‘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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‘Labour voters don’t have a problem with Jewish people….’, Telegraph, 5 May 2016

Posted on May 8, 2016 by tpbale

This time last year, many people believed that the Labour Party was about to supply the UK with its first Jewish Prime Minister since Benjamin Disraeli.  How things have changed.  The party that was led by Ed Miliband for five years between 2010 and 2015 and has a proud record of fighting discrimination in all its forms seems to have a serious problem with antisemitism.

But what about Labour’s voters?  Are those likely to back the party at the polls today any more likely to harbour anti-Jewish sentiments than those who will put their cross elsewhere? A survey conducted exclusively for Queen Mary University of London by YouGov on the first two days of this week suggests not.

Certainly, it looks as if the long weekend’s headlines about Ken Livingstone may have driven awareness of the issue up the agenda. Of nearly 1700 people questioned, some 29 per cent think there is a good deal or a fair amount of prejudice against Jews in the UK – up from 24 per cent when we asked the same question last year.

Yet when we asked people this week how much they agreed with the statement “Jews have too much influence in this country”, we found only seven per cent agreeing with it.  Moreover, only two per cent out of that seven per cent agreed strongly, suggesting that hard-core antisemitism is, thankfully, pretty rare in twenty-first century Britain.

And Labour voters, it seems, are no more likely than anyone else to have a problem with Jews. Indeed, if anything, they were, at 48 per cent, more likely than people as a whole (at 43 per cent) to disagree with the idea that Jewish people have too much influence. Indeed, the only outliers on this question were Ukip supporters, only 31 per cent of whom disagreed with the idea, with 14 per cent of them actually agreeing.

Furthermore, Labour voters (at 74 cent) actually seem happier than their Tory-voting counterparts (at 67 per cent) with the idea of the country having a Jewish Prime Minister – something some 65 per cent of people as a whole had no issue with.  Indeed, if any party’s voters had a problem with the statement, “A British Jew would make an equally acceptable Prime Minister as a member of any other faith”, it was, once again, Ukip’s: at 51 per cent, they were much less keen on the idea than average and more likely (12 per cent compared to 6 per cent of people as a whole) to say they didn’t like it.

But what was also interesting on this question, particularly in view of some of the mud that has been slung around during this year’s mayoral contest, was the apparent difference between voters in London and those living in other parts of the country. In the Midlands/Wales, in the North, in Scotland, and in the rest of the South of England, two-thirds of people said they had no problem with the idea of Jewish Prime Minister. In London, however, agreement dropped to 57 per cent. Londoners were also slightly less inclined to insist that a party having a Jewish leader would make no difference to whether or not they would vote for it.

Quite why this is the case, we can’t know for certain, though some are bound to point to the fact that, just because the capital is one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, doesn’t mean all of its communities embrace cosmopolitan attitudes – hence accusations levelled at Labour by some of its opponents that its antisemitism problem stems not just from sympathy with the plight of Palestiniansin the occupied territories but from its unwillingness to stand up to distinctly un-progressive prejudices back at home.

True or not, the results of our survey point, on this as well as other issues, to a mismatch between what Labour seems to have become under Jeremy Corbyn and the views of some (although not necessarily all) of its voters.  This might not stop the party winning London today. But the rest of the country? Forget it.

 

Originally published at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/05/labour-voters-dont-have-a-problem-with-jewish-people-but-london/

 

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‘How should Labour’s disgruntled moderates behave?’, New Statesman, 4 May 2016

Posted on May 7, 2016 by tpbale

When Albert O. Hirschman was writing Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to decline in Firms, Organizations, and States he wasn’t thinking of the British Labour Party. That doesn’t mean, though, that one of the world’s seminal applications of economics to politics can’t help us clarify the options open to the 80 to 90 per cent of Labour MPs who, after another week of utter chaos, are in total despair at what’s happening under Jeremy Corbyn.

According to Hirschman, people in their situation have essentially three choices – all of which stand some chance, although there are no guarantees, of turning things around sooner or later.

The first option is simply to get the hell out: exit, after all, can send a pretty powerful, market-style signal to those at the top that things are going wrong and that something has to change.

The second option is to speak up and shout out: if the leadership’s not listening then complaining loudly might mean they get the message.

The third option is to sit tight and shut up, believing that if the boat isn’t rocked it will somehow eventually make it safely to port.

