"Perhaps party manifestos or leaders speeches could contain a short utopian vision of a better world..."
Utopias tell us about people’s visions and dreams of a good life. People who create utopian visions think about what’s wrong with their world. They identify core problems with the present and cast their minds forwards to imagine a world in which these problems have been solved.
They tell us what’s wrong with the now. And they take responsibility for trying to offer alternatives: they tell us about the about the good life. They offer social and political criticism, vision and detailed alternatives. Perhaps party manifestos or leaders speeches could contain a short utopian vision of a better world.
This could give us an idea of the kind of world desired by our potential leaders. It might help us to see the differences between them more clearly. Nowadays, utopias are mostly written by musicians and creators of fiction – here’s one from Alanis Morrissette...
...and another from Bianca Paras...
...and the science fiction write Kim Stanley Robinson has written several, exploring climate change, testing different scenarios and imaging in different futures for humans and the natural world.
Modern politicians tend to shy away from them, partly because utopia has become a term of derision: unrealistic, excessively idealistic or naive In a vox pop session on Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning someone said that The Good Society “sounds like a good idea but is unrealistic”.
And that’s a real stumbling block for utopias in our society. Politicians don’t want to look silly. In fact, the whole point of utopias is not their realization. Utopias are imaginary spaces in which to think about what’s wrong with the world and how it could be made better.
They are (literally) noplaces. ‘Nice ideas’ that are unrealistic can have a real value. They can help us to think about where we would like to be, offer inspiration and perhaps catalyse action.
It’s a big mistake to think that utopias are visions of perfection that can be created in the real world. Dangerous things happen when people think like this. Some people would say that Hitler had a utopian vision, for example.
A despicable one: a world purged of ‘imperfections’. This was a utopia that justified mass murder. And the same pattern informs some religious fundamentalism today. So utopias can be a really dangerous and deadly political tool.
But, used carefully, they can be illuminating, inspiring and exciting. They can help us to work out what kind of world we want to life, and what a good life might look like. I think that could be useful.
Lucy Sargisson
Friday 30 April 2010
Thursday 29 April 2010
Nothing more disagreeable
"We say we want the truth, we say we want them to be honest; but we don’t really – we want them to make us feel good about ourselves..."‘The trouble with the public is they’re f*cking horrible’. That’s what Peter Mannion, the made-up – and rather sympathetic – Conservative in The Thick of It said after being confronted by the people’s ill-considered – some might even say bigoted - opinions about his own good self.
Of course a real politician would never express such a view. Not in public anyway. Not while they’re still seeking office. Yet, the only real shock about Gordon Brown’s ‘bigot’ comment is not that he said what he said but that so many claim to be shocked that he – or indeed any politician – said it.
Consider for a moment the situation. A hugely motivated individual whose every waking hour over the last months has been devoted to sucking up to people whose ill-formed views will decide his fate finally comes face-to-face with the beast. Actually she isn’t being especially unreasonable, but he cannot say he disagrees with some of her views for it’s her vote he needs. Instead he must smile, nod like an idiot and quietly die inside. No wonder he explodes in private. You don’t have to be psychologically flawed to do that, just a normal human being.
It has always been so.
Anthony Trollope used his own miserable time as a Liberal candidate in the 1868 general election to inform his depiction of campaigning in The Duke’s Children (1880). There the author says of canvassing that: ‘[p]erhaps nothing more disagreeable, more squalid, more revolting to the senses, more opposed to personal dignity, can be conceived’. For it casts, he stated, poor men and women as the ‘flattered’ instead of the ‘flatterers’, leading the ostensibly solicitous candidate to privately hate those whose rudeness he had to publicly indulge.
Of course Trollope wrote as a snobbish member of the upper-class – elections turned the world upside down he moaned - and he was, frankly, a terrible candidate.
Eighty-five years later however Dennis Potter’s 1965 BBC television play Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton mirrored the humiliation and physical discomfort sketched out by Trollope. Potter – a socialist and working class boy made good who contested a constituency in the 1959 general election - depicted the travails of a young intellectual Labour candidate. Barton’s cynical agent sniggers: ‘canvassing can make you throw up if you’re the sensitive type’. This Barton proceeds to do, in some poor soul’s front garden after meeting voters who are completely dismissive about politics; support his party, but for all the wrong reasons; or set a large dog on him.
When politician meets public anything can happen – which is probably why until this week Brown only met loyal party members. But if Brown’s episode says a lot about him it also says much about us, the voters, and what we expect from politicians.
We say we want the truth, we say we want them to be honest; but we don’t really – we want them to make us feel good about ourselves, and by the way we can be as casually insulting about them as we like. But if a politician lets the mask slip, then God help them. Potter’s play ends brilliantly – and disturbingly – when his agent turns to camera and addresses the television audience: why are our politicians so flawed he asks – it is, he says your fault.
Professor Steven Fielding
Small earthquake in Chile
"We might think that what happens in Chile is merely a small earth quake of no significance for us but perhaps it tells us a lot more than we might think about the end of New Labour..."We seem to be in the twilight moments of the dominance of the Third Way in British Politics with Labour running consistently third in election polls.
Explanations for this decline largely focus on the weaknesses of Gordon Brown’s leadership and the impact of the recession. But look elsewhere, and you see that New Labour’s problems are echoed across the globe.
It might have escaped many people’s notice in this country, but the paradigmatic Latin American Third Way Government of the Concertación in Chile recently came to an end. It had been in power for 20 years. A look at its experience can give us some clues about why New Labour’s electoral success was always likely to be ultimately self-defeating.
.
The Concertación Government was a coalition of the Centre Left. During the Pinochet Dictatorship (1973-1989) the party leaderships went through a process they called ideological ‘modernisation’, premised upon an embrace of liberal democracy and the liberal market and a rejection of structural alternatives of the social democratic and socialist kind. This it is argued by the party leadership resulted in their electoral success.
But as I have demonstrated in relation to the Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh), the party of the popular classes of the Concertación, modernisation brought about a closing of ideological and political space: alternatives to neoliberalism were dismissed as outdated. Thus when unions protested about the privatisation of pensions or the introduction of fees in University they were labelled irrational. There was an individualisation of social ills; social problems such as unemployment and crime were re-framed as due to a lack of skills and/or civility. Crime and insecurity became key features in political debate. Party elites focused on governing as opposed to maintaining their relationships with their party base with parties becoming activated only at election time and internal elections an affair between elites behind closed doors. Sound familiar?
For the parties of the Concertación this resulted in a hollowing out of internal democracy, decline in membership, disillusionment between activists and leaderships and the increasing disenchantment of their union allies. For the Government of the Concertación their relationship with society moved from the mediation of collective interests to a televised relationship with individuals in the electorate. Socially there was a move to the right in sections of the working and under-classes in relation to questions of crime and insecurity accompanied by an erosion of past left-wing political identities and loyalties. Again, it is striking how much of the Chilean experience echoes that of the UK.
For the Concertación their process of modernisation ultimately undermined their political identity and unity leading to the election of a coalition of the political right ‘La Alianza por el Cambio’ (Alliance for Change) who argued that Chilean politics needed change, to reconstruct 'Chileaness' and to combat insecurity and crime
We might think that what happens in Chile is merely a small earth quake of no significance for us but perhaps it tells us a lot more than we might think about the end of New Labour and the rise of the political right in British politics.
Dr Sara Motta
Wednesday 28 April 2010
The Nice Party Turns Nasty?
In her foreword to the Green Party manifesto, Caroline Lucas suggests that the Liberal Democrats have dumped their positive attitude towards government intervention, in favour of the view that ‘the state is a problem’. The ‘nice party’, she writes, ‘have just got nastier’.
The implication that the party has abandoned its cuddly social liberalism in favour of a mean-minded economic liberalism is intended as a slight, but will be music to the ears of many Lib Dems.
Not least among these will be David Laws, who has been arguing for some time that his party’s economic liberal tradition has been suffering from benign neglect. In the opening chapter of The Orange Book, published in 2004, Laws wrote that between the 1930s and the 1980s the old Liberal Party had embraced ‘forms of soggy socialism’ at the expense of a commitment to ‘free market principles’. The Liberal Democrats now had to reclaim those principles.
If the Lib Dems of 2010 seem ‘nastier’ than their predecessors, one might think, it can only be because Laws’ project to restore economic liberal values to their rightful place has succeeded.
One might think that – but one shouldn’t, for two reasons. First, because you cannot reclaim something that you never lost. Although the party certainly did experiment with ‘soggy socialism’, the Liberals never dispensed with economic liberalism in the way that Laws suggests.
Through the 1950s and beyond the party provided a political home for numerous economic liberals – not just sometime leader Jo Grimond, but also figures like Arthur Seldon and Alan Peacock – many of whom played a significant role in shaping Liberal thought.
Publications like The Unservile State and Radical Alternative, although now long forgotten, show the clear imprimatur of these economic liberals.
Second, because any reassertion of ‘nasty’ economic liberalism that has taken place has not obviously dampened the party’s commitment to ‘nice’ social liberalism. The Liberal Democrat manifesto is more explicitly redistributive than its Labour or Conservative counterparts, and reveals an obsession with fairness which borders on the pathological.
Although the party may no longer have the headline-grabbing tax policies of 1997 or 2005 – no penny for education, no fifty pence rate for the highest earners – it is no less socially liberal for their absence. A pledge to cut tax for the poorest is arguably more progressive than a pledge to raise tax for the richest – though, as it happens, present Lib Dem policies would do both of those things.
None of which is to say that a Liberal Democrat government would be ‘nice’. Whichever party is in government after May 6th is going to be forced to make cuts, and Nick Clegg has already signalled his intent to be as ‘savage’ as the situation demands. But there is no reason to believe that the Lib Dems are any ‘nastier’ than they ever were.
Matthew Francis
The implication that the party has abandoned its cuddly social liberalism in favour of a mean-minded economic liberalism is intended as a slight, but will be music to the ears of many Lib Dems.
