‘Can Theresa May even sell her new conservatism to her own cabinet?’, Observer, 17 May 2016.

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

Political parties can be frighteningly small worlds, with a cripplingly limited cast of characters. As a result, people whose careers are widely assumed to be over – either because they once messed up badly or because their face no longer seemed to fit – can sometimes make startling comebacks. It is this, and not just an understandable desire to prevent the headbangers crying foul when Brexit negotiations inevitably fail to deliver everything they want, which partly explains the presence of old stagers such as David Davis, Liam Fox and (the pro-European) Damian Green in Theresa May’s new cabinet.

The prime minister’s decision to bring these colleagues in from the cold may have had something to do, too, with friendship and wanting to project the idea that, after a decade of domination by thirty- and fortysomethings from Notting Hill, the grown-ups, with the signal exception of Boris Johnson, are back in charge of the Conservative party.

There may, however, be even more to it than that. Along with the fact that Davis, Fox and Green, like many of May’s younger picks, come from relatively “ordinary” backgrounds, they also incarnate ideological strains and stresses within her party that go back a long way but which, judging by her recent speeches, Theresa May and her advisers are hoping to meld to address contemporary needs and concerns.

The Conservative party that so dominated politics in the 20th century was essentially an amalgam of two 19th-century phenomena. On the one hand, there was Gladstonian liberalism, with its emphasis on “economy”, “self-help” and “free trade”. On the other, there was Toryism, with its stress on empire, national sovereignty and on incrementally improving “the condition of England” for the majority of its citizens, who, it was eventually accepted, would come to play a full (if hopefully not dominant) part in its governance.

For the most part, the tension between the two compounds that made up modern Conservatism proved creative but it was a tension no less, one best personified, perhaps, by Joe Chamberlain, the man many seem to be crediting as an inspiration to Mrs May, or at least to her consigliere, Nick Timothy, himself a working-class native of Chamberlain’s Birmingham. “Radical Joe” it was who crossed the floor from the Liberals to the Conservatives in pursuit of an end to free trade so as to build a wall around the country and its empire behind which more could and should be done for its people when it came to health, education and welfare.

Certainly, anyone looking for an insight into what, who knows, we might eventually end up calling Mayism should make straight for an essay on ConservativeHome written by Timothy back in March. Entitled “What does the Conservative party offer a working-class kid from Brixton, Birmingham, Bolton or Bradford?”, it attempts both to triangulate between but also to criticise the so-called “Soho Conservatism” associated with the Cameroons and the “Easterhouse Conservatism” associated with Iain Duncan Smith.

Liberal conservatism had its upsides, most obviously equal marriage, but also its downsides, notably its early emphasis on green issues and its continued support for free movement, neither of which is apparently of any interest to that much cited category, “ordinary working people”. Compassionate conservatism’s ambition to help the poorest of the poor may have been laudable but left it with little to say to the many people who, while they aren’t exactly on the breadline, can still struggle to make ends meet and get on in life.

Unless, argued the man who is now May’s joint chief of staff in Downing Street, the Tory party could convince people that it really was on their side, it would not only fail to win a comfortable parliamentary majority, it wouldn’t deserve to either. His solution, however, didn’t lie, as it seems to for some of the Tories who co-authored the libertarian manifesto Britannia Unchained, in robotically pursuing Thatcherism to its logical conclusion: Ayn Rand-style, devil-take-the-hindmost neoliberalism.

Instead, the party needed – yes – to champion fiscal responsibility, law and order and public service efficiency. But it also had to realise that, when savings needed to be made, it should look, say, to trim benefits going to wealthy pensioners rather than tax credits going to hard-working families. It also needed to respond effectively rather than simply rhetorically to their concerns about immigration. Tucked away, too, was a suggestion that the Tories should take housing more seriously.

Fast forward to the speech that Theresa May made to launch her leadership campaign in (where else?) Birmingham, as well as the unashamed pitch for the centre she made just before entering Number 10 for the first time as PM, and a plausible case can be made that, rather than simply being the warmed-over, one-nation platitudes we have heard so many times before from new Tory premiers, her words may hint at a more profound shift.

The source of that shift may not be entirely ideational either. It may also be driven, believe it or not, by the evidence. In a column dedicated mainly (and understandably wryly) to observing some of the similarities between May’s words and that advocated by his old boss, Ed Miliband, for whom he wrote speeches, Asher Dresner refers to a growing consensus that fiscal contraction doesn’t, in fact, lead to more sustainable growth. What’s more, even if it did, he added, growth no longer seems automatically to deliver noticeably higher living standards for all; and that it makes an awful lot of sense to borrow to invest in infrastructure and housing when credit is not just cheap but dirt cheap.

But there is one big problem with this optimistic take on what might become Mayism. For it to have any practical impact on public policy, it will, in a government with a working majority of just 16, have to win the support of parliamentary and cabinet colleagues (including two of the three named above), who will be at best ambivalent about and at worst implacably opposed to this new direction.

Liam Fox, for example, was caught on tape, in 2002, speaking about his plans to talk down the NHS to soften it up for privatisation and “self-pay”. Liz Truss and Priti Patel were two of the Britannia Unchained bunch. Chancellor Philip Hammond may have accepted May’s sensible decision to stop chasing George Osborne’s patently unachievable deficit reduction targets but that does not make him an overnight convert to neo-Keynesianism. And while David Davis may have been brought up in a council house, that doesn’t mean he suddenly approves of them. Sajid Javid, who likewise came into politics after state education propelled him from a humble background into an impressive business career, will be responsible for relations with local authorities and isn’t exactly a fan of the enabling state either. Nor is Chris Grayling or Jeremy Hunt. And as for Andrea Leadsom, the less said the better.

