“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

PM unveils election pledges at University of Nottingham

As was widely reported at the weekend, Gordon Brown was in Nottingham at the weekend. More specifically, he was at the University of Nottingham’s jubilee campus. He gave his speech at the Nottingham Geospatial Building, a new £9m research centre devoted to global navigation satellite systems and geospatial sciences, which has only just opened.

The location obviously wasn’t accidental. The campus sits in Nottingham South, which is a Conservative target, and is close to a series of other, even more marginal, Labour seats – such as Broxtowe, Erewash, and Gedling. Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, used the occasion to introduce local Labour candidates.

The speech formally unveiled Labour’s five key pledges ahead of the imminent General Election. But he also reiterated the strategy of acknowledging Labour’s position in the opinion polls, and painting Labour as the underdogs – a phrase he explicitly used.

But I was also struck by the extent to which he stressed the heritage of the Labour Party, all the way back to the founding of the NHS. He didn’t want to talk about just the last 13 years, but about the broader historical context, about what he claims Labour stands for, to try to show a clear distinction between them and the other parties. He was at great pains to emphasise Labour as standing for ‘fairness’, and there was a nice little dig about Labour launching pledges as the Conservatives announced their change of advertising team.

Professor Paul Heywood

Spinning the manifesto

Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has been in charge of drafting Labour’s manifesto since 2007. So he has had a long time to get it right. Over the weekend Miliband claimed in a Guardian interview that the manifesto will prove Labour remains best qualified to lead ‘the next phase of national renewal" and that it "will reform both the market and the state" and help “rebuild our politics”. This is good, classic New Labour stuff – ‘renewal’ ‘rebuild’ and ‘reform’ all evoke memories of 1997.
However, the elements Miliband chose to highlight suggest a shift in emphasis since then, with some signals of a change of direction - and one that might embarrass at least one leading member of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. It also poses a key question about the future of one of New Labour’s central policies.

The manifesto will apparently introduce a People’s Bank to help rebuild what Miliband described as the ‘fabric of communities’. The Bank will be linked to the growing number of co-operative credit unions across the country that help the poor borrow money on favourable terms. The Bank will be accessed through Britain’s 12,000 Post Office branches. This marks a decisive change in direction for the Post Office under Labour, giving it a greater public service role than implied by Peter Mandelson’s on-off-on-off attempts to part-privatise it since he became Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in 1998. Indeed during Labour’s time in office at least 4,000 post offices have closed in the face of much public opposition.

Miliband also claims the manifesto will include a ‘radical’ increase in the minimum wage. It currently stands at £5.80 but campaigners like London Citizens want it increased to £7.60. Miliband was coy about quite how high it might go, and he was not pressed on how this marked another change in direction from when the measure was first introduced in 1999. Many employers – and the Conservatives – claimed a minimum wage would bring disastrous economic consequences. Blair of course wanted to appease business but he also wanted to adhere to one of the party’s few pledges that favoured the trade unions. This meant ripping up what had been Labour’s stance under John Smith – a minimum wage set 50% of male median earnings initially, rising to two-thirds over time – and instead establishing an Independent Low Pay Commission, to decide on the rate, which led to complaints that it was set too low. The minister responsible was – maybe you have guessed? - Peter Mandelson. In his Guardian interview, Miliband was not pressed on how Labour will increase the minimum wage, given that it is set not by Government but by the LPC. Is his interview a sign that Labour intends to remove the LPC and allow government directly to set the minimum wage?

The problem for Labour in proposing ‘radical’ change, as Miliband claims the manifesto will do, is that skeptics will ask: why has it taken you till now? Shoring up the ‘traditional’ Labour vote, making sure they turn out come polling day, is one likely explanation of Miliband’s spinning of the manifesto. But there might be another. Miliband employed a number of caveats during the interview: there were lots of ifs, mights and maybes. The manifesto is still in a state of flux: the Prime Minister and Lord Mandelson have yet to approve it. It is more than possible that when they do, caution will reign and some of Miliband’s promised ‘radicalism’ watered down. In talking to the Guardian, Miliband might, then, have been doing two things. Boosting Labour’s message in advance of the imminent election campaign while also sending a signal to what remains of the party’s members. Should Labour lose and Brown fall on his sword, it would be very useful for someone spoken of as a likely leadership candidate – as the BBC’s Michael Crick has done recently to be the man known to have fought for a ‘radical’ manifesto.

Professor Steven Fielding

New MPs, quiet Parliament?

We’ve been running a project, at Nottingham, looking at backbench dissent for the last seven years. Late last year, it revealed that Labour MPs were on course to be the most rebellious group of parliamentarians in the post-war era (anyone who can’t face the full report can read this summary, from Progress). And, in January, we showed how the Conservatives were much less likely to vote against government legislation than people thought (again, anyone who doesn’t want to read the report can read its coverage in the Times or on ConservativeHome). And occasionally, it’s even benefitted charities, when people are prepared to bet their opinions against our evidence.


The final session of a parliament – as we approach the election – rarely produces much rebellion. MPs tend to keep schtum, for fear of the electoral consequences of division. With the exception of Tuesday’s vote on AV – which will cause a split in the Parliamentary Labour Party – it’s likely that the fag-end of this parliament will be relatively quiet in parliament, and so people are looking ahead, to the situation after the next election.

The biggest change will be the number of new MPs in the Commons, especially on the Conservative side of the House. A Conservative majority government, with a working majority, could see almost two-thirds of Conservative MPs newly elected. In part, this has been caused by the expenses scandal, and the rash of decisions to stand down from the Commons that have followed. But, even before expenses (see this article from January 2009), it was clear that any new Conservative government would have a very high number of new MPs, simply as a result of the huge increase in the number of MPs they require. They currently have fewer than 200; a bare Commons majority after the next election needs 326.

Whilst lots of attention has been on how this is going to be positive for parliament – fresh ideas etc – there are good reasons to be much more sceptical. Our work has consistently found that new MPs are less likely to rebel, and much more likely to do as instructed by the party whips, than are more established MPs. There are lots of reasons for this, but the cause is pretty constant. In 1992, for example, the new Conservative MPs were the most Eurosceptic, but they were the least likely to vote against the Maastricht bill. In 1997, the vast number of new Labour MPs were half as likely to vote against the whips as their longer serving companions. We suspect that the massive increase in new MPs may lead to a period of relative calm on the backbenches, at least for the first few years of a Conservative government.

Professor Philip Cowley