Not least among these will be David Laws, who has been arguing for some time that his party’s economic liberal tradition has been suffering from benign neglect. In the opening chapter of The Orange Book, published in 2004, Laws wrote that between the 1930s and the 1980s the old Liberal Party had embraced ‘forms of soggy socialism’ at the expense of a commitment to ‘free market principles’. The Liberal Democrats now had to reclaim those principles.
If the Lib Dems of 2010 seem ‘nastier’ than their predecessors, one might think, it can only be because Laws’ project to restore economic liberal values to their rightful place has succeeded.
One might think that – but one shouldn’t, for two reasons. First, because you cannot reclaim something that you never lost. Although the party certainly did experiment with ‘soggy socialism’, the Liberals never dispensed with economic liberalism in the way that Laws suggests.
Through the 1950s and beyond the party provided a political home for numerous economic liberals – not just sometime leader Jo Grimond, but also figures like Arthur Seldon and Alan Peacock – many of whom played a significant role in shaping Liberal thought.
Publications like The Unservile State and Radical Alternative, although now long forgotten, show the clear imprimatur of these economic liberals.
Second, because any reassertion of ‘nasty’ economic liberalism that has taken place has not obviously dampened the party’s commitment to ‘nice’ social liberalism. The Liberal Democrat manifesto is more explicitly redistributive than its Labour or Conservative counterparts, and reveals an obsession with fairness which borders on the pathological.
Although the party may no longer have the headline-grabbing tax policies of 1997 or 2005 – no penny for education, no fifty pence rate for the highest earners – it is no less socially liberal for their absence. A pledge to cut tax for the poorest is arguably more progressive than a pledge to raise tax for the richest – though, as it happens, present Lib Dem policies would do both of those things.
None of which is to say that a Liberal Democrat government would be ‘nice’. Whichever party is in government after May 6th is going to be forced to make cuts, and Nick Clegg has already signalled his intent to be as ‘savage’ as the situation demands. But there is no reason to believe that the Lib Dems are any ‘nastier’ than they ever were.
Matthew Francis
Tuesday 27 April 2010
Proportional (mis-)representation?
"...it’s the beauty of politics that predicted outcomes are often confounded..."
The surge is support for the Liberal Democrats has prompted much talk about proportional representation. One of the received wisdoms about PR, one which has been stressed especially by Cameron’s Conservatives, is that it leads automatically to coalition and therefore weak governments.
Leaving aside the question of whether coalition governments are necessarily weak (there is plenty of evidence from our European partners that they do not have to be), is it true that PR always leads to coalitions?
It might be instructive to look at the example of Spain. There, the architects of the post-Franco democratic constitution deliberately established a PR-based system in the very hope that it would create coalition governments.
Their aim was to ensure there was no repetition of Spain’s previous experience of democracy under the Second Republic in the 1930s, when the President was able to intervene in politics in such a way as to undermine the elected premier.
So, the 1978 Constitution under a restored monarchy gave the prime minister very extensive political powers to ensure political stability, but then sought to temper those powers by designing an electoral system which would ensure the need to build politically inclusive coalitions.
As so often, the best laid plans went awry. What has been Spain’s experience of coalition government? In practice, it has been non-existent: since the return of democracy, there has not been a single national-level coalition government in over thirty years of democracy.
To be sure, there have been several minority administrations, which have depended for survival on a series of deals with minor (usually regional nationalist) parties – but no formal coalitions.
Indeed, four of Spain’s ten administrations since 1977 have enjoyed absolute majorities, and only three have relied on any formal support from other parties. Moreover, there has been remarkable political stability at national level, with just five premiers since 1977: Adolfo Suárez (1977-81), Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo (1981-82), Felipe González (1982-96), José María Aznar (1996-2004) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (since 2004).
How do we explain that? In part, it is down to the particular form of proportional representation chosen. Spain, in common with several European democracies (and as also used in European parliamentary elections), operates the d’Hondt system – a somewhat complex list system named after Victor d’Hondt, the Belgian mathematician and lawyer. Under d’Hondt, seats are awarded one at a time according to the highest average, obtained by dividing the number of votes by the number of seats plus one in a given constituency until all seats are allocated. (There’s an online guide to calculating d’Hondt outcomes).
But the real key to the explanation lies in the way that electoral boundaries were drawn. In Spain, a crucial element was to draw boundaries in such a way as to over-represent rural votes, in the hope of countering the expected left-leaning urban vote and thereby favour the centre-right. In technical terms, there is a high ‘index of disproportionality’ in Spain, reflected in the fact that it takes far more votes to elect a deputy in Madrid than it does, for example, in Soria.
What happened in practice was that the Socialist party increasingly picked up rural votes, leading to their crushing electoral majority in 1982, which ushered in fourteen years in power (and four consecutive elections wins).
The key point here, though, is that proportional systems vary in their degree of proportionality. It’s a question of design: there are many different possible systems out there, and how proportional they are varies widely.
It may be that the particular system favoured by the Liberal Democrats – Single Transferable Vote – would encourage coalitions, but there is no law that says PR necessarily leads to coalitions.
What’s more, once it’s in place, people’s voting behaviour may well change. But it’s the beauty of politics that predicted outcomes are often confounded.
Professor Paul M Heywood
Trust the people?
"As Andrew Hawkins of ComRes noted in his commentary, ‘clearly a lot of people are very confused......’"
Sunday’s ComRes poll for the Independent on Sunday/Sunday Mirror contained two questions designed to tap into one of the central dividing lines of the election – what to do about public spending. Its findings are very revealing.
First, they asked this: “The Government should maintain current public spending plans in order to keep the recovery going”
Agree: 61%
Disagree 29%
Perhaps not surprisingly, younger people and those in poorer social groups were most likely to agree. Good news for Labour, you might think, given that this is their stance, and they appear to have almost two thirds of the public behind them.
But then they asked this: “The Government should cut public spending now to avoid higher taxes later”.
Agree 57%
Disagree 34%
As with the previous question, younger people and those in poorer social groups were the most likely to agree.
These are two totally contradictory stances – and yet the public want both of them. They want public spending both maintained and cut.
As Andrew Hawkins of ComRes noted in his commentary, ‘clearly a lot of people are very confused......’
Professor Philip Cowley
New Labour and the unions
When New Labour came to power in 1997, British trade unions were jubilant. Immediately upon entering office, the Labour government signed up to the Social Chapter of the European Union and introduced the minimum wage.
Nevertheless, the statutory union recognition legislation was watered down and social partnership was not institutionalised beyond the Low Pay Commission. European social legislation was implemented in a minimalist way and Britain continued to function as an obstacle to a further development of the Social Dimension in the EU. Most importantly, however, New Labour did not repeal the anti-trade union laws by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. Trade unions still have to run a highly complex and rigorous ballot of their members before announcing a strike and must give an advance notice of seven days of any strike action to their employer. A complete ban on solidarity and secondary action has remained in place.
In the case of recent strikes by British Airways cabin crew, key figures in the Labour government even went on air criticising Unite, the trade union organising BA cabin crew. Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the strike “unjustified and deplorable” and the Transport Secretary Lord Adonis referred to the planned strike as “totally unjustified”.
Yet several British trade unions, including Unite, continue to support New Labour in the run-up to the current general elections. There is, for example, Unite 4 Labour; the endorsement by the General Secretary of the GMB union; and a poster campaign by Unison.
Such a trade union commitment to support labour parties is not uncommon in Europe. Historically, labour parties and trade unions emerged in tandem as the two arms of the increasingly organised working class at the end of the 19th, or the beginning of the 20th century.
This historical legacy continues to have a strong impact on trade unions. In Sweden, although the Social Democratic government implemented a whole range of neo-liberal policies between 1994 and 2006, the main trade union confederation LO regularly put its bureaucratic apparatus at the disposal of the Social Democrats during election campaigns. In Germany between 1998 and 2005, the Social Democratic-led coalition government under Gerhard Schröder introduced a whole range of restructuring measures within the so-called Agenda 2010, including drastic cuts in pension and unemployment benefits. Trade unions did not like it, they organised demonstrations, but they refrained from criticising the Social Democratic Party openly during election campaigns.
Norwegian trade unions are a noticeable exception here. They have shown how a more independent position can result in more influence on policy-making as well as a revival of the close relationship with the Social Democratic Party. In 2000 and 2001 the then Social Democratic led government implemented several measures of neo-liberal restructuring against the wishes of trade unions. When the party then experienced one of its worst defeats in the 2001 elections, trade unions did not simply turn round and renewed their pledge to the party. On the contrary, prior to the 2005 elections they put forward their own political agenda, submitted related questions to all political parties and then endorsed those parties to the electorate, which had responded favourably. It was this focus on policies, rather than unquestioning support of the Social Democratic Party, which made clear to the latter that it first needed trade union support, if it wanted to return to power and second, that it could not take this support for granted, but needed to earn it with pro-labour policies.
Importantly, the policy programme by the trade unions rejected any kind of ‘third way’ policies. They made clear that only parties, which opposed any further privatisations or the outsourcing of public services to private sector providers, would receive their endorsement. While accepting that reform of the public sector was needed, unions put forward the Quality Municipality Project as their alternative, which focuses on reform through changes within the public sector including the incorporation of the expertise of the workforce. Trade unions have clearly been able to move the Social Democratic Party to the left again. Since the return to power by the Norwegian Social Democratic Party at the head of a three party coalition in 2005, old ties with the trade unions have been strengthened, the Prime Minister meets the President of LO, the main trade union confederation, on a fortnightly basis to discuss policies and any neo-liberal restructuring measures such as privatisation of the public sector are off the table.
Perhaps a similar, more independent strategy would also be more fruitful for British trade unions?