Indeed, the only standout pragmatic centrists in the cabinet are Green (a long-standing stalwart of the left-leaning Tory Reform Group and the modernising thinktank Bright Blue); the cabinet’s two PhDs, business secretary Greg Clark (Economics) and ex-Europe minister, now leader of the house, David Lidington (Elizabethan history), and the ex-miner, party chairman Patrick McLoughlin. Clearly, in the case of the first two at least, the departments they run are by no means bit-players. But they are nevertheless in a very small minority in cabinet.

And then there is the party in the country. Research suggests that while they may support Theresa May, aspects of her agenda will attract rather less enthusiasm – and not just because eight out of 10 grassroots Tories are middle class.

Figures from the British Election Study suggest that 72% of voters believe that ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth.

The Economic and Social Research Council-funded Party Members Projectsuggests that only 17% of Conservative party members feel the same. The gap between the public and the Tory grassroots when it comes to the idea that big business benefits owners at the expense of workers is, at 77%-27%, no less marked.

There is one thing on which the public, grassroots Tories, Theresa May, and probably most of her parliamentary colleagues clearly concur – the need to reduce immigration. That, however, only highlights the most glaring contradiction in the new prime minister’s embryonic “-ism”.

Controlling the UK’s borders would go down well with the “ordinary working families” who May says she wants to serve. But if it involves leaving the single market, it will almost certainly make them poorer. Conservatives cannot always reconcile their simultaneous desire for the free economy and the strong state. Which will Mrs May choose?

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/17/theresa-may-new-brand-of-conservatism

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‘Middle-class university graduates will decide the future of the Labour Party’, New Statesman, 14 July 2016 (with Monica Poletti and Paul Webb).

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

We don’t yet know whether it will be Angela Eagle or Owen Smith, or maybe both of them, who ends up running against Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership.  But what we do know – because we reckon we now know lot about the people who will vote in that ballot – is that any challenger is going to have their work cut out.

We surveyed Labour members just after the 2015 General Election, and then ran a second survey in May this year so we could capture those who joined the party after the election.

Now, for the first time, we’ve put those two surveys together in order to come up with a pen-portrait of those people who, because they were members before the NEC’s February cut-off date, will therefore be eligible to vote over the summer. You can find the more detailed figures here.

Labour’s grassroots members will almost certainly make up the bulk of those who choose the party’s leader over the summer. So what do they look like? And how do they think?

By our reckoning, Labour’s leadership contest is going to be decided, for the most part, by less than 400,000 mainly middle-class university graduates. Nearly half of these members – unlike many of Labour’s voters – live in London and the South of England.  Some 75 per cent of Labour members are ABC1 voters, and 57 per cent of them have a degree.  Around 15 per cent live in London and 32 per cent live in other parts of the South of England.  Only 28 per cent live in the party’s northern heartlands and 20 per cent in Wales and the Midlands, where (think, Nuneaton) any party wanting to win a general election desperately needs to win over voters.

Because a relatively large proportion of those who joined the party after the general election were women, the Labour membership has become a little more gender balanced, with a 55:45 male/female split.  The average age, however, hasn’t changed much: it’s still 51.

That might have something to do with the fact that roughly a third of the post-election joiners had been Labour members previously. Many of them appear to have returned after leaving in the New Labour era. They may possibly have replaced some of those who left the party because they didn’t like the direction it was taking under Corbyn.

Those voting in Labour’s leadership contest are socially very, very liberal. Only 22 per cent believe law-breakers should be given stiffer sentences and only 10 per cent support the death penalty. Some 84 per cent back gay marriage.  They are also very positive about immigration. On a seven-point scale running from immigration being bad for the economy (1) to it being good for the economy (7), they score it at 5.74.  On a similar scale which asks about the cultural benefits of immigration they come up, spookily enough, with exactly the same score.

On economic issues, it’s as if Blair and Brown (or at least the “neoliberal” Blair and Brown of the left’s imagination) never existed. Labour’s grassroots members are almost unanimous in favouring redistribution (92 per cent), in distrusting big business (94 per cent) and in believing that government public spending cuts have gone too far (95 per cent).

Asked to place themselves on a left to right scale running from one to ten, the average Labour member locates him or herself at 2.17.  Nearly one in ten members voted Green in 2015 – something that was notably more common among those who joined the party after that general election. Irrespective of when they joined, however, eight out of ten wanted the UK to remain in the European Union.

When asked what they’re looking for in a leader, Labour’s members are not unduly concerned with a leader’s ability to radiate strength and authority, or his or her capacity to unite the nation. Only around a third of them put a premium on having a leader who can appeal to the average voter. Interestingly, though, this did matter more to those who were already members by the time of the 2015 general election than those who joined after it.

Ultimately, what matters more to Labour members, it seems, is having a leader who, as well as being a good communicator, is in touch with ordinary people and has strong political beliefs – something that is especially true for those who joined after rather than before the last general election.

Whether Jeremy Corbyn or either of his challengers can tick all of these boxes is, we suspect, in the eye of the beholder.  Still, given who Labour members are and how they think, we suspect Mr Corbyn is going to be awfully hard to beat.

Originally published at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/07/middle-class-university-graduates-will-decide-future-labour-party

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‘With the Labour Party in complete turmoil, does it have any chance of regaining power by 2025? No’, City AM, 13 July 2016.

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

Labour is going to lose the next general election and very probably the one after that. So whether it can win again by 2025 depends entirely on how soon Theresa May decides to go to the country.

