Sun worshippers let us lead you

The front cover of Labour’s election manifesto - launched this morning – features a bright sunshine. Given that Labour are in the ‘future business’, it’s a strange choice – because it was a common image before 1945, but not since.
Before 1945 party political imagery would often feature the sun, promising a brighter future. Before the First World War and during in the inter war period, Gerald Spencer Pryse was at the forefront of poster design for the Labour Party. In his work the people could be seen stepping out of the dark and into a brighter future. Most notably in “Forward the Day is Breaking”

and also “To-morrow when Labour Rules”

Although not by Pryse but even more striking use of the sun-visual metaphor is ”Greet the Dawn, Give Labour it’s chance” (with the apostrophe in the wrong place), which was used by the party in the elections of the 1920s, and which Labour’s modern image most obviously resembles.

But it is not just Labour which historically has used the sun within its propaganda. The Conservatives “Sun-ray treatment” utilised strikingly similar imagery in 1929.

This has not been unnoticed by one prolific blogger, although it should be noted that he got the date wrong.

Christopher Burgess

David Owen on hung parliaments

He may, as Ben Brogan argues, have been rather over-selling it, but news that Vince Cable has discussed Lib Dem policies with Treasury civil servants to help them prepare in case he becomes Chancellor in a post-election coalition government has added fuel to the current bonfire of speculation about the likelihood of a hung Parliament. The latest polls suggest that Labour and the Conservatives are currently both short of winning a Commons majority.

Lord Owen knows a thing or two about hung Parliaments and the politics of cobbling together agreements with third, fourth and even fifth parties. Owen was a member of the Cabinet during Jim Callaghan’s 1976-9 Labour government, when Callaghan fought to balance the budget during a severe recession while depending on deals with the Liberals and various Nationalist parties to retain a Commons majority.



In this interview, given at Nottingham’s Centre for British Politics, Lord Owen (now a cross bencher) reveals that this experience has led him to support the creation of Charter2010. This seeks to promote a ‘stable and more representative government capable of dealing with Britain’s economic plight’ should the country fail to give either of the main parties a Commons majority, one which they will need if they are to deal with the deep dark hole into which the recession has thrown government finances.

History never repeats itself, but sometimes it has a damn good try, and historians have already examined this period in detail. If the 1970s have any lessons for our own times, Owen believes one of them is that should there be a hung Parliament then politicians have to work together over a sustained period to reduce the deficit. How likely is this? History cannot predict the future but it suggests we might be in for a bumpy ride.

Professor Steven Fielding

Don't expect much electoral accountability

There was a lively article by Fergal Davis on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site last week, arguing that voters in this election should hold their MPs to account for the way they’ve voted. Davis’s concern was civil liberties – but the argument could hold for a range of other things, from abortion to Trident, from post offices to Heathrow. Do we punish (or reward) MPs for the way they vote?

For some of his article, Davis uses a book I wrote in 2005, which looked at the voting record of MPs, and which showed that far from being the spineless bunch that everyone claimed, they were in fact becoming increasingly rebellious, with the Parliamentary Labour Party between 2001 and 2005 being the most rebellious of the post-war era. But the book also showed that there was no evidence that voters took much notice of this when it came to casting votes at the ballot box.

The last election provided almost the perfect conditions to test this. There were plenty of high-profile issues which led to substantial rebellions in the House of Commons and attracted public interest. In other words, there was plenty for voters to get their teeth into, if they wanted to. And there were plenty of organisations and websites designed to encourage exactly this sort of targeted voting, such as www.sonowwhodowevotefor.net (now defunct) or www.vote4peace.org.uk (whose url has now been taken over by an online casino).

Yet a detailed study I carried out into the 2005 election found that both rebels and loyalists performed roughly equally at the polls, with no statistically significant difference between them. The only substantive exception to this was the subject of university top-up fees – where rebels did appear to have performed marginally better at the polls than those who did not defy the whips – but the difference was worth less than one percentage point, and probably helped determine the outcome in just six constituencies. For the most part, it looked as if British voters made their judgment about the government as a whole – not about the behaviour of individual MPs. Where they do vote on the basis of the candidates, it was more on the basis of their constituency service – how much they work the parish pump, responding to queries about Mrs Miggins’s drainpipes – than about how MPs behave in the division lobbies.