Professor Andreas Bieler
Nevertheless, the statutory union recognition legislation was watered down and social partnership was not institutionalised beyond the Low Pay Commission. European social legislation was implemented in a minimalist way and Britain continued to function as an obstacle to a further development of the Social Dimension in the EU. Most importantly, however, New Labour did not repeal the anti-trade union laws by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. Trade unions still have to run a highly complex and rigorous ballot of their members before announcing a strike and must give an advance notice of seven days of any strike action to their employer. A complete ban on solidarity and secondary action has remained in place.
In the case of recent strikes by British Airways cabin crew, key figures in the Labour government even went on air criticising Unite, the trade union organising BA cabin crew. Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the strike “unjustified and deplorable” and the Transport Secretary Lord Adonis referred to the planned strike as “totally unjustified”.
Yet several British trade unions, including Unite, continue to support New Labour in the run-up to the current general elections. There is, for example, Unite 4 Labour; the endorsement by the General Secretary of the GMB union; and a poster campaign by Unison.
Such a trade union commitment to support labour parties is not uncommon in Europe. Historically, labour parties and trade unions emerged in tandem as the two arms of the increasingly organised working class at the end of the 19th, or the beginning of the 20th century.
This historical legacy continues to have a strong impact on trade unions. In Sweden, although the Social Democratic government implemented a whole range of neo-liberal policies between 1994 and 2006, the main trade union confederation LO regularly put its bureaucratic apparatus at the disposal of the Social Democrats during election campaigns. In Germany between 1998 and 2005, the Social Democratic-led coalition government under Gerhard Schröder introduced a whole range of restructuring measures within the so-called Agenda 2010, including drastic cuts in pension and unemployment benefits. Trade unions did not like it, they organised demonstrations, but they refrained from criticising the Social Democratic Party openly during election campaigns.
Norwegian trade unions are a noticeable exception here. They have shown how a more independent position can result in more influence on policy-making as well as a revival of the close relationship with the Social Democratic Party. In 2000 and 2001 the then Social Democratic led government implemented several measures of neo-liberal restructuring against the wishes of trade unions. When the party then experienced one of its worst defeats in the 2001 elections, trade unions did not simply turn round and renewed their pledge to the party. On the contrary, prior to the 2005 elections they put forward their own political agenda, submitted related questions to all political parties and then endorsed those parties to the electorate, which had responded favourably. It was this focus on policies, rather than unquestioning support of the Social Democratic Party, which made clear to the latter that it first needed trade union support, if it wanted to return to power and second, that it could not take this support for granted, but needed to earn it with pro-labour policies.
Importantly, the policy programme by the trade unions rejected any kind of ‘third way’ policies. They made clear that only parties, which opposed any further privatisations or the outsourcing of public services to private sector providers, would receive their endorsement. While accepting that reform of the public sector was needed, unions put forward the Quality Municipality Project as their alternative, which focuses on reform through changes within the public sector including the incorporation of the expertise of the workforce. Trade unions have clearly been able to move the Social Democratic Party to the left again. Since the return to power by the Norwegian Social Democratic Party at the head of a three party coalition in 2005, old ties with the trade unions have been strengthened, the Prime Minister meets the President of LO, the main trade union confederation, on a fortnightly basis to discuss policies and any neo-liberal restructuring measures such as privatisation of the public sector are off the table.
Perhaps a similar, more independent strategy would also be more fruitful for British trade unions?
Professor Andreas Bieler
Monday 26 April 2010
Pick and Mix
With less than a fortnight to go, here are some of the highlights of the blog over the last two weeks:
The manifestos compared – can you guess which one talks about chaos more?
Why the ippr don’t get the BNP – and why the BNP targets Islam.
Why Newnight Review don’t understand political fiction
How the polls aren’t really moving as much as you think
Why you should be sceptical about all the talk of this being an internet election
Plus:
Labour’s secret weapon: the World Cup
The benefits of attack ads
Gordon sings a song
And how to lose a TV debate, even if your opponent has punched a child in the face.
Professor Philip Cowley
The manifestos compared – can you guess which one talks about chaos more?
Why the ippr don’t get the BNP – and why the BNP targets Islam.
Why Newnight Review don’t understand political fiction
How the polls aren’t really moving as much as you think
Why you should be sceptical about all the talk of this being an internet election
Plus:
Labour’s secret weapon: the World Cup
The benefits of attack ads
Gordon sings a song
And how to lose a TV debate, even if your opponent has punched a child in the face.
Professor Philip Cowley
Sunday 25 April 2010
The absence
News that Labour is set to change its campaign strategy, moving Gordon Brown more centre stage, brings to mind David Hare’s play Absence of War.
I say ‘brings to mind’ – as a result of working on a forthcoming Radio 4 documentary on representations of New Labour I have just seen the 1995 television version of Hare’s play, sadly only available from the BBC Library.
After gaining unique behind-the-scenes access to Labour’s 1992 campaign Hare wrote about a Labour leader during a close election, which (spoiler alert) the party loses. Hare’s ‘George Jones’ is a kind of Neil Kinnock – a firebrand socialist whose rhetoric and commitment had once touched audiences.
However, as leader, Jones imposed discipline on an anarchic party to make it electable and in the process his closest aides had imposed discipline upon him, afraid he would revert to type and say the wrong thing.
As the campaign begins Jones is then trapped behind words and phrases that were not his own. He is also being undermined by some of his closest Parliamentary colleagues. This caution means that Labour’s campaign goes nowhere. To save the party from defeat Jones decides to go back to how he used to be, speaking not from notes written by others but from his own heart.
Yet at a major rally he discovers that his heart can no longer supply those inspirational words, so enmeshed had he become within an inauthentic politics and he is forced to read out his speech like a good little leader.
There is no suggestion that Brown is about to be set free like Jones, even though he threatening to invoke God against the Conservatives. Hare’s protagonist mouthed platitudes in which he did not believe: Brown does not seem to have that problem.
There are however wider echoes between the play and the current campaign. About Labour at a particular time, The Absence of War also addressed a more general proposition – that the more parties package themselves, in the hope of improving their electablity, the less they are true to themselves and so stop engaging the passions of the electorate.
Now, maybe things are not as simple as Hare presents them – but does he not have a point? For, after a second leaders debate in which Brown’s case was reduced to one word (‘Risk!’), Cameron’s to ‘New’ and Clegg’s to ‘Different’, the relationship between politics and authenticity must be worth discussing.
Professor Steven Fielding
I say ‘brings to mind’ – as a result of working on a forthcoming Radio 4 documentary on representations of New Labour I have just seen the 1995 television version of Hare’s play, sadly only available from the BBC Library.
After gaining unique behind-the-scenes access to Labour’s 1992 campaign Hare wrote about a Labour leader during a close election, which (spoiler alert) the party loses. Hare’s ‘George Jones’ is a kind of Neil Kinnock – a firebrand socialist whose rhetoric and commitment had once touched audiences.
However, as leader, Jones imposed discipline on an anarchic party to make it electable and in the process his closest aides had imposed discipline upon him, afraid he would revert to type and say the wrong thing.
As the campaign begins Jones is then trapped behind words and phrases that were not his own. He is also being undermined by some of his closest Parliamentary colleagues. This caution means that Labour’s campaign goes nowhere. To save the party from defeat Jones decides to go back to how he used to be, speaking not from notes written by others but from his own heart.
Yet at a major rally he discovers that his heart can no longer supply those inspirational words, so enmeshed had he become within an inauthentic politics and he is forced to read out his speech like a good little leader.
There is no suggestion that Brown is about to be set free like Jones, even though he threatening to invoke God against the Conservatives. Hare’s protagonist mouthed platitudes in which he did not believe: Brown does not seem to have that problem.
There are however wider echoes between the play and the current campaign. About Labour at a particular time, The Absence of War also addressed a more general proposition – that the more parties package themselves, in the hope of improving their electablity, the less they are true to themselves and so stop engaging the passions of the electorate.
Now, maybe things are not as simple as Hare presents them – but does he not have a point? For, after a second leaders debate in which Brown’s case was reduced to one word (‘Risk!’), Cameron’s to ‘New’ and Clegg’s to ‘Different’, the relationship between politics and authenticity must be worth discussing.
Professor Steven Fielding
Saturday 24 April 2010
They think it’s all over…
"Could Clegg win the World Cup? If ever there was a moment to ask that question, just perhaps … it is now..."
With poll after poll putting Labour in third place, it is surely time for those bunkered in Labour HQ to reach for their secret weapon: the FIFA World Cup.
Although political science lacks many truly iron laws, it is indisputably the case that England has only ever won football’s most cherished prize under a Labour Government. Indeed, the same truth holds for the Rugby World Cup (snatched from under the very noses of the Australians in 2003). With the South African tournament just a few weeks away, Labour may well feel that this is the best shot left in its locker.
Of course, it’s not such a clear vote winner outside England, though a variant could be prepared for use north of the border: the only party ever to have presided over Scotland’s defeat of the World Champions at Wembley with a rather cheeky performance from Jim Baxter. More recently, we might recall that the great Ashes win of 2005 (‘the finest test series of all time’) was preceded by New Labour’s third successful electoral outing.
Of course, it’s not all one-way traffic. Credit for Margaret Thatcher’s win in 1983 is often attributed to her success in the Falkland’s War (a claim the psephologists have long played down) but too little attention is surely given to Botham’s Ashes win of 1981.
And who fails to notice that the decline of England’s test fortunes against the old enemy in the 1990s neatly coincided with the long electoral decline of the Conservative Party?
At the same time, no-one over fifty will fail to recollect that the unbearable humiliation of England by West Germany in Mexico on 14th June 1970 was followed just a few days later by Heath’s surprise win over Wilson.
What are the precedents for the Liberal Democrats? Well, they are not entirely encouraging. Last time we had a Liberal government we were still inventing games for the colonies. Hobbs (Jack rather than Thomas) was opening the batting for England and tennis was being run by a bunch of amateurs. North of the border, little has changed: the Scottish Football League had just been won by Rangers from Celtic (or vice versa). The Liberal Democrat leader is an untested force. Could Clegg win the World Cup? If ever there was a moment to ask that question, just perhaps … it is now.