Most Labour MPs have so far plumped for the third course of action. They’ve battened down the hatches and are waiting for the storm to pass. In some ways, that makes sense. For one thing, Labour’s rules and Corbyn’s famous ‘mandate’ make him difficult to dislodge, and anyone seen to move against him risks deselection by angry activists.

For another, there will be a reckoning – a general election defeat so bad that it will be difficult even for diehards to deny there’s a problem: maybe Labour has to do ‘déjà vu all over again’ and lose like it did in 1983 in order to come to its senses. The problem, however, is that this scenario could still see it stuck in opposition for at least a decade. And that’s presuming that the left hasn’t so effectively consolidated its grip on the party that it can’t get out from under.

That’s presumably why a handful of Labour MPs have gone for option two – voice. Michael Dugher, John Woodcock, Kevan Jones, Wes Streeting and, of course, John Mann have made it pretty clear they think the whole thing’s a mess and that something – ideally Jeremy Corbyn and those around him – has to give. They’re joined by others – most recently Stephen Kinnock, who’s talked about the party having to take ‘remedial action’ if its performance in local elections turns out to be as woeful as some are suggesting. And then of course there are potential leadership challengers making none-too-coded keynote speeches and public appearances (both virtual and real), as well as a whole host of back and frontbenchers prepared to criticise Corbyn and those around him, but only off the record.

So far, however, we’ve seen no-one prepared to take the exit option – or at least to go the whole hog. Admittedly, some, like Emma Reynolds, Chuka Umunna, Yvette Cooper, and Rachel Reeves, have gone halfway by pointedly refusing to serve in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. But nobody has so far declared their intention to leave politics altogether or to quit the party, either to become an independent or to try to set up something else.

The latter is easily dismissed as a pipe-dream, especially in the light of what happened when Labour moderates tried to do it with the SDP in the eighties. But maybe it’s time to think again. After all, in order to refuse even to contemplate it you have to believe that the pendulum will naturally swing back to Labour at a time when, all over Europe, the centre-left looks like being left behind by the march of time and when, in the UK, there seems precious little chance of a now shrunken, predominantly public-sector union movement urging the party back to the centre ground in the same way that its more powerful predecessors did back in the fifties and the late-eighties and nineties.

Maybe it’s also worth wondering whether those Labour MPs who left for the SDP could and should have done things differently. Instead of simply jumping ship in relatively small numbers and then staying in parliament, something much bolder and much more dramatic is needed. What if over one hundred current Labour MPs simultaneously declared they were setting up ‘Real Labour’? What if they simultaneously resigned from the Commons and then simultaneously fought scores of by-elections under that banner?

To many, even to ask the question is to answer it. The obstacles – political, procedural, and financial – are formidable and forbidding. The risks are huge and the pay-off massively uncertain. Indeed, the whole idea can be swiftly written off as a thought-experiment explicitly designed to demonstrate that nothing like it will ever come to pass.

On the other hand, Labour MPs, whether we use Hirschman’s three-way schema or not, are fast running out of options. The price for loyalty looks like being long-term opposition. Voice can only do so much when those you’re complaining about seem – in both senses of the word – immovable. Exit, of course, can easily be made to seem like the coward’s way out. Sometimes, however, it really is the bravest and the best thing to do.

 

Originally published at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/how-should-labours-disgruntled-moderates-behave

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‘Where now are the earthly paradises from which an idealist can take hope?’, Observer, 20 March 2016.

Posted on April 16, 2016 by tpbale

It is only natural, when that hopey-changey thing is in short supply at home, that idealists start looking overseas for inspiration. And for some, it doesn’t stop there. Not content with attending demos and maybe tweeting and Facebooking in support of whatever country they happen to be making common cause with, they actually go there to express their solidarity.

That is not, of course, why Barack Obama is visiting Cuba this week, but it is why British leftwingers have made the self-styled socialist paradise their holiday destination of choice for decades. Sure, the weather’s great and so is the music. But what really attracts them, as long, that is, as they can forget about all the political prisoners and all the rationing, is its defiant refusal to compromise its principles.

