Whenever he comes to speak at the University – and as one of our local MPs he’s a frequent visitor – Ken Clarke always packs the room out. Students always turn up in droves to hear him speak, despite the fact that it’s now over a decade since he was in government, when most of them were still at junior school.
In this podcast, recorded just after a recent visit to the University, he talks about the state of Parliament and his hopes for reform. The current parliament, he says, has ‘disgraced itself’; in fact he claims it hasn’t really returned properly since the Christmas break, shell-shocked MPs just staying away and waiting for the election to end their collective suffering.
He’s hopeful about the prospects for reform under an incoming Conservative government, as you’d expect. But he notes two things that might make reform less likely.
The first is all those new MPs. As also previously argued on this blog, Clarke argues that the large influx of new MPs could be ‘somewhat compliant’, more easily controlled by the whips, and those who are keen on reform can ‘get the wrong end of the stick’. He worries they could ‘take us a step backwards’.
He also fears that David Cameron will face ‘all the usual pressures’ to retain executive power. Clarke says that he will stress that a Cameron government will make fewer mistakes if it is properly accountable, and he is hopeful that Cameron will heed his warning.
At this point, those of us who study Parliament experience a bout of déjà vu. For when Labour came to power in 1997, Ann Taylor had made similar pledges about what an incoming government would do to reform the Commons. ‘Awkward though it may appear to a few on our side’, she argued, ‘a more accountable government is a better government’. Yet whilst Labour certainly carried out significant reform of the Commons, it was much harder to identify reforms that had actually strengthened the power of the institution. Too many of the ‘modernisation’ reforms were cosmetic, or for the convenience of government or Members, and significant forces in the government resisted attempts to beef up the Commons. It was only when Robin Cook became leader of the House in 2001 that attention shifted to trying to strengthen the Commons, and even a politician as skilful as Cook often failed to get his way.
Professor Philip Cowley
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Monday, 22 March 2010
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
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
Saturday, 20 March 2010
Same old Tories?
Saturday’s Guardian featured a very lavish article on some high-profile Conservative candidates at the election. ConservativeHome – the website for Conservative activists and supporters – wearily labelled it as ‘the Guardian profiles the same Tory candidates that always get profiled’, and it certainly was. In part, this fixation is because of the novelty value of these candidates. Until David Cameron became party leader and prioritised the reform of the party’s candidate selection it was rare to find so many women, ethnic minority or openly gay Conservative candidates in winnable seats, so it’s understandable that the media are getting oh so excited about some of them.
Yet this focus is misleading, for three reasons. First, because despite the Cameron reforms, the bulk of Conservative MPs after the next election will remain white and male, and this will be especially true at the higher levels of the party. Should the Conservatives achieve a majority government, there will (under most realistic scenarios) be between 50 and 60 Conservative women MPs, significantly up from the 17 in 2005, but still less than one in five of the parliamentary party. There will also be around half-a-dozen new Conservative MPs from ethnic minorities, to join the two currently in the Commons. But the rest will look pretty similar to the ones who are there already, and despite David Cameron’s aspiration that by the end of his first term a third of his government will be female, it will almost certainly take more than one term before a sufficient number of women MPs have worked enough of a parliamentary and ministerial apprenticeship for the senior – and most visible – positions to look noticeably different.
Second, in another important way, the parliamentary party will remain very similar to previous groups of Conservative parliamentarians. For all the talk of trying to create a parliamentary party in the image of those represented, the absence of working class MPs on the Conservative side of the House will continue. In 2005, the Conservatives gained 25% of the DE vote and 33% of the C2 vote. Almost no efforts have been made to ensure that this segment of the population – and of the Conservatives’ own supporters – receives representation on the Conservative benches.
And third, it may well not be these much profiled candidates who are the ones who go on to achieve most should they get into Westminster. As I noted in an article in Political Quarterly, back in 2009 (for which a subscription is required, unfortunately):
So some of those currently being so lavishly profiled might do well to enjoy it; it could be the last time they achieve such national prominence.