Professor Chris Pierson
Friday 23 April 2010
Why is no one criticising Nick Clegg’s Vietnam War record?
"The Daily Mail trumpeted the Conservatives’ success in raising £1.5 million in the first week of the campaign, but Obama could raise that between sneezing and blowing his nose..."For those of us who treat elections as a spectator sport, the general election campaign is bubbling up nicely. But for a politics-as-sports fan like me, it lacks something in comparison with presidential campaigns in the United States. Sure, we’ve got our own ‘Yes we can’ (albeit ‘probably not’) dynamic going on. And the debates have been fun. But unlike the US, we don’t get to enjoy candidates’ paid-for advertising campaigns.
In particular, we’re missing out on juicy attack ads—30 seconds of dramatic narration enumerating an opponent’s real, implied and imagined transgressions, character flaws, voting record etc.
There are Party Election Broadcasts of course, but PEBs don’t give the same thrill as the 30 second spot. In the heat of battle where is David Cameron’s soft-on-crime Willie Horton? Where is the shady support group ready to step up and challenge Nick Clegg’s Vietnam War record?
Consider too, the people who are rendered redundant by the absence of paid ads in our election culture: the undergraduates, pensioners and other would-be focus group types; the political scientists and grad students with papers to write; the ad-watch and fact-check bloggers. Think of the atrophying creativity of our best advertising people.
And spare a thought for the wasted youth of our frustrated YouTube parody-makers. How do you parody a PEB?
What would this general election campaign look like if candidates ran paid ads? With other 4000 candidates, if every single one ran ad campaigns on TV it would be chaotic and unbearably parochial, but at the party level, with three competitive candidates, a trailing incumbent and two parties emphasizing a break with the current administration but also less likely to form a coalition with each other, conditions are ripe for a fantastically negative campaign.
And given the brevity of the UK campaign, the concentration of attacks would be spectacular. It is interesting to imagine what British campaign ads would look like. Would we see Daisy girl reinvented to remind us of the dangers of European integration? Would Gordon Brown emphasize his superiority over Nick Clegg in taking care of business at 3am? Or would ads be more inimitably British? Picture Gordon Brown as Stevens from Remains of the Day—surely a creative advertising type could take that idea and run with it?
More importantly, would campaign ads be good for the UK? And especially, would it make more people vote? Negative campaigning gets a bad press, but recent research in the US suggests that exposure to attack ads can sometimes mobilize voters to turn out and is often a source of substantive and documented information.
Negative messages stimulate stronger affective responses, are more memorable and signal to people that something important is at stake. They also help voters to differentiate between candidates—an important issue for less sophisticated citizens who say the candidates are all the same and therefore don’t vote.
In many ways the information environment available to voters during UK campaigns is very good. However, there is one area where politics is yet to fully penetrate: the commercial break. This is a niche that campaign ads were literally born to fill and might be able to reach less politically engaged voters who, even now, may be surprised to learn that there is an election coming up.
Rather than confining politicians to the news and shopping centres, why not unleash them on people waiting for Desperate Housewives or Masterchef to come back on? Since we can now access our preferred entertainment so efficiently, people who choose to avoid information about the election can do so with little effort. Running ads on Dave or E4 might just get more fans of Friends repeats informed and engaged in the electoral process.
It wouldn’t be cheap. Airtime at commercial rates isn’t cheap. At 2008 prices, a 30 second spot run nationally on ITV during Coronation Street would cost £75K. With the Electoral Commission’s limit of £20 million on campaign spending this is probably not a cost effective use of resources, especially given that there is no systematic evidence that negative advertising actually works electorally: small dents in an opponent’s support are offset by diminution of support for the sponsor of an attack.
Yet this doesn’t deter candidates and parties around the world, who continue to run negative ads in hope of striking it lucky. Lyndon Johnson’s Daisy Girl, the most famous and perhaps successful ad of all time, ran just once, albeit in the pre-multi-channel, pre-internet era when audiences were effectively captive.
Reaching audiences in our current fractured media environment is expensive and difficult—which is why we see such enthusiasm for experimentation with internet communication tools. Cost effectiveness is clearly an issue for parties in the UK, where raising campaign funds is more difficult than in the States: The Daily Mail trumpeted the Conservatives’ success in raising £1.5 million in the first week of the campaign, but Obama could raise that between sneezing and blowing his nose.
Dr Jon Sullivan
Thursday 22 April 2010
The Ghost at the Feast
"How do these three men in a boat see the world, and our place in it?"In Roman Polanski’s film, The Ghost, currently doing the rounds, Pierce Brosnan plays a recently retired British Prime Minister, sequestered in his American home-from-home, hard at work on his tennis and his memoirs. With his uncertain accent, impossible tan, ersatz charm, pectoral presence and petulant glamour, Pierce Brosnan makes an unconvincing Tony Blair. He is in good company. Tony Blair makes an unconvincing Tony Blair, for precisely those reasons.
Blair’s appearances have been fleeting enough of late, save for the well-rehearsed apologetics of the Chilcot Inquiry – will anyone mention the Chilcot Inquiry in the Prime Ministerial debate? – yet he haunts the stage as if there were a fourth podium, or perhaps a hobgoblin with a rictus grin and a glassy stare, whispering devilishly in the ear of each heir, ‘A force for good’ ....
No European leader of his generation spoke so unblushingly of good and evil. In this worldview, the US is a force for good, which is to say that Washington is worthy of love, actually. For the Prime Minister, this means making a conquest of the tenant of the White House, whoever that may be. Britain too is a force for good, naturally, and also the British Army. This is goodness militant. Tony was a true believer in the mission of the moment.
Does any of this survive him? Are any of the contenders prepared to talk in these terms? Of doing good in the world; of responsibilities to others (beyond stranded passengers); of humanitarian intervention; of bare-faced internationalism? Is liberal war a thing of the past, even among liberals, however perky and cosmopolitan they may be? Are there still causes worth breaking a lance for, out there in the world?
How do these three men in a boat see the world, and our place in it? Who will they talk to, internationally, and when? Who will they consort with? Do they care to pull their weight as a member of the EU, or they resigned to irrelevance? Are they prepared to say candidly what can be achieved in Afghanistan? What of the reckoning with the dark side of the war on terror – ‘extraordinary rendition’, ‘enhanced interrogation’ – torture? Will they commit to an independent inquiry on that?
And what of the lance, in our straitened circumstances? Among other great unmentionables, is the British ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, that threadbare totem, finally to be consigned to the dustbin of history? A strategic defence review is unavoidable. What direction should it take?#
Perhaps they have a haiku for us. In another tract for the times, Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega, there is a character who wanted ‘a haiku war’ in Iraq: a war in three lines –
‘A great power has to act.
We were struck hard.
We need to retake the future.’
As it happens, haiku
Are
All the
Rage.
The President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, a famous Belgian, has just published a book of them (and genuine ones too, not like the bastardised versions above). Prime Ministerial candidates could surely manage one each.
Professor Alex Danchev
Blame is the Spur
With the nation swept away on a tide of Cleggmania, it is tempting to think that real life really is stranger than fiction. But for those who cannot get enough politics from the election campaign the arts are doing their bit to help fill the gap."The honeymoon period is over Rab. We want results"
Roman Polanski’s new film based on Robert Harris’ novel, The Ghost is currently on release whilst Posh and Stiffed are playing the theatres. The latest edition of The Review Show sought to place these and other recent political fictions in context and explain their attitude.
The focus was almost solely on New Labour and Tony Blair and this led to the conclusion that, in the words of Toby Young, since 1997 the once ‘illusioned had become disillusioned’.
It’s hard to deny that New Labour have been at the sharp end of the satirists’ and playwrights’ pens over recent years. But even before Blair took office, BBC 2 screened Guy Jenkin’s comedy Crossing the Floor, the story of a Tory Home Secretary who sought to further his career by deserting and beleaguered Government and joining a renewed Labour Party.
The Labour Party are shown as craven in their attempt to take on this Tory turncoat and we learn that the Labour leader is ‘young, charismatic, handsome and only slightly demented.’ Tory/New Labour cross-dressing and media-driven mad leaders might seem commonplace today but were in fact seen as hackneyed even in 1996.
A review in the Independent bemoaned, ‘its cast of sleazy Tories and sleek New Labour spin-doctors (the baddies here) is so over-familiar that one can only hope for a surprise Lib Dem victory to give us some fresh targets.’ Fourteen years on, the reviewer’s wishes may be about to come true.
Indeed, take a step back from the 1990s and you notice that disillusionment and ideological strife have always been at the heart of fictional depictions of the left and its struggles with parliamentary socialism whether in the prime time ITV drama Bill Brand or pre-war novels such as Company Parade and Clash.
Apart from documenting these struggles, political fiction has also been a useful reflection on (and indeed is sometimes used as a tool for) an immanent critique that has a grand place within parts of the British left: ready to see betrayal and compromise on behalf of the leadership around every corner.
Not long after Blair’s election, the 100th anniversary of Nye Bevan’s birth was marked by Trevor Griffiths’ TV play Food for Ravens. As well as marking the man’s life it was clearly seen as an early warning about the principles New Labour was abandoning Bevan often plays this role.
But go back over sixty years and the same thing – this time deploying another totemic figure in Labour Party mythology, Ramsey MacDonald, thinly disguised as Hamer Shawcross – can be seen at work in the Boulting Brothers’ film adaptation of Howard Spring’s novel Fame is the Spur.
The film critic Raymond Durgnat wrote that the film was a direct attack on the Labour Government of the time but released in 1947 - and taking account of production time - this doesn’t quite seem right. Rather the film is better read as another precursory salvo, warning how Labour Governments will always let you down.
