that Britain was great, the 50s having been abandoned, although the Mail seemed to be trying its best to suggest it was the 80s as Maggie was waiting to be buried, but it most certainly isn't today.  There's been a gap for some time for a force on the hard right between the Tories and the various openly racist parties, and Nigel Farage has succeeded where others have previously failed.

Add in how little scrutiny the party received prior to the last week from the wider media, despite the likes of Paul Nuttall (nominative determinism) laughably claiming it's been smeared, as well as how Farage has been treated by the BBC (and the likes of the Graun) not so much as a politician but a likeable novelty act it would be churlish to ask serious questions of, and the party's showing in the county council elections is fairly easy to understand.  It has to be emphasised these are county council elections as I simply don't believe as yet that UKIP would have made such inroads into the cities and urban areas.  Yes, they've had strong showings in all the recent by-elections, but these can be mainly understood as protest votes, as YouGov's poll on why people have supported UKIP suggests.

Their share of the vote locally is something deeper.  Local elections have long had low turnouts, and those most likely to vote are generally older, fitting Lord Ashcroft's study that suggests UKIP most appeals to older men who are estranged from modern life and culture and don't want any part of it.  What's so odd is that on almost every point, the Tories do reflect their concerns on Europe, immigration etc.  Where they fall down is that they get the impression that they don't, and that their façade on trying to be all things to all people has further alienated them.  This goes beyond mere disenchantment though, as the Ashcroft poll suggested: this is just as much lashing out as it is expecting UKIP to make any real difference.

Which puts the Tories in such a quandary.  Cameron knows full well, even if his backbenchers don't, that he can't win a general election by being ever so slightly to the left of UKIP.  He couldn't win in 2010 on a centre-right policy platform, albeit one which made promises on protecting budgets his party would otherwise like to cut.  He therefore can steal some of Farage's clothes, cracking down harder on benefits or the perceived access that immigrants have to them, or by possibly bringing forward the EU referendum, although that will entail a battle with the Lib Dems, but go any further and the centrist support he has is likely to evaporate.  The real question is whether come 2015 those now plumping for UKIP decide they'd rather have Cameron as prime minister than Ed Miliband, and my guess is that many will come back to the Tory fold, such will be the level of propaganda about a return to power of Labour.  Some though clearly won't, and it might be those few that end up costing Cameron vital seats.

Then again, we've been here before with the sudden rise of fourth parties, almost all of which have quickly disappeared back into the ether.  Farage himself was talking about the SDP, but more apposite is the surge of the Greens in 1989, or the brief period when it looked as though the BNP might have shaken off its neo-Nazi image.  It's one thing to get elected, it's another to then keep the seat once the electorate have seen what you've done with it.  In this respect it wouldn't be a shock if, like with the BNP, UKIP fairly rapidly fades away.

Overshadowed by UKIP's success is the continuing decline of that former protest party, the Lib Dems.  To get just 352 votes in the South Shields by-election isn't just humiliating, it's catastrophic, as is the loss of another 124 council seats.  If the Eastleigh result showed us that you need a local operation to win, then the decimation the party is suffering bodes ill for 2015.  Nor was yesterday a happy day for Labour, who really ought to be doing far better than winning just shy of 300 seats at this point in the electoral cycle.  They're claiming that they're doing well in the areas which they need to win come 2015, but at the moment it looks as though the party is barely improving on its 2005 result, when disenchantment with Tony Blair was at its high point.

Strangely then, it's the Tories who probably had the second best day of it.  Yes, they've UKIP to worry about, but to lose 335 council seats from such a high point is just about the best they could have hoped for.  It's how the party reacts to the threat from its right that will define how it does over the next couple of years, and all the signs are it's going to fall exactly into the trap outlined above.

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5/03/2013 06:39:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, April 17, 2013 

We are all bourgeois now.

As unhappy coincidences go, today's announced rise in unemployment seems as fitting a tribute to Maggie as anything else.  We all Thatcherites now, says David Cameron, and while you can't level the accusation against him that he believes unemployment an acceptable price to pay for his overall reforms, especially considering no government since has believed in full employment, his government is going way beyond Thatcher's obstinacy on economics.  She after all did relent to an extent when monetarism sent the economy into free fall; Cameron and Osborne seem likely to ignore the advice of the highest priests of neoliberalism, the IMF, to scale back on austerity, such is the way they've made it impossible to do so without humiliating themselves.

Just as I didn't watch the royal wedding (and why on earth would anyone, for that matter?), I somehow managed to avoid the funeral.  Quite why so many find something to admire in our ability to put on pageantry when required equally escapes me; authoritarian nations also tend to be pretty good at putting on a show, and yet with the exception of the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics, we usually make fun of them precisely on that basis.  Just as the only reasonable reaction to goose-stepping soldiers is to laugh at them, so the pomp and circumstance that surrounds the monarchy and also now the chosen few regarded as being the equivalent of royalty ought to be mocked.  It is utterly ridiculous, almost everyone except for the dewy-eyed few know it to be ridiculous, and so undoubtedly this ridiculous tradition will continue to be rolled out for every major state event, such are our ways.

If nothing else, today has at least been revealing of how politicians regard each other in private.  Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were first elected to parliament in 1983 on "the longest suicide note in history" manifesto, but neither it seems had any objection to Thatcher being given a quasi-state funeral.  Indeed, it seems the only major thing the Tories added to the plans drawn up under the last government was the military aspect.  They might not have known that the right would take the opportunity of her death to attempt to portray her as second only to Churchill in the great national figure stakes, yet if they've had any such concerns since they certainly weren't on display today.  Nor has the week of hype and eulogising left the Mail drained; if anything, it's reached such a peak that you doubt they'll be able to top it when Liz pops her clogs.  "A journey's end", the front page read, while below they claim up to 250,000 were lining the route of the procession (since changed to a more realistic 50,000).  Just as you have to multiple the figures given by the police for any demonstration other than one by the Countryside Alliance by the power of 4, so it now seems you have to divide the numbers given by the Mail by the same amount.