Professor Philip Cowley
Yet this focus is misleading, for three reasons. First, because despite the Cameron reforms, the bulk of Conservative MPs after the next election will remain white and male, and this will be especially true at the higher levels of the party. Should the Conservatives achieve a majority government, there will (under most realistic scenarios) be between 50 and 60 Conservative women MPs, significantly up from the 17 in 2005, but still less than one in five of the parliamentary party. There will also be around half-a-dozen new Conservative MPs from ethnic minorities, to join the two currently in the Commons. But the rest will look pretty similar to the ones who are there already, and despite David Cameron’s aspiration that by the end of his first term a third of his government will be female, it will almost certainly take more than one term before a sufficient number of women MPs have worked enough of a parliamentary and ministerial apprenticeship for the senior – and most visible – positions to look noticeably different.
Second, in another important way, the parliamentary party will remain very similar to previous groups of Conservative parliamentarians. For all the talk of trying to create a parliamentary party in the image of those represented, the absence of working class MPs on the Conservative side of the House will continue. In 2005, the Conservatives gained 25% of the DE vote and 33% of the C2 vote. Almost no efforts have been made to ensure that this segment of the population – and of the Conservatives’ own supporters – receives representation on the Conservative benches.
And third, it may well not be these much profiled candidates who are the ones who go on to achieve most should they get into Westminster. As I noted in an article in Political Quarterly, back in 2009 (for which a subscription is required, unfortunately):
...much of the media focus will be on the most media-friendly candidates – especially, because of their novelty value, the newly-elected women and ethnic minority candidates – and not necessarily on those who are most likely to go on to achieve high office or be significant players within the party in the future. It is, for example, noticeable that many of the Labour MPs who attracted considerable media coverage in the aftermath of the 1997 result (such as Lorna Fitzsimons and Oona King) did not then go on to achieve high office, whereas those who went largely unnoticed by the national media (such as Jacqui Smith) did rather better.
So some of those currently being so lavishly profiled might do well to enjoy it; it could be the last time they achieve such national prominence.
Professor Philip Cowley
Sunday, 14 March 2010
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
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
Friday, 12 March 2010
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
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
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Why the environment is an electoral non-issue
Ask people if they think the environment is an important issue, and they will tell you that it certainly is. A ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of concern about global warming is reported by 67% of the British public respondents in the UK, and 84% of car drivers are ‘very’, or ‘fairly’, concerned about the effect of transport on climate change (indeed drivers show a higher level of concern for the effect of transport on climate change than non-drivers).
But ask people if they are willing to pay for environmental improvements and that support tends to disappear. Whilst 84% of those car drivers were concerned, only 18% were willing to pay higher taxes on their car for the sake of the environment. In another recent survey, of those airline passengers who were ‘concerned’ about the environmental impact of flying, only 14% held passengers mainly responsible for its effects. As Iain McLean of Oxford University has put it, the ‘feeling that something must be done is disconnected from feeling in favour of doing anything.’
This disconnection is a problem for politicians in democracies. If the electorate report high levels of concern, then this is an issue about which ‘something must be done’. But if there is no desire on the part of the electorate to actually do anything about it themselves (which there isn’t), and if this is understood by politicians (which it is), then we can expect this high-flown rhetoric to be accompanied by policies that make long-term promises but which leave the status quo intact in the short-term.
This disconnection has also led some to suggest that the environment is now an arena for political ‘simulation’, where electorates ‘demand’ environmental action, but where such demands are not intended to be taken seriously, being a mere performance or simulation of ‘real’ politics. Woe betide any politician who takes such demands seriously and seeks to act upon them. In policy terms, this means that it’s acceptable to promise carbon cuts in fifty years time, but not to apply the fuel duty escalator today. One way to explain this simulation is that environmental politics is particularly prone to what Bryan Caplan, an American economist, has called ‘rational irrationality’. Individuals can make no difference to the outcomes of environmental problems, and so have no reason to get good information about them (they are rationally ignorant). Furthermore they can believe what they prefer to believe without any cost. One can be a global warming alarmist or a climate change denier, on the basis of no good reason whatsoever; it costs you nothing as an individual and so you can just believe whatever you prefer (that’s rational irrationality). When, however, you are faced with the prospect of altering your travel habits or paying more tax, the potential costs of your preferred beliefs are revealed to you and you may sing a different tune.
