‘Is George Osborne really the Political Chancellor, or just a very Tory boy?, The Conversation, 16 March 2016

Posted on April 16, 2016 by tpbale

Is it actually possible for anyone to pen a portrait of George Osborne without using the phrase “political Chancellor” at least once? Even those of us who start out determined not to fall into that trap end up doing so before long.

Equally hard to avoid, it seems, is the tendency to note that Osborne “doesn’t always get the politics right”. Typical examples include his decision to signal “an age of austerity” prior to the 2010 election, which helped to worry an electorate that until then looked like it might give the Conservatives an overall majority. Then, of course, came his Ominshambles Budget in 2012. His taxes on Cornish pasties, caravans and grannies were widely credited with helping Labour get back in the game – albeit temporarily. And let’s not forget his embarrassing U-turnon tax credits in 2015.

After that comes an almost obligatory paragraph reminding us that the Chancellor nevertheless has an uncanny ability to bounce back from such setbacks. Those who write him off, we must be reminded, may be speaking too soon – particularly those who think he can’t take on Boris Johnson for the Tory leadership.

Clichés, of course, are clichés only because they contain a least a grain of truth. So, while it might be tempting to swim against the tide, and to insist that Osborne only ever thinks about the economy, always makes the right calls, and is bound one day to move next door, it would be silly. All the above applies, whether we like it or not.

But still, there may be more to be said, especially if we set aside our fascination with the micro and focus for a moment on the macro – and if we forget for the moment our obsession with his climbing, or failing to climb, to the top of Disraeli’s greasy pole.

What if instead we see Osborne as the servant of the party as much as its potential master – as an ideologue as much a member of what he apparently likes to refer to as “the guild”?

Seen in these terms, the Chancellor can only be regarded as a roaring success.

Blue blooded

His austerity rhetoric may have ensured that the Tories didn’t score an outright win in 2010 but the chances of them doing so were always vanishingly small.

What it did do was to prepare the ground for what remains one of his signal achievements – turning a recession brought on by a global financial crisis into a tale of Labour profligacy and incompetence.

It’s a tale so convincing that (admittedly with some help from Ed Miliband and Ed Balls) it was still believed by many swing voters five years later. They refused to vote for Labour even in the wake of Osborne missing almost every economic target he had set for himself.

But Osborne didn’t stop there. He proceeded to prove, through a series of budgets and Autumn statements – at least to the satisfaction of sufficient numbers of voters – that the state really could survive on far less than was previously assumed possible.

At the same time, he cut both the eligibility for, and levels of, a whole series of state benefits. He has simultaneously saved a ton of money and utterly residualised “welfare”. Now, an increasing number of people see state support not as a vital safety net but as a sink into which we’ve no intention of pouring any more of our hard-earned cash than we’re absolutely forced to.

Yet Osborne has done this while, so far at least, providing sufficient (or at least sufficiently cosmetic) protection for those parts of the public realm which, however infuriating it might be for Conservative neoliberals, voters regard as non-negotiable. The most obvious examples here are the NHS and pensions.

Indeed, he’s been so careful to protect the latter that he’s turned it from a purely defensive measure into a devastatingly offensive electoral strategy. He has helped ensure that the proportion of over 65s prepared to vote Labour has plummeted – a particularly useful trick to pull off given how many of them, unlike their grandchildren, actually turn up at polling stations on election day.

He’s even managed to do that at the same time as helping to signal to the more middle-aged chattering classes, via measures such as supporting same-sex marriage, that the Tories aren’t necessarily the “nasty party” anymore.

The Chancellor, then, might not be the consummate politician, inevitably destined for the very top. But he has undoubtedly been the consummate Conservative, helping his party towards a hegemony which may only be partial but which, under the first-past-the-post electoral system and with the opposition fast fragmenting, looks good for at least a decade to come.

The columnist Gaby Hinsliff noted recently that “the liberal left is basically learning how it felt to be a Conservative in the 1990s: marginalised, defensive, feeling the argument slip away from you”. If there’s one man the Tories should thank for that, apart perhaps from Jeremy Corbyn, it’s George Osborne.

 

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/is-george-osborne-really-the-political-chancellor-or-just-a-hard-core-tory-56248

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‘Minority views? Labour members had been longing for someone like Corbyn before he was even on the ballot paper’ (with Paul Webb and Monica Poletti), LSE Blog, 14 March 2016

Posted on April 16, 2016 by tpbale

A recently published blow-by-blow account of one of the biggest upsets we’ve ever seen in a Labour Party leadership contest reminds us that Jeremy Corbyn only made it onto the ballot paper due to the nominations of 35 MPs – ‘morons‘, according to John McTernan, Tony Blair’s Director of Political Operations from 2005 to 2007. Whether it’s right to blame them (or for them to blame themselves) is debatable, however. After all, the final choice lay in the hands of the Party’s grassroots. And when it comes to the role played by Labour’s members in Corbyn’s election, there’s some conventional wisdom that needs challenging.

The leadership electorate

It is all too easy for Labour moderates to comfort themselves with the idea that the 2015 contest was somehow hijacked by a bunch of left-wingers who joined over the summer. The truth is very different – and shows just how big the challenge facing those MPs who want to get rid of their leader really is. In fact, if we’d looked hard enough at Labour’s membership even before it surged over that summer, then we probably should have seen Corbyn coming.

Just after Labour lost last May’s general election, we surveyed its grassroots members as part of a study of party membership in 21st Century Britain. Rather than being presented with a pre-cooked list of runners and riders, those members were asked to write in who they would like to see take over from Ed Miliband. Out of 1,180 Labour Party members we surveyed, just two (yes, two) wrote down ‘Jeremy Corbyn’. A few months later he won the leadership by a landslide. So how on earth did that happen?