Nor was the ceremony itself beyond critique.  Today wasn't the time and place to discuss her politics, said the Bishop of London, Richard Chatres, who then decided at the end that it actually was as he defended her over the infamous "no such thing as society" comments.  She did believe in society, and the interdependence of people, he said, which is almost certainly true; what went unsaid was that however you read her remarks, she clearly said people shouldn't even expect to be housed by the state. I don't think anyone disputes that first and foremost our responsibility is to look after ourselves; it's that a majority of us still believe that the state should provide an adequate safety net, whether that be in housing or benefits. Society is not the state, as the Tories said at the last election, but Thatcher's government did more to fray the threads that tie communities together and make up society than any since the war.

The real irony of today is that for all their tributes to her, not to forget George Osborne's solitary tear, Cameron spent his first years as Conservative leader trying to repair the damage her overthrow did to the party. Arguable as his overall success has been, the last week has been a reminder to everyone that her legacy is still inescapable.  To suggest this is unlikely to go down well in those places that the Tories need to win to get a majority next time out is to put it too lightly.  The overwhelming mood might be apathy rather than anger, such as that in Leeds and Edinburgh rather than Goldthorpe, yet you shouldn't bet against Labour using a few of the images of the past week come in 2015, hypocritical in the extreme or not.

This said, Cameron was right in saying we are all Thatcherites now.  At least he was if he was meant the political class, as they clearly are all Thatcherite in one sense or another.  A significant number of the population by contrast remain in favour of an alternative, it's just they aren't so much as offered one. Nor are they likely to be. And eventually, something is going to break.

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4/17/2013 09:54:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, April 15, 2013 

A small, ridiculous gesture for a massive, undignifed death jamboree.

One of the problems that comes from Labour deciding to just let the Tories have their week of mourning/deification with the very minimum of criticism is that you let the likes of George Galloway represent what a significant amount of people are thinking.  It was an utterly absurd, cowardly move for the BBC to not play Ding Dong in full, instead opting for the typical compromise that pleased neither side.  I really thought we'd moved past the point at which things that were in poor taste were banned/censored due to outside pressure, not least when it comes to music.  There's plenty of music in the top 40 that's offensive in terms of how objectively awful it is, but if people buy it, it gets played.  It's how the system works.  Start altering that and it renders the entire exercise even more completely and utterly pointless than it already is.  Also, regardless of what Guido or the Mail think, for 52,000 people to buy a song in one week purely as a protest only underlines how the attempts to claim Thatcher as our greatest peacetime prime minister are a step too far.

And so now Big Ben is to be silenced for the duration of Saint Margaret's funeral.  It's a small, ridiculous gesture for what is turning into a massive, undignified summation of how for all Thatcher's rolling back of the state, the parts that were in most need of trimming are still fully functioning.  Turning your back on the entire charade really does seem to be the best possible way to register discontent with what has been a fully fledged political campaign from the moment the news of her death came through.

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4/15/2013 08:32:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, March 28, 2013 

Sophistry Thursday.

At times, even a hardened, dead-eyed cynic like me is utterly amazed at the sheer sophistry deployed by both ministers and senior civil servants.  Both Iain Duncan Smith and Mark Hoban have repeatedly denied that Jobcentres have been set targets, while last week head of the Jobcentre Neil Couling and the Department for Work and Pensions permanent secretary Robert Devereaux both denied strenuously that league tables were used to pressure staff into sanctioning more claimants.  They did collect data on the numbers sanctioned, but it most certainly wasn't being used in such a way as was being alleged.

A week later, and leaked to the Graun is the DWP "scorecard" for January, which looks strangely like a league table, and measures whether the number of "adverse decisions" for each scheme and benefit has either gone up or down month on month.  Quite clearly this tallying of data couldn't possibly be used in the way in which numerous staff have insisted it has been; it's merely, as Couling explained, there to ensure that any "anomalies" in the number of referrals are quickly picked up, or as Devereaux suggested, collected for use in response to parliamentary questions. 

It doesn't pick out individual Jobcentres, it's true, as the email from the manager of the Walthamstow suggested when she said they were 95th in the league table, which more than implies there is a further table that drills down further into the data.  All the more reason why Labour should keep pushing for a full inquiry into the sanctioning regime, which might just finally get to the bottom of who's lying.  Although frankly, you suspect they all are.

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3/28/2013 08:26:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, March 27, 2013 

The twilight of the TB-GBs.

There are but three explanations when the media almost as a whole praises a politician when they die, or as is increasingly the case, decides to resign to earn more money elsewhere.  First, they were a genuinely great figure, and there are ever fewer of those; second, they were known for their campaigning, or for being eccentric, and were therefore harmless; or third, they either gave great copy to journalists or lead such a colourful career that they didn't even have to speak to the press personally (that could be left to "friends").  Remember the incredulity when the England manager job went not to Harry Redknapp, the football bloke's bloke, always ready to stop his car and talk on transfer deadline day, but to the staid yet far more interesting if they could be bothered to actually do some proper work Roy Hodgson?  The same applies to politics.

Hence the gnashing of teeth over the exit of David Miliband to go and join Thunderbirds, or whatever the simply hi-larious gag still doing the rounds is now (it was worth a smile when alluded to on Newsnight last night; not so much the following morning on every news site).  The vast majority of the media decided that David Miliband simply had to be the next Labour leader, for the reason that he would be more of a continuation of New Labour than his brother, let alone the hated Ed Balls.  Of course, they had come to loathe New Labour, but in the same way that an aristocrat of old still had affection for a sprog spawned through a liaison with a scullery maid, they also felt they had helped to create it in the first place.  When Ed edged out his older sibling thanks to the votes of trade union members, this meant they had both been proved wrong and lost control over a party they thought they could still indirectly exert control over.

With David's departure to New York, they've now lost their least creative way of making mischief in the party.  The reality might well have been that David, although understandably originally embittered, has since reconciled with Ed and spent most of his time away from Westminster, but that's never been an obstacle to making stuff up in the past.  Nonetheless, too much can be made of the claims that if the elder Miliband had taken the offer of being a shadow minister that there would have been endless talk about the relationship between the two and potential policy clashes, including those from himself.  Miliband decided not to rejoin the shadow cabinet because he was doing just fine outside it, as his taking of the job at the International Rescue Committee underlines.  Who needs to be at Westminster full time or even an MP at all when you can still intervene occasionally from the sidelines, as both Blair and Brown have done and still be listened to intently?  Far more likely is that his return to frontline politics would have silenced those who still believe that the wrong brother got the top job, forcing them to accept what the man himself had.