The last word should be left to Rab C. Nesbitt’s pal Jamsie Cotter. Raising a toast to the scenes on the TV of Blair entering Downing Street for the first time he’s reminded that his Giro hasn’t arrived, ‘Aye, I blame that bastard Labour Government…The honeymoon period is over Rab. We want results.’
Matthew Bailey
Mr Clegg Goes to Washington
"This ignorance was, it turns out, Clegg’s greatest weapon..."When most people turned on their televisions to watch the first leaders’ debate they probably knew – or thought they knew - all they wanted to know about Gordon Brown and David Cameron. For good or bad their images had already been firmly fixed in their minds.
Of Nick Clegg however many were blissfully ignorant. This ignorance was, it turns out, Clegg’s greatest weapon. For when the viewers saw this seemingly nice young man with the striking yellow tie talk direct to camera and distance himself from the two ‘old parties’ and offer them a ‘new politics’ they had no reason to disbelieve him.
If only because they had had not been paying much attention to politics, so far as many voters were concerned, Clegg had no past, he was new: if not The Man With No Name, he was The Man With No Image.
Pity, if you will, the other two. For to be leader of either the Labour or Conservative parties is to be – no matter how hard your spin doctors work – a man mistrusted. One index of quite how bad are their images is their representation in fiction.
As I argued in the Guardian recently Tony Blair has an awful set of fictional representations. You might think that he deserved them. But these do not all originate from reactions to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, soon as ‘Tony Blair’ set foot on the stage, page or screen – even before 1997 - he was cast as media-obsessed, spin-centric and disingenuous. This might have said something about the real Blair – but it also said something about how writers represent those who seek and hold political power.
The Deal, Peter Morgan’s 2002 play for Channel Four, imagined the Brown-Blair relationship and speculated about how it was that the latter lost out to the former in 1994. In 2002 Gordon Brown was the hero – if Blair was superficial, Brown was substantial; if Blair was the blow-in to Labour, Brown was rooted, soaked in the party’s ethos; if Blair was disloyal it was Brown’s loyalty to John Smith that cost him the leadership. But look at Brown as depicted in The Trial of Tony Blair and Confessions of a Diary Secretary both of which were broadcast in 2007: childish, petty and sulky.
Right from the start Cameron too has got the sharp end of the stick. In Confessions of a Diary Secretary he is presented as a silly ass suffering some severe problems with his cycling shorts. In the 2009 documentary-with-made-up-bits When Boris Met Dave things are even worse: as a student he shown liking Sade.
Where is Nick Clegg? Nowhere to be seen. When politics is screened the LibDems as a whole hardly get a look-in.
The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, broadcast on BBC1 in 2006, reduced the 2005 election campaign to two middle aged Labour and Conservative candidates fighting in a supermarket car park. The LibDem turns up just as the police arrive.
As it happens he is also given a flea in his ear by our heroine but then this series was about Pritchard, who wins the election after creating a party of similarly politically disenchanted women. In 2010, Nick Clegg is our Mrs Pritchard – or more likely our Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
Frank Capra’s film might have been released in 1939 but it reverberates through not just US but also UK politics. Showing how an idealistic young man untouched by politics (for which read corruption and selfish ambition) cuts through the party games to actually stand up for the interests of the people, it is the model for any number of later screen fictions about politics.
Mr Smith has also been consciously or unconsciously evoked by plenty of politicians – both Obama and McCain did it in 2008 - keen to present themselves as the ‘outsider’ candidate. It is an image which in these disenchanted times can be pretty potent.
For Clegg the danger is that this is a one-off – how can you preserve your image as the outsider when the whole purpose of your being is to get inside?
Professor Steven Fielding
The Harrods Deterrent
"Perhaps a nuclear deterrent from Homebase would be more fitting than a future one from Harrods?"In Yes Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby reassures the Prime Minister that Trident is the sort of nuclear weapons system that Harrods would sell. This was a good analogy at the time, relevant to the follow-on system that the Blair government announced in 2006.
Trident D5 was designed for a superpower, guaranteeing the ability to evade enemy defences and offering such a degree of accuracy that it could be employed against the hardened military (that is, even nuclear) targets of an adversary. The successor submarines to the Vanguard class will have to come into service in the 2020s and will ensure interoperability with the American ballistic missile system long into the future.
Yet the Liberal Democrats have questioned the cosy consensus between the two main parties over proceeding with a ‘son of Trident’. Twice in the first televised debate between the party leaders, Nick Clegg poured scorn on plans to purchase a future nuclear weapons system of the ‘Cold War age’, at enormous cost.
In doing so, he is tapping into a vein of thinking that goes back to the time of Dr David Owen and the Social Democrat Party that questioned whether the UK needed such a highly capable nuclear system. At that time it advocated a deterrent in which nuclear-armed cruise missiles were fitted to some of the Royal Navy’s hunter-killer submarines.
Such an option could be pursued now. It would retain a nuclear capability in the face of an uncertain, proliferating world but would place it on a much more modest level. A cruise missile has undeniable drawbacks over its ballistic missile equivalent: it is more vulnerable to enemy counter-measures, it is of shorter range, it can carry only a single warhead and it impinges on the conventional role of submarines.
Nevertheless, it offers the prospect of remaining in the nuclear club with a submarine-based platform at a much reduced cost.
The Liberal Democrats are right to re-open a debate that was too swiftly closed down by the Blair government. With massive cuts in public spending in prospect and a black hole acknowledged within the defence budget, it is timely to put all issues up for debate. Both the Labour government and the Conservatives have said that the future of the strategic nuclear deterrent would be off-limits in the Strategic Defence Review that will follow the General Election.
But with the pressures of the war in Afghanistan and in an international environment in which the US and Russia have announced major cuts in their strategic arsenals, it is time to re-evaluate UK policy.
Perhaps a nuclear deterrent from Homebase would be more fitting than a future one from Harrods?
Professor Wyn Rees
Wednesday 21 April 2010
Polls stability again (well, sort of)
Again, the polls appear to be all over the place. Last night’s ComRes poll had the Conservatives in front by nine points, Populus by just one. You Gov had the Lib Dems ahead by three, Angus Reid had them ahead by just one. Lib Dem support had either ‘burst’ (ComRes had them back to 26%, albeit a level of support that many Lib Dems would have sold their souls for just a week ago) or was at its highest level (34%, with YouGov).
There’s no doubt that there’s some fluctuations. But, as with the pre-debate polls, there’s also some real continuity, once you take into account the margin of error you get from sampling.
The Conservative vote is the most stable of all. Since the Lib Dem surge, every poll has put the Conservatives on 33+/-2.
With one exception – yesterday’s Angus Reid poll – every poll has put Labour on 27+/-3.
And with two exceptions – yesterday’s ComRes and YouGov polls – poll survey has put the Lib Dems on 30+/-3.
And remember that each polling company conducts their surveys differently – different ways of doing fieldwork, and then (even more importantly) different ways of weighting and filtering the data – and so we should expect to see variation between companies.
If however we look at the spreads by companies, then we see even more stability. Excluding those organisations which have only done one poll since the Lib Dem surge:
ComRes have: Con: 33+/-2; Lab: 27+/-1; LD: 28+/-2.
YouGov have: Con: 32+/-1; Lab: 28+/-2; LD: 32+/-3.
Angus Reid have: Con: 32+/-0; Lab: 24+/-1; LD: 33+/-1.
ICM have: Con: 34+/-1; Lab: 20+/-1; LD: 29+/-2.
In other words, within polling companies, not a single poll has seen movement outside the margin of error, and the Conservative and Labour spreads are even more stable, the majority being just +/-1.
One other thing. The +/-3 margin of error is 95% accurate, but that means that one in every 20 polls will show variations beyond it. The phrase rogue polls is used wildly – as Mike Smithson of politicalbetting.com often says “a rogue poll is one whose results you disagree with” – but it technically refers just to those 5% of polls.
We are now seeing so many polls – 16 since the debates alone – that we should expect about one poll every five or six days to be a rogue.
UPDATE: This piece was written before the publication of today's Ipsos-MORI poll, but that merely confirms the argument above, with the poll nestling nicely near the mid-points, at 32/28/32.
Professor Philip Cowley
There’s no doubt that there’s some fluctuations. But, as with the pre-debate polls, there’s also some real continuity, once you take into account the margin of error you get from sampling.
The Conservative vote is the most stable of all. Since the Lib Dem surge, every poll has put the Conservatives on 33+/-2.
With one exception – yesterday’s Angus Reid poll – every poll has put Labour on 27+/-3.
And with two exceptions – yesterday’s ComRes and YouGov polls – poll survey has put the Lib Dems on 30+/-3.
And remember that each polling company conducts their surveys differently – different ways of doing fieldwork, and then (even more importantly) different ways of weighting and filtering the data – and so we should expect to see variation between companies.
If however we look at the spreads by companies, then we see even more stability. Excluding those organisations which have only done one poll since the Lib Dem surge:
ComRes have: Con: 33+/-2; Lab: 27+/-1; LD: 28+/-2.
YouGov have: Con: 32+/-1; Lab: 28+/-2; LD: 32+/-3.
Angus Reid have: Con: 32+/-0; Lab: 24+/-1; LD: 33+/-1.
ICM have: Con: 34+/-1; Lab: 20+/-1; LD: 29+/-2.
In other words, within polling companies, not a single poll has seen movement outside the margin of error, and the Conservative and Labour spreads are even more stable, the majority being just +/-1.
One other thing. The +/-3 margin of error is 95% accurate, but that means that one in every 20 polls will show variations beyond it. The phrase rogue polls is used wildly – as Mike Smithson of politicalbetting.com often says “a rogue poll is one whose results you disagree with” – but it technically refers just to those 5% of polls.
We are now seeing so many polls – 16 since the debates alone – that we should expect about one poll every five or six days to be a rogue.
UPDATE: This piece was written before the publication of today's Ipsos-MORI poll, but that merely confirms the argument above, with the poll nestling nicely near the mid-points, at 32/28/32.