General elections are rarely one-off events. It’s very unusual, at least in the UK, to see a political party which is trounced at one election bounce back in just one term. It can happen, but 1970 and 1997 are exceptions that prove the rule. After a heavy defeat, it normally takes the losing party one or two more goes to overhaul the winner.

The best-case scenario is that May calls a contest in 2017. This would mean another election in 2022, which would give Labour the chance to regain power in 2027. The only thing which is likely to change the odds is if Brexit proves to be an economic catastrophe and/or moderate Labour MPs form a successful new centre party. Neither is beyond the bounds of possibility. But don’t bet on either of them happening just yet.

Originally published at http://www.cityam.com/245328/labour-party-complete-turmoil-does-have-any-chance

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‘What do the Tory grassroots want from Prime Minister Theresa May?’, Conversation, 11 July 2016 (with Paul Webb and Monica Poletti).

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

Theresa May has secured her place as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservatives without having to win the direct approval of her party’s membership. The original plan was for her to run against Andrea Leadsom in an election, but the latter pulled out before a vote could take place.

But that doesn’t mean the views of these Tory foot soldiers are irrelevant. Their support is important to the stability and direction of the government that May will lead. They help establish the general mood of the party on issues and set parameters within which the front bench can – or would be wise to – operate.

So while May will be delighted to have easily won the confidence of the majority of her parliamentary colleagues, she will also be aware of the need to keep in touch with the party’s grassroots supporters. She will be particularly aware of this as a former party chairman. But who are the grassroots, what do they believe in, and what qualities do they want from their leaders?

Thanks to the Party Members Project, we are able to shed some light on the matter. In June 2015, we surveyed a sample of 1,193 members of the Tory grassroots, asking a wide variety of questions about their demographic background and their political attitudes.

Portrait of a party

While some of the other parties have seen significant surges in membership recruitment since then (most dramatically in the case of Labour, of course), this is unlikely to have been the case for the Conservatives; although the official membership numbers have not been publicly updated for some time, estimates have consistently placed them at approximately 130,000-150,000 for several years now. This suggests that our sample is likely to be as representative of the Conservative membership now as it was a year ago.

Profile of Conservative members compared to general picture across the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP, SNP and Greens Author provided

When asked questions that might indicate where they sit on the left-right political spectrum. On issues such as the distribution of wealth, far lower percentages of Conservatives agree with left-wing statements than we find across all party memberships in the UK.

When asked whether they think public spending cuts have not gone far enough (an obvious reference to the austerity policies pursued by the British government in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis), Tory members are far more likely to agree or agree strongly with austerity than adherents of other parties.

Where do they sit on the spectrum? Author provided

Quite clearly, then, the Conservative grassroots are distinctly right wing. What’s more, they are perfectly aware of it. We asked them to locate themselves on an imaginary left-right scale running from 0 (left) to 10 (right). The overall mean position for members of all parties was 4.44, but the average Tory member placed themselves at 7.76.

A party conference delegate shows her colours. PA

We found party members tend to agree or agree strongly with socially conservative statements. We also asked whether or not party members supported same-sex marriage legislation. Significantly fewer Conservative members agree with this major piece of social reform than members of other parties. That said, there is some evidence of movement on the issue since we surveyed them in a pilot study in 2013.

May’s record on this front is mixed. She has sometimes attracted the criticisms of social liberals for wanting to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights (a pledge she has recently resiled from), but she supported gay marriage legislation. It is hard to pin her down as consistently liberal or conservative, and that might not go unnoticed by her party.

Conservative views?

Tory members hold what might be described as “robust” views on immigration. We asked respondents two questions about immigration: is it good or bad for the economy? And does it undermine or enrich cultural life? For each of these they had to place themselves on a scale running from 1 (bad for economy/undermines culture) to 7 (good for economy/enriches culture). Their mean scores were 4.25 and 3.65 respectively – lower on the scale than other party memberships, for which the mean scores are 4.92 and 4.70.

Plainly, controlling inward migration is something the grassroots will now be hoping for. It is also an objective that singularly eluded May as Home Secretary. In the context of the EU’s commitment to the free movement of people this is hardly surprising, but as the post-Brexit Prime Minister she will have the opportunity of striking out in a new direction. The obvious challenge will be to find a way of doing this that does not inflict significant damage on the economy – something that will take considerable political skill.

Talking Brexit. Author provided

The Conservative membership showed an interesting attitude towards Britain’s membership of the EU when we surveyed them. It appears that a year before the referendum they were not determined come-what-may to vote Leave, but that their attitudes were largely contingent. Nearly two-thirds indicated that their vote would depend on the changed terms of membership that David Cameron negotiated before the referendum. Although we do not have direct evidence of this yet, it looks very like his efforts in this regard left them unpersuaded.

To characterise the majority of Tory grassroots members as head-banging Brexiteers might be misleading, then. This could have a bearing on how they regard their new leader, who was a notoriously lukewarm Remainer. It is probably not important to most of them that May was not a Leaver – especially in view of her clear post-referendum statement that “Brexit means Brexit”.

What they want in a leader

So we know a little of the general political outlook of Conservative members, but what are the specific qualities they will be looking for in their party leader? We offered respondents a list of 10 qualities, and asked them to say which they would pick as the three most important.

Notes for May. Author provided

For grassroots Tories, it would seem that “strong” leadership, ability to unite the nation, and being a good communicator weigh most in the balance. However, the latter matters notably less for Conservatives than it seems to for members of other parties. Surprisingly, perhaps, having strong beliefs and appealing to the average voter do not figure so highly for Tory members. Rather, what stands out about them is their wish for strong and authoritative leaders who can be good in a crisis and unite the nation.

