Principles and virtue-signalling

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Principled stands are all very well, and something for which politicians are generally happy to be credited. Until, that is, the cost of taking such a stand is perceived to outweigh the advantages gained. We saw it in Starmer’s ‘principled stand’ against the US bombing campaign in Iran, which was principled until he decided that allowing the US to use UK bases for ‘purely defensive’ bombing raids (an oxymoron if ever there was one) was a less costly option. And he’s never explained exactly how the purpose and target of each bombing raid was verified to determine whether it met the unspecified criteria for being ‘purely defensive’ – the suspicion remains that the ‘principled stand’ amounted to making a grand statement and then turning a blind eye.

Starmer also took a ‘principled stand’ over Ukraine, backing strong sanctions against unwarranted Russian aggression. Until unwarranted US aggression against Iran caused a potential lack of jet fuel and diesel, at which point the principles got lost. Principles which last only until those espousing them conclude that they are costing themselves too much aren’t really principles at all; they’re more about virtue-signalling.

Whether sanctions actually achieve very much is another question entirely. The theory is that by denying a country access to goods from outside the country and denying that country access to markets for its own goods, then pressure is placed on the economy to such an extent that the government can no longer sustain itself and must collapse/ surrender/ stop a war (delete as applicable). The truth of the proposition depends on three assumptions. The first is that the country being sanctioned cannot sustain itself entirely on the basis of its own resources and productive capacity, the second is the neoliberal economic dogma that the limiting factor on any government’s actions is the amount of money available to it, and the third is that all other countries buy into the sanctions regime.

In the case of Russia, none of those three assumptions are valid. Russia may not have the climate to grow certain crops, which might limit the population’s dietary choices (although after decades of Soviet rule, that might not be as novel as one might think), but the country’s resources are vast and varied, and they have the people and skills to exploit them. As long as they don’t need foreign currency, the idea that the money supply is somehow limited is a myth anyway: the constraint on government action is the availability of real resources, not the means of exchange to buy them. And in any event, there are significant other powers prepared to ignore the sanctions regime. Sanctions have the ring of the old adage, which runs ‘something must be done, this is something, we must do this’.

The conclusion – that sanctions are largely symbolic statements by those applying them, and little more than irritations to those to whom they are applied – is depressing. Failure to recognise that fact is even more so – it simply encourages people to continue to pursue a failed path. There is no quick or easy solution. Universal adherence to agreed international law is our only hope in the long term, but achieving it is another matter entirely. Perhaps we never will, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In the meantime, pretend principles achieve little except to divert attention from the real issue.

The five stages of Messiahdom

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Political parties finding themselves in difficulty whilst retaining an absolute conviction that they are right about everything have a tendency to start to believe in the idea of a Messiah. If only, the story goes, we had a different leader, all would be well. That’s the first stage of messiahdom.

The second stage comes when they alight upon the Chosen One. He (and it’s invariably a ‘he’) might not be immediately available: perhaps he’s overseas or at the very least stuck in political exile in the frozen and inhospitable north. These are simply obstacles to be overcome.

The third stage is when the Chosen One himself starts to believe that he really is the Messiah, the one the whole world has been waiting for, and the only one who can put right those things which need to be put right and lead his party to the sunlit uplands. That seems to be about the point at which the Labour Party has now arrived.

The fourth stage is the anointment of the new leader, and it’s the trickiest of all. It’s far from clear at this point whether Labour will overcome this particular hurdle. There will be those who lay obstacles in his route, such as re-opening a debate which makes it harder to persuade ordinary people outside the party to vote for him, whilst smiling sweetly and uttering welcoming words. Maybe his silvery northern tongue will win round the doubters, both inside the party membership and amongst the wider electorate, maybe not. I have a suspicion that at least some will feel more than a little p****d off at being taken for granted in the power games being played with and around them.

Whether the Labour Party gets through stage 4 or not might be an open question, but if they do, then stage 5 has a degree of inevitability about it. This is when it becomes clear that he’s not the Messiah at all, just a very naughty boy. Heroes almost invariably turn out to have feet of clay. The chances that a change of leadership will solve the problems of the Labour Party are slim; the historical record (particularly over the past decade) does not exactly convince me that switching out the person at the top will change any of the fundamentals, even if it may deliver a short term boost based more on hope than experience. A glib tongue and a chameleon-like ability to change position are no substitute for substance, and a few years spent in the political wilderness do not necessarily equip someone to succeed in the top job.

