Labour fight to see who has the loudest voice

Tweet

In the aftermath of last week’s election, I saw a vox pop from somewhere or other in the north of England in which one gentleman explained that he was a life-long Labour voter who had voted Tory because of Corbyn.  When asked what it was about Corbyn which had led him to that conclusion, he was unable to give much of an answer.  Such brief interviews provide anecdotal rather than empirical evidence, of course, but it does rather look as though ‘Corbyn’ did indeed play a significant role in the outcome, and that those in Labour who are trying to argue that it was all about Brexit and nothing else are somewhat detached from reality.  They’re unlikely to change their minds, though – I have the distinct impression that Labour’s post-election autopsy is going to be more about which faction’s interpretation is shouted the loudest rather than being based on hard data and analysis.

If answering the question, ‘Was Corbyn a factor?’ is easy enough, the ‘why and how?’ are much more difficult questions.  Was it because, as some (even in his own party) are claiming, he was a poor and incompetent leader, was it because of the policies he promoted, or was it because he was demonised in the Tory press?  It’s worth noting that it’s at least possible (or even, as I suspect, highly probable) that all three are true to a greater or lesser extent; there’s nothing mutually exclusive about them.  That won’t stop either his detractors or his fans demanding that others accept their own interpretation of which is correct, making me wonder whether Labour is capable of learning anything from the outcome.

The long-running antisemitism issue may well have been seized on by political opponents who have racism problems of their own seeing an opportunity to promote an anti-Labour narrative, but the way in which the Labour leader responded looked weak, slow and reluctant.  Whether that is fair or unfair is almost irrelevant – it meant that he didn’t give the impression of competence and determination in dealing with the issue.

That he was unfairly smeared and demonised by a section of the press is surely undeniable, as well as being entirely understandable.  Billionaire press barons and their friends who saw him as a threat to their position had every incentive to portray him as a dangerous extremist, and didn’t hesitate to do so, even if a more objective analysis of his policy programme for this election would place him and his party squarely in the mainstream of European social democracy.  But part of what Brexit is – and always has been – about for those most keen on it was taking the UK as far away from that mainstream as possible; it’s part of a long term project of moving the Overton window further in the direction of neo-liberalism.

There’s no doubt that many of the individual policies put forward by Labour were themselves popular, but it looks as if Labour’s ability to deliver them all simply wasn’t believed.  That shouldn’t be surprising – it was a highly ambitious programme, and I have doubted previously whether it was physically do-able.  I wonder, though, whether part of the reason for the public doubt about viability might have been a result of Labour, like the Tories, having spent the last decade promulgating the neo-liberal economic demand that government finances should be balanced.  Suddenly arguing for a programme which implied quite the opposite, whilst still arguing for fiscal rules which suggest that their basic position hasn’t changed looks dishonest.  I doubt that it’s a case of the electorate as a whole doing that economic analysis and reaching a conclusion; more a question of people who have had it drummed into them by Labour and Tory alike that some things are ‘unaffordable’ simply not being in the right frame of mind to believe the opposite.  Moving from ‘two legs bad’ to ‘two legs better’ overnight works in fiction, but not in reality.  There would have been nothing wrong with pivoting the party’s position over the last year or two to an alternative interpretation of macro-economics as a basis for the manifesto commitments, but without doing that, without explaining why so much of the economic establishment is wrong, they failed to lay the groundwork for their own programme.

There is much in what Corbyn has said over the years, as well as in this year’s Labour manifesto, which I could readily support (although there are a few major blind spots, such as the question of nuclear weapons and the support for independence for all nations except Wales and Scotland, to say nothing of Brexit itself).  Whether they have the courage to build on that, or whether the party’s timid careerists will demand a reversion to Tory-lite policies is yet to be seen.  I’m not optimistic.

Elections and mandates

Tweet

Within the space of a few minutes yesterday, the Tory Party Chair, James Cleverly – a man whose whole life seems to be dedicated to proving that nominative determinism is not a thing – managed to claim both that the Conservative Party (which won 56% of the seats on 43.6% of the vote) had a clear mandate for delivering Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and that the SNP (which won 81% of the seats in Scotland on 45% of the vote) had no mandate for a second referendum on independence because they didn’t win a majority of the votes.  A mandate is only a mandate when the Tories say so, apparently.

