Leading reluctant horses to water

Tweet

 

Spin doctors, to use the pejorative description of PR officers, generally have a poor reputation. But having worked with some, both in my political activity over the years and in my paid employment, I can honestly say that they are generally professional and hard-working. When presented with a situation where their clients have, shall we say, ‘got into a little local difficulty’, they will always do their very best to come up with a strategy aimed at rescuing the reputation of the individual or organisation employing them. Sometimes, however, the task is beyond even the best of them, and their task is never made any easier if the client believes that he or she knows better and/or is pathologically incapable of taking and following the best advice. And that brings us to the Prime Minister.

On Monday, he effectively tried to tell us that he couldn’t possibly know whether a party had taken place on 20^th May 2020 or even whether he’d been present, until a civil servant had investigated the claims and reported back to him. Whilst it’s just about believable that a PR expert might have tried to come up with some sort of approach to buy a little time in order to establish the facts for him or herself (they would know Johnson well enough to know that they couldn’t depend on the veracity of whatever he had told them), it’s hard to believe that what Johnson actually came out with was the product of any serious deliberation. And even harder to believe that the PR people would not have known that he’d be unable to prevent himself smirking as he uttered the words.

It should have been obvious to anyone that the statement wouldn’t hold for longer than it took to make it, and the PM’s own former adviser, Guto Harri, very publicly offered the advice that only a full and grovelling apology to the House of Commons stood any chance of saving his skin. It was good advice; it’s the accepted norm that the best – or perhaps I should say ‘least worst’ – option in difficult circumstances is to come clean, tell the whole truth, get everything out in the open and make a fulsome and sincere apology. It was Johnson’s only chance, and he fluffed it. It’s impossible to know, from the outside, whether his own in-house staff were trying to push him in the direction suggested by Guto Harri, but they don’t deserve to be in their jobs if they weren’t. Instead, what we got was the ludicrous claim that his own private office had invited 100 people to a party in his back garden after normal office hours without asking or even telling him, and that he and his then fiancée just happened to wander out into the garden at the appointed hour, saw people milling around drinking and eating snacks from a buffet table, assumed that it must be a work meeting (because aren’t all work meetings like that?) and joined in by mingling with those present, before realising after 25 minutes that it wasn’t a work meeting at all and returning to his own office. And, eighteen months later, when it came to light and he was forced into delivering a non-apology to the House of Commons, he proceeded to tell MPs privately afterwards that he had done nothing at all wrong.

It’s unbelievable that any spin doctor would have even countenanced advising Johnson to try such a lame and pathetic approach. I can imagine them sitting in front of a television pulling their hair out as he spoke. Normally, having worked in such a high-profile role as spin doctor to the PM would be a huge asset in seeking further employment, but who’d want to employ someone who was even suspected of going along with this charade? And that brings us back to the starting point – no matter how expert, professional or experienced a PR officer is, he or she can only deliver if the client is willing and able to listen to and follow advice. Nobody would ever accuse Johnson of falling into either of those categories.

GVA and GDHI

Tweet

There are times when I find myself agreeing with both sides in an argument and end up scratching my head as to whether they’re arguing about the right thing.  Today’s extensive coverage in the Western Mail’s Business section of the GVA vs. GDHI argument is a case in point.

The Welsh Government has chosen to adopt GDHI as its headline economic measure and the Western Mail set about finding people to explain why that was the wrong measure to adopt.  They half succeeded.

The Welsh Government argues that GDHI is a better measure of people’s real wealth, whereas a number of economists argue that GVA is a better measure of economic performance.  It seems to me that they’re both right.  The argument isn’t really about what the ‘best measure’ is, but about what it is we’re trying to measure and why.  It was a question which was skated round, rather.

If we are setting out to measure the relative wealth of people in Wales compared to the UK average, then I’d agree that the Welsh Government has probably selected the best measure to do that.  What it is not, however, is an effective measure of Welsh economic performance.  Because it includes all household income, it includes the fiscal transfer which results from the taxation and benefit system, which to some extent hides or disguises underlying economic performance.

That highlights an interesting point in itself.  It is theoretically possible for Wales to reach 100% of the UK average for GDHI with absolutely no underlying improvement in the Welsh economy, simply by increasing the redistributive impact of taxes and benefits - and without any action at all from the Welsh Government.  I can’t conceive of any UK Government actually doing that, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be done.  It might even satisfy many people in Wales that we were getting a ‘fair deal’; but it wouldn’t really mean that the Welsh economy was successful.