The potential for doing more harm than good is high, particularly if he falls off the horse at the next hurdle. Still, as spectator sports go, it’s better than a lot of politics.

Vigilantes are the problem, not the solution

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It must have been sometime in the 1950s that I used to watch Mr Pastry on the television, and I’m sure that I remember one episode in which he wanted to be a ‘village auntie’; but my memory also told me that Mr Pastry was Clive Dunn rather than Richard Hearne, so maybe it was a different programme. Anyway, the plot line was that our hero had completely failed to understand what a vigilante was. The media and commentators seem to be suffering from a similar lack of understanding every time that they refer to the dreaded ‘bond vigilantes’ who are apparently forcing interest rates up because they’re worried that the Labour government might in any way deviate from the Tory financial straightjacket rectitude to which they’ve been stupid enough to commit themselves.

It’s not true; the participants in the bond markets really don’t give a damn about what government policy is, and are not trying (as true vigilantes would) to exercise extra-judicial powers over perceived miscreants. They care only about extracting maximum benefit for themselves, and see the widespread belief that a change in government policy might make UK bonds a riskier prospect as an opportunity to line their own pockets. It’s a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those paying the interest might well want a stable low level, but that isn't necessarily true of those receiving it.

That doesn’t mean that paying higher interest rates on government ‘debt’ isn’t a potential problem for the public finances. The extent of that problem is somewhat exaggerated though: part of the ‘debt’ is held by the government-owned Bank of England, so the government is paying interest to itself in an exercise which is more about book-keeping than debt management, and the higher interest rates only apply to new ‘debt’, not to the money which has been ‘borrowed’ previously. It’s also true that around 30% of the 'debt' is owed to banks, financial institutions and governments outside the UK, but that is offset by the fact that governments outside the UK also owe large amounts (almost £900 billion in the case of the US alone) to UK banks and financial institutions, and to the UK government itself, and interest comes into the UK as well as flowing out.

The bigger problem with the conventional analysis is that it looks at only one side of the equation, to wit the financial impact on government finances. But we need to look at the other side of the equation – after all, if one body is paying interest, someone else is receiving it, and those recipients are the holders of those bonds, and they are mostly based in the UK. They include a small number of wealthy individuals who directly buy bonds and a much larger number of indirect holders, mostly current and future pensioners. And since the benefit received through interest payments is proportional to the amount of bonds held, the benefits will flow disproportionately to the most well-off. In short, government bonds are a mechanism by which wealth is transferred from the many to the few (Richard Murphy has a fuller explanation of that here), and it is the few (or their representatives) who are manipulating the markets to maximise that flow.

Bowing to the perceived pressure from ‘the markets’ is outsourcing financial policy to those to whom wealth is being transferred. Understanding that is a key first step to debating alternatives – but not one that the political representatives of the few, whether Tory, Labour, Reform UK or whatever, are keen on promoting.

The problem is with the product, not the salesman

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If the election results last week exposed just how much trouble Labour is in, the party’s reaction since then serves only to emphasise the fact. Whilst replacing a failed leader might not, in itself, be an altogether bad idea, believing that doing so will, in itself, ‘solve’ the problems facing the party is a triumph for hope over experience. Even more so when the ‘vision’ of all those being touted as replacements differs little from that of the incumbent. The problem is far more deep-seated than that, and it’s only due to an inadequate and unrepresentative electoral system coupled with a Tory collapse that Starmer was regarded as a ‘winner’ for getting a huge majority of seats in 2024 on 34% of the votes, whilst his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, was regarded as a dismal failure for gaining far fewer seats in 2017 on 40% of the vote. Which was the best salesman?

Whether history is made by the actions of prominent individuals or by what Boris Johnson called the ‘movement of the herd’ is one of those unresolved questions to which there is never a definitive answer. Mao, as I recall, once said that ‘the people are the motive force in the making of world history’; but then he also said something about ‘power springing from the barrel of a gun’, so take your pick of apposite quotations. I’ve long suspected that the truth lies somewhere between the two. Leaders come to the fore at a time and in a context which is set by longer term changes. The right person who happens to be in the right place at the right time can articulate things in a way which makes it look like he or she is driving change, but there are almost certainly others who could and would have fulfilled the role. I tend to support Ledru-Rollin with his "There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader", or whatever variation on the alleged quote you might prefer.