Professor Philip Cowley
Put your clothes on Dave!
Yet the Tory manifesto is not nearly so hard hitting as represented here; the formation of local work clubs and those on job seekers allowance carrying out community work, might even have once been described as paternalistic. Moreover, while the policy to which the poster refers is in the manifesto, it is a policy of last resort.
And it is last resort to which the Tory leader would have appeared to have returned, a sop to a wing of the party who would probably have voted for him anyway. More importantly given the changing nature of the electorate it is a move that Tim Bale argued against two months ago.
The poster’s combination of image and text is also an odd one. Posters are at their most successful when image and text combine, one supporting the other in harmony. It is perhaps the Conservatives who have been best at this in the recent past, as with Labour’s Tax Bombshell (1992), which successfully combined slogan and text in 1992, to visualise an internal fear that many voters had:
The new Conservative poster makes no attempt to join image and word. We have the image of go-getting Cameron and a seemingly unrelated slogan, and while the two don’t contrast they also seem to have little rapport. The poster may prove to be successful, but as a piece of political marketing it is banal.
And then there’s Cameron’s wardrobe or indeed lack of it. Firstly we had Cameron in no tie, relaxed and informal he was the man we could trust. We now have him with no tie and no jacket, go-getting and eager to get on with the job.
How many clothes will he mislay before the election is out?
Christopher Burgess
Tuesday 20 April 2010
Leaders debates - lessons from Romania
"...finding a balance between using kid gloves and attacking your opponent is very difficult..."Nearly all the pre-debate coverage last week tried to draw lessons from the US experience of presidential elections. But it’s not just the US that has them. Romania has had televised presidential debates since 1994, just four years after the revolution.
And to Romanian eyes, the British debates featured the typical British politeness of the candidates who barely engaged in any juicy attacks or cynical remarks, an audience so overwhelmed that the individuals asking questions had trembling voices when reading them from a piece of paper, the studio so grey it might remind one of the ’60s quiz games on black-and-white TV sets.
The most recent Romanian Presidential TV debate took place less than six months ago, on 4 December 2009, just two days before the vote, with 4 million people watching, out of a population of 22 million. And if there is anything to learn from it, it is that finding a balance between using kid gloves and attacking your opponent is very difficult.
Mircea Geoana, the leader of the Socialist opposition party, was leading in the polls for the whole period before the election. Moreover, footage had just been released on the incumbent Traian Basescu hitting a 10-year-old boy in the face at a presidential rally. Mr Basescu's campaign said the 18-second video that showed the president striking the boy was a dirty trick and the footage was "seriously altered", but by the night of the confrontation it had been shown dozens of times on television news channels, seen thousands of times online, debated incessantly, and become a major topic of everyday TV studio/ street conversation.
By assuming it had been vulgarized enough in the four days before the debate and that his winning card was talking mainly policy agendas and manifestoes, Mr. Geoana ignored the elephant in the room entirely. It was Mr. Basescu, who had all to lose in his bid for a second mandate, and with the leading two Romanian News TV channels against him, who brought it up. He found the balance between stressing the achievements of his administration, and accusing his opponent of protecting former “Securitatea” (Romanian Secret Police) and of running a dishonest campaign (with reference to the ‘fake’ video).
Basescu went on to win.
Oana Elisabeta Pop
A New Study on BNP Support: Why IPPR Got (Some of) it Wrong
"Extremism of various forms and its support have much greater social and policy relevance than previous years..."With each election comes a new wave of panic about the possibility of a BNP breakthrough. One problem with debate about the far right is that often remains completely detached from the rapidly-growing evidence base on what drives support for these parties.
We are not where we were in the general elections of 2001 or 2005: we now know a great deal about what motivates some Britons to vote BNP and the characteristics of communities where the far right tends to poll well.
A report released this week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) attempts to add to this evidence base. First, even though the report completely glosses the academic literature on this topic we should take a moment to applaud IPPR for trying to add to our understanding of this important issue. Clap clap.
The think tank community has something which some academics often crave: immediate impact and an ability to bend the ears of journalists and politicians who desire a quick digestible soundbite based on ‘the evidence’. If they play it right, think tanks can help shape agendas.
It is precisely for these reasons that think tanks need to remain as close as possible to the underlying evidence base which informs our understanding of questions like who votes BNP, or how can we explain the rise of the far right?
Unfortunately – as is the case with IPPR’s latest report on BNP support– sometimes this does not happen.
There are many things which are correct in this report and corroborate our existing work on these questions. Crime and unemployment have little effect on BNP voting. True. The party performs less well in areas where education levels are low.
True. We agree with these. But then there are other things in this report which are seriously problematic and need to be flagged.
We will highlight these flaws against the backdrop of the press release which accompanied the report. This release tells interested journalists and policy wonks that it is ‘not immigration but alienation and an ability to overcome social challenges such as isolation and low skills which are the main drivers for BNP support’.
It continues, ‘this important finding contradicts the argument that immigration is to “blame” for pushing voters into the arms of the BNP’. Enter the co-director of IPPR Carey Oppenheim who concludes: ‘What our findings can finally lay to rest is the mistaken popular belief that it is the experiences of immigration which leads to people voting for the BNP’.
Ok, so here are the problems as we see them.
Problem #1: The report tells us nothing about actual BNP voters or their motives because it is focused at the level of local authorities. This is a common approach in many early studies of the far right. It has potential to tell us something about the types of areas where parties like the BNP prosper, but tells us next to nothing about individual BNP voters and – crucially – their motivations.
By looking only at local authority level the report glosses over an enormous amount of heterogeneity and is susceptible to what academics call the ‘ecological fallacy’ whereby people start making inferences about the behaviour of individuals based on the characteristics of the communities in which they are based.
We are told, for example, that support for the BNP is less about immigration than political and social exclusion. Why then do BNP voters rank immigration the most important issue facing both their families and the country?
It might not be the direct experience of immigration which is fuelling BNP voting, but anxiety about immigration is a major driver of the party’s support, like it or not.
Problem #2: The methodology of the report is flawed, in several respects. First, the report has not corrected BNP support to account for ethnic diversity which means that they look at support for the party by looking at all voters rather than the ones who really matter here: white British voters.
The report compares support levels for the BNP among the entire electorate instead of support levels for the BNP among its target electorate of white voters .Unsurprisingly, this leads the researchers to find that the BNP does less well in ethnically diverse areas. Of course they do! Such areas include a large population that the BNP doesn’t target and which give it no support.
Problem #3: The report adopts a blanket approach to ethnic diversity. The claim is that ‘areas with larger numbers of non-white people are less likely to vote for the BNP’. Yet the report does not break ethnicity down by different groups, choosing instead to lump everyone into the category of ‘non-white’. As our research has shown, taking the time to make this distinction makes all the difference.
We (and other academics if the authors had read the existing literature) find a strong relationship between higher levels of BNP support and large Muslim communities. We also find that non-Muslim Asians have no effect on BNP support and that BNP votes are actually lower in areas with large numbers of Black voters (read my earlier blog).
Simply looking for a correlation between the proportion of non-white and BNP voting misses the point: support for the far right is far more complicated.
Problem #4: The report measures turnout by looking only at turnout in one general election (2005). This glosses the critical importance of local elections to explaining the BNP’s rise, where turnout has not always been low.
Initial local BNP gains in one ward in Burnley in 2002 took place against the backdrop of a rise in turnout, likewise in local elections in Barking and Dagenham over the years 2002-06.
Looking only at one general election and drawing conclusions about turnout and party support is risky business.
Problem #5: The report puts most of its chips onto the argument that there is ‘strong evidence that recent immigration is not driving people to vote for the BNP’, and that ‘immigration to an area appears, on the whole, to make people less likely to vote for the far right’.
The authors allude to the fact that it is less objective experiences of immigration which motivate far right support than subjective experiences of immigration, i.e. I might not have seen or interacted with immigrants on my street, but I’m concerned about the effects of immigration on my society.
This is a crucial point but is downplayed throughout the report. Instead, the ‘finding’ that objective experiences appear less important (which is itself based on limited evidence) is taken as evidence that immigration per se is not a major driver of support for the BNP – which run counter to all the evidence we have from actual BNP voters.
With these problems in mind, the point about all of this is that future research – whether from think tanks, academics or others – needs to think more seriously about ways of building on what we already know, rather than spinning out a convenient headline finding to journalists and politicians.
Despite the claims of IPPR’s co-director, no popular beliefs have been laid to rest here. We already knew most of this, while the ‘new’ claims lack the robust evidence which is required to turn them into facts.
Extremism of various forms and its support have much greater social and policy relevance than previous years. It is for these reasons that we need to think and research together in order to answer the challenges thrown up by these phenomena.
Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford
Multiple polling days
"Postal votes will be landing on doormats soon. They could well be doing so when the Lib Dems are enjoying their best election campaign ever..."A couple of months ago, I was chatting to a party strategist, and asked what he thought had done most to change the nature of British elections in recent years. His answer: postal voting.
Or more accurately, the increased amount of it, following the Representation of the People Act 2000, which allowed for postal voting on demand. Since then, the amount of postal voting has increased election-on-election, to the point where around 15% of the votes cast in 2005 were postal votes.
A paper published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (sub required, unfortunately) by Rallings et al argues that, for all the hooha, postal voting had relatively little impact on either turnout or party support at the last election.
But the reason that the strategist argued postal voting altered British elections was because they changed the focus and the structure, even if not necessarily the outcome.
Prior to the 2000 Act, everything the parties did built towards polling day. Whilst most things still build towards polling day, parties now also need to be aware of the significant chunk of voters who will be casting their votes before then. Widespread postal voting effectively creates multiple polling dates.
Postal votes will be landing on doormats soon. They could well be doing so when the Lib Dems are enjoying their best election campaign ever. Even if the Lib Dem surge subsides and Labour manages to pull back some of its support by the traditional polling day, a good chunk of voters will have cast their votes at the point when Labour were in third place.
