Why concentrate only on one side of the equation?

Tweet

 

The government claims that its proposed changes to the rules for legal migration into the UK will reduce the net total by around 300,000 per year. If they fully implement what they have announced, that may well turn out to be an underestimate; their numbers are based on the English exceptionalist belief that people are so keen to come to the UK that people will leave their families behind and come to take up low-paid jobs as carers, and that the brightest and best post-graduate researchers will similarly abandon their families and come to the UK alone, at least until their salary crosses an arbitrary threshold. It’s a big ‘if’ though; and the chances of the Tories fully implementing the plans are vanishingly small, not least because it will take time to draw up the detailed rules and procedures and process all those applications already in the system whilst the clock is already ticking down to the next election.

However, that isn’t the only reason for doubting whether they will ever do more than talk about the plans. Assuming that potential immigrants will happily leave their families behind as well as paying increased fees for the privilege of coming to the UK is only one of the silly assumptions that they’re making. They are also assuming that the electors whose votes they are chasing would either prefer to see the social care system go into meltdown than have immigrants working in it or else don’t understand the degree of dependency on those immigrants. The reality will become obvious at some point. It’s not a crisis which would hit social care overnight, of course – but like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it’s something which will happen in two ways: slowly, and then suddenly. Perhaps there are some people who really would be happy with that – but it’s unlikely that those whose relatives are dependent on that care will agree. And as things slowly get worse, the government will inevitably be tempted to reverse its policy, albeit as quietly as possible. Hopefully before the collapse enters the sudden phase.

Labour’s response has been little better. Equally convinced that the population are demanding an immediate halt to immigration, they have come up with an entirely arbitrary proposal to cap net migration at 200,000. Why 200,000? Why not 250,000? Why not 150,000? These are not questions to which they have any sort of rational answer; they’ve simply produced a figure from thin air which they think might be acceptable to the racists and xenophobes whose votes they seek, with no real thought given to the implications. Yet still they are likely to win the next election. Suella Braverman has said this week that the Tories face “electoral oblivion” if the government’s Rwanda legislation fails. In a rare moment of consensus, I agree. But then I’d also agree if she’d said that the Tories face “electoral oblivion” if the government’s Rwanda legislation succeeds. Saying that the Tories face electoral oblivion is one of those sentences which currently works perfectly well without any qualifying clause.

There is one policy change that they could make which might actually get the net migration figure down without the performative cruelty which they both seem to think is essential politics. Mathematically, in any ‘net’ figure there are two factors involved – so increasing emigration would have the same effect on the net numbers as decreasing immigration. It’s unfortunate that they shot themselves in both feet by removing freedom of movement, but if the financial incentives were good enough, there might be quite a few people willing to help the government out of its troubles by emigrating. It’s not a solution that’s ever likely to occur to them though: from their exceptionalist position, they would never understand why anyone would ever want to escape the dysfunctional rogue state which the UK has become.

Drawing the right comparisons

Tweet

 

The course leader on a training session I attended many years ago made the dramatic assertion that anyone who claims to have more than three priorities actually has none. Whether ‘three’ is the right number in this statement is open to discussion, but his basic point was that having too many priorities leads to a lack of focus on what is really important. What brought it to mind was the changes to NHS targets in England, which highlighted just how many targets the NHS is actually trying to meet. And a huge problem with a target-based approach is that people end up managing to meet the targets rather than to deliver the best outcomes.

Another example which comes to mind is a time when I sat through a meeting of a local authority committee which was seeking to find what are euphemistically (but wholly inaccurately) referred to as ‘efficiency savings’. The work overseen by this particular committee was subject to, as I recall, 97 different ‘key performance indicators’. Most of them set, apparently, by the Welsh Government in Cardiff. One of them concerned dog fouling, and more specifically the percentage of incidents cleaned up within a defined period after receiving a report from a member of the public. The authority concerned was achieving a clear-up rate of something like 95% against a target of around 80% (my memory of the precise figures may not be entirely accurate). Anyway, the point is that the officer leading the discussion pointed out that the council got no extra credit for achieving such a high level and could make an ‘efficiency saving’ by deliberately reducing the level of service down to the targeted level. The target was effectively being presented as an absolute, not a minimum, service level to be met, and the targets were being used to make comparisons between different authority levels, in a situation where spending more than strictly necessary in order to exceed the target was as big a sin as not spending enough to meet it. It’s a petty example, of course, but it underlines the dangers of trying to manage large and complex organisations by setting large numbers of targets.

People sometimes assume that the private sector, motivated by an exclusive focus on profit, is somehow different, but my own experience suggests otherwise. Whilst there might be an overarching profit target to be met, large and complex organisations often end up splitting that target down into divisional and departmental targets. I have in the past found myself obliged to argue about whether my department or another should carry a particular cost (which was actually rather less than £1,000) when I thought my time might be better spent trying to increase income.

Whatever, and back to the NHS, it seems as if the English Health Minister is more concerned with demonstrating that the English NHS is doing better than its Welsh and Scottish equivalents than he is with achieving satisfactory patient outcomes. And he’s not afraid of using invalid comparisons (because the figures are collected on different bases) to support his argument. He did call for ‘more transparency’ from Wales and Scotland (translation: keep your statistics on the same basis as England or else), but the English numbers aren’t exactly transparent either, and keeping the numbers in a format specifically designed to enable the English Health Secretary to attack his Welsh and Scottish equivalents doesn’t look like the most attractive option for Wales and Scotland. More importantly, neither does it actually help to improve outcomes.

The health service in Wales is far from perfect, we all know that. And comparisons are an important way of learning, of course they are. But if I wanted to assess comparative Welsh performance, I wouldn’t choose England as the best, let alone only, comparator for everything. There are many other places which do some things better (as well as some things worse); learning from them and applying those lessons where applicable is a sensible exercise. But it’s about a lot more than reporting numbers against arbitrary targets and using the results for political point-scoring. It’s not a point that I’d expect an English nationalist like Barclay to understand – if you start from the unshakeable belief that the English NHS is the best health service in the world and has nothing to learn from anyone else, trying to force others to do as you do is the natural default. It is not, though, a default into which Wales and Scotland need fall. We have the opportunity to be more open to doing things differently and should take it. Ignoring Barclay is a good starting point – it’s not as if he’s going to be around much longer is it? My bigger concern is that Starmer seems to see managing NHS performance in the same terms.