Lefties aren’t entirely alone in this. The British right, after all, began its ongoing love affair with the US long before the left fell head over heels for Havana. Rightwingers’ affection for the Anglosphere also means that Canada, Australia and New Zealand regularly get prayed in aid of a policy being pushed at home, be it a supposedly no-strings-attached free-trade deal, a tough-as-it-gets asylum regime, or a system of contestable advice and recruitment from the private sector in the civil service.

But the left has always – and perhaps has always had to – cast its net rather wider when looking for shining examples and sources of optimism, revolutionary or otherwise. Sadly, however, the sheer variety of countries in which it has invested its hopes, as well as the sometimes wilful naivety that helped nurture them in the first place, has seen those very same hopes dashed time and time again.

As long ago as 1956, Jimmy Porter, the antihero of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, was lamenting: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left.” And in some ways the first cut was the deepest. Many progressives had put their faith in the Soviet Union – and continued to do so long after it made any moral or practical sense – only to see it smashed to pieces by the invasion of Hungary that same year.

Fortunately, for the British left anyway, the often dark and disturbing legacy of this country’s colonial past provided plenty of other causes to latch on to. Perhaps the most significant, because it was so self-evidently ethical, was the long-running campaign against apartheid South Africa, a cause that could be easily converted, once Nelson Mandela became its first black president, into sympathy and solidarity with the “Rainbow Nation” he hoped to build.

To claim that Mandela’s project has run into the sand would be going too far. But anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to how things have gone since his departure would be hard pressed to regard today’s South Africa with starry-eyed admiration.

The same goes for the Latin American countries that used to command so much of the left’s empathy and attention. There were times, in the 80s, when deciding between the T-shirt advertising your support for the ANC and the one showing your solidarity with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua represented a serious political, as well as fashion, dilemma. It turned out, as it always seems to, that things weren’t quite as black and white as we thought.

Daniel Ortega and chums might not have been the devils they were accused of being by the Americans, but they were no angels either. And dammit if the same doesn’t apply to heroes of more recent vintage such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who left a legacy of chronic shortages and human rights violations, and now Brazil’s Lula and Rousseff, both of whom are facing allegations of high-level corruption.

Turn to the Middle East and it’s a similarly sad story. The same year that Soviet tanks trundled down the streets of Budapest, Britain, France and Israel were involved in an outlandish conspiracy to snatch back the Suez Canal from what some of the more zealous progressive opponents of the operation came close to portraying as plucky little Egypt.

Rather embarrassingly for the left, however, it was the Americans who put the mockers on the whole thing. And, once the heat had gone out of the situation, even the most dedicated anticolonialist found it hard to retain sympathy for the Egyptian dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and his brutal successors.

For a time, Israel’s kibbutz-style socialism seduced some on the left. But they couldn’t ignore the plight of the displaced Palestinians for ever, especially once voters started chucking out the centre-left in favour of rightwing hawks reliant for their Knesset majorities on some seriously dodgy characters. And then, just when the British left had begun to get comfy in their Yasser Arafat scarves, Gaza goes and elects Hamas, an organisation that even the most dedicated fan of its welfare work in the occupied territories would have to admit isn’t really progressive poster-boy material.

So where is a self-respecting radical to turn these days? Not even Scandinavia, long a good bet and a safe haven for those of a vaguely socialist or social democratic demeanour, seems up to the job any more. Maybe there was always less to it than met the eye, as Perry Anderson suggested in his 1961 essay Mr Crosland’s Dreamland. But it is harder today to argue, as Anderson noted some on the British centre-left did back then, that Stockholm is where “[e]lectoral realism and social idealism sublimely coincide”.

Nordic social democracy isn’t dead. Indeed, its entrenched values and institutions continue to constrain its opponents in ways that leftwingers living in Anglo-Saxon democracies can only dream of. But its political representatives are in no ruder health than they are anywhere else in Europe.

The Swedish Labour party may be clinging to office but the centre-right is in power in Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Norway. And in the last three cases, it governs with the support of radical rightwing parties. And the virulently xenophobic Sweden Democrats are now the third biggest force in that country.

Still, there is always Spain, in whose civil war Jimmy Porter’s idealistic dad supposedly received the wounds that eventually killed him and where the pony-tailed Pablo Iglesias is the latest leftwing pin-up – and Greece, even if its rock-star radical Yanis Varoufakis long since left the building.

Yet, if the past is any guide to the future, both countries are bound to disappoint sooner or later. Who knows, though? With Jeremy Corbyn at the helm, perhaps the British left no longer needs to look overseas to have its hopes raised and then dashed on the rocks of political reality.