Certainly, the influx of £3 supporters over the summer helped. But we have no hard evidence that it proved decisive. Indeed, Corbyn would have won even if the franchise been restricted to members only. True, Corbyn won ‘only’ 49.6 per cent of the membership, as opposed to the 83.8 per cent of registered supporters and the 57.6 per cent of ‘affiliated’ (mainly trade union) supporters. But even if more rounds of counting had proved necessary, it is inconceivable that he would have failed to pick up sufficient second preferences to have put him over the top on members’ votes alone.

Just as importantly, many of those members who helped elect Corbyn were already in the Party before the contest was even declared. YouGov, which conducted the fieldwork for our survey, also carried out a couple of polls of the Labour leadership electorate during the summer of 2015. Those polls suggested that almost two-thirds of members voting in the leadership contest had joined the Labour Party before, not after, the 2015 general election.

Admittedly, it looks as though the ‘old’ members were rather less keen on Corbyn than the ‘new’ members. In YouGov’s final poll in September – the one which saw them get the actual result almost spot-on – Corbyn was more highly rated by those who had joined after the general election than before it. Among those new-joiners, Corbyn won 62 per cent, as opposed to 51 per cent among those who joined when Ed Miliband was leader, and 42 per cent among those who were members before he became leader in 2010.

Yet, even with the influx of all these new people after the election, the membership which voted in the leadership contest probably looked pretty similar, and thought pretty similarly, to the membership that had campaigned for a Labour victory in May 2015.

True, there were a slightly greater number of younger party members (and a slightly smaller number of older members) in YouGov’s final poll than in our survey.  But the difference (5 percentage points when it came to the 18-24 group and 3 percentage points when it came to the over 60s) was hardly huge. Socially, three-quarters of the members in YouGov’s later poll could be classified as broadly middle-class, which was also true of the members we surveyed back in May. Men were in the majority in both cases (62-38 in May compared to 59-41 later that summer). Old and new members also came from the same regions of the country: 46 per cent from London and the South, 47 per cent from the Midlands and the North.

In fact, many of those members we surveyed in May 2015 were included in YouGov’s poll of Labour members conducted just before the leadership election. Tellingly, some 44 per cent of them had by that stage decided to vote for Corbyn.

The two reasons for the swing

This huge swing to Corbyn among those members who were already in the Party at the general election of 2015 was arguably down to two things. First, there was – right from the start – very little enthusiasm for any of the other candidates. Second, there was a good deal of latent dissatisfaction, as well as latent demand for a leader who was even more socially liberal and economically left-wing than Ed Miliband.

When we asked members to write in who should succeed Ed – back when Jeremy Corbyn received two mentions – Andy Burnham was the nominal front-runner among those who eventually stood. But – and this is a big but – he was the choice of a mere 18 per cent of members, while Yvette Cooper was on 8.5 per cent and Liz Kendall on just 2 per cent.  Indeed, the most striking thing was that, in May 2015, nearly 4 out of 10 grassroots members of the Labour Party (37.5 per cent to be precise) said they didn’t yet know who they wanted as leader. Add that to the 34 per cent who named somebody other than the four candidates who eventually made it onto the ballot, and we perhaps had every reason to expect the unexpected.

But attitudes mattered too. When we asked grassroots members in May 2015 to place themselves on a left-right spectrum running from zero (‘very left-wing’) to ten (‘very right-wing’), the average score was 2.39 – slightly to the left of the average SNP member and only just to the right of the average member of the Greens.

On specific issues, 9 out of 10 Labour members who were in the Party in May 2015 wanted to see government redistributing income and thought cuts to public spending had gone too far – hardly surprising, perhaps, when nearly half of them were public sector employees. Meanwhile, probably reflecting the fact that between 60 and 70 per cent of them were middle-class graduates, eight out of ten Labour Party members in May 2015 thought that immigration was a good thing.

When asked to rank the qualities they most valued in a leader, Labour members in May 2015 put a premium on he or she having strong beliefs, while very few put the ability to unite the party top of their list. Finally, around a third of members in May 2015 didn’t feel the leadership paid them much attention and a quarter felt it didn’t respect them; 6 out of 10 wanted ordinary members to have more influence on policy.

Given all this, Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to power was, in effect, an accident waiting to happen.  Grassroots members – whether they joined before or after he was nominated by MPs – weren’t so much ‘waiting for Jezza’ in particular as longing for someone, anyone, like him – or, more precisely, someone, anyone, like them – to come along and tell them what they wanted to hear. Persuading those members that they were wrong will take quite some doing.

Originally published at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/54068-2/

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‘What Tory activists think about Cameron’s deal…and staying in the EU’ (with Monica Poletti and Paul Webb), Times Red Box, 6 March 2016

Posted on April 16, 2016 by tpbale

Among the majority of membership which is over (in some cases a long way over) 35, the split between those who want to leave and those who want to stay resembles the split overall. That is, six out of ten want to leave, three out of ten want to stay and one in ten have yet to decide.

Among the precious minority of Conservative party members aged 18-34, however, things are much closer. True, some 52 per cent want out, but that leaves 41 per cent who want in. That should give any Tory with a serious eye to the future food, or even pause, for thought.

 

It seems like a lifetime ago, even though it was only a fortnight. Hardly was the printer-ink dry on David Cameron’s late deal in Brussels before the Brexit debate had moved on to the more fundamental questions involved in Britain’s decision to leave or to remain in the EU.

Anyone who’s ever gone to pre-natal classes may be familiar with the feeling. You spend weeks and months obsessing over the birth, only to find that it’s all over in a matter of hours – and now you’re into the really serious stuff.

None of this means, however, that we should forget about the deal altogether, not least because, before it was done anyway, many Conservatives were claiming that what Cameron came back with would help them make their minds up.

Indeed, when, with the help of YouGov, we surveyed grassroots Tories in April 2015, two-thirds of them told us that their vote would depend on the terms of the PM’s renegotiation.

