But what do they believe in?

"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

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

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 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

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

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

"The honeymoon period is over Rab. We want results"

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More MOE

"Move along, there’s nothing to see. Yet."

Yesterday I pointed out how the polls had been remarkably stable during the campaign, despite talk of their ‘volatility’, once you allowed for the margin of error inherent in sampling. Up till then, all but one poll during the campaign had put the Conservatives on 37 +/-3, Labour on 30 +/-3.


Since then we’ve had three more national polls. YouGov had 41/32/18. ComRes had 35/29/21. And Harris had 36/27/23. Fairly obviously, one of these – the YouGov poll – doesn’t fit into that earlier pattern, because it has the Conservatives on 41.

But it’s still hardly evidence of any great shift. It just means that over the last week every poll has had the Conservatives on 38+/-3 (rather than 37) and every poll has still had Labour on 30+/-3. Indeed, this is true of every poll since the campaign began.

Move along, there’s nothing to see. Yet.

Professor Philip Cowley

Forget debates...THIS is how to engage people

"Filipino voters expect to be ‘charmed and entertained’ by their candidates. Surely UK elections would be less tedious if we demanded the same? Gordon Brown, take note..."

In the Guardian recently Hadley Freeman wrote that UK elections are so boring that they might lead people to ‘self-lobotomise with a spoon’. Her comparison was with US - long and tempestuous, and UK - short and boring - elections.



The Philippines, which is due to hold presidential elections on 10 May 2010, just days after UK voters cast their ballots, gives us another, and perhaps more interesting, point of comparison.


The opening of the presidential race on 9 February 2010 was heralded by The Philippines Daily Enquirer as being like the beginning of a carnival.

And our Gordon might want to take note of the tactics of their Gordon: Richard (Dick) Gordon, a candidate for the Philippines presidential race.

Gordon, a former Senator, is not likely to win the race but he is having a lot of fun trying. Gordon and his running mate Bayani Fernando campaign as 'political transformers’ and have a transformers-branded truck as a campaign vehicle.

Gordon’s campaign was also boosted by his performance with the comedy duo Moymoy Palaboy in which they lip sync their way through the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.



The video for this performance went viral and had received over 50,000 hits within just three days of being loaded up to Youtube.

Gordon, who has admitted that he has little money for advertising his presidential bid, must be delighted with the free publicity. Filipino voters expect to be ‘charmed and entertained’ by their candidates. Surely UK elections would be less tedious if we demanded the same? Gordon Brown, take note.

Dr Pauline Eadie

Polls in stability shocker

"Most people involved in politics know about sampling error, but, as last night, they often forget its implications."

There were four opinion polls last night, all showing different sized-Conservative leads, ranging from 3 to 10 points. Cue confusion, and lots of talk about the polls being ‘all over the place’.

In fact, it’s dead easy to explain, and the polls are actually behaving remarkably stably.

Each opinion poll has a sampling error, an acceptance that sampling 1000 or so people is not going to produce an absolute accurate measure of the views of 40 or so million.

That sampling error is usually reported along with the poll – at least by the more responsible news outlets – and it is (usually) +/- three percentage points.

And every poll last night showed the Conservatives on 37, plus or minus 3. (Actually, every poll last night showed them on 37, plus or minus 2). And every poll last night showed Labour on 30, plus or minus 3.

In fact, with one exception right at the beginning of the campaign, every poll during the campaign has shown the same: the Conservatives on 37, plus or minus 3, and Labour on 30, plus or minus 3.

The veteran pollster Bob Worcester has one key maxim: focus on the share, not the lead, and he’s spot on.
Most people involved in politics know about sampling error (anyone still puzzled, there’s a good simple summary here), but, as last night, they often forget its implications.

Professor Philip Cowley

“I feel like I win when I lose”

"No-one (in their right mind) would want to find themselves governing in the scorched earth years that lie ahead of us. Not so much a poisoned chalice as a barrel’s worth of the stuff."

A familiar part of any electoral spring is the appearance of our old and counter-intuitive friend – “it’s a good election to lose”.

In varying forms, it has already made an appearance in The Guardian, The Independent and the London Review of Books courtesy of Messrs. Legrain, Lawson and Lanchester, respectively.
For Legrain and Lawson, the gist of the story is that it’s 1992 all over again. What appeared at the time, to some, to be Major’s surprising win was just the prelude to the rise of Blair and the New Labour decade.

There’s a curious parallel in Australia’s electoral experience. After a decade in power, Paul Keating won a surprise victory for the incumbent Labor Party in 1993 – the one he said was for ‘the true believers’ - but his exhausted administration just about limped its way through to 1996, a thumping electoral defeat and ten years’ long march through the political outback.

For Lanchester, the story is rather simpler. No-one (in their right mind) would want to find themselves governing in the scorched earth years that lie ahead of us. Not so much a poisoned chalice as a barrel’s worth of the stuff.

In general, the belief that ‘it’s good to lose’ rests on a conviction that a tired old government is best put out of its misery and the incumbent party given the chance to undertake ‘a period of renewal’ in opposition.