Appealing to the minority

Tweet

 

Most of the most fervent supporters of Laura Norder, in her rawest and most vengeful state, tend to prefer to see her dressed in deepest blue, and are highly suspicious of attempts to lighten the shade a tad, never mind choose a different colour entirely. The result when the Labour Party attempts to steal ownership of the issue from the Tories is that it ends up sounding either like empty rhetoric (“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”) or like an even more extreme version of the Home Secretary of the day. Tony Blair ‘only’ had to outflank Michael Howard in the role; the increasingly hapless Keir Starmer has to deal with the deranged Suella Braverman. Desperate times call for desperate measures, some might say, which may help to explain Labour’s highly personalised attack ads on Sunak over crime issues.

It's not entirely unreasonable in principle to seek to associate the current leader of the Tory Party with the actions of his party’s government over the past 13 years, even if he wasn’t even in parliament for the first five of those years: the buck stops at the top. It does, though, make it harder for anyone with any sense of rationality or fairness to argue that the actual DPP at the time a decision was taken not to prosecute Jimmy Saville was in no way responsible for the decision taken by the organisation he headed, which was the essence of Johnson’s unpleasant slur against Starmer. And there is at least a danger that extending the criticism of Sunak all the way back to 2010 ends up sounding like a criticism for not changing the rules and processes bequeathed to the Tories by Labour following the 2010 election. Fighting fire with fire is one thing, but joining one’s opponent in the gutter is another entirely. One of the earliest moral strictures drummed into me as a child was that two wrongs don’t make a right; the Tories may have started the descent into the gutter, but that’s a wholly inadequate reason to join them there.

The third attack ad has been widely interpreted as being an attack on the PM’s wife, but it seems to me that, looked at in objective terms, it is the most valid of the three to appear to date. It is a matter of recorded fact that the Sunak household benefitted from the availability of non-dom status for tax purposes, and when it came to light, he seemed to see nothing wrong with the arrangement as a matter of principle. Certainly he did nothing as Chancellor, and has done nothing as PM, to abolish or limit the availability of the status, and whilst that’s a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission, it’s entirely fair to pin that one directly on him, in a way that blaming him for sentencing by the judiciary simply is not.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, all the reports suggest that Starmer is delighted by the reaction to the ads. It’s an approach which has left many, including members of his own party, uncomfortable and uneasy, but he doesn’t care. It’s not as if they’re going to vote Tory as a result. All he cares about is appealing to those voters who can win or lose him the next election. We can be certain that he will have had detailed analysis showing who these people are and what they care about, but we can get a long way towards answering those questions by some simple arithmetic. To win an absolute majority, he needs to win 128 seats directly from the Tories; to displace the Tories as largest party, 79 seats would do the job. Assuming that all the extras come as direct changes from Tory to Labour, he needs about 150,000 people to change their votes to win 79 seats, and around 500,000 to change their votes to achieve an overall majority. They are the only votes in whom he is interested; he can and will forget the other 46 million voters.

The problem with identifying such a minority slice of the electorate is that they are unlikely to be typical of the rest of us: appealing to Tory voters who live in seats with small Tory majorities necessarily involves appealing to a comparatively tiny minority of the electorate, and one likely to hold more extreme views. People who believe that the justice system is about punishment, not protection of the public, rehabilitation or re-education, and that the more people thrown into prison for longer terms in poor conditions the better. Many probably also want to bring back hanging and flogging. People who don’t like foreigners, especially those of a different skin hue, and think the EU is some sort of evil empire. People for whom the not-so-subtle racism invoked by associating a picture of a PM of Asian origin with a message suggesting that he is lenient on grooming gangs is more of a wink and a nudge than a red flag. They could have taken a different decision; they could have decided to try and appeal instead to those Tory voters (yes, there are some) who have been turned off by the dishonesty, sleaze and sheer incompetence of the last three PMs; they have instead decided to go after those voters to whom all the worst attributes of Johnson actually appealed.

At it’s simplest, it’s case of seeing the end as justifying the means, but it’s another serious indictment of an electoral system where parties know that they only need to pitch their appeal to a tiny minority of voters. It would never work in a properly proportional system.

Ideology hasn't gone away

Tweet

 

Something that this blog has touched on from time to time is the idea that ideology is no longer relevant, or that we live in some sort of ‘post-ideological’ world, as I’ve seen some politicians describe it. It isn’t true. Different ideological perspectives haven’t gone away at all; they are just not represented in the main political parties, and don’t form part of mainstream political debate. The two main UK parties have both bought in to the same ideology, and argument between them is more about whether, and to what extent, the effects of their common ideology should be mitigated than about whether the underlying tenets of that ideology should be challenged and debated. This article on Nation.Cymru a couple of days ago referred to the same issue, albeit that it wasn’t always clear about the distinction between principles and ideas on the one hand and underlying ideology on the other.

It isn’t easy to try and sum up an ideology in a few words for the purposes of a short blog post, but if I had to pick out some of the key elements of the capitalist ideology which constrains mainstream political debate in the UK, I would pick the following four points:

1.    Competition (between individuals, organisations, and states) is generally to be preferred over co-operation,

2.    The objective of the economy is the generation and accumulation of wealth, and the purpose of the state is to facilitate that aim,

3.    Success, whether for an individual, an organisation, or a state, is measured in terms of the amount of wealth accumulated, and

4.    The role of citizens is to serve the economy and the state in the generation and accumulation of wealth.

The difference between Labour and Tory isn’t about any of those underlying beliefs, it is about the detail of policy resulting from them – Labour want to make the distribution of the accumulated wealth a little less unfair, and want to help the least privileged to be better able to compete with others and to fulfil their allotted role in the economy. These may be worthy aims, but they don’t represent an ideological difference. They might argue that small, gradual, and incremental changes are all that’s possible in current circumstances, and making small improvements to people’s lives is worthwhile in itself. I don’t totally disagree with that: for the disadvantaged, even a small improvement is better than nothing. There is, though, no reframing of how things could be; no great vision for a better world. The difference is between sects within an ideology rather than between different ideological perspectives.