Whatever, the panicked masses of the Labour Party seem to have convinced themselves that, if only X were in charge, the party’s fortunes would be transformed. They might be in with a marginally better chance if they could agree on a name to insert instead of the X. I can think of few worse outcomes for them at this stage than for an MP to stand down to allow Andy Burnham to contest a parliamentary seat and then lose it (along with the Manchester mayoralty) to the Greens or Reform, but it’s an outcome which they don’t even appear able to foresee. The bottom line, though, is that whoever replaces the X, the party is still stuck in a context where they are expecting any new leader to do a better job of repackaging and selling the existing product rather than improving the product. It’s not an approach which has exactly been universally successful in the world of business. Maybe politics is different. Maybe not.

Electoral change might be boring, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant

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With the dust settling on last week’s Senedd election, it’s opportune to review how well the new system of voting actually worked. No doubt the academics are already hard at work on a detailed analysis of the results and the factors which led people to vote as they did. One obvious weakness is that the system ended up favouring the largest parties, encouraging a degree of polarisation between them, just as first past the post has long done. And for all the talk of ‘every vote counts’, clearly some votes did not count; the lack of an opportunity to express a second or third choice meant that the votes of those whose first choice was rapidly eliminated ultimately counted for nothing. And then there’s the argument about voting for a party rather than a person – I’m personally not convinced of that, although many others are, because years of campaigning told me that most people vote for the party anyway. Overall, it’s produced a more proportional result than the previous system, but it’s not ideal.

Some have criticised Labour and Plaid for introducing the new system, describing it as some sort of stitch-up. Criticism of Labour is fair, but I’m not convinced that the same is true of Plaid. Multi-party politics with no overall majority requires compromise and agreement, and had Plaid not agreed to support Labour on this detail, we probably wouldn’t have had the other changes to the Senedd. With a super-majority required for such a change, it looked like a worthwhile compromise – provided it doesn’t become the norm for the longer term.

Most supporters of Proportional Representation tend to favour the Single Transferable Vote. Looking at the new Senedd, that’s true of Plaid, the Lib Dems, and the Greens – but those three parties together do not have the votes for a supermajority on this issue, and Labour and the Tories are generally opposed. Enter, stage right, Reform Ltd. It’s always hard to know what the company’s policy is on any issue because it keeps changing, but Farage (the ultimate determiner of all policies, as the owner and proprietor) has in the past been supportive of a move to STV. Whether he still supports that (given how well his company did in England under FPTP) is an open question, but if he does, there is a clear supermajority in favour in the new Senedd. It creates a potential opportunity for a change with long-lasting effect.

It’s clearly not going to be the top priority for the incoming government. There are far more urgent priorities in areas such as health and education, where visible change is urgently required. Electoral Reform is top of few people’s lists. I hope, though, that the new government will find time to discuss this with other parties – yes, including Reform Ltd – during the current Senedd term, while the door might be at least ajar. Thursday’s results were historic, there is no doubt about that. But historic isn’t the same as irreversible. Sometimes phoenixes do rise out of the ashes, and the Labour and Conservative parties in Wales might not be quite as moribund as they currently appear to be.

Gift or grift?

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The owner and proprietor of Reform Ltd claims that no rules were broken by the £5 million gift made to him prior to his decision to stand for election again in 2024. The gift, he claims, was entirely personal and not related to politics at all. It’s hard to believe that a gift of that magnitude to pay for security had no impact on the decision to stand for election of a man who had been reluctant to do so for reasons of security. The gift was described as ‘unconditional’, with no requirement to spend it on security, and it’s also hard to believe that a sudden windfall of £5 million had no impact on the spending of the recipient on things other than security, even if only by leaving him more of his own money. Given that Sir Starmer was obliged to declare donations for new suits and spectacles, it’s hard to see how the same rules allow undeclared donations of £5 million. Perhaps the various bodies looking into the donation will reach the same conclusion as Farage, although many might think that that would tell us more about the rules than about the gift or the individuals involved.

The donor’s generosity didn’t stop with the party’s owner and proprietor; he also became the largest individual donor in political history with his largesse to Reform Ltd. There’s no corruption involved, apparently, because he didn’t ask for anything in return. That’s probably true – but he didn’t need to. The Reform Ltd stance on cryptocurrency was already well-established. He doesn’t need the party to change any policies for his investment to pay off, he just needs the party to win power. And therein lies a gaping hole in the rules concerning donations to political parties. Giving donations to parties to buy a favourable change in policy is unlawful; giving donations to a party in an attempt to buy an electoral victory which will allow it to implement an already-adopted favourable policy is entirely within the rules.