Suitably refreshed and revised, and with a new leadership, the party will be well placed to seize back the reins of office and stride confidently into the future. But then that’s what some Tories thought in 1997 and certainly what many in the Labour Party imagined in 1979.

But ten years (or thirteen or, indeed, eighteen) is a very long time in politics. I was at university with young men who thrilled to the bright, fresh morning of Thatcherism but found themselves entering the House of Commons just as the long shadows of night were descending on the Conservative Party.

By the time that Cameron is in Number Ten (should he get there), it will be too late for them. Most politicians just can’t afford to wait. That’s why it’s always hard to find a politician who (really) thinks it’s good to lose – at least before the event.

It may be better to govern in good times than in bad times but it’s always better to govern than to oppose.

Once you’ve made all the accommodations and compromises and signed up for all the half-truths, what is there left but to win? And what ambitious thirty-nine-year-old imagines that a glittering prize will still be waiting for him or her as they crest their fifties?

But for those of us who have a little less at stake, the question remains: can there be a good election to lose and could this be one of them?

To retrace our steps just a little further, it depends upon whether you think this is 1979 or 1974 (always remembering that while Marx might have gotten some things wrong, his claim that history only ever repeats itself as farce was bang on the money).

The 1970s was also a decade of economic crisis (albeit one that is crudely mis-recollected). For all that Labour may have been a bit unlucky to lose in 1979 (more bad timing), Thatcher certainly had a plan (of sorts). Between 1974 and 1979, Labour went on trying more or less what had worked (or not really worked) before.

Do Cameron and Osborne have a plan for something very different from what has gone before? If so, it is cunningly concealed. Could Labour be back in 2015 with a radically rethought political economy? Maybe. Perhaps in 2010, there’s not really going to be a winner at all.

Professor Christopher Pierson

Out with the new, in with the old

"...to focus on their internet strategies whilst ignoring their direct mail operations, is like reporting on a football game by describing the corner kicks in loving detail but ignoring the goals."

Marcus Aurelius said that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. I’m not sure what that says about me, given that one of my ambitions is to go on Stars in Their Eyes as Diana Ross.

My second ambition, however, is to have a law named after me - like Godwin’s law, or Parkinson’s law, and so based on the media coverage of the election so far, here’s a first go at Cowley’s Law. It’s this: there is an inverse relationship between the importance of any election campaign technique and the amount of media coverage devoted to it.

The immediate spur for this eponymous claim was the defenestration of Stuart Maclennan, the former Labour candidate for Moray, found last week to have been using his twitter account to post some near-to-the-knuckle (and in a couple of cases, way beyond the knuckle) comments. Yes, Maclennan was brought down by things he wrote on twitter, but it was merely the vehicle by which he broadcast opinions which made his candidature unsustainable. There will no doubt be similar moments over the next few weeks. But there are always have been. Remember Howard Flight, the Conservative vice-chair sacked and then barred from standing again as a candidate in 2005 because of things he’d said about spending cuts? There was nothing web 2.0 about that – his comments were made at an old fashioned meeting – but his fate was the same as Maclennan’s.

No Luddite me, and so this isn’t an attempt to ignore or downplay the importance of the internet or new social media. On which I would recommend an excellent blogpost by Mark Pack (originally given as a lecture to our postgraduate students at the University of Nottingham), or James Crabtree’s fascinating article in Wired, detailing the way the Conservatives are using the internet, and especially the way that they are buying up google adwords, allowing them to target their online message. Both these pieces show that its effect of the internet on politics is much more nuanced than people often think. All the parties rightly take the web and new social media much more seriously than they used to. Crabtree quotes one Conservative staffer saying that in the past the person in charge of the website was also the person you went to ‘if your Outlook broke’. No longer.

My problem is more the balance of the focus between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ in how the election’s reported. For example, until this weekend’s story about Labour’s supposed targeting of cancer patients – a story denied by the party – I’d not seen a single article about the way the parties were utilising direct mail. Who are they targeting? How are they doing it? What messages are they prioritising? Ditto leaflets. Yet polling evidence from the British Election Study – from February, so before the parties really stepped up their campaigning, but the most recent we’ve got – showed that these old fashioned techniques totally outstripped the new. Those contacted by mail and leaflets outnumbered all of those contacted by other campaigning techniques combined. Of those contacted by the Conservatives, for example, 89% had had something through their letter box, compared to 18% by email. And would-be Labour supporters were just as likely to be contacted by one of the oldest forms of campaigning going, a knock on the door, than by email (12%), and more likely to have been phoned (14%) than emailed.

And a survey released today showed how just a tiny minority of voters expected to get information online. Only 9% of voters questioned in a poll by Opinion Matters for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) said they expected to get information from political websites and 5% from emails sent by politicians. Compare that to 63% said they would find out about the election from the TV, 47% from newspapers and 27% from radio. It’s interesting that this story does not seem to have been picked up yet in the media: do stories about how the internet isn’t that important just not have legs?