One alternative ideological perspective would be to re-write points 1 to 4 above as follows:

1.    Co-operation (between individuals, organisations, and states) is generally to be preferred over competition,

2.    The objective of the economy is to secure the fulfilment and happiness of the population, and the purpose of the state is to facilitate that aim,

3.    Success, whether for an individual, an organisation, or a state, is measured in terms of the extent to which people are happy and able to lead fulfilled lives,

4.    The role of the economy and the state is to serve citizens in the achievement of the above.

It would be silly, of course, to ignore the role of ‘wealth’ in its widest sense in enabling the alternative view. Money may not buy happiness, but its absence is a sure-fire way of making people unhappy. But the policy differences stemming from the second perspective are much more significant than a little bit of redistribution here, and a bit of extra help there. An education system aimed at developing people’s potential, and at having a well-educated population as a goal in itself, rather than a population only trained to do the work required is one. An understanding that ‘wealth’ ultimately boils down to ‘access to resources’, and that a resource-constrained world needs to agree on how to share those resources fairly for the benefit of all is another.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that we can get from where we are to where we could be overnight, although we certainly won’t get there by not trying. But the alternative vision isn’t even being presented; those for whom ‘there is no alternative’, to coin a phrase, have successfully closed the Overton window to a narrow interdenominational debate with the constraints of their own ideology. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Valuing outcomes over process

Tweet

 

One of the things I learned about running projects during my working life is that process is as important as outcome. And at the risk of being accused of a gross act of gender stereotyping, it also appeared to me that it was often (but not exclusively) men who fixated on outcomes, whilst women were often at least as interested in the process by which those outcomes were achieved. Success – at least in terms of carrying people with you – necessarily involves paying attention to both aspects. One of my great hopes for the Senedd (or Assembly as was) was always that achieving a gender balance might lead to a kinder form of politics in which the process of arriving at outcomes was given rather more importance than ever seemed to be the case in Westminster – that is to say that it would harness the best of both approaches. I haven’t been entirely disappointed, but then neither have things worked out quite as I would have hoped (especially, it has to be said, from the Conservative ranks).

At first sight, Rishi Sunak’s decision to use the Section 35 process to block the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Act might well look like a clever move. After all, there are elements of the Act which leave some SNP MSPs – to say nothing of party members or voters – very unhappy, and if you’re going to choose a battlefield, one where the enemy is divided is better than one where he is united. It is, though, a classic example of confusing outcomes with process. And probably deliberately so. The problem doesn’t start and end with Sunak and the Tories either. Labour’s parliamentary opposition to devolving the right to Wales to review gender recognition rules here (despite the views of Labour MSPs), and what looks like implicit support for Sunak on this issue, seems to be based on similar considerations. It’s not at all clear whether, or to what extent, the problems over this particular legislation played a part in the announcement this week of the Scottish First Minister’s resignation, nor whether her successor will do what she said she was going to do and challenge the UK government’s decision in the courts. Given the divisions within the SNP on the substantive issue, it’s a tough call; but leaving the decision unchallenged serves only to emphasise the reality of devolution: real power remains in London.

A few days ago, Simon Jenkins wrote a column for the Guardian in which he argued that there has always been another route to independence, via the infamous ‘devo-max’ referred to by Gordon Brown and others at the time of the last independence referendum. I suspect that he’s entirely right in his suggestion that had that third option been on the ballot paper in 2014, it would have secured an easy majority over both independence and the status quo. That’s partly, at least, because ‘devo-max’ is – and always has been – an ill-defined proposition which means different things to different people. The likelihood that legislation passed by either the Tories or Labour in London would have matched the expectations raised by the term must surely be close to zero, meaning that it would have resolved nothing. We have, after all, seen what they did with the famous ‘Vow’, which was effectively gutted by the parties who signed up to it. But, even supposing that ‘devo-max’ legislation had been written and passed, both Labour and the Tories would certainly have inserted the equivalent of Section 35 somewhere; at the end of the day, whatever the extent of devolution, however the legislation is framed, power devolved will always mean power retained.

There is one, and only one, way of bringing about anything remotely resembling a federal UK, and that is to start from a position where each of the member countries is assumed to be independent and they then come together as equals to agree which powers (if any) are better pooled and shared. Voluntary pooling of sovereignty on the one hand, and the centre ‘allowing’ specified powers to be exercised for the time being by devolved legislatures on the other, are two completely different animals. It’s not a distinction which the main UK parties are capable of making; for them, achieving their desired outcome (maintenance of a unified state) will always trump considerations of process and buy-in.

Tweedleleft and Tweedleright

Tweet

 

Leaving aside for a moment the not-inconsequential question of how meaningful terms like left wing or right-leaning are, a self-styled ‘right-leaning’ think tank produced a report last week claiming that Labour could secure a huge majority if only they shifted their social policies to the right. It’s a cunning plan – become indistinguishable from the Tories on policy in a range of areas, and Tory voters might vote for you. It’s hardly a new idea, though. It was, after all, Thatcher’s boast that her greatest achievement was New Labour, meaning that she had shifted the Overton window of political debate in the UK to the right in such a way that, to stay within that window, Labour also needed to move right. And if we assume that the prime function of any political party is to gain power, then pitching its appeal to the beliefs and prejudices of the electorate is one way of doing exactly that.

What it is not, however, is a programme for change or any sort of demonstration of leadership. Nor is it about setting out the possibility of an alternative future. It does seem, though, to be exactly what Keir Starmer is doing, with or without being nudged that way by Tory think tanks. And not only on ‘social’ policies. The think tank suggests that a more left wing approach to economics is acceptable to voters as long as social and cultural policies are right wing; but Starmer and his shadow Chancellor are wedded to right wing economic policy as well. They are hopelessly committed to the idea of avoiding new debt and repaying old debt, a policy which is not only unnecessary, but which also commits them, one way or another, to some variation on austerity.

Specifically, the report suggests that Labour needs to appeal more to ‘authoritarian’ voters. A choice between an authoritarian Tory government and an authoritarian Labour government, pursuing broadly similar economic policies, is not the most appealing prospect. It’s another argument, for those of us who believe that there is an alternative, for Wales to go its own way.