UPDATE: Writing it, I thought 'I can't believe I'm the only person to think about this'. And then I saw this from the excellent UK Polling Report, which proved that I wasn't. Great minds, etc.
Professor Philip Cowley
Shorter, fairer, more polluted? The Lib Dem manifeso compared
"At worst, the government has provided too much and voters will actively want less. Either way, other parties can make gains..."
Following on from the previous comparison of the Conservative and Labour manifestos, what about the Liberal Democrat manifesto?
The first thing to note is the comparative difference in size. Whilst the Conservative manifesto was nearly 29,000 words long, and Labour’s over 30,000 words, the Lib Dems come in at a relatively svelte 21,668 words.
Another striking difference is the massive disparity in the number of times the word ‘fair’ (or ‘fairness’, ‘fairer’, ‘fairest’) was mentioned in the manifestos. In the Lib Dem manifesto this was mentioned 99 times, compared to 64 for the Labour manifesto, and just 12 for the Conservative manifesto.
Given that the Lib Dem manifesto was nearly a third shorter than the Conservative manifesto, this makes the difference even starker.
In their manifesto, the Conservatives used the word polluting only once, whilst the Lib Dems mentioned pollution 14 times. This suggests a qualitatively difference in each parties’ perception of environmental issues. It may be the case that this is a result of the Conservatives making aspirational (perhaps utopian) appeals about the environment, whilst the Lib Dems are focusing upon an existing problem that needs to be managed.
Labour made no references at all to pollution. This may be a result of their focus upon a ‘green recovery’ (largely in economic terms) rather than a more dedicated ‘environmentalism’.
More generally, the Lib Dems were far less likely to use imagery relating to ascending (‘rise’, ‘rising’, etc.; 110% less uses) or height (‘higher’, ‘grow’, etc.; 54% less uses) than Labour. In this respect, the Lib Dems were similar to the Conservatives, between who there were no significant differences.
This is consistent with a relatively less positive vision of the UK in measurable areas (notably the economy) of both past performance and future prospects.
Again similarly to the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are less likely to use words relating to time (‘past’, ‘decade’, ‘time’, etc.) than Labour (34% less uses). Also similarly to the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are more likely to invoke ‘abstract thought’ imagery (‘belief’, ‘choice’, ‘plan’, etc.) than Labour (37% more uses).
This is probably a result of Labour attempting to play upon their past reputation for governing, whilst the Lib Dems (who have no recent governing experience) attempt to suggest alternate prospects.
Interestingly, this is a dangerous strategy for Labour. Recent scholarly work has shown that voters can have a ‘thermostatic’ perception of issues (discussed in more detail here). They vote for a party because the party offers them something that they want; once that want has been met other wants and needs come to the fore.
At best, the government has successfully given people what they wanted and they have ceased to want more. Playing on this in an election risks isolating voters by reminding them that you are no longer offering to fulfil new ‘wants’.
At worst, the government has provided too much and voters will actively want less. Either way, other parties can make gains. Attempting to trade on past performance – by looking back at the wants you have met in the past – may bring less reward than some in the party might hope.
All differences noted are significant at the 95% level, unless explicitly stated, and all percentage comparisons are corrected for relative differences in size. Absolute word usage numbers are uncorrected.
Jonathan Rose
Following on from the previous comparison of the Conservative and Labour manifestos, what about the Liberal Democrat manifesto?
The first thing to note is the comparative difference in size. Whilst the Conservative manifesto was nearly 29,000 words long, and Labour’s over 30,000 words, the Lib Dems come in at a relatively svelte 21,668 words.
Another striking difference is the massive disparity in the number of times the word ‘fair’ (or ‘fairness’, ‘fairer’, ‘fairest’) was mentioned in the manifestos. In the Lib Dem manifesto this was mentioned 99 times, compared to 64 for the Labour manifesto, and just 12 for the Conservative manifesto.
Given that the Lib Dem manifesto was nearly a third shorter than the Conservative manifesto, this makes the difference even starker.
In their manifesto, the Conservatives used the word polluting only once, whilst the Lib Dems mentioned pollution 14 times. This suggests a qualitatively difference in each parties’ perception of environmental issues. It may be the case that this is a result of the Conservatives making aspirational (perhaps utopian) appeals about the environment, whilst the Lib Dems are focusing upon an existing problem that needs to be managed.
Labour made no references at all to pollution. This may be a result of their focus upon a ‘green recovery’ (largely in economic terms) rather than a more dedicated ‘environmentalism’.
More generally, the Lib Dems were far less likely to use imagery relating to ascending (‘rise’, ‘rising’, etc.; 110% less uses) or height (‘higher’, ‘grow’, etc.; 54% less uses) than Labour. In this respect, the Lib Dems were similar to the Conservatives, between who there were no significant differences.
This is consistent with a relatively less positive vision of the UK in measurable areas (notably the economy) of both past performance and future prospects.
Again similarly to the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are less likely to use words relating to time (‘past’, ‘decade’, ‘time’, etc.) than Labour (34% less uses). Also similarly to the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are more likely to invoke ‘abstract thought’ imagery (‘belief’, ‘choice’, ‘plan’, etc.) than Labour (37% more uses).
This is probably a result of Labour attempting to play upon their past reputation for governing, whilst the Lib Dems (who have no recent governing experience) attempt to suggest alternate prospects.
Interestingly, this is a dangerous strategy for Labour. Recent scholarly work has shown that voters can have a ‘thermostatic’ perception of issues (discussed in more detail here). They vote for a party because the party offers them something that they want; once that want has been met other wants and needs come to the fore.
At best, the government has successfully given people what they wanted and they have ceased to want more. Playing on this in an election risks isolating voters by reminding them that you are no longer offering to fulfil new ‘wants’.
At worst, the government has provided too much and voters will actively want less. Either way, other parties can make gains. Attempting to trade on past performance – by looking back at the wants you have met in the past – may bring less reward than some in the party might hope.
All differences noted are significant at the 95% level, unless explicitly stated, and all percentage comparisons are corrected for relative differences in size. Absolute word usage numbers are uncorrected.
Jonathan Rose
Monday 19 April 2010
Life’s not fair, son
"Would the Lib Dems prop up a government that had come third in the popular vote? Now, there’s a question many of us didn’t think we’d be asking when this campaign began..."
Three things have changed as a result of the Lib Dems poll surge following Thursday’s debate. Two are (fairly) obvious, the third less so.
Starting with the most obvious: the Lib Dem vote has increased dramatically. Today’s YouGov poll for the Sun puts them on 33. The last YouGov poll before the debate had them on 22. In other words, the party has increased its support by 50% in the space of just four days.
Today’s poll puts them in the lead, as did a bpix poll on Sunday. We’ve seen third party surges before, but not this close to a general election. No one knows whether the Lib Dems will manage to sustain this level of support, or whether it will fade (or even increase yet further). Anyone who does tell you they know is fibbing, for we are in unchartered waters here.
Second, and as a result, both the other two parties have lost support. Prior to the debates, every opinion poll during the campaign put the Conservatives on 38+/-3, every poll put Labour on 30+/-3. That is no longer true. The Conservatives have been on 31 in two of the post-debate polls. Labour have dropped as low as 26. The two-party share of the vote in today’s poll – in what used to be seen as the archetypical two-party system – is just 58%.
The third consequence is the least obvious. When I was growing up, and used to complain that something wasn’t fair, my Dad would reply: life’s not fair, son. That applies in spade to the British electoral system. Projections of seats from votes should always be treated with caution – especially now – but most projections of seats based on recent polls would put Labour third in votes but first in seats. And the Lib Dems, first in votes, would come third in seats.
Prior to the debates, whilst most polls pointed to a hung parliament it was one in which the Conservatives would most likely have emerged with most seats. No longer. On most projections from the post-debate polls (and the precise details differ depending how you make that projection), we will have a hung parliament but with Labour as the largest party in terms of seats. And that is the real game changer from Thursday.
If they can push on, and increase support, then the Lib Dems might break through this barrier, and begin to be properly rewarded in seats. But they need around 37/38% to become the largest single party, and around the 40% mark to form a majority. And short of that, the Lib Dem surge hurts the Conservatives more than it hurts Labour.
This does, however, pose a problem for Nick Clegg. The Lib Dem position is that, in the event of a hung parliament, they are prepared to reach agreement with whichever party has the most obvious ‘mandate’ from the voters.
Nick Clegg, has, however always been very careful not to specify whether mandate means votes or seats, arguing that this is a hypothetical discussion, the sort of thing that nerdy academics worry about but which didn’t worry normal folk much.
In fact, it has always been a real possibility that Labour might emerge with more seats but with fewer votes. And on today’s poll is looks even less hypothetical.
Would the Lib Dems prop up a government that had come third in the popular vote? Now, there’s a question many of us didn’t think we’d be asking when this campaign began.
Professor Philip Cowley
Three things have changed as a result of the Lib Dems poll surge following Thursday’s debate. Two are (fairly) obvious, the third less so.
Starting with the most obvious: the Lib Dem vote has increased dramatically. Today’s YouGov poll for the Sun puts them on 33. The last YouGov poll before the debate had them on 22. In other words, the party has increased its support by 50% in the space of just four days.
Today’s poll puts them in the lead, as did a bpix poll on Sunday. We’ve seen third party surges before, but not this close to a general election. No one knows whether the Lib Dems will manage to sustain this level of support, or whether it will fade (or even increase yet further). Anyone who does tell you they know is fibbing, for we are in unchartered waters here.
Second, and as a result, both the other two parties have lost support. Prior to the debates, every opinion poll during the campaign put the Conservatives on 38+/-3, every poll put Labour on 30+/-3. That is no longer true. The Conservatives have been on 31 in two of the post-debate polls. Labour have dropped as low as 26. The two-party share of the vote in today’s poll – in what used to be seen as the archetypical two-party system – is just 58%.