Since then, there have been a couple of other, even more detailed, attempts to locate an electoral link. One, by Arthur Spirling of Harvard, claims to identify a difference between the type of issues on which MPs rebel, arguing that government-party voters demand unity on votes that are key parts of the government's programmatic agenda, but welcome more rebellious behaviour on less important issues. The second, by Nick Vivyan of the LSE and his colleague Markus Wagner of Vienna (and to be presented at the forthcoming PSA conference), has looked at the behaviour of individual voters, and claims to have found an effect once you control for the predispositions of voters (in particular, those who were already hostile to the government were more likely to reward dissenting behaviour).

Yet Spirling’s distinction between important and unimportant votes looks too much like a post hoc rationalisation, and there doesn’t appear – to me, anyway – to be much logical distinction between the votes which the electorate seem to identify as important and those they do not. And the problem with the Vivyan and Wagner paper is that if such an effect is identifiable at the individual level, why does it not also show up at the constituency level? Even they acknowledge that the effect is ‘relatively weak and general rather than issue-specific’ (that is, rebellious MPs benefit, regardless of what they rebel on), which is hardly an advert for great electoral accountability.

Perhaps more importantly, 2005 was such a perfect test case for holding MPs to account for the way that they voted that if that is the best that we can find, then we shouldn’t expect much better this time round. Davis was, of course, issuing a call to arms – and good luck to him. The problem is that if you didn’t find much evidence of voters punishing MPs for their voting in 2005, it is unlikely you’ll find it in 2010, when conditions are much less favourable. And, perhaps sadly, certainly not on issues of civil liberties.

Professor Philip Cowley

Managing welfare

What was most notable about the recent Gove-Balls clash over the access of children from poorer households to Oxbridge was not that Gove got his numbers right. Would it really make much difference if 145 rather than 45 of those receiving free school meals had found their way to the pinnacle of our university system? Neither wanted to engage with the real issue of limited social mobility, perhaps because neither of them have any idea of how this issue could be addressed. More likely they do know (for just the most recent survey of what’s wrong and what needs to be done, see the Marmot Report) but they are also aware that there’s no political will to see the problem addressed.

Where once parties argued over the ownership of industry or the status of trade union rights or the appropriate forms and levels of taxation, increasingly the argument has been one about who can best manage the nation’s publicly-provided welfare. And where once this argument was about differing forms of welfare (state versus market, public versus private), it is now increasingly one about who can best manage the sorts of institutions about which the two (or three) main political parties are largely agreed. Conservatives don’t want to abolish the NHS. Labour will not attack private schools. If there is some sort of political consensus here (temporally, at least, a post-Thatcherite consensus), it does not look much like the agreement that some suppose to have held in the ‘Golden Age of Welfare’ (from the end of the war until the early 1970s). The newer consensus is a rather downbeat affair which seeks to squeeze the maximum output from a very finite pot of resources in the face of escalating social needs (above all, though not exclusively, those generated by an ageing society). The claim to govern is a claim to manage the welfare state efficiently. Both major parties insist upon an interest in excellence, choice and social mobility but both know that probably the best they can hope for is that levels of service should be ‘adequate’ and that the least advantaged should share in some way in the privileges that continue to accumulate for those above them.

Whoever wins the election, there will be tough choices to face in social policy. Welfare needs have a built-in ratchet effect - a powerful combination of ageing populations, new medical technologies and more unstable patterns of family formation. This challenge is exacerbated by those changes that bring on less secure economic lives, with interrupted working careers and a declining social wage (and pension entitlements). Meeting this challenge in a context of increased public indebtedness plus high levels of household debt and growing social needs is not easy. Perhaps (as those who face the prospect of defeat are sometimes heard consolingly to say), it’s a good election to lose.