Labour to embrace Tory alternative reality

Tweet

 

According to Labour’s leader Keir Starmer, voting for Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal will bring closure to the whole EU debate in the UK, marking the end of divisions both within the Labour Party and in the population at large. It’s straight out of the Johnson / Trump playbook, but stating as fact something that is plainly not true doesn’t make it fact for them, and it won’t work for Starmer either. As noted yesterday, there isn’t an easily identified and objectively ‘right’ way to vote on the deal being presented to parliament today (although there are plenty of wrong, or at least misleading, ways of justifying the decision taken), but even if there were, the issue would be far from closed.

It is entirely understandable that Starmer would seek to avoid the question of the UK’s relationship with the EU being a major issue in the 2024 election, but equally impossible that he can control that. In the first place, the deal that has been agreed is, at best, half-baked – there are many loose ends around which negotiations will continue for the rest of this decade. Then there is the five-and-a-half-year deal on fisheries which will require substantial renegotiation in the coming years, and where failure to agree could undermine the whole deal. Then there are the inevitable and pre-announced attempts by the current UK government to backtrack on regulatory alignment which are likely to lead to running battles over the terms of trade. Johnson needs a villain, and the idea that the EU will cease filling that role for his government in order to allow Labour to move away from the issue is fantasy. There is also the impact of Brexit on the future cohesion of the UK – that isn’t going away any time soon. And finally, for any party which claims that its aim is to improve the lives of the people of the UK (and I think Labour still makes that claim, although it’s sometimes hard to be certain), there are a whole host of ways in which the future relationship with the EU could and should be improved – is Labour really planning to offer no view on any of that?

Above all, there is the obvious and looming reality that an isolated UK on the fringes of the world’s largest and most successful trading block will perform less well in the decades to come than it could as a member. Going back to the 1960s, this was, ultimately, the reason for the UK’s accession to the Common Market in the first place. The biggest differences between now and then are that the EU now is bigger, more successful, and more integrated as a market than it was then, and that the alternative model (strengthening EFTA) which many of us supported at that time is no longer available. The idea that the ongoing relationship with that market can be set in stone today, for a decade or more, by a thin and inadequate deal which closes off future debate is a fantasy – and a dangerous one at that.

The Brexit myth was and still is that a small offshore country can deregulate business and individuals and still be allowed to compete on equal terms, with trade determined solely on price in accordance with a simplistic textbook view of economics. It’s almost understandable why a bunch of people who know more about financial manipulation and speculation than real industry and business might think that can work, but it’s a lot harder to see why the Labour Party are so keen to embrace the same alternative reality. Starmer is about to set the terms of his own failure.

Tory MPs are just grandstanding

Tweet

There are those who struggle to understand why someone who has spent his whole life aiming to take on the top job should be so willing to risk his hold on it for the sake of retaining one member of his team. But I think that misreads the nature of Boris Johnson’s ambition and the nature of the job that he thinks he’s doing. He never really wanted to be PM at all – the job he wanted was world king. And the sort of monarch he wanted and still wants to be is the absolute variety – none of this ‘constitutional monarchy’ nonsense for him. Being merely the Prime Minister of a small part of the world is a long way short of achieving his lifetime ambition, but in settling for something which isn’t even second-best, he’s trying to do the job as though it were the one he wanted. In his world, if the king says something is so, then it is so – anyone who says otherwise is a traitor.

We know from his time in school that he has always believed that normal rules and constraints don’t apply to him, and he has lived his life accordingly – brushing off and brazening out any and every situation or problem which would have brought down lesser mortals. To highlight just one incident from many years ago, the way he treated his participation in a conversation about having a journalist beaten up as though it was a huge joke should have ended any hopes he had of ever achieving high office. Being sacked for lying – twice – ought to have exposed the nature of the man as well but he has simply carried on regardless. The one thing that he has learned from all this is that the technique works; nothing embarrasses him, nothing makes him feel any shame or regret, nothing dents or damages his enormous ego and self-esteem.

So, faced with an apparent crisis with his chief advisor having been caught out cheating and lying, with his own daily lies being exposed every more clearly, why wouldn’t he believe that he can simply bluster his way through the bad patch until people’s attention turns to something else? What if he is losing support amongst his own MPs – this is a man who turned a majority government into a minority government just a few short months ago by expelling anyone who disagreed with him. He then proceeded to win a huge majority of seats in the general election which followed. Why wouldn’t he believe that he can do it again? “With one bound he was free” was the leitmotif of Dick Barton, but it could equally be the phrase which encapsulates the charmed life of the chancer who currently holds the position of Prime Minister of the UK.

Whilst observers speculate on how long he can hang on to his right-hand man, seen from his position the problem is merely one of riding out the storm until people find something else to talk about. As king, he has the sovereign right to appoint who he wants when he wants; he and his immediate courtiers have the absolute right to do as they please when they please; having to answer questions from subjects is all a bit of a bore and a waste of his valuable time. Mere disagreement from those he regards as lesser people doesn’t and won’t phase him, just as it never has in the past. Some Tory MPs are breaking ranks to express a contrary view but experience has taught him that he can safely ignore them. The Tory party has traditionally been ruthless in removing its leaders but he’s purged the party to such an extent that I wonder whether it is any longer capable of such action. Unless the rebels are prepared to commit regicide, verbal criticism in response to constituent pressure is just grandstanding.

Not bizarre enough yet

Tweet

Some Tory MPs, including failed leadership candidate Dominic Raab, have been arguing in recent days that it will be “the EU’s fault” if the UK walks away without a deal at the end of October.  It sounds a bit like the playground argument that ‘some big boys made me do it, Miss’, a level of argument wholly appropriate to the farce of the Tory Donkey Derby. 

But in principle, he does have a point – if someone is refusing to accept a reasonable argument, then they are at least partly responsible for what happens as a consequence.  My problem, though, is understanding exactly which bit of ‘we demand that you bend the rules of the single market to suit us, give us rights not enjoyed by member states to negotiate separate deals, and open up an uncontrolled back door into the single market in Ireland’ he considers to be reasonable.

Meanwhile the man who made the bizarre claim that he makes and paints model buses out of old wine crates (in what looks like an attempt to find out just how gullible his target electorate – the Tory membership - is) has displayed his mathematical ‘prowess’ by stating that setting a firm and immovable target for leaving, whether there is a deal or not, somehow makes the odds of leaving without a deal a million to one against.  This is tantamount to claiming that the odds of an EU27 which has consistently said that the withdrawal deal cannot be negotiated agreeing to cave in and make changes after all are 999,999 to 1 on. 