On the other hand, if we want to measure underlying success, then GVA is a much better measure.  It tells us the extent to which we are paying our way rather than depending on fiscal transfers.

The question that needs to be asked – and really doesn’t seem to have been probed in any depth – is why the Welsh Government feels that measuring household wealth is better than measuring the state of the Welsh economy.  Why measure equality of wealth rather than equality of performance?  Surely anyone concerned about the Welsh economy would be more interested in measuring to what extent we are economically self-sufficient – even if we never actually decide to turn that into political independence?

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the measure has been chosen primarily because it makes the numbers look better.  That would make it another victory for spin over substance.

Not asking the right question

Tweet

The meeting between the Prime Minister, the Energy Secretary, and the ‘big six’ energy companies seems to have been a classic case of creating the appearance of action without actually doing anything very much.

That high and rising fuel prices are a problem is indisputable and that they impact disproportionately on the least well-off is equally so.  But exhorting energy companies to make their bills clearer, and to make it easier for consumers to switch supplier, is little more than tinkering on the fringes.  And there’s nothing new in any of it, as one of the more independent suppliers who was present stated after the meeting.

The response of opposition politicians has been little better.  Ed Miliband’s statement that the companies should use their profits to reduce prices is merely the most glaring example of a lack of will to implement real change.

There does seem to be some doubt as to whether the claim that the energy companies are making an average profit of £125 per household per year is true or not.  The companies themselves claim that it’s closer to £15, but I’m not sure how relevant any figure is. 

‘If £125 is too high, what’s the right figure?’ is not a question to which I’m hearing any answers.  And in any event, the percentage figure is more relevant that the absolute figure, and energy companies’ profits do not seem that far out of line with other profit-making businesses.

That goes to the heart of the inadequacy of the political response.  The underlying question – whether we want these services provided by companies whose main aim is profit – is not even being asked.  Suggesting that companies should sacrifice the interests of their shareholders for the benefit of their customers is like criticising the outcomes of the free market without challenging the underlying basis.

Government (or opposition) politicians could propose an alternative ownership model for energy companies, or they could propose legislation to limit profits or enforce lower tariffs, but they do none of those things – because they accept the basic economic model under which the companies operate.

That leaves them nothing to fall back on except pious words and spin, which will do little to alleviate the problems which many will face this winter.

Anyone for golf?

Tweet Clearly, the fact that the Ryder Cup is being held in Wales will attract publicity for Wales; and it's reasonable to hope that it will increase Wales' profile and improve our image internationally. It will also give people in Wales a chance to see world class sportspeople in action. Those are worthy aims in themselves.

I'm not convinced that it will bring the claimed economic benefits, though. And the efforts of government spokespeople to spin this in terms of £s and jobs look to me as though figures are more or less being plucked out of the air. That there will be some benefit to local businesses particularly in catering and accommodation seems reasonably certain; but whether it repays the investment looks rather less so.

But does it matter? Should we really look at events like this solely in terms of pounds and pennies? If we always took such a narrow view, then Wales would never bid for any major events, and we would be confining ourselves to the backwaters.

A confident, outward-looking Wales has a role to play in the world, and that includes hosting international events from time to time. We might need to pick and choose which we can afford, and which we think will do most for us and the people of Wales, but we shouldn't just decline to consider any such events on the basis of a simple profit and loss exercise. Neither should we seek to justify them on the basis of figures which are, at best, of dubious provenance.

My concern isn't about whether such events achieve the results which the government promise in advance (and which are ultimately pretty unprovable anyway), it's about whether we choose the right events, and whether we are able to afford the ones we select. Oh - and where the money comes from. I'm not sure that is is right or sensible to spend economic development money on such events.

Election round up

Tweet The official history of this election will be written in due course, once all the results are in. But after a long and hard campaign, here are a few initial thoughts, untainted, as it were, by any actual numbers.

Clearly, both the main UK parties thought they were learning from Obama by stressing the words 'Hope' in the case of Labour, and 'Change' in the case of the Tories. But it has seemed to me from the outset that they've heard the words, but not understood the message, because my perception is that the campaigns have actually centred around two rather different words.

Labour's campaign seems to have been primarily based around 'Fear' - fear of the Tories and what they might do. The Tories, on the other hand, seem to have opted for 'Despair' - despair about Brown and all his works. In short they've taken two essentially very positive words, and corrupted them into two highly negative campaigns.