Now, even if some of those were simply trying to appear fair-minded – the sort of people prepared to give the man who’d just won them a general election a chance – the sheer size of that figure suggested that a large number of ordinary members of the Conservative party hadn’t yet decided which way to jump.

But that was then and this is now. And now is make your mind up time. What YouGov’s latest polling of Conservative party members shows is that most of those who have now made up their minds have broken for Brexit.

While one in ten are still undecided, six out of ten members are voting to leave – twice as many as the 30 per cent following David Cameron’s lead and voting to remain.

How Conservative members would vote on EU

Remain a member of the European Union Leave the European Union Don’t know
All Members (N=1,005) 28.76 60.3 10.95

Cameron’s deal does appear to have made some difference. Overall, most party members were not impressed. Given how Eurosceptic they are, however, the fact that though 57 per cent of them thought it was a bad deal 43 per cent thought it was good could still count as a win for the PM.

It is ultimately impossible, of course, to say with certainty whether views on the need to stay or leave were driven by views on the deal, or vice versa, but there’s clearly a correlation between the two.

Some 89 per cent of those who thought Cameron got a bad deal are going to vote to leave, whereas 62 per cent of those who thought he pulled off a good deal are voting to remain.

Voter intention based on view of Cameron’s deal

Remain a member of the European Union Leave the European Union Don’t know
All Members (N=1,005) 28.76 60.3 10.95
Good Deal 61.78 24.04 14.18
Bad Deal 4.11 88.55 7.33

Drilling down into the figures allows us once more to challenge the common wisdom that Tory activists are particularly more likely to want out of the EU.

If we separate party members into those who canvassed voters in 2015, either face to face or on the phone, and those who didn’t, then the first group are more likely to be voting to leave. But the difference (62 per cent of the activists as against 58 per cent of the rest) is tiny: just four percentage points.

Voter intention based on level of activism

Remain a member of the European Union Leave the European Union Don’t know
All Members (N=1,005) 28.76 60.3 10.95
Low intensity’ activity* 32.45 58.49 9.06
High intensity’ activity** 27.59 61.87 10.55

* low intensity activity: displaying election poster, liking on Facebook, following a political party on Twitter
**high intensity activity:  canvassing on the telephone, canvassing door to door

Whether this inconvenient truth will ever register with commentators hooked on the narrative that Cameron is in serious trouble with precisely those Tory members the party relies on to deliver its ground game is a moot point.

It’s a point worth making, however, when we speculate about whether what we might call the really useful part of the party in the country will simply cease to function if  voters reject Brexit. Yes, only one in three will be delighted while six out of ten will be disappointed. But whether most of the latter group will walk away from the party in disgust is highly debateable.

In fact, what really distinguishes Outers and Inners among the Tory membership is first, ideology, and second, age.

Here the differences are really striking. More than half (56 per cent, to be precise) of the 12 per cent of members who see themselves as on the left of the party are planning to vote to remain. And eight out of ten of the 45 per cent of members who regard themselves as on the right of the party are going to vote to leave. Most Tories are Eurosceptic, but the real headbangers are on the right.

Voter intention by Tory ideology

Remain a member of the European Union Leave the European Union Don’t know
All Members (N=1,005) 28.76 60.3 10.95
On the right of the party 11.97 79.6 8.43
On the centre of the party 38.86 48.1 13.03
On the left of the party 55.65 32.26 12.1

But age also matters.

Among the majority of membership which is over (in some cases a long way over) 35, the split between those who want to leave and those who want to stay resembles the split overall. That is, six out of ten want to leave, three out of ten want to stay and one in ten have yet to decide.

Voter intention by age of Tory members

Remain a member of the European Union Leave the European Union Don’t know
All Members (N=1,005) 28.76 60.3 10.95
18-34 41.35 51.92 6.73
35+ 27.34 61.16 11.5

Among the precious minority of Conservative party members aged 18-34, however, things are much closer. True, some 52 per cent want out, but that leaves 41 per cent who want in.  That should give any Tory with a serious eye to the future food, or even pause, for thought.

 

Originally published at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/redbox/topic/the-europe-question/what-tory-activists-think-about-camerons-deal-and-staying-in-the-eu

 

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‘The bloody history of civil war in the Tory party’, Financial Times, 27 February 2016

Posted on March 6, 2016 by tpbale

That the Conservative party believes as much in the strong state as it does in the free economy has long been both its triumph and its tragedy.

Triumph because the combination of the two has often proved electorally unbeatable. Think Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan in the 1950s, Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s, even Lord Salisbury in the 1890s.

Tragedy because, when tensions have arisen between the desire for unfettered trade and competition, on the one hand, and sovereign national government, on the other, the party tends to turn in on itself, losing office as a consequence. Think John Major in the 1990s, Edward Heath in the 1970s, Arthur Balfour, Andrew Bonar Law (and, for a while, Baldwin) in the Edwardian era, and, perhaps most famously, Robert Peel, whose decision to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846 split his party so badly that it effectively found itself cast into opposition for decades.

Because the Tories have always cared as much for men as measures, their arguments over high principle take on an extra edge by being bound up with high politics. The really big splits in the Conservative party’s long history have always seen fights over an issue conflated with competition for the crown. Hardly, surprising, then, that Remain v Leave is also about Dave v Boris.

Benjamin Disraeli, for instance, was thinking about his own prospects as much as he was about the party’s policy when he threw in his lot with its powerful landed interests, who were outraged at what they saw as Peel’s betrayal of British agriculture. Half a century later, Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for tariffs undoubtedly had as much to do with his ambition to lead the party as it did with his belief that Britain (and the Empire) would be best served by erecting barriers to free trade.

Fast forward to the early Seventies and it is obvious that many of those objecting to Heath taking Britain into Europe — most obviously Enoch Powell — were motivated, yes, by heartfelt objections to the loss of sovereignty that accession entailed, but also by often very personal animus against the prime minister.