One possible explanation is that he’s actually realised just what a task he has in front of him and is now trying to lose; it would be a better explanation of some of his recent statements than that he’s making a serious attempt to win.  It might also suggest that he’s not quite as irrational as he appears.  The problem with this approach, however, is that he is seriously underestimating the gullibility of that target electorate.  He’ll have to come up with something much more bizarre than he’s managed to date if he really wants to lose.

The universe might not be big enough

Tweet

Infinity is a difficult concept to explain, but the old saying that given an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of keyboards and an infinite length of time, one of them would end up typing out the complete works of Shakespeare, correctly spelled and in the correct order, is as good an attempt as any.  If the number of possibilities is endless, then all possibilities must occur at least once (although a pedantic mathematician might well argue that in such a scenario, the Shakespeare possibility, like all the others, would itself occur an infinite number of times).  Put in simpler terms, it means that to get a specific outcome from a random process requires a very large number of iterations.

Given that requirement for very large numbers, it is surely no surprise that of the 10 candidates in the Tory leadership contest, none of them has managed to display an anywhere decent hold on reality.  Indeed, 10 being almost infinitesimal when compared with infinity, it’s close to a mathematical certainty that none would be able to do so.  It could be argued that we need to make a few adjustments to the arithmetic, however, to take account of the fact that, contrary to appearances, the leadership election process isn’t entirely random.  The 10 possibilities have been self-selected from a larger pool of around 300 Tory MPs (I think 313 at the time of writing, but who knows by this time next week?).  Mathematically, that’s still a lot closer to infinitesimal than infinite, though, so it doesn’t really change the calculations much.  And there’s no real evidence that the Conservative Party’s selection processes, let alone the electoral system in the UK, positively select for those with a grasp on reality.  Indeed, looking at polls on the views of the party membership, the opposite seems more likely to be true.

The multiverse theory postulates that there are a large number of parallel universes, so it has to be possible that there might just be one universe, somewhere out there, where at least one of the candidates for the leadership understands the world in which (s)he is living.  It doesn’t postulate that the number is infinite, however, so we’re still only dealing with probabilities.  But given that the number isn’t infinite, we can probably safely conclude that there is unlikely to be a universe anywhere in which Boris Johnson is regarded as an honest and realistic politician.  It was Douglas Adams who said that “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”  It still might not be big enough to avoid a Boris premiership, though.

Is dishonesty really the same as sophistication?

Tweet

There is a long and utterly dishonourable tradition in rural Welsh politics where so called ‘Independent’ candidates for local authorities get elected unopposed by any of the formal political parties.  One of the reasons for this is that some of them adopt the practice of telling all of the parties “I’m with you really, but I’m more likely to get elected as an independent”, and have even been known to give small donations to multiple parties as a token of their ‘good faith’.  I even recall one who told us that he’d be standing as a Plaid candidate next time round so we didn’t need to oppose him, but he didn’t want to announce it until after nominations closed so that none of the other parties could oppose him.  It’s probably needless to say that after nominations closed and it was too late to find another candidate, it emerged that he was standing as an ‘independent’, yet again.

It’s a practice which was brought to mind by the ‘news’ from the Conservative Party leadership contest that Boris Johnson has developed an almost unassailable lead amongst MPs with 80 now allegedly supporting him.  The Conservative Party likes to regard its MPs as being “the most sophisticated electorate in the world”, but this is actually a euphemism for “the biggest bunch of liars”.  Given that the eventual vote is held by secret ballot, it is perfectly possible – and apparently entirely normal – for MPs to pledge their vote privately to more than one candidate, in the hope that if they are believed to have been on the winning side, they may gain some preferment when ‘their’ candidate has been elected.

What that means, in practice, is that Johnson and his team haven’t a clue how many are actually going to vote for him, and nor do any of the other candidates.  The ‘news’ that he is far in the lead is no more than propaganda parading as fact in a dark and devious attempt to give the impression that his ascent is unstoppable.  There are two things that I don’t understand, though.  The first is why any news media – all of which know what a bunch of liars they’re dealing with – should choose to present this as ‘news’.  The second is why any of those resorting to such propaganda – who are even more aware than the media of the level of dishonesty amongst their colleagues – would think it stands any chance of working.

Setting us against each other

Tweet

Yesterday’s report from a committee of the House of Lords on “intergenerational fairness” raises some important points, but spectacularly misses the most important of all.  No, it’s worse than that – it doesn’t so much miss the point as reinforce a completely and deliberately misleading view of the problem.

I’ve never thought that things like the Winter Fuel Payment, the Christmas pension bonus and free TV licences were much more than political gimmicks – (comparatively) cheap giveaways by the chancellors who introduced them with a view to seeking the votes of a particular demographic whilst avoiding the more costly alternative of paying a decent pension in the first place.  (I put bus passes in a rather different category, since they also help to encourage a switch from private to public transport which has wider benefits than those gained by the groups in receipt of passes.)  The question surrounding their abolition should be the straightforward one about whether the basic pension is at an adequate level.

Evidence on that is mixed.  There are various tables showing that the state pension in the UK is lagging far behind that in other countries (here’s one example), but a fair comparison isn’t quite as simple as that, as this analysis indicates, because there are a range of other factors which need to be taken into account.  It would be fair to say, though, that state pensions in the UK are not exactly the most generous when compared with other countries of similar size and wealth.  Whilst I’m not a huge supporter of these fringe gimmicks, for those wholly or mostly dependent on the state pension those ‘extras’ are small but they are a welcome supplement to income; removing them without addressing the underlying low level of the pension is premature to say the least.

None of that is my real argument with yesterday’s report, however.  That relates rather to the juxtapositioning of benefits for the old with the struggles of the young, and the underlying argument that giving to the young depends on taking from the old.  Setting one less advantaged group against another is one of the oldest tricks in the book for those who wield the real power and control the real wealth.  Blaming immigrants for the lack of housing or blaming the old for the inability of the young to afford a home are two sides of the same coin – and both avoid discussing (let alone addressing) the real problem of an unequal distribution of wealth and income in society.  When the richest 10% of the UK’s population own more than 50% of the total wealth, the important inequality isn’t between old and young at all. 