There is, perhaps, something classically Churchillian and One Nation about this skillset. Whether Theresa May has good standing in this area in the eyes of the party membership is something on which we can only speculate right now. She has the advantage of having survived that well-known political graveyard, the Home Office, longer than any politician in living memory, which may commend her to many. In this role she can even claim a notable triumph in her dogged determination to deport Abu Qatada from the UK, in the face of several judicial setbacks.

May’s rhetoric of late has certainly carried with it the timbre of One Nation politics and has shown a certain pragmatism. A longstanding advocate of equal pay for men and women, she has now promised employee representation on company boards of directors, shareholder votes on executive pay and an attack on inequality. She has identified herthree immediate priorities as governing “for everyone, not just the privileged few”; uniting the country; and negotiating EU withdrawal successfully.

True, Theresa May’s Nasty Party conference speech of 2002 angered some Tory activists. The point she was seeking to convey to the more ideologically zealous among them was that the Conservative Party could only hope to govern again if it remained in touch with mainstream society and was not seen to pursue the exclusive, narrow-minded agenda of a select few. In this respect, her stated position this week has remained consistent – and it resonates with the membership’s desire for strong leadership that might bring unity to a fractured nation.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/what-does-the-tory-grassroots-want-from-prime-minister-theresa-may-62305

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‘With Nigel Farage off the scene, will it be easier to reach a compromise with the EU on free movement? No’, City AM, 5 July 2016.

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

Nigel Farage has a fair claim to being the country’s most influential politician of the last decade. The pressure his party exerted on the Tories forced David Cameron into a referendum which he never wanted but now looks set to change the course of the UK’s economic, political, social and diplomatic history. Not bad for someone who never even managed to get elected to parliament. But his resignation as leader won’t make it any easier for whoever takes over as PM to persuade EU member states that we should retain full access to their market without granting their citizens access to ours. They don’t owe us a living, so why allow us to free ride? Meanwhile, back at home, does anyone seriously think Farage will happily fade into obscurity? He’s a populist attention-seeker who’ll doubtless carry on claiming we can have our cake and eat it. And anyway, his successor will be just as determined to hold the government’s feet to the fire on migration.

Originally published at http://www.cityam.com/244736/nigel-farage-off-scene-easier-reach-compromise-eu-free

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‘Jezza’s Bezzas: Labour’s New Members’, Huffington Post, 28 June 2016.

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

Labour is in crisis. Whoever stands in the next leadership contest will have to face its grassroots members, large numbers of whom joined the party to help elect Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.

With the help of YouGov and as part of an ESRC-funded project on UK party membership in the twenty-first century, we (Professor Tim Bale and Dr Monica Poletti (Queen Mary University of London) and Professor Paul Webb (University of Sussex)) have conducted a new survey of Labour’s new members, fielded just after the May 2016 local, devolved and mayoral elections.

We have surveyed 2,026 members and registered supporters of the Labour Party who joined it after the May 2015 general election. This includes 876 people who joined as full members, 280 who initially joined as £3 registered supporters but then upgraded their membership (ie 1,156 full members in total) plus 870 people who are just registered supporters. Tables are available on request.

So what do they look like – and how do they compare with those members the team surveyed back in May 2015, the vast majority of whom were members when Ed Miliband was leader?

Demographics

Labour’s new members aren’t on average much younger than those who were in the party before the general election. The average age of full members has actually nudged up from just under 51 to just over 51. They are similarly well-educated: around six out of ten of Labour’s post-GE2015 members have degrees, which was the same for pre-GE2015 members.

They are, though, even more middle class, with 78% of them (compared to 70%) of them being ABC1s.

Contrary to some conventional wisdom, they are not any more likely to come from London: 14% of the new members come from the capital, rising to 20% of the registered supporters, compared to 15% when we surveyed members last year. They are, however, slightly more likely to come from Southern England (34% compared to 30%) than they were.

Previous political experience

A fair few of the full members are re-treads: although 58% of them haven’t previously been a member of a political party, nearly a third of them (31%) have previously belonged to the Labour Party but, having left it, re-joined after GE2015. The number of re-treads, incidentally, rises to over 40% for those aged over 50. In short many of the new members may well be people who feel ‘We’ve got our party back’.

Groups they belong to

There has been a lot of talk about Momentum – the organization that sprang up to help get Jeremy Corbyn elected leader and, which rather than packing up having done the job, has carried on, at least in the view of Labour’s ‘moderates’, trying to ensure he stays as leader and pushing Labour to the left. One in ten of Labour’s post-GE2015 consider themselves members of the group – slightly more if one takes only those who joined during the leadership contest or after Corbyn won it. To put this in perspective, though, this is about the same number who belong to the RSPB and English Heritage and about half of those who belong to the National Trust.

Possibly more importantly, 25% of post-GE2015 members belong to trade unions compared to 39% of members in our May 2015 survey. That said, at 30%, those new members who joined after Corbyn’s election are slightly more likely than other new members to be trade unionists.

Ideology: left, liberal – and a fair few former Green voters

Labour’s new members are, as expected, pretty left-wing across the board, although this was also the case, note, for pre-GE2015 members, the vast majority of whom tended to think badly of business and fondly of redistribution. New members and supporters are, though, even more anti-austerity and inclined to think that government spending cuts have gone much too far though. They are also more socially-liberal than pre-GE2015 members. This should not come as a surprise perhaps given the fact that a relatively high number of the post-GE2015 full members and registered supporters voted Green in 2015.