Indeed, as others have noted, David's resignation as an MP only makes clear that regardless of what many, including myself thought when Ed unexpectedly won, he's been far more radical and agile a leader than almost anyone has given him credit for.  No, he hasn't got everything right, far from it, not least on his caution on opposing the coalition's demonisation of benefit recipients, something that David himself made clear in his last notable speech in the Commons, but he's clearly not going anywhere.

That's much to the disappointment of those who still believe the best route back to power is not to oppose the coalition on much of what it is doing, but to carry on in the great New Labour tradition of triangulation, offering much the same, just with a kinder face (except when it comes to civil liberties, where Labour arguably still remains to the right of the Tories).  Miliband senior's departure removes their final hope of the party returning to the politics that won three elections, and then, err, lost them the last, although they continue to try to convince themselves that was all Gordon Brown's fault.  It's never occurred to them that Miliband was just as much of a bottler as the right-wing press accused Brown of being, forever threatening to wield the knife and then always pulling back at the last moment.  Nor is there any indication that David would improve Labour's current poll ratings, which continue to show an average lead of around 10 points.

If today has reminded of anything, it was the remarkably similar response to James Purnell standing down as an MP.  Many of the same people then said what a massive loss to politics it was, what a wonderfully innovative thinker he had been, with some on the right claiming he could have saved the Labour party.  All this was code for the fact that he was a Blairite-ultra, and the man who helped to introduce the work capability assessment which continues to ruin the lives of tens of thousands of the sick and disabled.  If he achieved other than that, it was that he helped to set the stage for the coalition's even harsher cuts. 

The problem such politicians have is that they tend to be liked only by journalists; Purnell's resignation in an attempt to unseat Gordon Brown was followed by precisely no one, despite him imagining it would open the floodgates.  When Purnell went it was good riddance to bad rubbish, although he has naturally since found a job at the ever obliging BBC.  David Miliband could have been a real asset to his brother had he wanted to be, yet if his leaving signifies anything, it's that the TB-GB era of British politics is well and truly over.  And surely, that's something to welcome.

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Friday, March 22, 2013 

Someone's lying.

The leaking of an email from a Jobcentre adviser manager in Walthamstow which seems to suggest there are league tables and targets in place for the sanctioning of those on benefits is little short of a bombshell.  It can only be explained in one of four ways: the letter is a hoax; the manager herself is lying, and saying there are league tables in place to try to get her staff to sanction more "clients", which doesn't really make any sense unless there is some sort of pressure on her which isn't in the form of league tables; the Department for Work and Pensions' regional managers are acting on their own initiative, against the apparent express wishes of ministers, and are drawing up league tables based on how many claimants are sanctioned by specific Jobcentres; or Iain Duncan Smith and Mark Hoban are lying through their teeth, including to parliament, which ought to lead to resignations.

It seems to judge by Duncan Smith's appearance in the Commons today that the letter is indeed genuine, so we can dismiss the first explanation.  Indeed, he seemed to be suggesting that the reality was a mixture of the second and third explanations, and that "innumerable orders not to employ targets" had gone out to Jobcentres.  Who then has been drawing up these league tables, seeing as they do appear to have existed?  Was it senior Jobcentre staff or officials within the DWP?  Seeing as Duncan Smith seems to have known that targets had been put in place before, why exactly is it that staff seem to have directly disobeying his orders?  Will the staff responsible be disciplined as result?

I know the variation on Hanlon's razor which suggests we shouldn't blame conspiracy when cock-up often more adequately explains such discrepancies, yet even if this the case, it doesn't alter the fact that IDS and his junior ministers are ultimately responsible.  The conspiracy explanation also helps us to understand exactly why ministers were so determined to stop compensation being paid to those sanctioned; many it would seem have been not because of any real refusal to take a job, a placement or look for work, but because Jobcentre staff are being given targets to hand the sanctions out regardless of infractions.  Moreover, it also suggests I might well have been too harsh on Liam Byrne on the DWP budget: it looks as though sanctioning is indeed built into the system, which also explains why the pressure being put on Jobcentre staff has been so immense.  If they don't stop enough people's benefits, further cuts may well be needed.

To say these revelations are disgusting doesn't even begin to adequately express how vile it is that some of those looking for work in the current job market have been denied the meagre amount of money they receive due purely to the pressure being put on Jobcentre staff.  It also reopens the debate on the work capability assessment and ATOS, and whether targets are also in place for them as to how many they should be declaring are fit for work.  If they are at the Jobcentre, why wouldn't they be elsewhere in the benefit system?  Whatever the ultimate explanation, one thing ought to be apparent: regardless of Labour's failings on opposing the coalition, the real enemy is the coalition that regards the most vulnerable in society as easy targets.

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3/22/2013 03:42:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 

Liam Byrne: must try harder.

In one sense, you can understand the more than cautious approach Labour has taken on welfare reform in opposition.  They know it's an utter lie that they didn't reform welfare, as the Tories continually claim; they introduced the work capability assessment for goodness sake, still making life miserable for tens of thousands of those declared to be fit for work by ATOS, but know it's futile complaining too loudly about it.  It's also the case that in principle, Iain Duncan Smith's universal benefit makes sense: whether it works in practice we're yet to see. Lastly, they also deserve credit for calling the Tories' bluff and opposing the coalition's 1% cap on benefits, despite the dangers of such a policy.  As it's turned out, it hasn't affected the party's polling whatsoever, even if they again haven't properly set out the arguments against a real terms cut in benefits.

All this said, the decision to abstain on today's vote on the "emergency" workfare bill is perplexing and naive.  Yes, you can understand that it would be incredibly easy for the Tories to paint Labour as being the party of the welfare scrounger, and the DWP certainly has worked every sinew in its attempt to paint those who have been sanctioned for any reason as malingerers who refused reasonable job offers. It's also laudable that Liam Byrne has at least attempted to improve the bill by ensuring those sanctioned have the right to appeal and know from the outset exactly what it is they're agreeing to when they go on any of the various schemes recommended to them at Jobcentre Plus.

The issue here though ought to be a simple one: the government is legislating to deny those at the very bottom rung of society what is legally and morally owed to them. As Sunny writes, many of those on the workfare schemes were deliberately denied the information which would have allowed them to make an informed choice on what to do, while the legislation on sanctions was purposefully vague. This is wholly a mess of the coalition's own making, and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with such manoeuvring.