It was disappointing, but sadly not at all surprising, to see Labour peers lining up with their Conservative counterparts to set the young against the old by telling them that their problems are being caused by giving too much money to pensioners.  It's a long way from that party's historic roots.

An election wouldn't get May off the hook

Tweet

There has been a degree of speculation about Theresa May calling a snap election, with reports that some ministers have warned their local activists to be ready.  The Prime Minister has ruled it out and has already promised her party that she will not lead them into the next General Election, but given her record, neither of those are reasons to assume that she won’t do it.

Depending on the extent to which seats actually change hands, an election could certainly change the parliamentary arithmetic, but whether it unblocks the Brexit process is another question entirely.  It would force Labour to clarify its position in its manifesto, and a lot of questions have, rightly, been asked about what Labour’s manifesto would say about Brexit – whenever the next election comes.  Rather unfairly, considerably less attention has been given to the Conservative manifesto.  At one level, this is understandable: the PM writes the manifesto, and we can probably assume that it will refer to the implementation of her deal. 

But to what extent would any such manifesto actually bind the MPs elected on it?  Even if she were to win a working majority in such an election (itself very much open to doubt) is she really stupid enough to assume that Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve would all suddenly feel themselves bound to support her deal?  An election might well make Labour’s position clearer, but it will do little or nothing to resolve the internal conflicts within the Tory party.  Those conflicts have driven the Brexit mess from the outset; they will continue to do so even if, by some strange chance, the PM were to win a majority of seats in a snap election.  

As far as Brexit and the Conservative Party are concerned, an election would resolve nothing.  It would, though, kick the can a bit further down the road and therefore meet the only discernible political objective which the Prime Minister has.

How long is the horn?

Tweet

Based on his speech yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn has clearly been taking lessons from Theresa May.  And fair play to him, why should it be the exclusive preserve of the Tories to make speeches in which they say very little but which the media portray as some sort of pivotal moment?  For make no mistake about it – despite the media hype, the detail of what Corbyn actually said (full text available here) was essentially the same as what he and the Prime Minister have both been saying for months. 

It’s true that he said that Labour would seek to remain in ‘a’ customs union, something which May has ruled out.  That certainly looks like a difference, but the devil is in the detail.  The Government have ruled out remaining in any sort of customs union on the solid and entirely accurate basis that any such union necessarily precludes individual trade agreements with third party countries.  They are demanding a bespoke agreement instead which provides the benefits of the customs union whilst also allowing the UK to negotiate other trade deals.  What Corbyn said was that he was quite happy for the UK to remain in a new bespoke customs union, but that such an arrangement “would depend on Britain being able to negotiate agreement of new trade deals in our national interest.”  That doesn’t look like a whole lot of difference to me; it’s just semantics.

It is, of course, in the interests of the Tories to pretend that Labour are saying something radically different so that they can portray them as betraying the will of the people.  It is in the interest of the Labour Party to pretend that they are saying something radically different so that they can persuade Remainers to vote for them in the general election which is looking increasingly likely.  And it is in the interests of the media to pretend that Labour are saying something radically different so that they have something to report.  However, none of this actually makes it any different in reality.  Using different terminology to describe a beast of fantasy doesn’t make it any less of a fantasy.

In the epic session at Chequers last week, the Tories managed to unite around the proposition that they want the EU to provide a unicorn.  I’m not sure that they’ve entirely resolved the enormously important theological questions about how long or what colour the horn should be, but they’re absolutely certain that any type of horse would be completely unacceptable, and a betrayal of the will of the people who, whether they knew it or not, demanded a unicorn in the referendum.  And, let me be clear (as the PM might say), the government is getting on with the work of delivering that unicorn in the negotiations with the EU27.  Corbyn and Labour, on the other hand, are now entirely in agreement that they are not going to demand a unicorn at all, oh no.  For them, a horse will be perfectly acceptable, just as long as it has a large single horn growing out of its forehead.  I don’t know whether they’ve got round to discussing the size and colour of the horn yet, but I’m sure that they will in due course.

Meanwhile, the EU27are doing a lot of collective head-scratching, wondering what sort of people can devote so much time and energy to debating the finer points of the appearance of a mythical beast.  For those who follow the true faith of Brexit, this insistence on ascribing the status of myth to their beloved unicorn (or one-horned horse if you prefer that term) is yet another example of the way in which those evil Europeans are determined to punish the UK for leaving the EU.

Now, let’s get down to basics.  Should the horn be smooth or spiralled?

Agreeing to disagree

Tweet

The increasingly public disagreements within the UK cabinet would be funny if the issue weren’t so serious.  Their attempts to claim that they’re saying the same thing when they are very obviously saying something very different are stretching the meaning of language considerably.  Agreeing that ‘freedom of movement’ ends in 2019 because the EU rule no longer applies, but then arguing that ending compliance with the rule does not mean that people will no longer be free to move for some years to come is a distortion worthy of Orwell.  And even that distortion isn’t acceptable to the Foxes of this world.

It isn’t only the Tories who are struggling, though.  When John McConnell claimed last week that Jeremy Corbyn and Carwyn Jones ‘are on the same page’, I surely wasn’t the only one left asking myself whether they were indeed looking at the same page number, but in completely different books.  In a similar attempt at distorting language, it seems that the claim is based on them wanting the same thing – the ‘exact same’ benefits of membership of the single market.  It’s just that half of them believe that they can have that without being a member of the single market whilst the other half have at least a nodding acquaintance with Planet Earth.

The denied divisions are having a serious impact on both parties.  On the government side the paralysis caused by infighting and a lame duck Prime Minister is increasingly hampering the government’s ability to do anything very much; and on the opposition side, some are even starting to talk about splitting the party over the issue. 

Margaret Thatcher once famously said that her greatest achievement was New Labour; that she had, in effect, provoked a change as a result of which the party became little more than a clone of the Conservative Party.  She didn’t do a lot for the Tories, though.  She left them as she found them – bitterly divided over Europe.  It’s a division which has haunted her successors.  The Cameron-May legacy doesn’t look to have done anything other than made that problem worse, although perhaps they too will look to what they’ve achieved for Labour instead.  Infecting that party with the same toxic virus over Europe as their own party has suffered for many years is an achievement, of sorts, I suppose.