In the 1990s, too, rows over Europe were also rows about leadership. In the run-up to the 1992 general election, John Major returned to a hero’s welcome after supposedly winning “game, set and match” in the negotiations over the Maastricht treaty. But when the UK’s ignominious post-election exit from the European exchange rate mechanism cost the Conservatives their opinion poll lead, as well as their long-held reputation for economic competence, things quickly began to look very different.

Suddenly, Tories who insisted that Thatcher had been stabbed in the back by a cabal of Europhile colleagues were no longer dismissed as embittered obsessives. Maastricht quickly came to be seen by a substantial minority of their fellow MPs as a humiliation rather than a high-point of British diplomacy. If they could not prevent the treaty’s ratification, then they would undermine Sir John and replace him with someone capable of getting the party back on Thatcherite track.

Even when that finally happened, however, in the wake of Labour’s 1997 landslide, arguments over the party’s direction inevitably got mixed up with an argument over who should be in charge: first, Michael Portillo or William Hague; then Iain Duncan Smith or Michael Howard; and finally David Davis or David Cameron?

It was Mr Cameron, of course, who got the nod in 2005, after a third general election defeat. But rather than disabusing his party of the notion that Brussels was the source of all Britain’s problems, or else allowing it to lead the charge against the EU, he (not uncharacteristically) fudged that decision. Even his eventual call for an in-out referendum following a renegotiation of the UK’s membership is just another example of his trying to have it both ways.

That the referendum now seems to be generating headlines about civil war in the party, however, cannot simply be blamed on Mr Cameron’s cowardice or, for that matter, on London mayor Boris Johnson’s semi-naked ambition.

The reason that things are as bad as they are, and may get worse before they get better, is because, unlike the Corn Laws and tariff reform, this country’s membership of the EU does not — at least in the eyes of Eurosceptics — represent a choice between the free economy and the strong state. Indeed, in their view, the very opposite applies: staying in Europe threatens both of the Conservative party’s core principles. Rather than boosting Britain’s potential as a free-trader, any pooling of sovereignty is seen by sceptics as undermining it, removing our right to cut regulation and the trade deals we need to survive in a globalised world.

The real problem for the Tories is that this analysis is essentially shared both by those in the party who want to remain in the EU and those who want to leave. As a result, the Conservatives are currently having the worst kind of argument anyone can have — an argument between friends. Moreover, they find themselves in the bizarre situation in which an apparently binary decision — in or out — stands virtually no chance of settling that argument. Even if we leave, the rows over our relationship with the EU will continue.

The only consolation in all this — for the Tories if not for the rest of us — is that there is zero risk, given the parlous state of the Labour party, that any of this will cost them, as it has before, their hold on Downing Street. For once, civil war is a luxury the Conservatives can easily afford.

Originally published at https://next.ft.com/content/6afad41c-dbe1-11e5-a72f-1e7744c66818

 

 

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‘Speaking for Britain? MPs broadly reflect the views of their supporters on Europe – but one side should worry a little more than the other’ (with Philip Cowley, Anand Menon and Sofia Vasilopoulou LSE Brexit Blog, 12 February, 2016.

Posted on February 21, 2016 by tpbale

To hear some people talk about ‘the political class’, you’d think that those who do the electing and those that get elected have little in common, creating a damaging disconnect which is supposedly fuelling populist politics on both left and right.  If they’re right, then we need to worry: representative democracy structured around political parties relies on there being at least a reasonable congruence between the ideas of those who are represented and those who do the representing.

Europe is often given as a prime example by those who claim there’s a gulf between the views of ‘the people’ and those at Westminster.  Out there, it is said, folk have been fed up with Brussels for years, but up (or down) in London, only a handful of MPs have – until recently anyway – been prepared to put their heads above the parapet and say we should get out of the EU.

With a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU imminent, it is worth taking a look at that so-called gulf between those who sit in the House of Commons and those who put them there – and in particular at whether the views on Europe held by those who sit on the green leather benches in the name of a particular party bear any similarity to the views of those voters who support that party.

In the spring of 2015, we asked voters a series of questions designed to get at their opinions and their feelings about the European Union.  A few months ago we asked the same questions to MPs.  How do they compare?

First, we asked a general question about how much the UK had benefited from being in the EU.  The results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 ‘The UK has greatly benefited from being a member of the EU’

Note: In this and all subsequent tables, data for voters come from a survey (N=3000) of British voters in April and May 2015; the figures for party supporters are those who said they felt close to one of the parties (Conservative supporters N = 802; Labour supporters N=587). The data for MPs comes from a survey (N=98) conducted by Ipsos Mori’s Reputation Centre in November and December 2015; the figures for all MPs include representatives of the other parties in the House of Commons, with data weighted to reflect the balance of the House by party and ministerial status. Data reported are rebased to remove Don’t Knows and non-respondents.

 

The House of Commons is rather more inclined than the population it represents to think that the UK has done well out of EU membership.  A majority of MPs (57%) agreed with the claim that the UK has greatly benefitted from being in the EU (that is a score of 5-7), compared to 41% of voters – and more than a quarter of MPs (27%) gave the strongest possible score of 7, compared to just 6% of voters. There are plenty of Eurosceptic MPs (27% gave a response of 1-3), but fewer than there are out there in the electorate (37% of whom ticked 1-3) and the centre of gravity in the Commons is clearly more pro-EU than it is in the country as a whole.

When it comes to the two main parties, Conservative supporters, although they aren’t quite as likely as Conservative MPs to dismiss out of hand the idea that the UK has benefited from EU membership, are broadly speaking similarly Eurosceptic.  That said, rather more of them are prepared to see some (albeit not much) good in the whole thing.