 

Originally published at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/20/which-earthly-paradises-can-good-socialists-visit

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‘Gloves are off in Brexit battle’, Mirror, 20 March 2016.

Posted on April 16, 2016 by tpbale

VOTERS might never have been able to take Iain Duncan Smith too seriously, especially when he was Tory leader from 2001 to 2003. But to many MPs and ordinary grassroots members he matters.

IDS represents the “faith, flag and family” wing of the party – people who believe Britain should be outside the EU and who, while keen on the free market, reckon the rich have a responsibility to look after the less fortunate.

There are a fair few Tories of this persuasion in the Commons, and David Cameron only has a narrow majority. It is another indication the gloves are coming off in the fight between Tories who want Brexit and Boris and those who’d prefer to keep us in Europe and a smooth transition from Cameron to Osborne.

It’s not quite no-holds-barred stuff yet.

But in politics things can spin pretty swiftly out of control. Watch this space.

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‘Why Iain Duncan Smith resignation registers a six on the political Richter Scale’, The Conversation, 20 March 2016.

Posted on April 16, 2016 by tpbale

If there were a Richter Scale of Political Resignations, then prime ministers such as Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and Harold Macmillan would register at the very top – on nine.

Big beasts such as Conservative Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine would register at about seven. Iain Duncan Smith’s departure, on the other hand, would probably score around six.

The work and pensions secretary’s departure is the sort of earthquake that would only inflict slight to moderate damage on solid structures but is capable of causing more severe problems for less stable edifices. Unfortunately for the Conservative Party, at least in the run up to the EU referendum, it fits all-too-easily into the latter category .

Duncan Smith can hardly claim to be in the same league as Geoffrey Howe – a genuinely quiet man who altered the economic and social destiny of his country. His resignation has clearly resonated, crystallising the antipathy many Tories feel toward a chancellor they see as too clever by half and a prime minister they regard as far too desperate to keep the UK in the EU. But Howe’s resignation really detonated, blowing a decade of British politics to kingdom come by triggering the defenestration of an icon and the eventual defeat of the Conservatives by New Labour a few years later.

Still, while Duncan Smith’s departure doesn’t represent a direct threat to a sitting prime minister, like Howe’s did, it is nonetheless a direct hit on the prime minister’s entire political project. It strikes at the heart of Cameron’s attempt to persuade the country that it can trust the Conservatives to combine competence with compassion and that it should vote to stay in the EU.

The critique that came through in Duncan Smith’s resignation letter rams home the Out campaign’s portrayal of David Cameron and George Osborne as disingenuous out-of-touch toffs who don’t give a monkey’s for ordinary people. And that is one of the few narratives, along with the idea that Britain will be overrun by foreigners unless it gets out of the EU, that stands a chance of overwhelming the In campaign’s message that Brexit is a leap in the dark that will endanger Britain’s prosperity and security.

Who to believe

Blogs, newspaper columns and the airwaves have been running hot with analyses of Duncan Smith’s “real reasons” for going. But motives in these cases are always myriad and mixed. They are one part long-felt frustration (in this case over Osborne’s game-playing and determination to achieve savings without hitting those voters the Tories need most), one part eye on the main chance (in this case kicking one of the guys who is key to battling Brexit while he’s down).

It is impossible at this stage to tell whether, by resigning, Duncan Smith has inflicted a flesh wound – superficially nasty but no risk to the Remain camp in the long term – or something a whole lot more serious.

Which kind of wound it turns out to be will depend partly on the Conservative Party itself but also on the public, too. And when it comes to the latter, political junkies would always do well to remind themselves that most people aren’t paying anywhere near as much attention to all this as they are. By the time the referendum rolls round, pollsters will be lucky to find a majority of ordinary voters who not only know some Tory guy resigned back in March but that his name was Iain Duncan Something.

This weekend, then, has been a bad one for Cameron, and especially for Osborne, but earthquakes, even moderately severe ones, are very often survivable.

 

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/why-iain-duncan-smith-resignation-registers-a-six-on-the-political-richter-scale-56574

Also published as Why the IDS earthquake (probably) won’t kill Cameron http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12199994/Why-the-IDS-earthquake-probably-wont-kill-Cameron.html

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