Yesterday, Nick Ainger had an article on the IWA website, in which he said "many supporters of Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats have said they intend to vote tactically vote for me to ensure that the Conservative candidate doesn’t get in". I don't doubt that he's found a few saying that, as have I. I'm not sure about the use of the word 'many' though – but I'll come back to that.

Similarly, one of Simon Hart's leaflets carried a picture of a claimed 'Plaid supporter' who has switched to the Tories because "the only way to replace Labour is to vote for the Welsh (sic) Conservatives". He too has claimed that many others are saying the same.

Now, the fact that some supporters of Plaid and the Lib Dems are considering voting tactically against one or other of the main UK parties is no surprise at all. But I suspect that the extent of that is being exaggerated, and it's an over-simplistic analysis which ignores some other trends. Labour and Tory both need to exaggerate the trend, of course. So-called 'tactical' voting of this sort needs people to believe that lots of others are doing the same thing, or else it becomes pointless. In reality, to the extent that it is happening, I suspect that the two different sorts of 'anti' votes are largely cancelling each other out locally.

(As an aside, although AV is not a proportional system of voting, it does allow people to express a second choice, and have that second choice taken into account. I suspect that all parties would find that the second choices of their supporters are nowhere near as uniform as they seem to believe – and that some of them would be quite surprising. A topic for another day.)

The two trends identified by Labour and Tory candidates may be the only ones that they want to talk about – but they're not the only ones which are happening. There's a 'plague on both your houses' trend happening as well – traditional supporters of Labour and Tory alike, fed up at the sameness and bickering, who are looking for an alternative. Some of them will undoubtedly go to the Lib Dems on the back of Clegg's performance; but equally, I have picked up a sense that for some people, Clegg has simply 'joined the mainstream', and that the plague is now being cast upon all three of them.

Then we come to local factors.

'Hunting' is the one subject which the Tories have studiously avoided mentioning. It's easy to see why. Although hunting is a popular subject amongst a certain minority, it has no traction with the wider public. I suspect that even a majority of Tory supporters are opposed to repeal – I've certainly picked up some of them who will not vote for the Tory candidate because of this one issue.

Does the local campaign make any difference in the television age? I'm sure it still does, but it's hard to say how much. The Tory campaign, buoyed up by massive inflows of both financial and human resources from those whose sole aim is the repeal of the Hunting Act has been the strongest and most visible. Money talks – but is it enough to buy victory?

They've certainly had more posters up than anyone else, but most of them seem to be on farmland, which actually tells us little about the underlying strength of their support. And I've even heard suggestions that there have been landowners who have insisted on showing Tory posters even if the tenants are somewhat less enthusiastic. Now that would be an echo of the politics of the past, and of the reasons for the deep-seated hostility to Tories in parts of Wales.

The second strongest and most visible campaign has undoubtedly been the Plaid campaign. 'We've only seen you and the Tories' has been a common message as we've travelled around the constituency. We even picked up a hint over the weekend that the Tories were becoming more worried about our challenge than about Labour.

The Labour campaign seems to have been much patchier than I've ever seen it before – little evidence of a serious effort in many areas. And the Lib Dems have been all but invisible; their campaign has depended totally on the performance of Clegg in the media.

So – where does that leave us? A week or two ago, Vaughan Roderick blogged that no-one had a clue what was happening. I agreed with him then, and still do today. There are movements in voting patterns, but without knowing the relative volumes, it's hard to see an overall picture. Each party - inevitably - concentrates on those switches of allegiance from which it benefits, and conveniently ignores the others. It's spin rather than analysis, of course.

Large numbers of people, even yesterday, were still saying that they hadn't decided. Traditionally, that's been a polite way of saying 'no' in some cases, but I think that there are genuinely more uncertain people this time around, and canvassers from other parties have been saying the same thing.

One final point, which much of the analysis of the latest polls seems not to take into account, is the impact of postal voting. Whilst those voting today will be taking account of all the final statements and news, many of those voting by post – around 9,000 in this constituency – will already have cast their votes on the basis of the position as it looked a week or ten days ago.

Overall, sadly, an overwhelmingly negative election, with no real enthusiasm either for the present government or for the official opposition. And they know that as well as I do.

Enough navel-gazing – out to get on with another sort of roundup.

The wages of spin

Tweet I thought that Alastair Campbell performed well during his grilling by the Iraq enquiry; but I wouldn't have expected otherwise. He's a master at his trade, and that came across. The question is, though, how credible is he? All those years as a spinner have destroyed his credibility for many people, even if he's actually telling the truth.