Some 17% of new members voted Green at the general election in 2015 – a figure which rises to 20% of registered supporters, 28% of those who first joined as registered supporters and then became full members, and 24% of those who joined the Party after Corbyn became leader. This compares to just 6% of pre-May 2015 members. Even in May 2016, nearly one in ten of those Londoners who joined Labour as members or registered supporters after the general election voted for the Green candidate, Sian Berry, rather than Sadiq Khan.

Jezza’s bezzas

Not surprisingly, given the above, half (49%) of Labour’s new members believe the membership should have more say over policy, with the figure rising to 54% and 65% respectively among those who joined during and after the leadership election.

The same pattern is repeated when we asked the post-GE2015 membership about who they would support if there were to be a challenge to Corbyn and he were to stand in another leadership contest. Some 64% of all those who are full members would vote for Corbyn. Although his support among £3 registered supporters (53%) and even lower among those who joined as full members before the last summer’s leadership contest (46%), it is super-solid among those who joined the party during (68%) and after (80%) that contest.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn certainly seems to have convinced new members that the leadership respects them. In May 2015, some 26% of Labour members did not believe that it did. That feeling applies to just 8% of the new members. Some 89% of post-GE2015 members think the leadership respects them – a figure that rises to 95% of those who joined after Corbyn was elected.

These people, then, are Jezza’s bezzas – his praetorian guard, if you like. And – surely rather alarmingly if you are one of those Labour MPs who isn’t content to hold your tongue – they seem open to using the prospect of deselection to ensure that there is a price to pay for badmouthing the dear leader.

Alarmingly keen on deselection and mandatory reselection

‘Only’ a third (32%) of members, perhaps aware of the past voting record of Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell, say that ‘Labour MPs who continually vote against the party’s agreed line in Commons votes should be deselected’. But another 29% neither agreed nor disagreed with that statement, which presumably means they might be persuaded to back action. And among those who joined after the leadership contest, the proportion who need no persuading rises to 38%.

However, Labour’s new members seem much, much keener to discipline MPs who lay into Jeremy himself. A clear majority (55%) believe that ‘Labour MPs who persistently and publicly criticise the leadership in the media should be deselected’ – a proportion that rises to two-thirds (68%) of those who joined after Corbyn was elected.

And possibly most worrying of all, there appears, at least among Labour’s post-GE2015 membership, to be majority support (59% vs 25%) for the introduction of mandatory re-selection of all Labour MPs.

Confident that Jez he can – but more clicktivists and slacktivists than activists?

Those most recent joiners are almost most confident that a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn will win the next general election. Despite the dire polls and the equally dire local election results, some 64% of Labour’s post GE2015 membership believe Labour is likely to win the next general election – a figure which rises to 77% of those who joined after Corbyn became leader.

What is fascinating, however, is that if Labour is to win, it may have to do it largely without much practical help from its new members and registered supporters. Confirming the complaints of many a Labour MP and ward secretary, the newbies might talk (and tweet) a good game, but they don’t necessarily turn up to do the hard yards.

Just over two-thirds of Labour’s post-GE2015 members and supporters (68%) have retweeted, posted or forwarded a message supporting the Labour Party on social media and nearly nine out of ten (88%) claim to have signed a petition on behalf of the party. But only 15% of them have participated in door-to-door or telephone canvassing of voters or helped out at a party function, and only 28% of them claimed to have delivered leaflets. Indeed, some 63% said they had put in no time at all on behalf of the party during recent local, mayoral and devolved elections.

Finally, 61% of Labour’s new members say they have never attended a party meeting – which could mean that MPs worried about their obvious enthusiasm for deselecting those hostile to Jeremy may have less to fear than they might think.

Originally published at http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tim-bale/jeremy-corbyn-labour-membership_b_10713634.html

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‘Simply unstoppable or a self-inflicted wound?’, UK in a Changing Europe, 21 June 2016.

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

Today, we heard the Prime Minister give his final plea on why we should remain in the European Union, but if David Cameron ever truly believed he could stop his party ‘banging on about Europe’ when it finally got back to government, his hopes were dashed just months into his premiership. The first real sign of trouble began as early as October 2010 when there was a mini-rebellion by 37 Tory MPs on the UK’s financial contribution to the EU, and things just went downhill from then on.

Europe was always going to be an iceberg issue. Whether those Conservatives who continued to wind themselves up over it were Little Englanders, obsessed with ‘sovereignty’, or ‘hyper-globalizers’, more concerned with the corporatist constraints that were supposedly preventing the country fulfilling its free-trading destiny, Cameron in opposition had never dared to confront them head-on, hoping instead that he could shut them up by conceding some of what they wanted. As a consequence, those members of parliament (and of the party in the media) who wanted Britain out of the EU were pretty confident they could push him further when he got into Downing Street. They were absolutely right.

Cameron had hoped that the swift implementation of his pledge in opposition to legislate for an automatic referendum on any EU agreement which involved a ‘significant’ transfer of powers to Brussels would be enough to appease his Eurosceptics for the rest of the parliament. He could not have been more wrong. They had grown larger in number after the election, and grown more worried because of the evident and seemingly endless crisis in the Eurozone. And even those Tory MPs who, privately at least, sometimes wondered what all the fuss was about were under pressure from their constituency associations to show they cared.