For Labour, however, a larger proportion of the parties’ supporters than its MPs reckon the UK hasn’t got much out of the EU. And, by the same token, a much smaller proportion of Labour supporters than Labour MPs are inclined to believe that the country has benefited greatly from membership: a full half of Labour MPs gave the most pro-EU response possible, compared to just 11% of Labour supporters.

A similar, though not identical, pattern, was revealed when we asked about whether integration had gone too far or should go further: on that question, Labour supporters are broadly in line with their MPs; Tory supporters, predictably enough, come over as Eurosceptic but are much less willing than Tory MPs to hold what one might call ultra-sceptical positions. On a scale from 1 to 11, where 1 meant that the integration of Europe has already gone too far and 11 meant that European integration should be pushed further, 64 per cent of Tory MPs selected 1, compared to just 20 per cent of Tory supporters.

We then turned to policy, asking questions about the right of free movement of workers and the right of those moving from one country to another to claim benefits outside their home country, two key parts of the government’s renegotiation agenda.  The results are shown in Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2 ‘The right of EU citizens to work in other EU countries should be restricted’

Table 3 ‘EU citizens should be allowed to receive welfare benefits only in their country of origin’

On these two touchstone issues, those elected to represent the British people do not, as a whole, take as hard a line as those they represent.  Taking scores of 5 to 7 to indicate agreement, we find majorities of voters supporting both proposals (56% and 73% respectively), but only a minority of MPs back restrictions on the right to work and only a bare majority (52%) support the restrictions on welfare benefits. Tory supporters, broadly speaking, take an equally, and even a slightly harder line, on both issues than their MPs. But the difference is particularly striking when it comes to Labour supporters, who are take a much harder line than their MPs on both issues.

Finally, we turned to feelings, presenting MPs and supporters of both parties with a series of words designed to tap into the emotions evoked by the country’s EU membership.  The results are summarised in Table 4.

Table 4 ‘Which, if any, of the following words describe your feelings about Britain’s membership of the EU?’ (choose up to four words)

Apart from the fact that more voters than MPs seem indifferent to the UK’s membership of the EU, what stands out is how much more positive about it the Commons as a whole is compared to the public.  MPs are more likely than the public to say they are confident, happy, hopeful and proud – and less likely to say they are afraid, angry, disgusted or uneasy. This is especially true when we compare Labour MPs and Labour supporters.  With one exception (the scores for ‘happy’), there are sizeable differences between the proportion of Labour MPs giving positive responses and the proportion of Labour supporters doing the same. Conservative supporters, while they are slightly more likely than the party’s MPs to say that the UK’s membership makes them feel ‘afraid’ and slightly less likely to say that it makes them feel ‘hopeful’, are more in line with those MPs in the sense that membership makes almost two thirds of them, too, feel uneasy.

We do, then, find some support for the idea that there is a gap between the views of representatives and the represented. In general, the Commons is a little less Eurosceptic than the public, although the difference is hardly a gulf.  MPs from both of Britain’s main parties broadly reflect their own supporters’ views on Europe, although voters take a harder line on the free movement of labour and on migrant benefits than MPs, including those MPs representing the parties they favour.  This is particularly the case for Labour supporters, who also feel much less positive about the EU than do Labour MPs.  All the more reason, perhaps, why Labour’s In for Britain campaign, fronted by one of its big beasts, former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, may play a crucial part in efforts to ensure that the UK remains in the EU.

Originally published (with tables) at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexitvote/2016/02/12/speaking-for-britain-mps-broadly-reflect-the-views-of-their-supporters-on-europe-but-one-side-should-worry-a-little-more-than-the-other/

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‘Cameron and Tebbit are both wrong: Tory activists are not as set on leaving the EU as many imagine’ (with Monica Poletti and Paul Webb), 5 February 2016.

Posted on February 21, 2016 by tpbale

David Cameron has run into trouble for warning Tory backbenchers not to make up their minds on whether to campaign for Leave or Remain “because of what your constituency association might say”. The reaction to his remarks was swift and damning, particularly from those who want out, all of whom assume, to quote venerable Thatcherite veteran Norman Tebbit, that “activist Tories are deeply Eurosceptic”.

It’s an easy assumption to make, but it’s wrong. For one thing the Tory grassroots, like Tory MPs, have by no means made up their minds which way to vote in the referendum. For another, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between those who actually turn up and do things for the party at election time and those who don’t.

As part of our project on UK party membership in the 21st Century (PMP), we surveyed nearly 1200 grassroots members of the Conservative Party just after last year’s general election. As well as asking them how they thought they would vote when it came to the European referendum, we also asked them what they’d done for the party during the election campaign.

The results for all party members, irrespective of activity, are shown in Table 1, which shows that lots of them will decide once Cameron’s package is finalised.

Table 1 How the Tory grassroots would vote in the EU referendum

I would vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU I would vote for the UK to leave the EU My vote would depend on the terms of a negotiation
All members
(N=1169)		 19.85% 15.57% 64.59%

So far, so surprising – at least to those convinced that all Conservative Party members are foaming Europhobes. But if you look at Table 2, it’s also obvious that activists – those at the election who got involved in what we call high-intensity campaigning – aren’t really any more likely than completely passive party members to have made up their mind to vote out.

 Table 2 How active and passive members would vote in the EU referendum by May 2015 Electoral Campaign Activity

  I would vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU I would vote for the UK to leave the EU My vote would depend on the terms of a negotiation
All members
 19.85% 15.57% 64.59%
No campaign activity
 19.62% 15.00% 65.38%
‘Low Intensity’ activity* 21.67% 14.45% 63.88%
‘High intensity’ activity** 19.34% 15.90% 64.75%

*low intensity activity: displaying election poster, attending a party meeting, liking on Facebook, following and retweeting on Twitter, driving somebody to the poll station, other
**high intensity activity: delivering leaflets, canvassing, standing as a candidate, helping run a party committee

If there are differences among Tory party members, then, they aren’t to do with activism. They are more to do with age, with education, and with how right-wing they like to think they are.