Money, students and manifestos

Tweet

It’s only a few weeks since the UK General Election and already Labour seem to be rowing back on their promise to write off student debt, with claims in the last few days that it was more of an 'ambition' than a firm policy, even if it didn’t exactly sound that way during the election campaign. 

Here in Wales, Plaid Cymru, the party which helped Labour introduce tuition fees in the first place during the One Wales period, is now criticising Labour for increasing fees to match the latest change in England, claiming that the proposal goes against the Labour Party’s manifesto.  They presumably assume that we’ve all forgotten that when most of the Plaid AMs voted to introduce fees in the first place they were also going against their own manifesto commitment.  (And it’s worth noting that the politician taking the decision to increase fees is actually a member of the Lib Dems, another party with a somewhat, shall we say ‘chequered’, history on the question of fees.)  The whole issue of student fees seems to be one which unites governing parties in supporting them whilst opposition parties unite in opposing them, and that’s true whichever party forms either the government or the opposition.

The underlying question has two strong ideological elements to it.  The first is whether services supplied by the government should be collectively funded or paid for by those who actually use them, and the second is to do with the question of the availability of money for the government to pay for things.

Regular readers will know that I’m a committed supporter of the idea that services should be funded collectively rather than paid for individually, and I entirely accept that that is a position which flows from my own ideological standpoint.  In the case of university education, I accept that those benefitting from it often end up better off financially than those who don’t, but a properly progressive taxation system would ensure that those with the highest earnings also make the highest contributions to paying for services.  (And, as an aside, people who end their education at ‘A’ level tend to do better financially than those with GCSEs, and those with GCSEs do better than those without.  Why single out one particular type of education for payment at point of use?)

But let’s turn to the second ideological factor – the availability or otherwise of money.  Governments, of whatever colour, tell us that ‘we can’t afford’ to provide university education without charging for it.  But like all the other things that they tell us we can’t afford, it comes down to policy choices.  How much the government raises in taxes, how much it borrows, and how much it spends are all political choices.  When the government needs a few billions for some project or other – such as buying the support of the DUP or starting another war somewhere – it can always find it, because the UK Government controls the money supply.

However, the Welsh Government does not control its money supply.  It has long been a theme of this blog that governments are not like households, and they really don’t have to balance their budgets in the same way, but more accurately, that is only true for governments which can control the supply of money – like the UK Government.  The Welsh Government’s budget, on the other hand, really is more like that of a household, and a household whose purse strings are controlled elsewhere and which can be arbitrarily loosened or tightened.  Whilst I might have had more sympathy for Labour’s response if they had been more honest and spelled out more clearly that any promise relating to fees in Wales was wholly dependent on the election of a Labour Government for the UK as a whole (and therefore on voters in England), their basic point that they can only find the money to do something different in Wales if London gives it to them or they cut elsewhere is a valid excuse in itself.

The backtracking by UK Labour is a far more serious issue.  The interesting point is that in his interview McDonnell actually acknowledged that half the nominal amount of student debt will never be paid back in any event.  And figures elsewhere suggest that 70% of students will never repay the whole of their debt.  In essence, the whole edifice of student loans and debts is based on little more than an accounting sleight of hand. 

The UK Government pretends that it is not paying student fees because the students are paying them.  But the students do so by borrowing the money from the Student Loans Company which is wholly owned by the UK Government.  And where does their money come from?  From the Government, of course.  So, instead of using borrowing, taxation or the magic money tree to pay fees, the government raises the same money from the same sources to fund loans through the SLC, and for accounting purposes assumes that it’s going to get around half of it back over a lengthy period.  The other half – the bit that will never be repaid – will, in effect, have already been paid by the government – exactly what the government says it ‘can’t afford’ to do as a reason for introducing tuition fees in the first place.

Before the election, it appeared that Labour were offering hope to young people that they could enjoy a university education in exchange for paying a fair share of tax if they earned more when they took up employment.  It even looked as though they understood that governments are not like households.  After the election, it appears that they’re reverting to type and falling in with the Tories’ attitude towards finances after all.

How will you pay for it?

Tweet

When it comes to political manifestos, I struggle to work out which is the silliest – asking that question, or trying to answer it.  But that doesn’t stop them.  Having ‘fully-costed’ manifestos is, it seems, de rigueur, even if it’s economic nonsense, and yesterday’s Labour manifesto was a case in point.  I can’t remember when or how it became necessary for parties to explain in detail both the cost and the method of financing of their policy proposals, but I suspect it’s a consequence of the Thatcher years when a political ideology contrary to the interests of the many was promulgated by the simple expedient of pretending that government spending is like household spending, and must always balance out.

It’s a simple enough comparison to make, and it’s counter-intuitive to argue that it’s nonsense, which is why it has taken hold to the extent that it has.  The press and broadcast media promote the ideology by default – whether because they are biased towards it, see it as in their own best interest, are innumerate, or are just plain lazy is an open question.  It doesn’t really matter why – the effect is that parties have become so afraid of challenging the established wisdom that they seek to comply even if at least some of those involved realise how silly it is.

So, yesterday was Labour’s turn to answer the silly question and explain how they will pay for one of the boldest manifestos put forward for many a year, so they duly gave an appropriately silly answer.  Oh the numbers certainly add up, it’s just that they’re based on so many unstated assumptions as to be completely meaningless.  The government, with all its statisticians and experts, has only just been able to tell us what the rate of inflation was last month, and nobody knows what the actual rate of economic growth is until after the event either.  And that’s without throwing in uncertainty over exchange rates, Brexit, and unexpected events which are, by their nature, unforeseeable.  Yet producing a ‘fully-costed’ manifesto requires all of these things to be known for the next five years in advance.  It’s impossible; figures which can only be, at best, rough estimates based on a whole range of assumptions are being bandied around as though they are gospel truth.

Since being elected in 2010, and again in 2015, the Tories have borrowed hundreds of billions of pounds more than they said they would.  This is equivalent to hundreds of billions of pounds’ worth of uncosted expenditure compared to their manifesto promise, yet few of the media so keen to pin down Labour and other opposition parties seem to bat an eyelid over that.  Politicians can get away with uncosted expenditure as long as either a) they don’t predict it in advance, or b) they’re Tories, apparently.  But having said that, I should make it clear that it’s the hypocrisy and double standards to which I object, not the borrowing itself.