On 24 October 2011, the Commons divided on a motion calling for an in–out referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, by which time the government had already faced 22 rebellions on Europe, involving over 60 Tory backbenchers in total, the biggest one attracting 37 dissenters. Still, no-one predicted quite how big the trouble would be. After Cameron insisted on a three-line whip, arguing (not unreasonably) that without it the number of Tories voting for a referendum could go as high as 150, some 81 of his own MPs (49 of them from the 2010 intake and two on the government benches) defied him. This was, as Phil Cowley and Mark Stuart swiftly noted, ‘double the size of the largest Maastricht revolt’, and ‘aside from the gun control rebellions faced by John Major in early 1997, …the largest rebellion to hit a Conservative Prime Minister since 1945’.

The pressure eased a little a couple of months later when Cameron, at the December 2011 European Council meeting, vetoed the ‘Treaty on Stability, Coordination, and Governance’, thereby forcing the vast majority of member states that wanted to go ahead with it to proceed instead with a non-Treaty agreement labelled the Fiscal Compact. The PM returned as some sort of hero, with the (temporary) boost the party received in the opinion polls further convincing Eurosceptics (assuming that they needed convincing) that ratcheting up the anti-Brussels rhetoric was the key to electoral success. Ultimately, however, instead of satisfying them, Cameron’s stand only left them wanting more of the same.

This was especially the case after it became apparent that there was possibly less to his veto than met the eye and in the light of a ruling in January 2012 by the European Court of Human Rights (later circumnavigated) that Home Secretary Theresa May could not deport terrorist suspect Abu Qatada to Jordan. The ECHR was not, as sceptics knew full well, an EU institution, but its ability to override British sovereignty was, as far as they were concerned, all of a piece with Brussels and therefore grist to their mill – particularly once it became obvious that the leadership, pleading resistance from the Lib Dems, had booted their idea of a ‘British Bill of Rights’ well into the long grass. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘Balance of Competences Review’, supposedly set up to help the government redraw responsibilities between the UK and the EU, would, they predicted (rightly as it turned out), lead absolutely nowhere.

So it was that, by the spring of 2012, David Cameron, although not at that stage George Osborne, had all but come round to the idea – first mooted by William Hague – that, since the pressure from the parliamentary party for a referendum would sooner or later become unstoppable, it might be better to announce one pre-emptively. Such an announcement would also, it was hoped, spike UKIP’s guns well before the next European Parliament elections. This was something everyone in the Party was desperate to do for fear that success for Nigel Farage in June 2014 – a success that transpired anyway, it turned out – would set him up nicely for the general election the following year.

So hints were dropped during the summer of 2012, but any commitment was still studiously avoided – even in the wake of a letter signed by 100 MPs at the end of June that year demanding legislation to pave the way for a referendum in the next parliament. The equivocation did nothing to improve the mood among Eurosceptics, 53 of whom decided at the end of October to send Cameron a crystal-clear message by defying a three-line whip and ganging up with Labour to defeat the government on an amendment demanding a cut in the EU’s budget – something which, ironically, Cameron was able, with the help of other member states, to go on to deliver in early 2013.

Still, it was now patently obvious that the rebels would stop at nothing until they got what they wanted. In the third week of January 2013, having warned his European allies and key players in the business community, and taking care to make a strong, even optimistic, case for a reform rather than Brexit, Cameron made what became known (as a result of its being given in the company’s HQ) as his Bloomberg Speech. The government would renegotiate the UK’s relationship with the EU before putting the outcome to the people in an in–out referendum which, as we all know now, was later set for June 23 2016.

David Cameron today tells us that Britain leaving the EU would be ‘a self-inflicted wound’. It’s hard not to retort that he should know all about those. The holding of a vote on the UK’s membership may well have been inevitable from the moment that this particular Prime Minister assumed office. But maybe he should ask himself just whose fault that was.

http://ukandeu.ac.uk/simply-unstoppable-or-a-self-inflicted-wound/

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‘Antisemitism is rare in Britain, but Labour should still examine itself’, New Statesman, 20 May 2016.

Posted on August 4, 2016 by tpbale

Another week, another bunch of stories about antisemitism in the Labour Party.  First off we had the announcement that Shami Chakrabarti’s inquiry would aim to report by the end of June.  Barely had we had time to digest that before we got a YouGov survey in the Times suggesting that a substantial proportion of the Party’s members and registered supporters seemed to think that (a) the whole thing was got up by the media and (b) Ken ‘did someone say Hitler?’ Livingstone didn’t deserve to be expelled. Hot on its heels came concerns expressed about the fact that Jan Royall’s inquiry into Oxford University Labour Club wasn’t going to be published in full.  And finally – well probably not finally, actually – it looks like a Labour MEP has been comparing Israel’s conduct in the Occupied Territories with, you’ve guessed it, the Nazis.

Understandably, the focus so far has been on the Party itself.  But what about those who simply support it and, indeed, the country as a whole?  Is there much evidence to suggest that Labour voters and Britain in general has a problem with Jews, at least when it comes to politics?

The answer would seem to be no – although things are far from perfect.  In fact, less than one in ten voters think that Jews have too much influence in Britain and two-thirds would be happy with a Jewish Prime Minister. But that does of course mean that a minority aren’t as open minded as they could or should be.

Those figures come from a survey of 1,694 adults, weighted and representative of all GB adults, carried out at the beginning of this month by YouGov for Queen Mary University of London’s School of Politics and International Relations.

More precisely, just seven per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that ‘Jews have too much influence in this country’, a drop of three percentage points since 2014 when we last asked the same question.

Meanwhile, 65 per cent of voters said that a Jewish Prime Minister would be as acceptable as a member of any other faith – an increase of three percentage points since 2014. In party terms Lib Dem voters are the most likely (81 per cent) to agree with that statement, followed by Labour voters (74 per cent), Tory voters (67 per cent).  Only UKIP voters (51 per cent) were noticeably less likely to agree.