Moreover, as Mark Ferguson on Labour List argues, abstaining also gives tacit approval to the work programme that the party has rightly been deriding as worse than useless.  Indeed, in the specific case of mandatory work activity, the scheme is worse even than that as it saw the numbers claiming employment and support allowance increase. Liam Byrne's argument is also completely disingenuous: his suggestion that if everyone was to be compensated it would mean more cuts implies that savings through sanctions are built into the DWP's budget, which can't possibly be the case.

It's true that Labour's opposition wouldn't see the bill defeated, as the Tories can in this at least rely on the support of the Lib Dems, but it's beside the point. If Labour's position truly is that there should be a job's guarantee, then those who have been let down or worse, actively mistreated by the current system, surely deserve better than the forced imposition of schemes that are being used just as much to massage the unemployment figures as they are to help those out of work. Byrne's intervention hasn't so much challenged Iain Duncan Smith's bad faith as made it more slightly more palatable.

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3/19/2013 08:52:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, March 07, 2013 

Immigration: just the facts, Ma'am.

Panic, as even the slightest glance at recent history attests is infectious, and politicians for their part are just as susceptible as everyone else, if not more so.  Just a few weeks back it seemed as though immigration had dropped down the political agenda, or was at least not the hot button topic it had been in recent years. Cue a few scaremongering articles in the Mail and Express about the imminent flood of Romanians and Bulgarians (for which read gypsies, gangs, organised criminals and foreign scroungers) and the continuing rise in support for UKIP, and suddenly we have politicians of all stripes scrapping over who can be the harshest on the new arrivals and anyone else non-British claiming benefits. It at least makes a slight change from the seemingly constant assaults on British welfare claimants, but not much of one.

The last few weeks have been a great example of how politics often seems to work now.  Our representatives haven't been responding to public concern, as there was little in the way of complaints about immigrants claiming benefits as opposed to immigrants in general, but rather taking a non-issue, massively exaggerating it to the point at which it then does worry the public, and so demands a response.  As Jonathan Portes sets out at length, immigrants overwhelmingly put more in than they take out (they also speak English to a far greater extent than is often claimed). The only real potential problems are the NHS, where it's non-EU migrants and visitors who have been accused of taking advantage, and the issue of child benefit payments going to parents when their children have never even visited this country, and in that instance it works both ways, even if the payments in other EU countries aren't as high.

Due to this, there's not really much point in arguing with the policies outlined by Yvette Cooper today in her speech.  If making the rules on when migrants can claim Jobseeker's Allowance slightly more stringent than they already are reassures some people, then fine.  Much more useful would be a crackdown on those who exploit migrant labour, as Cooper also proposed, but just how many employers or agencies do succeed in not paying the minimum wage is debatable; it's almost certainly not as many as the public suspect and politicians make out.

Much of the attempt by Labour to get back on the front foot is though a waste of time.  Immigration has become one of those issues that regardless of how you approach it, how sensitively it's debated or how many times you repeat the facts, very few minds are changed.  The evidence for the undercutting of wages, for instance, is slight, yet it is repeatedly brought up and complained about, just as it was once a common claim that social housing being taken almost exclusively by black and Asian families.  

In part, this is the legacy of Labour's great cock-up: the failure to put in place initial controls on the 8 accession states in 2005, and the much quoted estimate that only 14,000 migrants would come a year, which was based on the belief that the other EU states would open their borders at the same time when as it turned out only ourselves, Sweden and Ireland did.  Apologising for that mistake is pointless when the effect has turned out to be so massive, as is Cooper's other comment that diversity makes us stronger when she and other politicians then say in the next sentence that immigration must now either be extremely limited or stopped altogether.  Indeed, it achieves exactly the opposite of the effect intended when, as the statistics continue to show, net migration continues to be in the hundreds of thousands.

The only way to tackle the disquiet caused by immigration is to be brutally honest.  Freedom of movement is clearly here to stay, and if anything borders are likely to become ever more open rather than closed, with a few exceptions.  It is the utter hypocrisy on the part of the Western world to say to the poor in developing countries that they must stay where they are while those lucky enough to be born in the West can essentially go wherever they please so long as they have the money to back them.  Moreover, the attempts to bring net migration down to the tens of thousands are likely to damage the economy in both the short and the long term, as we're already seeing with the numbers of foreign students wanting to come here dropping dramatically.  Closing the door to those who take almost nothing out in services whilst putting so much in isn't only phenomenally stupid, it does nothing to help those already here who have either been failed somewhere along the line or for whatever reason find themselves out of work.

This isn't a popular argument currently, it's true, and it's certainly not going to go down well initially.  When though we're still discussing immigration come 2015, when it turns out that the coalition has failed miserably to get the numbers down to the tens of thousands, and when it might well be Labour that are making the running due to that, perhaps some will come to the conclusion that it's about time they stopped treating people like fools and confronted them with the cold hard reality.  It might turn out not to be the vote loser they assume.

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3/07/2013 09:42:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, March 01, 2013 

Obligatory what Eastleigh tells us post.

1. Getting your local party in order is vital

There's only one reason the Lib Dems managed to hold on in Eastleigh, and that's down to their organisation in the town.  It certainly wasn't due to any love for the party whatsoever, or for how they've performed in coalition, merely that the voters narrowly preferred what they knew to either UKIP or the Tories.  Which leads to

2. Having the right candidate

Who knows whether the Tories would have done better if they had someone other than Maria Hutchings as their candidate, but they couldn't have done much worse.  Hutchings was fine for the 2010 election when the view of the nation was elsewhere, but out of her depth when in the spotlight.  The Tory campaign was clearly terrified she was going to make even more of a mess of it than she already had with the schools comment, and when you have to tell the media she's essentially a volatile personality to explain why she's not giving any interviews, it reflects badly on you rather than her.  Despite some snide remarks, I think John O'Farrell did a fine job as the Labour candidate; they were never going to win the seat, and his softly softly campaign was a better option than throwing everything at it and still not getting more than a 0.2% swing.