Professor Chris Pierson

Cameron and the renewal of the 'property-owning democracy'

The Conservative Party has recently won considerable publicity by renewing a pledge to allow workers' co-operatives to own and run public services.In so doing, the party has been accused of 'stealing political clothes that will never fit them'. Co-operatives, it is alleged, are an intrinsically left-wing concept and will never be natural Conservative terrain - despite claims to the contrary by Jesse Norman, founder of the Conservative Co-operative Movement, and Phillip Blond, the 'Red Tory'.
But this is not the first time that Conservatives have entertained the idea of working with co-operatives, and certainly not the first time they have endorsed the notion that employees should have a stake in the ownership and/or the management of their workplaces. That idea dates back to the 1920s, when such schemes were proposed by the Conservative MP Noel Skelton as the solution to a 'lop-sided' distribution of property.
Skelton - whose writing has been an acknowledged influence on Blond - observed that the reforms of the nineteenth-century had left the 'working people' with their political rights and educational status much enhanced, but their economic status unaltered. For Skelton, this 'imbalance' accounted for much of the social and industrial unrest of the interwar period - not to mention the rise of the Labour Party - and a vast extension of property-ownership was required if British society was to be restored to equilibrium. His preferred means was the introduction of industrial co-partnership schemes, which would give ordinary working people a shareholding in the company for which they worked (including a portion of the profits and the possibility of seats on the board). This platform offered the Conservative Party 'the ideal ground on which to fight Socialism'. And Skelton even had a name for the type of society which would emerge as more and more working men became owners - he called it the 'property-owning democracy'.

The Conservative Party displayed little initial enthusiasm for co-partnership, but the principle of extending ownership (and particularly the idea of the 'property-owning democracy') was seized upon as a powerful political weapon. In reviving the concept at the 1946 Conservative Party conference, Anthony Eden noted that the extension of private property ownership offered a 'constructive alternative' to the policy of nationalisation pursued by the Labour government. By the 1950s, however, the focus had shifted away from industrial capital to housing. Although the Conservative Party was still committed to wider distribution of property, it had now come to the conclusion that, in the words of Minister for Housing Harold Macmillan, 'of all forms of property suitable for such distribution, house property is one of the best'. The party was also no doubt aware that homeowners were more likely to vote Conservative than private renters or council tenants.

Although housing continued to play a role in Conservative attempts to create a 'property-owning democracy', under Margaret Thatcher's leadership the party rediscovered an interest in the ownership of industry. By making shares in newly privatised industries available to the general public, the Thatcher administrations hoped to create a 'capital-owning democracy' in which ordinary people would become shareholders feel a 'heightened sense of pride in British business'. Together, the privatisation campaign and the 'Right to Buy' formed the centrepiece of a strategy to extend property-ownership to all levels of British society - a goal which Mrs Thatcher referred to as 'the great Tory reform of [the] century', and which the plans for a 'peoples' bank bonus' suggests is still a Conservative objective.

Plans to allow workers' co-operatives to own and run public services are merely the latest manifestation of this longstanding theme in Conservative ideology - a fact implicitly acknowledged by George Osborne when he compared the proposals to the sale of council houses. And by offering public sector workers the opportunity to own and run the services which they provide, David Cameron could arguably come closer than any previous Conservative leader to fulfilling Skelton's vision.

However these proposals have not descended directly from Skelton, but rather draw on numerous Conservatisms - including Thatcherism. Although Cameron and Osborne have been careful to sell the policy as 'progressive', the detail of the proposals - from the Conservative Party, and from think-tanks ResPublica and The Innovation Unit - has been couched in the vocabulary of the market. They have relied on many of the same justifications as the privatisations of the 1980s - efficiency, productivity, and the needs of the 'service user'. The plans also allow considerable room for private sector involvement - either in managing the co-operatives or as partners in a 'joint venture'.

Warnings that we should be careful to 'count the spoons' are, therefore, entirely justified. Although these plans have been sold - and so far bought - as 'progressive', they are far from unambiguous. Co-operatives may mean more independence for our public servants - or they may represent a form of back-door privatisation. Are these just warm words from a Cameron still trying to appeal beyond his party's natural constituency? Time will tell.

Matthew Francis, PhD student in the School of Politics and International Relations

Recreating our political history

If journalism is the first draft of history the biopic is now a close second, having become the staple output of many television drama departments. Recently figures as diverse as the Queen, Margaret Thatcher and Winnie Mandela have been given the treatment.