The vast majority of respondents, 83 per cent, said that knowing a party leader was Jewish would make no difference to their voting intentions. Just six per cent of voters said it would make them less likely to vote for that party – although this rises to 13 per cent among UKIP voters.

These party differences may have something to do, at least in part, with familiarity.  Lib Dem voters are most likely (40 per cent) to say they have Jewish friends, acquaintances or work colleagues – followed by Labour voters (37 per cent), Tory voters (36 per cent), and UKIP voters (24 per cent).

Perhaps not surprisingly, age and to some extent social class difference make a difference: broadly speaking, younger people and ABC1 voters seem to be more open-minded.  But there also seems to be some regional variation in attitudes: Londoners seem a little less likely than voters living elsewhere in the UK to accept the idea of a British Jew becoming Prime Minister.

A majority, 57 per cent, of respondents living in the capital agreed that a Jewish Prime Minister would be as acceptable as a member of any other faith. But that was a lower proportion than elsewhere. Voters in the rest of southern England are the most accepting of the idea (69 per cent), followed by voters in the north (65 per cent), the Midlands and Wales (65 per cent), and Scotland (64 per cent).

More generally, there is some evidence that the recent controversy over antisemitism in the Labour Party may have heightened awareness of perceived discrimination. Asked about the level of prejudice against Jews in the UK, 29 per cent of all voters said there is ‘a great deal or a fair amount’ – an increase of five percentage points since 2014. While nearly one in two (48 per cent) feel that Jews face little or no discrimination, that figure is down six percentage points from when the same question was asked a year ago.

So voters reckon there is discrimination out there, but most of them don’t seem themselves to be swayed by prejudice, at least when it comes to politics. There are variations of course, and pockets of intolerance persist among some voters – particularly (but not exclusively) among those inclined to support UKIP – and some communities.

It will come as no surprise to hear an academic suggest we need more research to explain why this might be the case. But it is also worth what we’ve discovered from this survey being taken into account by those now charged looking into (and hopefully rooting out) antisemitism as it affects Labour.

Context isn’t everything but it matters. Political prejudice against Jews in Britain isn’t widespread but it hasn’t altogether gone away – another reason why a Party which aspires to lead the country should seize the opportunity to take a good look at itself.

Originally published at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/antisemitism-rare-britain-labour-should-still-examine-itself

 

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‘The Corn Laws analogy is misplaced. There’s no good reason why the Tories should split over Europe’, ConservativeHome, 17 May 2016.

Posted on May 22, 2016 by tpbale

An apocryphal aphorism coined by a firebrand left-wing legend might not be an obvious way to start a discussion about what could happen to the Conservative Party in the wake of the EU Referendum, but Nye Bevan surely had a point when he asked ‘Why gaze into the crystal ball when you can read it in the book?’  The past may be a foreign country but it’s often a better guide to the future than even the best-informed best-guesses.

The problem, however, in this case is that just about the only book anyone seems to have read is the one which features Robert Peel’s decision back in the mid-nineteenth century to repeal the Corn Laws – a move that triggered a huge split in the Tory Party and put it out of power for decades.  Rarely, these days, does one read a column talking about the Conservatives contemporary travails over Europe which doesn’t make at least a passing mention of the precedent. I should know: I’ve written one or two of them myself.

Yet, to enter a plea in mitigation, I’ve only done so to make the point that, even if it is the first example for which everyone wanting to demonstrate a portentous sense of historical perspective reaches, it’s not actually very useful.

For one thing, Peel’s decision was so divisive because it was so obviously at odds with what the vast bulk of the Tory Party at the time stood for – both ideologically and in terms of the socio-economic interests it represented.  This is not the case with Cameron’s decision to back remaining in the EU – a position supported by, let’s not forget, the majority of his colleagues in Cabinet and in the Commons, as well as by many of those who’ve backed the Conservatives financially over the years.  Moreover, whereas Peel’s move represented a break with the status quo, Cameron’s stance merely confirms it.

For another, the parties and party system of 1840s were nowhere near, to lapse into social-science-speak, so institutionalised as their equivalents today, when parties are (relatively, at least!) disciplined outfits with fairly clearly-defined programmes on which they are regularly held to account by a mass electorate and a mass media.  This has been the case in liberal democracies all over the world since 1945, and one would be hard-pressed to think of a single mainstream centre-right party that has melted down or smashed itself to pieces over even the most fundamental of internal disagreements.  The idea that this would happen to a party operating, as the Tories do, in a first-past-the-post system that mercilessly punishes small and splinter parties is even more far-fetched.

So the crystal ball it will have to be – and gazing into it gives us two obvious scenarios.

First up: we vote to remain.  In which case David Cameron is highly unlikely to attempt a ‘revenge reshuffle’ in order to see off the sceptics: he lacks the strength to do it and anyway it’s not his style. Instead, he, and even some on the other side, will try to forgive and forget – and to prove that you can indeed put the genie back in the bottle.

Whatever the margin, however, this won’t provide a miracle cure for the Conservative Party’s problems over Europe.  Instead those problems will return, at least for a while, to being chronic rather than acute, although they will doubtless flare up again as soon as Brexiteers feel they’ve left a decent interval or Brussels decides to amend a treaty, whichever is the sooner.