3. Stealing the policies of the insurgent party doesn't work

To all intents and purposes, the Tories and UKIP ran broadly identical campaigns: cap/stop immigration, have a vote on/get out of Europe, kill the first born, etc.  The difference was the voters believed UKIP meant it, while anyone who thought immigration and Europe are pretty irrelevant to a place where neither has much of an impact had to choose between Labour and the Lib Dems.  A leaflet on the day even had the Tories literally using UKIP's colours, to no obvious benefit.  The Tory backbench belief is that if Cameron was a "real" Conservative he'd be able to win a majority.  Rather, it suggests moving onto UKIP territory simply leads to further support for Farage's band and the disillusion of moderates.  Why vote for the imitation when you can have the real thing?

4. But UKIP are still highly unlikely to win a seat

The rise in UKIP support can only be put down to one thing: protest.  It can't be about immigration, which is coming down, unless there really are a lot of people terrified about Romanians and Bulgarians coming over next year, which I don't believe; it isn't about Europe, as not that many people ever place Europe as being a hugely important issue; and it's not about anything else, as UKIP don't have policies on anything else.  Or rather they do, just that if people knew about them they wouldn't like them.  There may be a kernel of truth in John Harris's observation that their bringing up of the loss of manufacturing in Eastleigh struck a nerve, yet this seems like a classic mid-term result rather than the emergence of a competitive fourth party.

5. Bombarding the electorate both works and pisses them off

For a by-election, a turnout of 52% is more than respectable.  You also suspect though that the media and the parties would now do well to get out and stay out for the next couple of years.

6. The "Get Clegg" campaign by the right-wing press failed miserably

Apart from the hilarity of the Mail pretending to care about sexual harassment, the continued splashing on the party's woes over Lord Rennard seems to have had no impact whatsoever.  It's rare that elections are won on anything other than local issues, and in this instance the circumstances of Huhne's resignation also had no impact, as the other by-elections triggered over expenses also proved.

7. Another hung parliament/just about workable Labour majority still looks most likely result come 2015

Eastleigh overall changes very little.  What it does suggest is that the Lib Dems will fare better in their Tory marginals than they will in their Labour ones, which means they could still hold the balance of power come 2015.  The Tories could conceivably win Eastleigh in 2015, as the Ashcroft polling shows, but it would take a gargantuan effort to judge by this performance.  They seem to be keeping a lid on their anger for today, but the Tories as a party are in deep trouble.

8. Michael Gove is still a berk

Yes, Thatcher said she wasn't for turning.  She still did, then denied she had ascribed to monetarism whatsoever.

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Thursday, February 28, 2013 

The desperate hours.

Not really much point in speculating about the Eastleigh result tonight, although anything other than a Lib Dem win would now be a major surprise.  What is worth discussing though is the reaction of many in the town to the siege laid by both the political parties and the media, who bizarrely have started believing their own hype about this being the most important by-election for 30 years.  Even if the Tories are pushed into third place by UKIP, it's not even close to being an indication of how things will play out in 2 years time; mid-term governing parties are always unpopular, and they haven't helped themselves by picking a candidate liable to go off-piste at any moment.  The popularity of the Lib Dems locally (they hold every council seat in the town) has more or less ensured they haven't suffered the same fate.

The over-the-top campaign has definitely confirmed one thing: that the marginals are going to be the focus more than ever.  My seat is nominally marginal, and yet some wards are obviously considered such rotten boroughs (Tory, in my case) that I have not once seen anyone canvassing here, let alone had the door knocked.  Those in the top target seats might want to start preparing now: May 2015 might be a deeply unpleasant month.

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2/28/2013 09:18:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, February 21, 2013 

Eastleigh? Beastly, more like.

It's a miserable, bitterly cold half-term week in February.  There's almost no hard news, except for the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing, which is in the usual style enabling those who know nothing about anything to definitively claim he's either guilty/innocent (although it is great to see that once again the British justice system has convicted three men of conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks when their plans to make explosives out of ammonium nitrate extracted from sports injury cold packs were impossible when said substance had been removed from the ingredients, and they also didn't have anyone other than themselves prepared to be suicide bombers), so it's hardly surprising that the likes of the Graun are trying to make something out of the Eastleigh by-election.  Martin Kettle writes of Crosby and Greenwich, while a previous leader mentions the more recent Brent East and Crewe and Nantwich, somehow forgetting that by far the most surprising recent by-election win was George Galloway's in Bradford West, which only the paper's own Helen Pidd predicted.

Eastleigh is clearly not a Crosby, a Bermondsey, or even close to a Bradford.  There is no indication whatsoever that UKIP are in the running, and Labour's share of the vote in the constituency has been declining ever since 1997, John O'Farrell's candidacy seeming unlikely to change that.  The only real lines of interest are that it's the first straight by-election fight between the two coalition parties, and that the Tory candidate has a long record of putting her foot in it. Considering that a vote for either the Lib Dems or the Tories is effectively one in support of the continuation of the coalition, that Labour or UKIP aren't doing better is the real surprise.

Nonetheless, there are a few things to be drawn from how the contest has played out so far and seems likely to.  First, it suggests that the predictions of a Lib Dem wipeout come 2015 are way off. If ever there was going to be a contest where the incumbent party should lose, this ought to be it. Chris Huhne didn't just keep up a lie for 10 years, he's almost certainly going to prison as a result.  Rather than take advantage of this and do the sensible thing by choosing a moderate candidate more likely to appeal to former Huhne supporters, the Tories have stuck with Maria Hutchings, who seems to regard Nadine Dorries' career trajectory as something to aspire towards. Quite apart from her past remarks on asylum seekers and abortion, claiming that state schools aren't good enough for her 5-year-old cardio-respiratory surgeon son in waiting is just incredibly stupid, even if she wasn't talking about local schools as she claims.

Whether due to Hutchings or by design, the Tories are running a distinctly right-wing campaign, which seems more than a little misguided in Eastleigh.  Pretty much all they wanted to talk about the first week was immigration, implying that the Lynton Crosby strategy that worked so well for Michael Howard in 2005 is back in full effect. Never mind that such a gambit is only liable to work when you're not the ones currently failing to meet your pledge to reduce the numbers to tens of thousands, and that scaremongering about Bulgarians and Romanians only brings more attention to the lack of control over freedom of movement within the EU, the party seemed to think it was a potential winner.  While you shouldn't make sweeping national conclusions from by-elections, should the strategy fail in Eastleigh it might just make the party think twice before making it a major part of their campaign come 2015.

