Month: January 2014

Labour’s Best Frenemy

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
edballsedmiliband
Maybe a 65% top marginal rate of income tax would make us even more popular.

 

Dan Hodges may have resigned his Labour Party membership last year in protest of the parliamentary party’s opportunistic stance on intervention in Syria, but he still strongly identifies with Labour values – indeed, his Telegraph biography states that he “writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation”. One would expect no less from the son of my firebreathing local MP, Glenda Jackson. Which makes his scorn for the current Labour leadership and pessimism for their prospects in the 2015 general election all the more compelling.

Of course, one might say that it is perfectly natural for someone who has publicly fallen out with the party hierarchy to publicly root for their demise, and that it is unseemly to trumpet the latest poll results showing Labour’s lead over the Conservative Party almost completely extinguished. But Dan Hodges comes packing precedents, facts and statistics.

First come the simple, time-tested truths:

The party that is seen as being best placed to run the economic affairs of the nation normally wins the election. And at the moment that party is seen to be the Conservative Party. In fact, that party has been seen to be the Conservative Party ever since Labour was ejected from office in 2010. Through rain, through shine, through double-dip (erroneously reported double-dip if you prefer), and through recovery, the Tories have enjoyed a comfortable lead on the economy. The perception that David Cameron and George Osborne are the guys to run the nation’s finances is baked in.

Another issue is leadership. The man who people see as the best suited to be prime minister is usually the one they select as their prime minister. In this case that man is Cameron. From the day Miliband was elected Labour party leader, people have looked at him, and then they’ve looked at Cameron, and they’ve said “David Cameron is the one best suited to running the country”. There has never been a single day when they’ve said “Actually, I think that Ed Miliband is best suited to running the country”. Again, the Tory advantage on leadership is baked in.

Strikes one and two. On economic stewardship, for better or worse, the question is quite settled. George Osborne, for all the many things he has done wrong and key conservative principles on which he has compromised (partly through necessity of coalition and partly through want of a backbone), has still managed to deliver the strongest rate of economic growth since 2007. Meanwhile, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls’ continued shrieking about economic flatlining and living standards (always a lagging indicator) are increasingly coming to sound churlish and divorced from reality.

Hodges also considers the trove of other indicators that are trending in favour of the government at present:

If you think abut it, it’s fairly logical. “So, Bill, I see the economy is growing faster than any of our EU rivals, unemployment is falling, crime is falling, that wave of east European migration didn’t materialise after all, business optimism has returned, wages are rising again, inflation is still low, interest rates are still low, and this lot seem the ones best placed to help the family finances. What are you going to do in the election on Thursday?” “You have to ask? I’m going to kick the bums out.”

The crux of the matter, according to Hodges, is that in order for Labour to win, the British electorate would have to simultaneously break almost all of their recent behavioural precedents and behave in a most unpredictable way, namely:

An opposition party could retain its midterm vote share. A party in power could be ejected after just one term. Even though the economy is improving and unemployment is falling and crime is falling and business optimism is increasing and interest rates are historically low and inflation is historically low and wages are rising in real terms, people could say “It’s time for a change.”

Well, when you put it like that…

It did not have to be this way. As any reader of this blog will know, I am no supporter of the Labour Party, and given the fact that the Conservative-led coalition government is at least making timid steps to roll back the size of the state and tackle government spending, I have no great desire to see things change in this regard. But I also saw a path that Labour could have taken to put themselves in a better position going into the 2015 general election, a path that they conspicuously chose not to take.

This route to potential victory involved making an initial very public mea culpa accepting responsibility for their previous economic mismanagement and unsustainable growth of government (and so drawing a line under it) and a pledge to take deficit reduction at least as seriously as the Tories, followed by a pivot to actually address some of the British public’s legitimate concerns on welfare, on Europe and on government spending. From his recent columns, it is evident that Dan Hodges also saw this potential door back into power, just as it was firmly being pushed shut by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

The Labour Party leadership and allied local party activists who have drunk merrily from the Ed Miliband Kool-Aid since 2010 probably do not like to hear any of this, from someone they no doubt consider a turncoat. But I have a strong premonition that, should the 2015 general election not go Labour’s way, it is the words of Dan Hodges that people will summarise and plagiarise when writing their post-mortems of the Ed Miliband era.

Maybe Dan Hodges isn’t Labour’s worst enemy in their own midst; in fact, he is quite possibly their very best friend at the moment. If only they could see that.

Live-Blogging The SOTU 2014

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Andrew Sullivan’s excellent live-blog of the State Of The Union 2014 speech delivered by President Obama. My own thoughts and reaction to follow.