Historians undoubtedly ground their teeth as these accounts gave the protagonist undue importance and distorted events for dramatic effect. For their mantra has long been that history is made through the interaction of structure and agency, a process in which the individual, however famous, plays but a part. However recent US research [Andrew Butler et al, 'Using popular films to enhance class room learning', Psychological Science, 20:9 (2009)] shows that even amongst Ivy League students, film versions of the past can exert more influence on perceptions of the past than do academic texts. The power of the moving image compared to the immobile word has long been suspected. As Gore Vidal wrote of the Hollywood historical romances of his youth: 'we are both defined and manipulated by [cinematic] fictions of such potency that they are able to replace our own experience, often becoming our sole experience of reality'. From what we know of media effects, this process of confusing fiction for reality is made more certain if the same kind of fiction is transmitted over a prolonged period.

If biopics do construct visions of the past it is no wonder New Labour seems destined for electoral oblivion. For the small screen has given us a number of insights into the lives of the party's high command, and all of them point in one direction. The Deal (2002) depicted Tony Blair as a media-obsessed opportunist; A Very Social Secretary (2005) highlighted David Blunkett's hypocrisy and arrogance; Tony Blair: Rock Star (2006) depicted Blair as a life-long operator intent on self-advancement; while The Confessions of a Diary Secretary (2007) showed John Prescott to be as lascivious as Sid James in his pomp and, for good measure, represented Blair and Brown as overgrown school boys.

In January 2010 Channel Four added another chapter to New Labour's television history, broadcasting Mo, a biopic of Mo Mowlam, the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1997-9) who died in 2005. Publicity for the drama indicated it would strike a different note to its predecessors: Mowlam was described as a 'charismatic woman whose no-nonsense approach to politics helped achieve one of the monumental landmarks in recent British history, the Good Friday Agreement'. The drama focused on Mowlam's fight with cancer but did say something about her supposedly decisive contribution to bringing peace to Northern Ireland. It implied Mowlam's habits of swearing, taking off her wig and showing her knickers helped break the log-jam, although it was made not clear exactly how. Factors that did not fit into the narrative were ignored. These included: the long-dawning realisation amongst Sinn Fein that terrorism had failed; John Hume's vital early intermediary role; and the Major government's preparatory work. Blair's contribution was also marginalised, with the Prime Minister presented as stealing Mowlam's thunder. Like most biopics Mo was, then, all agency and little structure.

The biopic genre is not new - George Arliss won an Oscar for Disraeli (1929) - and is an obvious offshoot of the publishers' venerable stand-by, the biography. Yet at the present moment - at least with regard to the New Labour biopics - it poses potential dangers. It reinforces the journalistic desire to personalise politics, casting politicians as minor celebrities: politics is thereby presented as a process in which the majority play no part, except in the crowd scenes. While in earlier biopics, the likes of Disraeli were treated like heroes - in the 1929 film he outsmarts a Russian spy - in contemporary biopics the subjects are all people of questionable character. Mo is unusual in depicting a politician in warm terms but she is marked out as exceptional and, before the cancer kills her, a victim of the dominant 'cold politics' personified by Peter Mandelson.

The current crop of political biopics is not only inaccurate historically but potentially harmful to our civic culture. Political scientists have tried to find ways of 'reengaging' the people with politics. Gordon Brown appears to think that a new electoral system for Westminster might do the trick. So far little consideration has been given to whether the way in which most people gain an understanding of our political past might effect how they think about current politics. Historians could help by taking such versions of the past seriously and recognizing that historiography now exists as much on the screen as on the page. They might encourage their own students to critically engage with how political history has been represented - and ask for example why Disraeli was depicted as a lion in 1929 but by the time Mrs. Brown (1997) was released he had become preoccupied only with spin. Outside the seminar room they should ask those responsible for producing these representations - commissioning editors, producers and writers - to discuss why they depict our recent political history in the ways they do. If even politicians are now expected to be more accountable then why not those who represent them on the screen?

Professor Steven Fielding