The campaign up to now also reinforces the fact that the Lib Dems' main worry in their marginals with the Tories is not voters going to the right, but how many are likely to defect to Labour or won't be able to bring themselves to vote tactically next time round.  With the by-election unlikely to affect the national picture, this isn't that big a concern right now, but it will be in just over two years' time. The ability of the party to convince waverers to stay with them is what will ultimately decide their and almost certainly Nick Clegg's fate.  Eastleigh won't on either score.

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2/21/2013 09:03:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, February 14, 2013 

Time to put flesh on the bones.

2013 so far hasn't exactly been an auspicious one so far for the Conservative party.  All their gambits, and there have been more than a couple in the past six weeks, seem to have come to naught.  The attempt to portray Labour as hopelessly out of touch by jumping on their voting against the 1% uprating in benefits has had no discernible impact on the polls.  By the same token, the promise of an in/out referendum on the EU come 2017 caused a slight ripple, which has since disappeared.  Lastly, the vote on gay marriage showed how deeply split the Tory party remains between what the modernisers believe will help them win the election, and what the err, conservatives believe is likely to hinder them.  Any goodwill which the announcement of the referendum generated was just as quickly snuffed out.

The latest setback for the Tories, the 12% percent lead for Labour in this month's Graun/ICM poll, does look slightly ominous.  Yes, there's sampling errors and the fact that all the other polls suggest Labour's lead remains about the 10 point margin, but ICM usually shows lower leads due to their reallocation of some don't know answers to the party they last voted for.  With the Lib Dems having voted against the boundary changes that would have given the Tories an advantage in around 30 or so constituencies, the chances of Cameron improving on his party's showing in 2010 become ever more slim.

Not that any of these problems for the natural party of government have been due to Labour being anything other than a generally efficient opposition.  Ed Miliband continues to put in solid performances at PMQs, often besting Cameron, yet you can hardly say that he's been the most visible of leaders since the new year.  Presumably some of that time was well spent preparing for today's speech, which is almost certainly his best since he became leader, his last two conference speeches being the only others of real note.

This isn't though down to the announcement of the twinned policies of reintroducing the 10p top rate of tax and paying for it through a mansion tax.  Whether the sums add up certainly isn't clear, as the band at which the 10p rate would be set depends on the amount raised through the tax.  It would arguably make more sense to do a wholesale revaluation of the council tax bands, as indeed the Institute for Fiscal Studies has since suggested, although such a policy would doubtless be vigorously opposed by those who have spent the last 20 years caring more about how much their house is worth than actually enjoying living in it.  As the IFS has also pointed out, reintroducing the 10p rate would just further complicate matters, especially when the government has been raising the personal allowance, which regardless of the downsides of the policy is a move everyone understands.  Their suggestion as to what could be done instead from the proceeds of the tax is either increasing tax credits, a policy Labour seem to be moving away from, or increasing the threshold at which employee national insurance contributions are paid, which would be the obvious step to take in line with the rise in the personal threshold.

No, the real reason why it's notable is that for the first time in years a party is making the case for running the economy differently. As Miliband said, it may well be true that we're in a race with the likes of India and China, but that doesn't mean our response should be to dump hard won rights, as the Tories want as part of their EU treaty renegotiation and Osborne has already introduced through his ludicrous shares for rights scheme. Emphasising how the 1% have taken 24 pence in every pound over the last 30 years and connecting it with how the Tories believe they still deserve a tax cut is exactly the sort of message Labour needs to keep making.

It doesn't therefore matter that New Labour did obeisance at the feet of the bankers, what matters now is that Miliband brings foward policies that make concrete his pledge to break with the era of the trickle down theory. It's fine saying Labour would break the stranglehold of the big six energy companies and stop the train companies ripping customers off on the most used routes, it's how they're going to go about doing so.  Welcome as proposals such as the introduction of a technical baccalaureate are, they're just small parts of what needs to be a far wider vision of what a "one nation" Britain would look like.

The polls suggest that for now at least this lack of detail doesn't matter, as silly as it seems to be saying that while the 10p rate and mansion tax are policies Labour would implement now if in government, they won't necessarily be in the manifesto come the election.  Much as this makes sense when for all we know the depression could yet extend to 2015 with all that would entail for government spending or rather the lack of it, the time is fast approaching when we need to know exactly what policies Labour will pledge to implement should they win.  Miliband has made a good start, and his repudiation of the worst of New Labour is now all but complete; it's what comes next that will decide whether or not David Cameron will helm a one term government.

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2/14/2013 09:48:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 31, 2013 

Ever fallen in love..

Interesting to read Iain Dale's post on how he's falling out of love with politics, along with a couple of equally thought-provoking responses.  My own take on why apathy seems to have become the default response to politics is similar to Paul's, in that it leads back not to Thatcher, but rather to the surrender to the markets of the late 70s, exemplified by Denis Healey's going to the IMF and James Callaghan's statement that Keynesianism was no longer an option.  With that surrender has come the failure of politicians to offer anything approaching a vision of a better society: all they promise now is either shallow aspiration, a belief in the fallacy of meritocracy, or more simply, that they'll do a better job of managing the country than the other lot.

Let's face it: the main political battle since the sub-prime crisis has been over who will cut what and when.  The choice on offer has been either cuts now, or slightly less deep cuts over a longer term period.  In fact, such has been the coalition's success that their programme for deficit reduction is now practically indistinguishable from that of Labour's, albeit Miliband 'n' Balls would do things slightly differently, whether through their jobs guarantee or cut in VAT etc.  The only real resistance to this inexorable narrative has been from the Occupy movement, who in this country at least seemed determined to ensure their own irrelevance from the outset.  No leaders, no real suggestion as to what the alternative should be, just that corporations aren't people, bankers aren't very nice and that everyone should pay their fair share of tax.  Inspiring it wasn't.

When politicians won't even provide the merest outline of how they want to make things better, or won't in terms that aren't technocratic, you can't be surprised that so many switch off.  Which brings me to another explanation that is far more prosaic: there's never been so much to distract yourself with as there is today.  When in 1976 there were only 3 television channels, extremely primitive video games and VHS systems still a couple of years away, politics was something to involve yourself in even if you weren't particularly vehement in your views.  Today if you so wish you can avoid hearing almost anything of the news let alone politics, and you can't really blame those who choose to do so.

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1/31/2013 10:38:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, January 08, 2013 

Caught in their own welfare trap.