None of this is to decry reporting on the way parties are interacting with the internet, but to focus on their internet strategies whilst ignoring their direct mail operations, is like reporting on a football game by describing the corner kicks in loving detail but ignoring the goals. We’d do well to remember another law, the one named after Willie Sutton. He was the bank robber who when asked why he robbed banks, reputedly replied ‘because that's where the money is’. If only journalists covering this election would do the same. Go where the parties are devoting their money and efforts, and report that.

Professor Philip Cowley

And now for something serious...

"... just voting might start a process that leads to the parties taking them more seriously..."

We have been told that this is going to be a Mumsnet election, the parenting website whose users are principally affluent, ‘aspirational’ women in their thirties and forties concerned with ‘quality of life’ issues. They are the latest version of the classic ‘swing voter’ who lives in the kind of marginal constituency that now supposedly decide general elections - the Worcester Women for our own times, the British cousin of the American Soccer Mom. Since 1997 many other names have been coined for what is basically the same group of women. In 2005 Labour focused on the School Gate Mum. Last year the Conservatives said they would woo Holby City Woman. More recently Douglas Alexander referred to Take a Break Woman as critical to Labour’s fortunes in 2010.

At the risk of sounding post-modern, all these groups are obviously made up; they only matter because the parties (and journalists) think they matter. Those who study elections are sceptical that any one group holds the key to a general election: when support shifts from one party to the other it is pretty much the same across social groups. The real significance of these groups of phantom women lies in what they say about how the parties think about the electorate, about who is important (and who is not important) to them - and why.

Alexander’s invocation of Take a Break Woman is in this regard really interesting, if only because he got it so wrong. Those who read Take a Break are not the affluent, early middle aged women whose votes he is trying to chase. The kinds of women who read that august weekly have, in fact, long been disregarded – and continue to be ignored - by Britain’s political class.

Let me declare an interest. I was commissioned (by a drinks company whose name will soon become obvious) to write a report on the politics of women in their twenties and early thirties in the social groups C1/2 and D, many of whom work in part-time jobs, all of whom are on below average incomes and a significant number of whom have to juggle their work with caring for pre-school or young school age children. When asked in a survey that accompanied the writing of the report what were the biggest issues affecting their everyday lives, the top answer – at 58% - was ‘money worries’. We gave these women a name, and because it had to alliterate we called them the ‘Lambrini Ladies’. The report is out now.

These women are a ‘lost political generation’. They are amongst the most disengaged from formal politics, and the most likely not to vote – even before the campaign began many had already decided that it was not for them. This has always been the case – young women on lower incomes have long seen politics as something that men do, and have failed to connect their everyday lives with Westminster where middle aged, middle class men (and a few women) get together and shout at one another. They are, we suggest disengaged at least partly because the parties have failed to engage with them.

Our report points to a problem shared by all the main parties. But it also gestures to - as they say in cheesy management manuals –an opportunity. Our findings very much accord with a recent Observer poll of Netmums users. Now, those who go on the Netmums site – not to be confused with the more middle class Mumsnet (do keep up) – are very much in the same mould as those we talk about. The Observer poll revealed that while Labour had lost ground with such younger, lower income women the Conservatives had failed to make a strongly convincing alternative case. Their votes are up for grabs. But no-one is talking about them, even in a campaign that looks like it will lead to a hung Parliament.

Why? One answer is that they live in the wrong constituencies – too many are in safe Labour seats – although how ‘safe’ some of those are now might be questioned. In any case, we estimate that there are about four million Lambrini Ladies, and they are everywhere, even in the marginals where just a few votes can determine who becomes an MP. Of course their very disengagement plays against them – the parties only talk to those who they think will vote, like affluent middle-aged women. But if the parties started to address the kinds of issues that these women consider important, then they might make a difference. For what the Lambrini Ladies want are concrete, specific policies that plausibly promise to make their lives a little bit easier. What they do not want is politics as soap opera – they might watch East Enders but that does not mean they want the leaders’ wives gushing on about how their husbands are wonderful fathers who make the coffee in the morning. Pictures of David Cameron holding a baby will not wash – these women know what a baby looks like. In the accompanying survey they were asked if they were proposing to vote because politics was like a soap opera – only 6 % said so. The rest had more serious reasons, although many of them were negative, it seems that – if nothing else - it is dislike of Labour (25%), the Conservatives (18%) and even the Liberal Democrats (9%) will get many Lambrini Ladies into the polling booth.

In a few weeks what can be done? That is very much up to the parties. It is also up to the women themselves. One reason why we are told that this is going to be a Mumsnet election is because the kind of women who use the site demand to be heard. Young women on lower incomes who find making ends meet a daily problem do not tend to be that kind of woman. They do not have the cultural resources which many of those once referred to as Worcester Women simply take for granted. There are lots of deeply embedded issues that need to be overcome here, but just voting might start a process that leads to the parties taking them more seriously.

Professor Steven Fielding