The difference between gift and grift turns out to be a lot smaller and harder to define than many might think. What we need isn’t one or more enquiries into whether or not rules have been broken, but a change in the rules themselves. Most particularly, we need a cap on the amount anyone can give a political party – or an individual politician – in any financial year. And it needs to be a low cap – a figure in thousands rather than tens of thousands, let alone millions.

Reform Ltd are using a curious form of logic

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Maybe, as some have suggested, the proposal by Reform Ltd to site internment camps for migrants in constituencies which vote for the Green Party is just a wind-up, an attempt to provoke outrage. Maybe, maybe not. There’s certainly something very Trumpian about it, aping the way violent immigration enforcement is used differentially in the US depending on whether a particular state did or did not vote for Trump. Some have suggested that it might be illegal, but if the UK ever got to the stage of electing a majority Reform Ltd government, such a government would have no trouble legislating to remove any legal obstacles. There is certainly something very ‘un-British’ about it, curiously enough from an overtly British/English nationalist party.

Perhaps we’ll never get there. After all, the ability of Reform UK to actually implement such a policy depends on a party led by Farage not imploding for another three years, and then winning a majority of seats in the Westminster parliament. History suggests that the former is unlikely, and the latter depends on the former, but we shouldn’t be complacent. I suspect that they actually mean what they say. Whether they would be able, as they claim, to hold detainees for only a short time before deporting them is an open question. It sounds simple, but in practical terms I suspect that people would need to be held for months rather than weeks, and the total number of detainees at any one time would be very much higher than they are claiming as a result.

Leaving aside the questions of both practicality and probability, the logic, even on their own terms, is a little ‘fuzzy’ to say the least. Setting up the camps is presented as a consequence of voting for open borders, and therefore something which those who vote for open borders should welcome, but that’s a complete logical reversal. Setting up camps is actually a consequence of voting for closed borders and a mass deportation policy; those who should welcome the camps are those who vote to set them up (Reform Ltd voters), not those who vote against them. On the other hand, and they probably haven’t worked this through themselves yet, they’ve actually given us a clear way of stopping their deportation policy in its tracks. They have guaranteed that no Reform Ltd-voting constituency will get a camp, so if every constituency elects a Reform Ltd MP, there would be nowhere to site a single camp. It’s not an action I’d encourage, of course – but ‘Vote Reform to stop Reform’ has a certain ring to it. Logic, like arithmetic, isn't exactly one of their strengths.

It's the vision that matters

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The demands and counter-demands about costings from the various parties contesting the Senedd elections are not just a red herring, they’re a diversion from the substance of the debate between the parties. The media may be provoking this, but the parties seem to be falling in. There are three good reasons why no party will ever convince another party (or any objective observer) that their costings are ‘right’.

Firstly, any set of costings is necessarily based on estimates and assumptions – it cannot be otherwise. Those estimates and assumptions will always be open to challenge – with no shared basis, there can never be a meeting of minds.

Secondly, one of the few things which seems certain about next week’s results is that no party will have an overall majority. Whether we have a coalition government or a minority government, the party leading that government will not be able to get its full programme through the Senedd without negotiation and compromise with one or other parties. No programme, no matter how ‘fully costed’ it is, will survive intact as a result.

Thirdly, even if there were to be a party with an overall majority, able to attempt to implement its programme in full, circumstances will always conspire to obstruct it. The generals say that no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy – much the same is true when a manifesto meets the reality of government.

That doesn’t make manifestoes irrelevant, and it doesn’t invalidate making at least an attempt to show how they might be implementable, but debating the financial minutiae diverts attention from the one thing that manifestoes should give us – a sense of the priorities and values of the varying parties. Reducing the debate to the level of ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’, or arguing abut the credentials and eminence of the economists who’ve given the numbers a detached nod tells us nothing about the various parties’ visions for Wales. Or, rather more worryingly, perhaps it actually speaks volumes about their visions.

Enforced poverty is no answer

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The political parties of the neoliberal right (Reform Ltd, the Tories, and Labour), aided and abetted by the majority of the media, continue to push their agenda of cutting the bill for benefits and pensions. The current most popular rationale which they give is to divert money into armaments, but if it wasn’t that, it would be something else. It’s easier to sell the anti-benefits message if it can be presented as a binary choice, even if that presentation is a complete nonsense.