Borrowing, despite all the rhetoric, actually makes sense at a time when people are queuing up to lend money to the government at what are, effectively, negative real interest rates.  They don’t call it lending to the government, of course – they call it investing in NSI products, or buying government bonds.  But whatever they call it they are in fact lending money to the government, and are currently willing to go on doing so.  Labour’s talk of increasing borrowing not only makes economic sense, it’s a welcome change from the ideological straitjacket.  My main criticism would be that they’ve tried to put a firm figure on it, rather than simply stating that they will borrow whenever it makes sense to do so.

There’s an interesting analysis here of borrowing over the years by Labour and Conservative governments respectively.  It clearly shows that the rhetoric generally being used is at variance with the truth: overall, Tory governments borrow more and Labour governments are actually better at repaying debt.  One possible (and counter-intuitive interpretation) of this is that, actually, the Tories really are better at economics than Labour, and that, despite what they say, they have a willingness to borrow as and when appropriate – we just need to judge them on what they do, rather than on what they say they will do.  It isn’t the only possible interpretation however, and it would be a far too simplistic one.  A more detailed analysis of the difference in circumstances facing governments of the two parties would be too lengthy for this post.  It’s enough for the time being to indicate that knee-jerk criticism of Labour for planning to borrow owes more to spin than to good economics.

Where's the alternative?

Tweet

Whilst the extent of their success may have been somewhat overplayed by the press and media, there can be no doubt that last Thursday’s local elections were a boost to the Tories.  But if there’s one thing that must be even more pleasing than the actual results to the Welsh Tory high command, it’s the reaction of the other parties.

This response from Wayne David was typical of the complacency coming from Labour in particular.  It is of course true that the Tory advance in Wales was not as great as some polls had been suggesting, and was less than in England, but at least part of that is down to the fact that there are large swathes of the old Glamorgan and Gwent where the Tories can rarely even be bothered to stand.  Holding off a Tory surge in areas where the Tories have few or no candidates hardly counts as a huge achievement.  At a time when yet another election has demonstrated that many parts of Wales are becoming similar to England in terms of voting behaviour, suggesting that Welsh Labour has somehow got it right and can teach English Labour a thing or two looks more like ignoring reality than facing up to it.

As voting behaviour in Wales increasingly changes to match that in England, few things will please the Tories more than to see Welsh Labour reverting to its default – and only – strategy of not being the Tories.  I suspect that Labour will have to suffer even more damage – possibly even terminal damage – before they realize that the strategy is of increasingly limited value.  Harking back to Thatcher and the miners – let alone Churchill and Tonypandy – is appealing to a demographic which is inevitably and inexorably declining due to natural causes.

But one of the problems facing us in Wales is that it isn’t just Labour which is depending on this out-dated strategy.  Much of what I‘ve seen of Plaid’s messaging for the General Election so far seems to be based on the idea that they’re even more anti-Tory than the Labour Party.  It looks as if we’re facing an election where the two main opponents of the Tories in Wales are going to spend much of their time arguing over who’s best-placed to defend us from those who will, yet again, be painted as baby-eaters or worse.

It’s an essentially negative approach, with little by way of vision for an alternative future.  Worse still, it fails to present an alternative set of values.  One of the reasons for the increasing success of the Tories has been that they have managed to get increasing numbers of people to buy in to what is essentially a selfish political philosophy.  Whether they’re talking about looking after Brits first, controlling the borders, cutting benefits, or cutting taxes, the underlying theme is one of an appeal to individualism and selfishness amongst the target demographic and demonising the non-target demographic.

In much of their response to this approach, the self-styled ‘progressive’ parties seem largely to accept the implicit values and propose minor variations to policy; what they’re not doing is promoting an alternative set of values based around community solidarity and collectivism.  The existence of that alternative set of values amongst the Welsh electorate is simply assumed, despite the growing evidence to the contrary.  But failure to promote an alternative set of values leaves a situation in which people are being asked to choose which of the parties will best deliver on the one set of values which is evident.  Why wouldn’t voters increasingly turn to the Tories?

Don't do as I do...

Tweet

It was always clear that those arguing for the UK to leave the EU were right, in simply factual terms, in saying that if the UK was currently paying in £18 billion and only getting £9-10 billion back, the UK would be able to replicate all current EU spending in Wales and the UK more generally, and there would also be a ‘surplus’ of some £8-9 billion available for spending on other things.  Or, at least, it was factually accurate with one condition - the only impact on finances is the change in the way that £18 billion is spent.

It was always equally clear, however, that that change would not and could not happen in isolation.  Some of the functions carried out by the EU and paid for by the UK subscription would need in future to be carried out by the UK so part of the ‘surplus’ was already accounted for.  And it was always highly unlikely that a UK Government, with a different set of priorities and an ingrained resistance to the whole concept of regional aid, would ever agree to spend the money in the same way.

But, even more significantly than either of those factors, there is the impact on other government revenues and expenditure of the decision to leave the EU.  Now I’ve long believed that the UK economy can and will adapt to being outside the EU, which is why I never saw the argument as being predominantly an economic one.  But that’s not to say that it will adapt immediately; there was always going to be a short-term shock before the adaptation happened. 

The result of that short-term shock will probably be a reduction in growth and a corresponding reduction in taxation revenues received by the Exchequer.  (Insofar as there is an economic argument for Brexit, it is the belief that short-term pain will lead to long term gain, and it surprised me throughout the campaign that the Brexiters didn’t use that honest argument instead of trying to suggest, flying in the face of the obvious, that there would simply be no problems.) 

That in turn means that the £18 billion reduction in contributions to the EU is far from being the only change in the overall fiscal position of the UK Government.  I don’t know what the overall impact will be, nor over what timescales – but then neither does anyone else.

That’s all by way of context to considering the statement yesterday by Andrew RT Davies for the Conservatives in Wales.  His comments (and specifically the line that “the Treasury will have more money”) seem to be predicated on an assumption that there are no other changes to the Treasury’s revenue and expenditure following Brexit.  Whilst he doesn’t come across as a man with a strong grasp of economics, I still find it hard to believe that even he really believes that.  In effect he’s trying to spend money which may or may not exist (neither he nor I can know that at this stage). 

It’s truly astounding that, without a hint of irony, he then goes on to accuse Labour of doing precisely that – spending money which doesn’t exist.  Pots and kettles come to mind.