Andrew Sullivan's avatarThe Dish

US-POLITICS-STATE OF THE UNION-OBAMA

10.22 pm. The metaphor of the soldier slowly, relentlessly, grindingly putting his life back together was a powerful one for America – and Obama pulled off that analogy with what seemed to me like real passion. One aspect of his personality and his presidency is sometimes overlooked – and that is persistence. He’s been hailed as a hero and dismissed as irrelevant many times. But when you take a step back and assess what he has done – from ending wars to rescuing the economy to cementing a civil rights revolution to shifting the entire landscape on healthcare – you can see why he believes in persistence. Because it works. It may not win every news cycle; but it keeps coming back.

If he persists on healthcare and persists on Iran and persists on grappling, as best we can, with the forces creating such large disparities in wealth, he will…

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UKIP In The Spotlight

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Cognizant of the UK Independence Party’s likely strong performance in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, some reputable publications have joined the long-established monitors such as UKIP Watch in paying closer attention to the daily goings-on within the resurgent party. Displaying great originality, The Telegraph calls their version…UKIP Watch too. So no possibility of confusion there, then.

To their credit though, The Telegraph’s UKIP Watch redeems itself with some insightful analysis on Day 1, effectively countering the oft-repeated myth that UKIP’s support is comprised almost exclusively of disaffected “grumpy” Tories:

Why is the myth of Ukip as an army of angry, middle-class suburbanites who are obsessed by Europe and having a referendum so widespread and persistent, when the reality is so different? Most likely because of the difference between Ukip’s activists and their voters.

Committed activists and politicians, the kind of Ukipper the media are most likely to encounter, very often are middle-class, Southern and suburban former Tories (particularly the Ukippers you are likely to stumble across in the Westminster village, where most journalists congregate). Add to this the continual fascination in the media with Conservative splits over Europe and it is easy to see how the “Ukip = angry Tories + Euroscepticism” formula has taken hold.

A very good point. Why would UKIP be immune from the phenomena that affects the main three parties, namely that their most strident activists little represent their average voter? It is good to hear this point addressed in the media, and it would be even more encouraging to see the stories about the kooks and crazies in UKIP’s midst covered in the same way – namely that those on the cutting edge, whether for good or bad reasons, tend not to represent the whole.

Godfrey Bloom will be sitting out the next few rounds. Image from ITV News.
Godfrey Bloom will be sitting out the next few rounds.
Image from ITV News.

The column’s authors, Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, also make clear that the ‘typical’ UKIP voter is nothing like the cartoonish stereotype of a stuffy, old-fashioned Conservative, and that the retired colonel or Women’s Institute stalwart image is misplaced:

If Spitting Image were still around they would most likely portray the average Ukipper as a ruddy faced, middle-class, middle-aged golf club bore, who lived in a suburban semi-detached house in the Home Counties, wore lots of tweed and bored his neighbours to death by droning on about the evil Eurocrats in Brussels. But this stereotype could scarcely be further from the truth.

Ukip’s supporters look more like Old Labour than True Blue Tories. Ukip’s supporters tend to be blue-collar, older, struggling economically, and often live in poorer, urban areas, with big pools of support in the Labour heartlands of the North. Middle-class suburbanites do not dominate Ukip. They shy away from it.

In fact, Ukip are Britain’s most working-class party. Blue-collar workers are heavily over-represented. Middle-class professionals are scarce. Such voters often express as much hostility to the Conservative party as they do to Labour. This news should not be surprising. Earlier research on Goldsmith’s Referendum Party in the mid-1990s found that they too came from across the spectrum. But despite this research the “disaffected Tory thesis” has become entrenched in the Westminster village, and now dominates misguided coverage of the party.

This, if anything, is the area on which UKIP will need to focus the most if they are to make the perilous transition from successful protest party to a real general election player capable of winning seats in the House of Commons – the fact that the spot in their party reserved for middle-class professionals is currently Tumbleweed Central. These higher-information voters are key to credibility, and they are also primarily the movers and shakers who keep the British economy ticking over. Not having these people in your camp in any significant numbers is a cause for concern, and one that will certainly need to be addressed after the upcoming European elections.

So far, however, UKIP seems to be showing no signs of wilting under the increased scrutiny – indeed, their affable leader Nigel Farage MEP seems to have recovered some of the form which deserted him last week, going so far as to record this spoof weather forecast segment for the BBC’s Sunday Politics show:

 

Perhaps this further helps to explain the reason for UKIP’s continued popularity and appeal – which of the other party leaders, emerging from a week of very difficult and in some cases embarrassing press coverage, would be so relaxed and willing to poke fun at themselves in so self-deprecating a manner? There is something inherently appealing about a politician who is willing to speak

Nigel Farage is confident, and as more and more of the media is coming to realise, his confidence may be well placed.