His assertion that the SNP did not have a majority of the popular vote has the merit of being true, but then the Tories didn’t win a majority of the popular vote in the UK as a whole either, a fact which he seems to think irrelevant.  The results overall show, yet again, that there is a problem with the voting system used for parliamentary elections in the UK, in that it does not ensure fair representation of the votes cast; winner takes all in a majoritarian system is not a good way of expressing the ‘will of the people’.  But to the extent that we accept that ‘them’s the rules’, those rules cannot morally be applied selectively.  The fact that they can be legally so applied highlights, yet again, another flaw in the UK’s constitution, namely the belief that parliament’s sovereignty stems from the monarch, not the people.

It seems inevitable that the Scottish government will now demand the power to hold a referendum, and that the PM will, initially at least, refuse it.  Legally, there can be no doubt that he can make that refusal absolute for the whole of his term in office, and perhaps he will, even if it becomes apparent over coming months that such a refusal is fuelling rather than suppressing the demand from Scotland.  That would, though, require him to actually believe in the perpetuation of the union, and there have been scant signs to date that he actually believes in anything other than that he should be PM.  I don’t know what the SNP will do in the face of the initial refusal - they have wisely avoided revealing their next steps to date, but I can’t believe that they will simply say “OK, your call, we’ll go away and forget it then”.  We do know that there is a general lack of concern among the members and supporters of the PM’s party about whether Scotland stays or goes, and if he starts to see a growing demand in Scotland; if Scotland starts to become the same sort of preoccupation which Brexit has been for the past three years; and getting rid of Scotland looks like something that will help to maintain his own grip on Englandandwales, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him changing course.  After all, it’s not as if changing course is unusual for him, is it?

Classic leaflet fail

Tweet

Yesterday, at last, the long-awaited (I might be exaggerating ever-so-slightly there) Labour Party election leaflet arrived.  This was my favourite part:

Fair play, I thought.  Good point, I thought.  And they’re obviously very serious about it as well – they have repeated the exact same message on all three of the individually-addressed copies of the leaflet sent to the house to make sure that we all understand their seriousness.  But one might be excused for thinking that someone in the campaign team might just have paused for a second and wondered whether this would lead some readers to ask themselves whether they should believe anything else in the leaflet…

How long are the lies good for?

Tweet

Election promises have always come with caveats and been subject to fudgy wording, but the PM has excelled himself in the number of different categories which he has applied.  The strongest category is, famously, dying in a ditch, and we know from experience that that is good for around 110 days.  Assuming less strong promises are broken more easily and that the additional lifespan of each type of promise is roughly equal, we can calculate how long each type of promise is good for, which gives us a table like this:

	Number of days	Expiry Date
Commitment	15	27 December
Pledge	30	11 January
Promise	46	27 January
Guarantee	62	12 February
Cast-iron guarantee	78	28 February
Absolute cast-iron guarantee	94	15 March
Die in a ditch	110	31 March

That gives the manifesto a 'use by' date of 31^st March and a 'best before' date of 27^th December.  So, if you happen to have a copy of the Tory manifesto in your store cupboard, it’s worth bearing in mind that it will probably start to go off before the end of the year.

Trust in liars

Tweet

An inveterate and pathological liar who can happily say one thing today and the complete reverse tomorrow came to London this week and declared that his country had no interest whatsoever in opening up the NHS to private companies.  His host, another inveterate and pathological liar, who can happily say one thing today and the complete reverse tomorrow said that it didn’t matter what the first liar said, because he would not allow it in any case.  The only surprising thing is that some parts of the media regard the statements of either or both as being enough to settle the argument once and for all.

A simple fiscal rule

Tweet

I mentioned yesterday the way in which party manifestos have been criticised by various think tanks over their tax and spending proposals.  It has unfortunately become widely, but erroneously, accepted that government spending is like household spending, and that governments should only spend money which they have first raised through taxation.  For the last few elections, all three of the main UK parties have taken this as being close to gospel and criticised each other for any apparent mismatches, elevating the elimination of the surplus to almost a fetish.  It’s been strange, though, that although it’s the Tories who have pushed this approach most, it is the Tories who also, in practice, have regularly ignored this ‘requirement’, pushing the date at which the budget is balanced ever further into the future, whilst Labour have, rather foolishly, allowed their own economic policies to be defined by this crude and unnecessary approach.  The Tories set a trap and Labour fell for it – maybe not so strange after all, then.