It's fair to say that I've been rather despairing of the ever increasing attacks on benefit claimants, both those in work and out of it.  The BBC has joined in, surveys seem to suggest ever hardening attitudes towards those both sick and unemployed, there are numerous first-hand reports of those in wheelchairs being accused to their face of faking their disability for payments, and then there are the people who have died while waiting for their appeal against being declared fit for work by ATOS to be heard.  Recessions and hard times almost always result in those one rung down the ladder being kicked by those above them, but the way in which those at the top, whether in politics or the media, have upped the ante over the last couple of years has still managed to shock.

Today marks the end point.  The Conservatives have overreached themselves to such an extent through the benefit uprating bill and the rhetoric surrounding it that the only result will be the undermining of the entire narrative.  It should be remembered that the current popular attitude towards welfare is not the work of either the Tories or the tabloids, it's thanks to Labour's helming of the system.  Not, as the tabloids and Tories have it that they failed to reform it, but rather that they set in motion the exact reforms the coalition have supercharged.  The work capability assessment was Labour's invention, as was replacing incapacity benefit with employment and support allowance, while abolishing income support.  All this was put about with the equivalent of a nod and a wink, which while preferable to the "strivers vs skivers" of late had the same end result: encouraging the tabloids to print ever more articles about scroungers or the very few claiming huge amounts of housing benefit.

This shaming of claimants has been so successful that Labour has completely gone along with it. Faced with Osborne's wheeze of freezing benefits at 1%, they've wanted to talk only of the effect on those in-work, as if those out of work aren't striving for a job, or the sick and disabled making do on their meagre payments aren't worth an in line with inflation rise. Those on the right of the party balked at even this, imagining they were walking straight into Osborne's trap.

As so often in the past, politicians have once again underestimated the public.  Osborne felt certain this would be just as popular as the benefit cap, the undeserving poor put in their place, with minimal impact on those claiming tax credits.  Depending on how the question is asked you get different results, but overall it looks as though opinion is close to evenly split on whether the move is justified or not.  It's certainly nowhere near the 75% support the £26,000 cap receives. What's more, this is the point at which support is going to peak.  Once everyone fully realises how either they or their friends and family will be affected, the number in favour will drop further.

More than anything else, the Conservatives and Osborne continue to mistake their showing in the polls for actual popularity.  The fact is, almost anything government touches is instantly passé: once you're completely open in your loathing for the poor and poorly paid in general, as opposed to the underclass or those taking the taxpayer for a ride, the fightback begins in earnest.  When the politics are so base and so transparent that you're putting up billboards denouncing Labour for daring to say the low paid, the sick and the out of work should see their benefits increase with inflation, something they agreed with last year when Osborne said the same people deserved the rise, you're inviting the parodies and vandalism that will inevitably follow.

It's still come to something though when it's David Miliband, of all people, who exposed his party's cowardice in not going all the way in denouncing this bill for what it is.  It is rancid, and the Liberal Democrats should never be allowed to forget that they supported it. Miliband showed where the money to fund the rise could come from, and even dared to say the problem was unemployment, not the unemployed, underlining just how far the debate has moved from reality when something so obvious has to be pointed out.  When there are simply not enough jobs to go round, where is the fairness in expecting those on JSA to make do on an extra 71p a week?

Even if the Tories are regretting their attempt to create a dividing line, as the likes of Andrew Sparrow and others are implying, and are now attempting to tone down the rhetoric, it's far too late.  The damage has already been done: it's a measure highly unlikely to win many votes, especially coming 2 years before an election, despite the Tories seeming to believe it's just around the corner through the billboard campaign, and it will reinforce amongst those who are claiming what the Tories really think about them.  This is a government that demands responsibility above everything else and yet it refuses to take any itself, whether it's on the double-dip recession that never merits a mention, or the humiliating failure of the work programme.  As Liam Byrne said, in opposition Iain Duncan Smith made clear that "Conservative policies have to work for Britain's poorest communities and ... must be measured by that standard".  Duncan Smith presumably agrees then that the spread of food banks is a wonderful example of the Big Society in action.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012 

Cameron gets the shit touch.

Here's a political concept that some people seem to have difficulty understanding: when in opposition, what you do first and foremost is oppose.  As long as you stay within certain boundaries, you can be as opportunistic, hypocritical and shameless as you like if the overall goal is to make the government look divided and weak, as well as pursuing the wrong policy.  The Tories, notably, did the opposite while Blair was still perched in Downing Street, supporting him and the other Blairites on academies while the party's own backbenchers voted against.  The end result?  Michael Gove's continuing attempts to wrest control of schools away from local authorities as a whole, and the almost certain eventual insertion of privatisation into education.

There are obviously limits to this approach.  Doing it too near to an election is to treat the electorate for fools; and you can't go from one extreme position to the other without doing much the same, unless the facts have changed.  For the most part, Labour have obeyed these rules: it's questionable whether opposing giving more money to the IMF achieved anything for instance, especially when err, Eurozone economies not collapsing is clearly a good thing all round, but otherwise the two Eds have mainly played safe.

While you can see why some of those who are pro-Europe within the party have then objected to today's decision to vote with the headbangers on the Tory right, it still made perfect political sense.  David Cameron after all keeps telling us that he wants to stay in the EU, but there has to be a fundamental renegotiation of our membership.  Presumably then he'd support a cut in the EU's budget in real terms, as the amendment supported by Labour called for?  Well, no.  Ever since his cack-handed "veto" last year which achieved precisely nothing, the rest of Europe have treated us pretty much as we deserve: as whining carpers who've spent the past 40 years in a perpetual sulk.  Even if Cameron wields his "veto" again, all that will happen is the budget will roll over, or increase automatically.  He's not going to win whatever happens.

For Labour, the defeat of the government is a fantastic achievement.  It's the first significant defeat for the coalition in parliament, and it came on the day Ed Miliband compared Cameron to John Major.  If anything, Cameron's predicament on Europe is worse than it was for Major: he might have had his "bastards", but they for the most part didn't want to be out of the EU completely.  This current lot do, and Cameron knows that's something he can't possibly deliver, not least due to how the vast majority of business is quite rightly opposed to leaving.  The more he talks up what he's going to do and the more he fails to achieve anything whatsoever, the more the anti-EU vote is going to desert the Tories and turn to UKIP, improving Labour's chances in the marginal constituencies they need to win back.