In principle, I've never had an issue with an attempt to present a decision, policy, or whatever in the best possible light. Faced with a 1 litre container which has half a litre of water in it, there's nothing at all wrong with trying to present it as half full rather than half empty (or the other way around, if you're the opposition). But there's a great deal wrong with trying to present it as 'almost full', let alone 'overflowing'. And far too often, the spinners cross the line between selecting the most 'relevant' facts, and presenting them in the best possible light, and inventing 'facts' which support the story that they want to tell.

A strong and confident performance may look good on the news bulletins; but if it's based on untruths, it will eventually fall apart. Given the underlying untruths which seem to have been at the very heart of Blair's decision to go to war, I don't think that any performance on the witness stand, however adept, will salvage Blair's reputation on Iraq.

Ultimately, the wages of spin is disbelief. Making statements which are not credible, or which are later shown to be simply untrue, destroys the credibility of those who make them.

Proscription and spin

Tweet One does not have to have any sympathy with some of the messages being preached by the organisations which were proscribed by the government yesterday to have concerns about whether the decision to proscribe them was the right one. It seems a pretty illiberal response to organisations promulgating messages that most of us don't like very much. It also raises questions about how we decide which organisations to proscribe; if I agreed with the approach, I think I could make a reasonable case for proscribing the BNP, for instance.

Clearly, if an organisation, or any individuals belonging to an organisation, commit criminal offences, they can - and should - be prosecuted. There are plenty of laws available to the authorities, and Labour seem to have added not a few to the list in recent years. Proscription seems to be based on a suggestion of illegality where either the firm evidence is defective, or else the will to take a case to court is absent.

At a practical level as well, I'm far from certain that proscription is likely to be successful; it's far too easy for an organisation to disband and reform under another name, or even operate less obviously as an informal network. Successor organisations can in turn be banned, of course, but the authorities are likely to be playing a permanent game of catch-up.

I'm left wondering whether it wasn't simply an effort to appear to be doing something in response to wholly understandable and justifiable public outrage. It might make people feel better, but it probably hasn't achieved very much.

Dirty tricks not unique to one party

Tweet The outrage which the Tories have displayed over the antics of Damien McBride, and his attempts to publicise untrue allegations, is entirely justifiable of course. What was being planned and discussed was dishonest, cynical, and completely unacceptable.

By coincidence, whilst the storm was at its height over the weekend, I chanced upon this extract from Paddy Ashdown's autobiography in the Sunday Times. (How sad is reading that?). The final two paragraphs (referring, I believe, to the 1992 election) made interesting reading, given the statements being made on the media by prominent conservatives at the same time as I was reading the paper:

"All this made life for my family even more difficult and seriously undermined my self-confidence, too. That, it appears, was precisely what was supposed to happen – as we discovered after the election, when we learnt that some Tories had imported a group of US activists called “the Nerds”, whose job was to spread malign rumours and make unfounded personal accusations against senior opposition MPs.

"Perhaps this was done without official sanction from the top of the Conservative party. But after the election Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of The Sun, revealed that at least one cabinet-level Tory minister had approached him seeking to retail scurrilous and untrue allegations against a number of senior opposition MPs."

They say there's nothing new under the sun (or in this case, in The Sun), but it put the outrage into a rather different context. I don't, by any means, seek to justify or support what McBride and others were trying to do – it's a wholly unacceptable approach to politics. But people who live in glass houses really should be careful what they do with their stones…

Conflicting promises

Tweet The Green Man has written to me with a cut and pasted list of Peter Black's accusations of alleged failures by Plaid Cymru, seeking an explanation. It's an interesting, if somewhat muddled, list that Peter has put together, and to which Green Man has added some extra 'failures' in a comment before sending them on to me.

Inevitably, the original list has the sort of spin which one might expect of an opposition politiican. Lib Dem AMs are, of course, entitled to try and portray Plaid in the worst light possible, but he was really struggling with some of the items on his list. It felt a bit like he'd decided that he was going to get to a list of 10 by hook or by crook - but even after stretching the points as far as he could, he could still only manage a pretty tenuous 9.

In an even more interesting piece of spin, Green Man manages to invent promises that we never made in order to accuse us of not keeping them. It's an interesting approach, but pretty pointless really. According to him, we promised both a "moratorium on all further Wind Turbine developments" and "to cover all the best bits of Wales with ugly useless subsidised wind turbines". I suppose it's inevitable that he concludes we've only kept one of them – it would have been pretty difficult to keep both. In reality, of course, we promised neither and have done neither, but why let mere facts get in the way of a good rant?