Table 3 focuses on age, and shows that younger Tory members are much more likely than average to want to stay in the EU.

Table 3 How Tory members would vote in the EU referendum by age-group

I would vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU I would vote for the UK to leave the EU My vote would depend on the terms of a negotiation
All members 19.85% 15.57% 64.59%
18-34 29.92% 13.93% 56.15%
35-54 19.66% 19.66% 60.68%
55+ 15.82% 14.78% 69.40%

What about education? Again, there seems to be a difference, although not so pronounced: as Table 4 shows, graduates appear a little more likely to want to remain and less likely to want out.

Table 4 How graduate and non-graduate Tory members would vote in the EU referendum

I would vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU I would vote for the UK to leave the EU My vote would depend on the terms of a negotiation
All members 19.85% 15.57% 64.59%
Non-graduate 18.10% 16.81% 65.09%
Graduate 22.43% 13.50% 64.07%

The most striking differences, however, come when we look at how Tory grassroots members would vote according to where they place themselves on a left-right spectrum running from zero (very left wing) to ten (very right wing). It seems clear, at least from the stats in Table 5, that right-wing Conservative Party members are more likely to have made up their minds to leave, come what may, while more centrist members are much more likely to want to remain.

Table 5 How right-wing and not so right-wing Tory members would vote in the EU referendum

I would vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU I would vote for the UK to leave the EU My vote would depend on the terms of a negotiation
All members 19.85% 15.57% 64.59%
Centre-Right (5/7) 29.30% 9.25% 61.45%
Right (8/10) 13.90% 19.43% 66.67%

Note: Left-Right scale runs from Left (0) to Right (10)

It turns out, then, that both Mr Cameron and Mr Tebbit – and indeed the rest of us – shouldn’t simply assume that grassroots Tory activists will necessarily be pushing their MPs towards Brexit. As always in Conservative Party affairs, things are rarely as simple as they first appear.

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‘What Conservative MPs really think about Britain’s EU membership’ (with Philip Cowley), 2 February 2016.

Posted on February 21, 2016 by tpbale

There is a delicious irony in the fact that David Cameron, who ended up promising his party a referendum so as to avoid Europe tearing apart his government just as it tore apart John Major’s back in the 1990s, has ended up parroting his predecessor’s much-mocked mantra: ‘negotiate and decide.’

That said, it looks as though the Prime Minister – unlike his predecessor – has actually persuaded most his parliamentary colleagues, and most of his grassroots, that this line makes sense, at least for now. With the help of the ESRC’s UK in a Changing Europeinitiative, directed by Anand Menon, we commissionedIpsosMori to ask just under a hundred MPs for their views on EU issues. Six out of ten Conservative MPs said that their vote in the referendum would depend on the result of the PM’s negotiations.

Moreover just over half of Tory MPs say they expect those negotiations to make at least ‘a fair amount’ of difference to our relationship with the EU. That said, that still leaves nearly four out of ten saying they don’t think the negotiations will achieve much, albeit only one in ten who think they will make no difference at all.

It’s also very noticeable that those who say their vote will depend on the outcome of Cameron’s efforts are more likely to expect them make a difference. That might mean that that they are primed to believe that he is going to get something good enough to allow them ultimately to plump for Remain rather than Leave.

What’s striking, too, is that Conservative MPs’ views on the basic question of how they’re planning to vote in the referendum are very much in line with those of grassroots party members.  Just after the general election, a survey conducted for an ongoing, ESRC-funded study of party membership in the UK run by Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University asked those members the same question on the referendum as we’ve just asked MPs. Some 11 per cent of Tory MPs say that they ‘will vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU regardless of any re-negotiated terms of membership’ – the answer ticked by 19 per cent of grassroots members.

On the other side of the fence, some 20 per cent of Conservatives in the Commons say that they ‘will vote for the UK to leave the EU regardless of any renegotiated terms of membership’ – a hard-core Eurosceptic response echoed by 15 per cent of Conservative members out in the country.

But by far the most common response among both MPs and grassroots members is support for ‘negotiate and decide’.  Some 61 per cent of the former and 63 per cent of the latter say their vote would ‘depend on the terms of any renegotiations of our membership of the EU.’

The Prime Minister, then, appears to have convinced Tories from top to bottom not to rush to judgement – an achievement in itself, given quite how Eurosceptic it has become over the years.

Of course, because we’re taking about surveys, there’s an inevitable margin of error.  When it comes to members this is pretty small: +/- 3 per cent. When it comes to our MPs, it’s more significant – and therefore worth dealing with head-on rather than waiting for those determined to hole us ‘below the line’ to do their damndest.

Worst case, as it were, the number of Conservative MPs wanting to leave come-what-may could be as high as a hundred but it could also be under 40.  Likewise, the number ‘waiting and seeing’ could run to as many as 250 or as few as 150.  Still, better a range based on research than a finger in the wind or even a reliance on voting behaviour in parliament – much as we believe, of course, in the validity of the latter!  In any case, the results we’ve obtained seem reassuringly clear-cut.

That’s certainly the case when it comes to how Tory MPs think the country will vote in the upcoming referendum.  True, there is a tendency for those definitely wanting out to bet the public will end up going their way, while those who have already made up their mind to vote to stay think voters will ultimately veer in their direction. But two thirds of Conservative MPs reckon Remain will win the day, and only a third believe that Britain will vote for Brexit.

This could well prove crucial: Tory MPs are only human; if their money, smart or otherwise, is on the UK remaining a member state, then they may well decide (especially if they believe that promotion is more likely to come to those who toe the line rather than rock the boat) to take the path of least resistance.  In which case the Prime Minister, and not the better-off-outers, will have the momentum and the majority of the parliamentary party on his side – something that may well carry weight with voters, many of whom are still to make up their minds.