So despite general agreement on how important it is, don’t expect the environment to figure as a key issue in this general election. This is not just because the party leaderships agree on the importance of environmental matters – they also agree on the benefits of economic growth, but they will fight like ferrets in a sack over who can deliver it best. It is also because of the intractability of both (a) satisfying the demand that ‘something must be done’ and (b) satisfying that demand in a way that appears to cost nothing to anyone right now. It is much better to make a few vague long-term commitments and go back to education, education, education.
For more on this, see here
Dr Mathew Humphrey
But ask people if they are willing to pay for environmental improvements and that support tends to disappear. Whilst 84% of those car drivers were concerned, only 18% were willing to pay higher taxes on their car for the sake of the environment. In another recent survey, of those airline passengers who were ‘concerned’ about the environmental impact of flying, only 14% held passengers mainly responsible for its effects. As Iain McLean of Oxford University has put it, the ‘feeling that something must be done is disconnected from feeling in favour of doing anything.’
This disconnection is a problem for politicians in democracies. If the electorate report high levels of concern, then this is an issue about which ‘something must be done’. But if there is no desire on the part of the electorate to actually do anything about it themselves (which there isn’t), and if this is understood by politicians (which it is), then we can expect this high-flown rhetoric to be accompanied by policies that make long-term promises but which leave the status quo intact in the short-term.
This disconnection has also led some to suggest that the environment is now an arena for political ‘simulation’, where electorates ‘demand’ environmental action, but where such demands are not intended to be taken seriously, being a mere performance or simulation of ‘real’ politics. Woe betide any politician who takes such demands seriously and seeks to act upon them. In policy terms, this means that it’s acceptable to promise carbon cuts in fifty years time, but not to apply the fuel duty escalator today. One way to explain this simulation is that environmental politics is particularly prone to what Bryan Caplan, an American economist, has called ‘rational irrationality’. Individuals can make no difference to the outcomes of environmental problems, and so have no reason to get good information about them (they are rationally ignorant). Furthermore they can believe what they prefer to believe without any cost. One can be a global warming alarmist or a climate change denier, on the basis of no good reason whatsoever; it costs you nothing as an individual and so you can just believe whatever you prefer (that’s rational irrationality). When, however, you are faced with the prospect of altering your travel habits or paying more tax, the potential costs of your preferred beliefs are revealed to you and you may sing a different tune.
So despite general agreement on how important it is, don’t expect the environment to figure as a key issue in this general election. This is not just because the party leaderships agree on the importance of environmental matters – they also agree on the benefits of economic growth, but they will fight like ferrets in a sack over who can deliver it best. It is also because of the intractability of both (a) satisfying the demand that ‘something must be done’ and (b) satisfying that demand in a way that appears to cost nothing to anyone right now. It is much better to make a few vague long-term commitments and go back to education, education, education.
For more on this, see here
Dr Mathew Humphrey
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
How the internet is changing politics
One of the dullest statements about the forthcoming election is that it's going to be the election in which the internet comes into its own as a campaigning tool.
For one thing, it's not the first time we've heard it -- people said it in 2005, 2001, and even in 1997. But more importantly, as Mark Pack shows in this fascinating talk, the reason it's a boring thing to say is because the reality is much more complicated, more nuanced than this.
Mark, who was in charge of the Liberal Democrats internet campaigns in both 2001 and 2005, gave this talk as part of Nottingham's Distinguished Practitioner series, which provides our postgraduate students with an invaluable opportunity to interact with distinguished names from the 'real world' of politics and international relations.
Professor Philip Cowley
For one thing, it's not the first time we've heard it -- people said it in 2005, 2001, and even in 1997. But more importantly, as Mark Pack shows in this fascinating talk, the reason it's a boring thing to say is because the reality is much more complicated, more nuanced than this.
Mark, who was in charge of the Liberal Democrats internet campaigns in both 2001 and 2005, gave this talk as part of Nottingham's Distinguished Practitioner series, which provides our postgraduate students with an invaluable opportunity to interact with distinguished names from the 'real world' of politics and international relations.
Professor Philip Cowley
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