Moreover, calling for a cut in the budget is the right policy, whether you want to stay in the EU or not.  When member states are across the board introducing austerity, rightly or otherwise, it's absurd that the union should be getting an above inflation budget increase.  Any comparisons with what Labour did in 2005 are beside the point when the EU was about to expand eastwards and the economy was growing strongly.  In any case, no one's going to remember in 3 years time whether Labour's position was cynical or not; if they recall it at all it'll be that Cameron couldn't get his party to support him.  For a while it seemed as though it was George Osborne who couldn't do anything right.  Now the shit touch seems to have been transmitted to the prime minister as well.

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10/31/2012 11:34:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 23, 2012 

The Tories can still win in 2015.

According to media consensus, David Cameron and the Conservatives had a bad first week back following the end of the conference season.  Any uplift from the decision to stop the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the US was swiftly curtailed by the belated resignation of Andrew Mitchell, just 48 hours after Ed Miliband had said the chief whip was "toast".  Add in the passing frenzy of George Osborne sitting in first class on a train to Euston having only paid for a standard ticket, his aide attempting to convince the ticket inspector that the Chancellor of the Exchequer couldn't be expected to sit in the pleb wagons as they were trying to watch a film on a laptop, and it isn't surprising there are long pieces, from hacks and Tories alike, suggesting Cameron needs to get a grip.

Cameron, naturally, has an answer to all this.  Away from the ephemeral stuff, the economy is beginning to turn.  Unemployment is down, and on Thursday it seems certain that the country will emerge from the double dip recession of the past 9 months with the publishing of the last quarter's GDP figures.  Inflation is also down, as is crime, and much more questionably, NHS waiting lists.  Everything is moving in the right direction, and shortly, the public at large will begin to recognise the improvement and support from the Conservatives will start to rise again.

There are, equally naturally, a number of holes in Cameron's argument.  While it seems likely there will have been growth in the third quarter, the figure itself will be crucial: economists suggest that anything less than 0.6% will be highly disappointing considering the making up for the lost output of the extra holiday for the diamond jubilee, while the Olympics should also have provided a boost.  If this turns out to be the case, all it will confirm is that we're still bumping along the bottom, with the economy broadly flat.

Similarly, while the unemployment figures are somewhat encouraging, they mask the fact that hundreds of thousands are underemployed, wanting to work longer but unable to get the hours.  The last quarter saw a drop of only 4,000 in those claiming jobseeker's allowance, while the number unable to find a job for over a year has also increased.  The work programme, much praised by Cameron and other ministers, doesn't seem to be working.  As for inflation, it seems certain to surge as fuel bills rise.  Food prices are also destined to increase following extreme weather in both this country and abroad, crops having been decimated.  The report yesterday that increasing numbers of those in work are having to rely on housing benefit to keep a roof over their heads as rents continue to rise is another major worry.  Then there's the cuts still to come, the introduction of universal credit and the problems likely to surround that, as well as the abolition of disability living allowance and the roll out of its replacement, the personal independence payment.

All this, along with the opinion polls continuing to show Labour with a comfortable lead over the Conservatives, as well as making up the ground on which party is trusted most to run the economy, is helping to convince more than a few that this will be a single term government.  Indeed, when it's taken into account that the Tories will need to increase their share of the vote on what they achieved in 2010 (36%) in order to have any chance of forming a government, something there is no indication at the moment they are capable of doing, their chances of remaining in power seem all the more remote.  To strain the point slightly, it should be remembered that the Tories have now not won an election outright for 20 years, longer than the 18 years Labour spent in opposition.

The problem is that this could all too easily turn out to be wishful thinking.  The numbers on the TUC's march at the weekend, while still respectable at 100,000-150,000, were well down on the previous year's, suggesting there's either apathy or resentful acceptance even from those most well disposed to Labour's arguments on the failings of austerity.  This is backed up by the polling conducted by Peter Kellner for YouGov, which found that while the party has won back most of the support it lost to the Liberal Democrats (not surprising when there's now a grand choice of either Labour or the Greens for those of us on the centre-left and beyond) few on the centre or right have yet been convinced to come back.  Moreover, it would be foolish to rule out a Liberal Democrat revival, especially if the party moves to dump Nick Clegg prior to the election, or when their past voters realise they still loathe Labour and the Tories just as much as they always did.

At the moment, Labour is far too dependent on the economy continuing to flatline.  As right as Miliband and Balls are to resist the urge to set out their spending plans this far from an election, this isn't an excuse for the lack of policy initiative elsewhere, or the failure to flesh out what a "one nation" Labour Britain would look like.  The attitude of the party seems to be that the Tories are so incompetent and blundering that they'll effectively knock themselves out of contention, while the Liberal Democrats can be left to expire of their own accord.  This ignores the very real possibility that the problems in the Eurozone could be fixed, that a second term for Obama could result in a delay to America's own fiscal retention programme, or even, against all the odds, that the economy could start growing strongly of its own accord.  The Tories' taking of Blair's advice to start "reforming" immediately means that even if Labour win the next election, the NHS, schools and the welfare system will all be massively changed from how they were in 2010.

Should any of the above happen, the Tory message come 2015 will be simple and effective: do you really want to jeopardise all that's been achieved?  Even if it doesn't, the emphasis will undoubtedly be on how Labour can't be trusted on the economy, taxes or public spending, or for that matter on welfare or immigration.  Ed Miliband will be portrayed variously as a weak, capitulating Brownite, a dangerous left-winger, and as so devious he even stabbed his own brother in the front.  The party's link to the unions and their direct involvement in Ed's election will be played up for all its worth.  The party will also face being attacked from both sides, the coalition parties defending their achievements in government equally combatively.  The idea that Labour can stroll to victory just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

This isn't so much a warning just for Labour as it is for those of us who have already slipped into the comfortable belief that the additional cuts to benefits won't happen as the coalition will be gone by then.  One thing we can depend on is that the nasty party is back: the 2015 Tory manifesto will be both populist and punitive in equal measure, such has been the failure of Cameron's brand of "liberal" Conservatism, and this will in turn push Labour to the right.  Any Labour government seems better though at this moment in time; the disappointment and disenchantment can come later.

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10/23/2012 09:09:00 pm | | | links to this post

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