We can also say with some confidence that Cameron is absolutely right to try to get something out of Brussels on migrant benefits in particular and on red tape more generally.  Both are seen to be crucial issues by the overwhelming majority of Conservative MPs, three quarters of whom agree with the proposal that people should only be able to claim welfare in their country of origin, with the same proportion saying that when they think of the EU they think ‘bureaucracy’.

He is also right, we think, to recognise that the dominant emotion aroused by the EU among Tory MPs is ‘unease’ rather than ‘anger’, with only a quarter saying it makes them feel the latter, compared to just over two-thirds who pick the former.

If the Prime Minister Cameron can get a package which speaks to this unease, even if it doesn’t definitively deal with it, then our research suggests (to borrow from Mr Major once again) that most of his colleagues will ‘shut up’ rather than ‘put up’ – at least, that is, until after he wins his referendum.

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’12 step programme to rehabilitate Fianna Fáil’, Irish Times, 2 February 2016

Posted on February 21, 2016 by tpbale

When Fianna Fáil asked me back in 2012 what defeated parties needed to do to put things right, I came up with a 12-step programme. So, has the party followed it – or has it fallen off the wagon?

1) Fully grasp the scale of your defeat: All but the most blinkered realised that the 2011 election wasn’t just a swing of the pendulum but a near-death experience. That’s why the party has avoided tearing itself apart looking for quick-fix solutions which were never there. Things may not be great even now. But never forget they might have turned even nastier.

2) Don’t underestimate your opponents: This was always going to prove hard. If you’re Fianna Fáil, it’s self-evident that the Government is clueless, heartless, and led by a lightweight non-entity. Many voters, however, think that Fine Gael is pretty much the best of a bad bunch at the moment. And whatever they think of Enda Kenny, he just about looks and sounds the part – and he’s not about to risk proving otherwise by going head-to-head with Micheál Martin during the election campaign.

3) Spend money on opinion research: Over the past four years, the leadership has been commissioning qualitative research to supplement public opinion polls. The latter focus on voting intention when what you really need to know as a party is first, what are the questions that people are going to be asking themselves when they vote; second, is there any chance that you can encourage them to ask different (or at least additional) questions; and, third, what can you do to make yourself, rather than your opponents, the answer to those questions?

4) Don’t waste time defending your record: This has occasionally proved difficult: after all, no one likes being trashed and traduced – and the damage done to Labour in the UK by failing to dispute the Tories’ caricature of its 13 years in office shows you can go too far the other way

5) Don’t waste too much time on internal reform: Luckily the party got its organisational changes done and dusted relatively early, and without much trouble – apart, that is from the fuss over quotas for female candidates.

6) Do everything possible, visually and verbally, to signal change: Given Fianna Fáil decided to stick with their leader, then candidate selection was perhaps the most obvious way of doing this, especially since all its TDs were men and Sinn Féin was clearly going to do its best to give the impression it was bringing in fresh, young faces. Given how reluctant established parties can be to do the latter, the imposition of quotas by law, although they’ve caused a lot of unhappiness among those who feel they’ve lost out as a result, has probably done the party a favour.

7) Accept that any policy review should be strategic and symbolic rather than substantive: Fianna Fáil has at least tried to weave together a coherent narrative about a more “enabling” state focused on investing in order to spread opportunity and equip the country for a global future. And for the most part it managed to avoid pumping out policy promises too early, preventing opponents from either pinching them or destroying them while they were still on the ground. The fact that Fianna Fáil is promising an independent audit of its election platform may well be as important as what is in it.

8) Spend time opposing the government tooth and nail but avoid jumping on every passing populist bandwagon: This hasn’t always been easy, not least because there’ve been so many tempting opportunities, on health, on mortgages, on water charges and, more recently on flooding. On the other hand, Fianna Fáil has at least refused to descend, as so many opposition parties in Europe have descended, into narrow-minded nationalism.

9) Don’t be fooled by ‘success’ in second-order elections: Yes, of course Fianna Fáil talked up its performance at the 2014 locals and Europeans: members have to be given a little hope now and then, after all. But, behind closed doors, very few people in Fianna Fáil really believed those elections meant they were primed for a big comeback in 2016.

10) Recognise that the key to that comeback is leadership, not membership:It was never going to be easy for Micheál Martin. He wasn’t a clean-skin, untainted by time spent in government. He doesn’t really do alpha-male. There have been – there always are – people who reckon (sometimes out loud) that they could do a better job. But, unlike many party leaders, he’s not a drag on his party’s poll rating, and he’s not someone who voters simply can’t imagine in the top job.

11) Realise that comebacks take two or three parliamentary terms: Fianna Fáil know this but surely no one expects the party to admit it? If they’re wise, trying to get them to speculate about potential coalitions will draw a similar blank: any talk of teaming up with Fine Gael would suit Sinn Féin; flirting with Sinn Féin would lend it a fatal legitimacy.

12) Remember that parties with venerable traditions rarely disappear:Fianna Fáil hasn’t but, as electorates and party systems fragment, it’s getting more and more difficult everywhere for the giants of old to hold on to the seats and vote-shares they once took for granted.

After its near-death experience in 2011, Fianna Fáil is off life-support and breathing on its own. It now needs to prove that it is up and about. That means keeping the gap between it and Fine Gael as near to single figures as possible, winning 30-odd seats in the Dáil, and ensuring Sinn Féin finishes third. Not much maybe. But enough – at least for now.

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‘EU referendum: A third of MPs could still back Brexit’ (with Philip Cowley and Anand Menon), Spectator, 1 February 2016

Posted on February 14, 2016 by tpbale

How many MPs will come out for Brexit? After hearing endless best guesses, we got rather fed up, and used Ipsos Mori’s Reputation Centre to conduct a proper survey of MPs. The total sample size is just under 100, with respondents included front and backbenchers, weighted accordingly.