Things look different in this election – the rhetoric about ‘fully-costed’ manifestos is still there, but it all seems half-hearted given that the Tories have thrown their own rules to one side and decided to simply spend more.  Only the Lib Dems are still really hung up about the mad demand that the budget should be balanced, leading them to propose what is probably the stupidest economic policy ever put forward by a major UK party, that the government should run a permanent surplus on its current expenditure budget, regardless of the circumstances at the time.  Richard Murphy sets out some pretty trenchant views on the proposal here, and has a nice graphic from Deficit Owls asking why politicians want to push people into debt here.

There is, and never has been, any need to keep the government’s spending in balance; it is the economy as a whole which needs to be in balance, bearing in mind the various sectors.  The concept of sectoral balances is explained well here with a particularly good graphic, but in essence, a permanent public sector surplus requires a permanent deficit elsewhere, and that essentially means businesses and individuals in the private sector.  Anyone arguing for a public sector surplus needs to be able to explain why a private sector deficit is a good idea, and that’s not an explanation that I’ve heard to date.

All the parties are keen on having, and being seen to have, a set of ‘fiscal rules’, but in practice these are largely ignored.  They’re just window-dressing as an alternative to trying to explain why things don’t work that way.  In reality, the only fiscal rule any government needs is one that says it will do what it considers appropriate in the circumstances which exist at the time.  That’s not much of a rule at all, but any other rule is just a means of trying to hide the fact that government spending is more a matter of ideology than economics.

'Experts' are not always as independent or objective as is claimed

Tweet

A feature of the way in which the media report on the manifestos of the various parties is the use of ‘independent’ think tanks to express their opinions.  Thus we have reports like this one in the Guardian, covering the response of the so-called ‘Institute for Financial Studies’, claiming that “neither Tories nor Labour have credible spending plan”, and describing the IFS as a “respected think tank”.  It isn’t just the Guardian, of course – the IFS is regularly quoted by other media including the BBC and treated as an expert source.  I don’t doubt that this makes them ‘respected’; clearly several media sources have a great deal of respect for their work.  Neither do I doubt that they are ‘independent’, at least in the narrow sense of not being affiliated to any of the political parties. 

What they are not, however, is independent of ideology, as Richard Murphy explains here.  The organisation is closely aligned to the neoliberal view of the world, and their analysis starts from a number of assumptions.  The result is that, inevitably, they are predisposed to a particular policy direction, and are critical of proposals which don’t match that ideology.  The fact that, in this case, they end up criticising both Labour and Conservative spending plans might underline their independence from both of those parties, but it also highlights the fact that other interpretations of economics are possible, and increasingly main stream, given that the Tories have (in rhetoric at least, even if not yet in terms of spending levels) moved towards the Labour position in an attempt to win votes.

There is another ‘independent’ think tank, the Resolution Foundation, which is, if anything, even worse but which is also extensively quoted as an ‘expert’ source by the media.  I don’t agree with the Gove position that we have all ‘had enough of experts’, but there is unquestionably a need to apply a critical eye to people who either themselves claim to be experts or else who are presented as experts by those quoting them to ensure that they are really as independent and objective as might at first sight appear – and the media seem remarkably unable to apply that critical approach.  It has become all too easy for people to set up institutes and foundations which look independent and objective yet which, in reality, start from a clear ideological perspective.

Living in the wrong place?

Tweet

Driving to the shops yesterday, I happened to catch a snatch of an interview by Jeremy Vine of Ed Davey, the deputy leader of the Lib Dems, discussing the major issue of the election, cycle paths.  Davey and the Lib Dems are, apparently, in favour of more cycle paths, but Vine rather unhelpfully pointed out that, where he lives, the local Lib Dems are opposing the creation of new cycle paths.  Davey’s response was roughly as follows: “But where I live, the local Lib Dem council is building new cycle paths.  You should come and live in my constituency”. 

It was a quick-thinking riposte, but it’s actually quite revealing, not to say damaging.  He’ll probably regret the words he used.  There was no attempt to deal with the implicit question that what the Lib Dems stand for varies from area to area, and it even managed to express a vague hint that if the Lib Dems in your area aren’t doing what you want, then it’s your fault for living in the wrong place.  The Lib Dems have, of course, campaigned for many years on a hyper-local platform; they are willing to say whatever will win them votes at any given time and place, even if it’s the exact opposite of what their neighbouring branch is saying up the road.  And there’s nothing wrong with hyper-localism as such, as long as the voters in a particular constituency or ward know what they’re voting for – unless and until a party espousing it claims to have a clear national platform.  If a party’s candidates are elected on widely differing platforms in different constituencies, you can never be certain what their policy really is on some matters until you know which of them is elected; the manifesto is an irrelevant diversion.  He may have been caught out accidentally giving an honest answer - probably a disciplinary matter.