If, on the other hand, we vote to leave, things may actually be easier – certainly in the long term.  In the short term, of course, Cameron might have to go, although maybe not quite as quickly (or as willingly) as many assume.  Meanwhile, those who joined him in campaigning to remain will accept the will of the people: after all, they’re pragmatists – that’s why, some would say, they’re in the Remain camp in the first place. Just as importantly, they will be supported, rather than summarily executed, by the majority of those in the victorious Leave camp, most of whom, it is all-too-easily-forgotten, are grown-ups too.

Leaving might also have an upside in the sense of encouraging the Tories to turn to what some people (and most voters) regard as more pressing matters – the economy, housing, social care, the NHS and the slow-down in social mobility.  As long as the party’s Ayn Rand faction doesn’t interpret victory in the referendum as a mandate to drag the party way off to the unchained right, a chance to re-focus in this way can only be to the good.

But leaving throws up a potential downside for the party too.  If Brexit does trigger a leadership contest, whoever wins it will face huge pressure to seek a personal mandate via an early election. Gordon Brown’s experience will weigh heavily, as will the overwhelming likelihood of an easy victory over a Labour Party which is at best out of sorts and at worst out of its mind.

The Conservatives would win that election, yes.  But Corbyn would lose it – and badly.  A 1983-style defeat would offer Labour a chance to come to its senses much earlier than might otherwise be the case and mean that the Tories could face an election in, say, 2023 against a much more formidable opponent – possibly against the backdrop of a) an economy still struggling to recover from the initial shock of Brexit and b) net migration figures which Brexit had done little or nothing to reduce.

All of which recalls another aphorism, although not, this time, one we can attribute to anyone in particular: ‘Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.’

 

Originally published at http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2016/05/tim-bale-what-will-become-of-the-conservative-party-after-the-referendum.html

 

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‘David Cameron is not the man to shoot the Conservative Eurosceptic dog’, Telegraph, 10 May 2016

Posted on May 22, 2016 by tpbale

You know the Tory Civil War is back on when the body-snatching starts again in earnest.  A few weeks ago, Winston Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, the MP for Mid-Sussex, made it plain that he took a dim view of Leave campaigners trying posthumously to enlist the great man to their cause.  Now, however, the other side are up in arms because, in their view, the Prime Minister tried to do pretty much the same during his speech at the British museum on Monday.

But before we worry about how much more we, or indeed the Conservative Party, can take of this sort of stuff between now and June 23rd, it’s worth stepping back to ask who’s really to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which the Tories now find themselves.  No-one, of course, emerges spotless from such an excercise.  But David Cameron surely has more to answer for than most – and not because he’s at last being beastly to the Brexiteers but because he wasn’t beastly enough to them in the first place.

It was Sir Nicholas who recently declared in an interview with ConservativeHome that “If you have an Alsatian sitting in front of you, and it growls at you and bares its teeth, there are two ways of dealing with it. You can pat it on the head, in which case it’ll bite you, or you can kick it really hard in the balls, in which case it’ll run away”

Cameron chose right from the start to pat Conservative Eurosceptics on the head rather than kick them where it hurts.  Hence the trouble the Tories are in today. The Prime Minister hasn’t always crossed the street in order to avoid a fight with his own party.  But he is not by nature confrontational, preferring calibration and conciliation to outright conflict.  And nowhere has his tendency to buy himself time and to buy his opponents off been more evident than on Europe.

When, during the 2005 leadership contest, Liam Fox declared that he would pull the Conservatives out of the EPP group in the European Parliament, Cameron, who had previously given no indication whatsoever that he intended to do anything so self-defeating, almost immediately followed suit.

Once he had won, Cameron found that, despite some stalling, he couldn’t renege on the pledge, notwithstanding the time and effort it was bound to take in order to restore the damage it did to his relationship with Angela Merkel.

In any case, he came to appreciate that honouring that pledge, along with giving in to demands for a further promise of policy repatriation and a referendum lock on any further transfer of power to Brussels, would be a useful and apparently cheap way of proving his Conservative credentials to those worried about him taking the party too far into the centre ground.

However, the fact that Cameron failed to win the 2010 election and therefore had to do a deal with the Lib Dems – and the fact that the Eurozone seemed on the verge of collapse while UKIP began to threaten his MPs’ majorities – meant that when his right-wingers presented him with the bill for services rendered, they insisted on adding extra items.

Suddenly, they demanded , the Prime Minister would have to veto this and avoid opting back into that.  Oh, and that referendum – well, it would no longer be enough to keep it in reserve as a rocket of last resort; instead it had to be brought up to the front line and fired off immediately. And, in case he didn’t quite get the message, they would rustle up the odd rebellion just to remind him that their bite could be as bad as their bark.

Cameron’s Bloomberg speech, at which he finally gave the leavers what anyone with any sense knew they’d wanted all along, may have seemed to some like an act of leadership – but only in the sense apocryphally attributed to the French republican, Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”

But even if, as the referendum result seems to hang in the balance, there are signs that he may finally have decided to fight fire with fire and show the Leave Alsatian who’s boss, there’s a catch.

For one thing, that Alsatian isn’t a puppy anymore, meaning that a few swift kicks aren’t going to be enough to do the job.  He’ll have to hurt it more than he might want to – and if he loses in June, it will be him, not the Alsatian, who’ll have to run away. For another, what is Cameron going to do with said canine if, in the end, Remain wins the day?

Talk of some sort of post-referendum “reckoning” – the proverbial “revenge reshuffle” – might excite some particularly zealous In campaigners.  But it seems improbable, largely because it would be so out of character: even if he could control it, Cameron simply isn’t the kind of guy to take a dog out back and shoot it.  And nor, one suspects, are any of his probable successors.

 

Originally published at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/10/david-cameron-is-not-the-man-to-shoot-the-conservative-euroscept/

 

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