Being against one thing doesn't mean you support one particular alternative

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One of the features of parliamentary process is that votes on legislation, budgets etc eventually come down to a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Prior debate, both in committee and on the floor of the chamber, offers opportunity for parliamentarians to seek to amend and improve the proposition under consideration, but at the end of the process, nuance, subtlety, and the fact that there may be varied reasons why members choose to support or oppose the proposition are all erased in a simple binary vote.

Whether Labour made the ‘right’ call in this week’s Senedd vote on the supplementary budget is a matter of opinion, and depends on first asking the question ‘right for who?’; what suits the party’s needs may or may not suit the needs of the people. Maybe they were trying to put down a marker about not being taken for granted; perhaps they’re just struggling with the move from government to opposition. Whatever their logic, I’m amongst those who think that they called it wrong on this occasion. Whether the government should have made more effort to get them onboard is another moot point – just as former governing parties need time to adjust to being in opposition, so too former opposition parties seemingly need time to adjust to being in government.

The biggest disappointment for me, however, came not in the vote, but in the aftermath. Voting against the government is not the same thing as voting for the other opposition parties, and Plaid’s repeated criticism of Labour for voting ‘with Reform Ltd’ grates with me. It’s a tactic which has been used by Labour, in particular, against Plaid for decades, especially in Westminster, but it’s a kindergarten approach, and it’s disappointing, to say the least, to see the party which has been subjected to such an approach for so long trying to use the same approach against its former tormentors, rather than demonstrating that the grown-ups are now in charge. There are going to be a lot of votes in the Senedd during the current term, and the combinations of parties voting either for or against a proposition will also vary. Voting the same way as Party B doesn’t mean that the rationale for voting that way is shared, and the suggestion that it does is a dishonest way of avoiding the substance. Resorting to the ‘yah boo’ tactics of Westminster is not a good look.

Five million unanswered questions

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Labour’s decision to report the alleged hacking of Farage’s phone to the police is a gimmick, of course. Given the reluctance / inability (delete as applicable) of the boys in blue to investigate a whole host of crimes, diverting resources to a crime which the ‘victim’ himself has not seen fit to report is an unlikely prospect. But if the objective is to keep the story about Farage’s receipt of a £5 million gift running for a day or two longer, it is at least an effective gimmick. It’s reasonable to suppose that the attempt by Farage to turn the story into one about an illegal action performed against him was itself an attempt to divert attention from the £5 million, a generous gift which he continues to maintain is an entirely personal matter between friends.

But the ‘hacking’ story raises more questions as well. Farage is claiming that the ‘hacking’ was the result of a spear-phishing exercise. Assuming that to be true, then it wasn’t really what most of us would call ‘hacking’ at all: it means that he was conned into giving the attackers access to his phone and/or data. Still a crime, of course, just not quite the one which is being alleged. We’ve not been told what the messages were which induced him to part with the access codes to his data, but the possibility that revealing them might just be embarrassing could be one explanation for his coyness in involving the appropriate authorities. We also don’t know who the cyber-security experts were who have concluded that it was a “hostile state actor” behind the plot but, again, those experts seem not to have been the ones employed by the British state precisely to counter such actions against politicians and others.

It’s easy to see why, tactically, Farage might want to blame Russia. Given the suggestions that he and his party are too friendly by far towards Putin, putting some distance between him and the Kremlin looks like a reasonable plan. But hold on a moment – let’s look at this from the other side. Why exactly would Russia want to bring down Farage (and it’s reasonable to suppose that to be the aim of the leak of information)? Looked at from the Kremlin, the best chance of getting a more Russia-friendly government in the UK at the next General Election is through getting Reform Ltd elected, and all the conventional wisdom suggests that is more likely under Farage than under any alternative leader. That must surely be as obvious to Putin as it is to me, so why sabotage the campaign?

There are still far too many unanswered questions about that mysterious £5 million and the events surrounding it.

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.

Are the parties fighting the last war?

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It’s difficult to know how seriously we should treat any individual opinion poll. Different organisations use different methods, particularly when it comes to ‘weighting’ to try and ensure that the sample is representative. But when multiple polls by different organisations over a lengthy period show broadly consistent trends, it’s reasonable to suppose that they are telling us something about what is happening. In the case of the upcoming Senedd elections, I’m still struggling to believe how well in the one case, and how badly in the other, Reform Ltd and the Labour Party are doing. Whilst I can’t simply ignore the data-driven evidence in front of us, I’ll admit that, for someone who spent decades campaigning door to door, the extent and speed of the change is something I’m struggling to understand and accept. It somehow doesn't 'feel' right, and evidence which contradicts experience is always a difficult thing.