BBC - it's worse than an anti-Corbyn bias

Tweet

Politicians like to claim that the BBC is biased against them, and the BBC’s usual response is that, as long as all parties are saying that, they’re probably being balanced.  That seems a bit simplistic to me.  Two recent complaints involve the use of archive footage instead of actual coverage of the PM laying a wreath at the Cenotaph and the editing out of laughter when the same PM was asked about the importance of truth in politics.  This week has seen a suggestion that when Corbyn agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Neil it was on the basis of the BBC having indicated to his team that Johnson would be subjected to the same interviewer; a suggestion which it appears may not be true.  Any one such incident ‘might’ be excused as an innocent ‘mistake’, but at what point is it reasonable to highlight an emerging pattern of bias?

Andrew Neil is a tough interviewer, and whilst some of us might enjoy seeing our least-favourite politicians skewered, it would also be nice to see them given time and opportunity to answer a question or two.  And Neil’s questions are often loaded as well.  I remember my English teacher over half a century ago talking about loaded questions, using the classic example of the journalist asking someone “When did you stop beating your wife?”, a question which, however it is answered, leaves the listener convinced that the interviewee is indeed a past or present wife-beater.  Neil’s loading is a bit more subtle than that, but it’s there, nevertheless. 

Take his questions on nuclear weapons or dealing with the leaders of ISIS as examples.  The implication behind the questions is that no-one is fit to be PM unless (s)he is willing to confirm that (s)he would order:

a.    The incineration of millions of civilians in a nuclear strike, and

b.    The extra-judicial killing of foreign nationals in the territory of another sovereign state.

Both are, of course, illegal actions for any government to take under accepted international law, but the demand is that the interviewee give a categorical answer regardless of the complexities of the situation at the time – and the assumption is that there is only one ‘correct’ answer.  This is more than party political bias – this is bias towards a particular view of the world which refuses to accept the validity of any other viewpoint.

I wouldn’t argue that the BBC should treat all world views as equivalent; giving the same weight to an ISIS viewpoint as that of a more general ‘western’ viewpoint would be an absurd requirement (although it might help the BBC in its mission to inform and educate if it just occasionally made an effort to understand and explain alternative viewpoints rather than simplistically labelling their adherents using a catch-all word like ‘terrorists’), but the argument is rather different when it comes to domestic politics.  Corbyn’s world view is clearly not the same as Johnson’s, and the Greens, SNP and Plaid also have their own world views.  Failure to treat all of those as equivalent, particularly in the context of a general election, goes beyond mere bias for a ‘British’ view rather than a ‘foreign’ one and directly intervenes in domestic politics, something which a state-run broadcaster in a ‘democracy’ simply should not be doing.

The BBC is unquestionably biased, but it isn’t as simple as being biased towards a particular party and against others.  It’s more of an insidious, institutionalised bias in favour of one view of what the world is and should be, and it’s a bias which delegitimises alternative views.  And it’s much harder to deal with that sort of bias than a simple party-political one.

Is Labour's manifesto achievable?

Tweet

A lot of the coverage of Labour’s manifesto has concentrated on the question of affordability.  Where, people ask, will all the money come from?  It is fundamentally the wrong question to be asking.  As Professor Richard Murphy explains succinctly here, a government in control of its own currency can always afford to do whatever it wants to do; the question is whether, when, and how the money subsequently needs to be recovered from the economy.  The distinction between finding the money in advance and recovering it after the event may look a small one, but it’s key to understanding the way government finances work – spending always precedes taxation, and spending creates economic growth and jobs.

More importantly for me is the question about how practicable the Labour manifesto is.  There’s much with which I’d agree (although why, oh why, did they feel the need to throw in support for Wylfa Newydd?), but it’s a highly ambitious program which will not only require a huge amount of legislation to be passed through Parliament, but also a huge amount of energy and time to implement on the ground.  I seriously doubt that a government – any government, even a highly competent one – could do all that in the short timescale apparently being promised, even if it hadn’t already committed itself to spending at least the first six months preoccupied with Brexit.  That’s a minimum of 10% of the parliament gone before they could even start on the other stuff.  It’s not that any of what they promise isn’t do-able (and affordable!) in itself; it’s rather a question of whether anyone can really change as much as that as quickly as that.  It left me with the impression that they are happy to promise the earth knowing that it’s unlikely they’ll be called on to deliver.