It may even be a popular policy, given that the debate around benefits has been slowly and insidiously polarised over recent years in such a way that many people have come to believe that anyone receiving benefits is a freeloader on the efforts of the rest of us. They just don't think it will affect them. The turkeys have been sold on the argument that promoting the virtues of stuffing somehow means that they will be spared the Christmas chop.

There is, of course, no doubt that some savings can be made. Complex rules could be simplified to reduce administration costs, benefit fraud could be targeted (although the costs of doing that will eat into any savings, and targeting tax fraud and evasion would be a more productive use of resources). But such savings are on the margins: the only real way of generating large financial savings from the benefits bill is to cut the amounts being paid. Reducing payments is one approach, cutting eligibility is another; but whichever approach is chosen, one inescapable consequence is that the spending power of some real people in the real economy would be reduced. How many, and by how much, are debateable questions; the underlying fact of a reduction in spending power is not.

Even if it were possible to identify accurately and precisely which people are ‘choosing’ not to work as opposed to which are unable to (and the reality is that that is very difficult to do – real people, in real families, in real communities have a complex mix of circumstances which mostly lie in grey areas rather than black and white ones), the bottom line is that the number of them is much lower than popular sentiment might suggest. Savings on the scale being demanded by some require a much less targeted approach under which many more people lose access to funds. They will include older people, sick people, children – are we really going to push them into poverty in an attempt to starve someone in the household into a probably non-existent job?

‘Cutting the benefits bill’ looks to be an easy task if we look only at the number of pounds and pennies being spent by government. It looks very different, though, if we start to look at the people involved. It challenges our perceptions of the sort of society we are or want to be. Yes, of course, we want those who can do so to make a contribution, but is being employed really the only way of doing that – and is enforced poverty for those who don’t really the best answer? For the neoliberals – for whom everything boils down to pounds and pennies – the answers might be in the affirmative; for those who believe that there is more to life and the human experience than money and economics, jettisoning that narrow approach and starting with people is the essential first step.

Experience of failure is not the killer qualification as which some see it

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Experience is an odd commodity. As a generalization, most of us might expect that someone who has a lot of experience of doing something will be better at it than someone who has none, but it doesn’t always work that way. One of the reasons why some people end up doing the same job for many, many years is that they really aren’t very good at it. Peter’s Principle (“In a hierarchy individuals tend to rise to their levels of incompetence”) applies. I once interviewed someone for a job who claimed to have twenty years’ experience, but when we questioned him it turned out that he really had one year’s experience repeated twenty times. Experience is not only about duration – it’s also about depth and breadth. And experience of repeated failure without learning from mistakes made is a handicap, not a qualification.

The First Minister claimed this week that Labour should stay in power because it is the only party with previous governing experience in Wales. Even if it didn’t effectively amount to an argument that Labour should therefore enjoy perpetual power (because no-one will ever be able to gain that experience if we accept the argument), it’s a curious claim to make. In the first place, whilst some of the lessons learned from experience can be passed on after a fashion, ‘experience’ itself is personal to the experiencer. In the second place, ‘parties’ don’t have experience of government, it’s the ministers (who are often in any post for only a comparatively short time) who do; parties, as institutions, tend not to be very good at passing lessons on, which is one of the reasons why new generations of politicians often repeat the mistakes of the past. In the third place, many of those within Labour who possess this magical experience are either standing down in this election, or else at risk of defeat anyway. In the fourth place, whilst not everything that the Labour Government has done can fairly be described as a disaster (whatever their opponents might say), and there are often mitigating arguments based on relative incomes, ages and health, the objective evidence surely means that there are very few who would look at the last 27 years and see nothing but outstanding success; experience of failure may not be quite the qualification as which the First Minister apparently sees it. Finally, the institution which is supposed to be the guardian and repository of experience and its lessons isn’t the party, or even the ministers, but the apolitical civil service – which will still be there after May 7 to serve the new ministers.

I’m not sure that “desperate” – the headline accusation lobbed by Plaid – is an entirely fair description of the tactic by Labour. The subtext is surely a much more powerful condemnation: Inability to comprehend any alternative approach, complete failure to understand that voters in Wales want ‘change’ (even if they don’t all want the same change), and a general weariness with the apparent inertia of our political systems and structures. Our best hope for the outcome on 7 May is a government composed solely of independence-supporting parties. It’s hard to envisage any government which includes the attitudes currently being displayed by Labour having the vision and the energy to do anything sufficiently different.