Once we get to a situation where there are two obvious front-runners, it’s probably inevitable that those two will start trying to ‘squeeze’ the votes of the other parties by presenting the outcome as a binary choice. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t intensely disappointing. In most of the campaigns I ever fought, I was more of a squeezee than a squeezer, left trying to convince people to vote for what they wanted most rather than against what they wanted least. So-called tactical voting is harder to determine under the new voting system for the Senedd elections, since it will probably only really have an impact on the sixth, or at best fifth and sixth, seats in any constituency, and it’s really hard to predict what will happen as we get down to that level of vote counting. Some of the politicians try to tell us that the new system makes every vote count, but it really isn’t true. Anyone voting for a party (or independent candidate) receiving less than around 10-12% of the vote in a constituency will effectively be, in the eyes of those trying to use the squeezing tactic, ‘wasting’ their vote; such votes will have no impact on the outcome of the election. Denial of the opportunity to register a second or third choice is my main criticism of the new system.

The question isn’t just about the mechanics and technicalities, however. I’ve long wondered just how effective the pressure to choose between Labour and Tory has been or, rather, to what extent the polarisation of electoral politics in the UK between the two largest parties was down to this tactic as opposed to other factors. Purely on the numbers, more recent elections show an increasing tendency away from a two-party polarisation – if it did work in the past, it hasn’t worked so well recently. Not only is it essentially a negative approach, but to the extent that it did work at all, it was never based on any careful analysis of opposing manifestos before choosing the lesser of two evils – it was far more visceral than that. A hatred of ‘the Tories’ on the one side and of ‘the Socialists’ on the other was always a substitute for proper debate between alternative visions for the future. Perhaps the fact that the ‘alternatives’ were generally not that different when analysed more objectively helped that framing. Whether either Plaid or Reform Ltd attract that sort of folk history-based hatred to a sufficient degree (outside the bubble in which the political anoraks live) is surely an open question. 'Stopping Reform' may not be quite the killer line that some seem to think.

They say that generals always prepare to refight the last war rather than the one that might actually happen, and I can’t help wondering if adopting a tactic based on what has historically believed to have been the case and trying to apply it in an entirely different scenario isn’t acting in a similar manner.

Cutting wages is no solution

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As a simple fact of mathematics, any organisation which can cut the salaries it pays to its employees will ‘save’ money. Whether it’s a sensible thing to do, whether it’s the right thing to do, whether the employees will calmly accept the reduction without resorting to industrial action – none of those things affect the simple mathematical truth that reducing salaries means the employer spends less to achieve the same result. For those of us lucky enough to be part of an occupational pension scheme (which is most people by now, even if some of the schemes aren’t particularly good), the employers’ contribution to those schemes is part of the overall remuneration package: it’s a form of deferred salary. Cutting the amount employers pay for pensions is, therefore, a wage cut by another name – it’s just that the impact won’t be felt immediately.

One of Reform Ltd’s latest wheezes to ‘save’ money involves doing just that – cutting back on the benefits paid out in pension schemes, and thus reducing the amount of the deferred salary due to employees. It’s a not very well disguised salary cut. Whether it’s quite the pain-free saving as which it appears in the short term is another question, however. Reducing the incomes of future pensioners will reduce their retirement standard of living. By how much depends on the circumstances of the individuals, but we can be certain that at least some will end up applying for extra benefits as a result, and it will also reduce the amount of income tax collected from pensioners – it’s not a ‘no-cost’ proposal. Looking at the wider economic impact, people with less money spend less as a result, and that in turn reduces demand in the economy.

The fact that none of this is immediately obvious to many is down to the fact that the real impact won’t happen for years – or even decades – when those with a reduced pension reach retirement age. Maybe those proposing it believe that it will be so effective in deterring people from retiring at all that the impact will be insignificant. In a world which increasingly treats only ‘working people’ as having any validity whilst all others are to be regarded as a ‘burden’, that’s a perfectly possible interpretation. It’s a view of the world which isn’t restricted to Reform Ltd – it will probably be mainstream Labour-Tory policy in a year or two. It highlights a feature of politics – and indeed, the capitalist economic system – which is the increasingly short term views which prevail. A society which works for all people throughout their lives has to take a long term view, considering the first 18 years of life, as well as the last 20-30, when people are likely to be ‘unproductive’ in economic terms, but are still part of the society in which they live. Squeezing out costs in the short term might be good micro-economics, but it’s lousy macro-economics, quite apart from being a lousy way of treating individual members of society. It’s a distinction which those who benefit directly from the short term gains are unable – or, more likely, unwilling – to understand.