The third consequence is the least obvious. When I was growing up, and used to complain that something wasn’t fair, my Dad would reply: life’s not fair, son. That applies in spade to the British electoral system. Projections of seats from votes should always be treated with caution – especially now – but most projections of seats based on recent polls would put Labour third in votes but first in seats. And the Lib Dems, first in votes, would come third in seats.
Prior to the debates, whilst most polls pointed to a hung parliament it was one in which the Conservatives would most likely have emerged with most seats. No longer. On most projections from the post-debate polls (and the precise details differ depending how you make that projection), we will have a hung parliament but with Labour as the largest party in terms of seats. And that is the real game changer from Thursday.
If they can push on, and increase support, then the Lib Dems might break through this barrier, and begin to be properly rewarded in seats. But they need around 37/38% to become the largest single party, and around the 40% mark to form a majority. And short of that, the Lib Dem surge hurts the Conservatives more than it hurts Labour.
This does, however, pose a problem for Nick Clegg. The Lib Dem position is that, in the event of a hung parliament, they are prepared to reach agreement with whichever party has the most obvious ‘mandate’ from the voters.
Nick Clegg, has, however always been very careful not to specify whether mandate means votes or seats, arguing that this is a hypothetical discussion, the sort of thing that nerdy academics worry about but which didn’t worry normal folk much.
In fact, it has always been a real possibility that Labour might emerge with more seats but with fewer votes. And on today’s poll is looks even less hypothetical.
Would the Lib Dems prop up a government that had come third in the popular vote? Now, there’s a question many of us didn’t think we’d be asking when this campaign began.
Professor Philip Cowley
Letters From Economists
"The tale of the 364 may simply illustrate that the backing of economists – though rhetorically useful for politicians – is not a reliable guide to good policy..."Those following the on-going debate about how and when to reduce the deficit will have seen a letter printed in last Thursday’s Daily Telegraph. Signed by almost sixty academic economists, it is the second to back Labour’s plans to delay spending cuts until ‘the recovery is well underway’, and warned that Conservative plans to cut immediately could ‘imperil not only jobs but also the prospects for reducing the deficit’.
It serves as a response to similar letters from business leaders and yet more economists warning that the Labour Party’s approach to managing the economic recovery poses exactly the same risks as the Tory strategy for cutting the deficit.
Those with longer political memories, though, will recall a similar letter of March 1981, when Geoffrey Howe’s monetarist, deflationary budget provoked howls of derision from professional economists. In the depths of a recession and at a time of growing unemployment, Howe and Margaret Thatcher had proposed substantial increases in taxation alongside substantial cuts in public borrowing – precisely the reverse of the counter-cyclical policies advocated by the Keynesian economists who then dominated the profession.
The response to these measures was a letter to The Times, signed by 364 academic economists from universities across Britain, condemning the budget as having ‘no basis in economic theory’ and as posing a significant risk to ‘the industrial basis of our economy and… its social and political stability’. The signatories urged the government to ‘reject monetarist policies and consider urgently which alternative offers the best hope of sustained recovery’.
The letter had been signed by a cross-section of the most eminent names in economics – including James Meade, Amartya Sen, Alec Cairncross, and Nicholas Kaldor, alongside the present Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King (not to mention one of my former tutors) – and appeared to demonstrate the utter intellectual isolation of the government. When challenged, Mrs Thatcher was able to name two economists who supported the measures in the budget – her own advisors, Alan Walters and Patrick Minford – but one civil servant is said to have quipped afterwards that it was a good job she hadn’t been asked to name three.
Nearly thirty years on, however, the conventional wisdom would have it that the 364 economists were wrong and that Howe and Thatcher were right (although some of the signatories continue to defend their position). Although unemployment continued to rise, and would not peak until 1986, the prophesised depression never arrived. Indeed, an economic recovery began within weeks of the letter’s publication and seemed to make a mockery of the economists’ predictions.
The tale of the 364 may simply illustrate that the backing of economists – though rhetorically useful for politicians – is not a reliable guide to good policy.
Matthew Francis
Sunday 18 April 2010
Clegg is Cripps not Churchill shock
"Nick Clegg will have to show that he is more than that if he really is going to rival Churchill...."
The Sunday Times quotes a YouGov poll that says Nick Clegg is nearly as popular as Winston Churchill.
Wonderful stuff for those responsible for the story, the justification for which is that in 1945 Churchill had an approval rating of 83% while Clegg’s is currently 72%. The only sting in this particular tale – for Clegg anyway - is that Churchill went on to lose the general election - rather badly I seem to recall - a few months later.
Actually the best historical figure with whom to compare Clegg is not Churchill but Sir Stafford Cripps. Stafford Who you may ask? Those with some history behind them might know that he was Clement Attlee’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man of severe moral rectitude, a teetotaller and vegetarian.
That however did not stop his Conservative opponents referring to this paragon as ‘Sir Stifford Crapps’ after a BBC radio announcer committed one of the funniest political spoonerisms, ever.
Crapps – sorry, Cripps – is less well known for something else. In 1942 he was nearly as popular as Churchill. I wrote about this a while ago but it is worth retelling the tale.
At the start of 1942 Britain was in trouble militarily and Churchill had his back against the wall. There was a popular mood that castigated all parties as to blame for the country’s troubles. Along comes Sir Stafford. Having been expelled from the Labour party before the war he was not attached to either of the two main ‘old’ (as Clegg might put it) parties.
Returning home in January after ending his stint as Ambassador to Moscow he gave a BBC radio speech. This struck a loud, clanging chord with a disenchanted British public – half of whom heard the speech and 93% of those approved of its message, which when boiled down was just an appeal for greater individual effort to win the war.
Almost as vacuous as Clegg’s contribution to the leadership debates, you might think. Even so, this one speech catapulted Cripps to the front rank of politics: at the peak of his popularity 34% of people wanted him to replace Churchill at Number 10.
So, what happened? I don’t recall Cripps becoming Prime Minister. Reality happened. Churchill brought him into government where he promptly got lost in administration while El Alamein helped restore faith in his government.
History teaches no lessons but it does show in this case that radio (and television) might create political stars who shoot across the firmament but they need more than that if they are to stay there. Cripps was merely a temporary repository for a public narked off with all politicians: Nick Clegg will have to show that he is more than that if he really is going to rival Churchill.
Professor Steven Fielding
Saturday 17 April 2010
Now that's what I call a poll
"Who said elections were dull?"Until the debates, every opinion poll during the election had shown the Conservatives on 38+/-3, and Labour on 30+/-3. The YouGov poll published in the Sun today is the first to show movement beyond the sort of fluctuations you get from sampling error.
And how. It puts the Lib Dems in second place, with 30%, behind the Conservatives on 34%, with Labour now trailing in third (28%).
There are multiple reasons to be at least cautious about a) assuming that things will stay like this, or b) trying to work out what that means in terms of seats. These are explained very well at the superb UK Polling Report website.
But the one thing we can be certain of – it’s certainly livened things up. Who said elections were dull?
Professor Philip Cowley
Creating the Big Society?
"There are many problems with localism, from its potentially damaging effects on democracy and equal and universal services to a bias towards certain groups..."Despite Labour’s odd choice of cover, it was the Conservative manifesto that looked the most unusual last week. It was presented as an invitation to ‘join the government’ – to set up our own schools, to elect local police chiefs, to run the local post office, and to form co-operatives to deliver local public services.
In itself, this could just be dismissed as an attempt by a party to offer something different without requiring any extra spending, but it’s not just them. Although each party wants to paint the other as returning to their big or small state roots, there is in fact now a consensus in British politics around the agenda of localism.
Partly, the roots of this lie in Thatcherite individualism and Blair’s ‘choice’ agenda. But New Labour, influenced in the 1990s by think tank Demos, also introduced the idea that creating connected communities was the answer to many of the problems of our increasingly individualistic society.
Social capital was Blair’s ‘magic ingredient’. Increased funding for community organisations, Local Strategic Partnerships and teaching schoolchildren to be ‘active citizens’ were all meant to empower communities, and inviting co-operatives and social enterprises to run health services, and individuals and businesses to resurrect failing schools as Academies were all Labour policies.
There are many problems with localism, from its potentially damaging effects on democracy and equal and universal services to a bias towards certain groups becoming more involved. But the most obvious issue at the moment is its workability: how do you create empowered local communities without greater state intervention or expenditure?
Crucially, research suggests that civil society has to be built up over time in order for it to have a positive impact on politics. It is not created simply through reductions in the size of the state, something that Cameron, despite some of the rhetoric, does seem to have realised.
He says that ‘collaborative democracy’ and an army of community organisers can march us into a new era of localism. For this to happen, however, he needs all of us to start volunteering. What could provoke this kind of change?
The Conservatives keep repeating one word: responsibility. They have been involved in research into the moral development of character and say they want a ‘cultural change’. Though they don’t go into detail, they even say they’ll use ‘the latest insights from behavioural economics’, whatever that means, to foster participation.
Indeed, is imposing one set of values on the population ever a good idea? ASBOs and the New Deal have already attempted to enforce certain behaviour, but most people are unlikely to voluntarily respond to Cameron’s invitation unless there is a clear benefit for them.
It’s not only about a lack of time (as the Guardian’s Jackie Ashley has argued), which can be bit of an excuse, but about the situation people find themselves in.
During the recession, volunteering has increased, but without resources and support these people will stop when they can find jobs.
The Big Society has to exist before you remove the state, and it takes time, money, and recognition to build. If people don’t feel part of communities or engaged with their local area, they will not be encouraged to do so by being given a ‘right to bid’ and run services or a ‘right to buy’ the local pub.
What is needed is reform alongside funding. In their manifesto the Tories acknowledge that this means an ‘active role for the state’. We probably need more of this to help society grow.
Chris Wood
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