In total, half of respondents said they would be voting in favour of remaining in the EU, 11 per cent said that they would be voting to leave – but a full third said that their views would depend on the terms of any renegotiation. A further 3 per cent did not know how they would vote (and one respondent said that they would not be voting at all).

There were, however, very clear differences by party. Almost 70 per cent of Conservative MPs either said their vote would be contingent on the negotiations or that they did not yet know how they would vote. A full 20% said they were going to vote to come out regardless, almost double those who would stay in regardless.

Once we allow for a margin of error on the poll, these figures represent a full 66 Conservative MPs (+/- 33) voting to leave, with another 200 (+/- 43) still weighing up the options. By contrast, just 5 per cent of Labour MPs said they’d be voting to come out regardless. We then asked those whose minds were not yet made up (almost all of whom were Tories) what would swing their vote. The top issue, mentioned by more than half of the MPs who had still to make up their mind, was border control, with access to the welfare state coming a close second. One or both of these issues was mentioned by just over 70 per cent of all those who said their vote was contingent on the negotiations. These may be difficult areas in which to achieve reform, but the Prime Minister is at least pitching at the issues that matter to (mostly his) MPs – either that or they have accepted his framing of what the important issues really are.

We also asked how great a change MPs thought the renegotiations would produce. Not much, is the main view. Just 9 per cent of MPs said that they expect the negotiations to produce a great deal of change, and 21 per cent expected ‘a fair amount’. The majority expected ‘not very much’ or none. But again there are very stark party differences. Just 5 per cent of Labour expected at least a fair amount of change to come from the renegotiation. The equivalent figure for Conservatives was 52 per cent. This is (obviously) linked to the much higher percentage of Conservatives who said they expect their vote to be contingent on the negotiations. Of those who say they will vote to remain or leave, the percentage expecting very much of the negotiations is small (just 15 per cent of remainers and 15 per cent of leavers said they expect a great deal or a fair deal of change).

But of those – almost all Conservatives – who said their vote will depend on the negotiations, 48 per cent said they expect to see either a great deal or a fair amount out of the negotiations. The causal link here is not obvious. Is it that they genuinely expect more change – perhaps as a result of having more faith in the Prime Minister – and are thus willing to claim that their vote depends on that change? Or is it that, having said their vote is contingent, they then have to say they expect a reasonable amount of change? Your guess here is as good as ours.

We also asked MPs what they thought the outcome of the referendum would be. Overwhelmingly, MPs thought that Britain would vote to stay in in the EU: that was the response of seven out of ten of our respondents. Some 23 per cent said they thought Britain would leave, and 7 per cent said they did not know. And here the party differences became smaller. Majorities of both Conservative and Labour respondents think Britain will remain in the EU.

MPs’ views of what will happen tend to align with their own preferences: 81 per cent of those who said they are voting to stay in also said they think the outcome will be to remain; 77 per cent of those who are voting to leave thought it will be to leave. The key to the fact that Conservatives overall expected the outcome to be to remain is that the majority of those who want to see the results of any negotiations before deciding how to vote expected the eventual outcome to be to stay in: two-thirds of those who say their vote is contingent on the negotiations expect a remain vote and just a quarter expect Britain to leave. (The remaining 10% per cent don’t know). We suspect this may well change the calculus of whether to come out for Brexit on the part of some Eurosceptic but ambitious Conservatives. That they mostly expect the outcome to be a vote to Remain must make it more likely that some wavering MPs will eventually come down on the same side. Why throw yourself on the barbed wire for what you suspect is a lost cause?

 

Originally published at http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/eu-referendum-a-third-of-mps-could-still-back-brexit/

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‘What they really think on Planet Tory’ (with Philip Cowley), Daily Telegraph, 1 February 2016

Posted on February 14, 2016 by tpbale

When The Telegraph broke the parliamentary expenses scandal back in 2009, many wondered what planet MPs were living on. In fact, they live on two. When it comes to their views on the EU, Tories in Westminster really are from Mars, while Labour MPs are from Venus.

We know this because, after hearing so many best-guesses about how many MPs, particularly on the Government benches, were going to come out for Brexit, we decided to find out for ourselves. Together with Anand Menon, director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s UK in a Changing Europe initiative, we commissioned Ipsos Mori’s Reputation Centre to conduct a survey of MPs, designed to tap into what they really think.

As well as allowing us to make a more accurate and up-to-date assessment of how Tory MPs are likely to vote in the referendum, our survey revealed stark differences between the two main parties.

We knew those differences were there, of course – how could it be otherwise, after decades during which any ambitious Tory was obliged to demonstrate hostility to the EU to stand any chance of selection for a winnable seat, while enthusiasm for Europe was one of the few things that seemed to unite Labour’s Left and Right.

But, surely, wasn’t some of this just for show? Apparently not. The differences between Tory and Labour MPs on the EU’s past, present, and future are deep, even visceral.

Almost 90 per cent of Labour MPs agreed that “the UK has greatly benefited from being a member of the EU”. To them it means freedom to travel, study and work anywhere in Europe; prosperity; a stronger say in the world and even peace. Britain’s membership makes them hopeful, proud and happy.

On Planet Tory, however, things look very different. Only a quarter of Conservative MPs can see any great benefits from Britain belonging to the EU. “Uneasy” was the watchword for most of them, and some even said that our membership made them “angry”. To them, the EU means bureaucracy, lack of border controls and a waste of money.

There was just as big a difference when it came to specific policies. Nearly three-quarters of Conservative MPs supported the idea that EU citizens should only be able to claim benefits in their country of origin – a proposal that attracted the support of less than a third of Labour MPs.

Some say the issue of Europe cuts across conventional political divides. And, true, there are divisions in both the major Westminster parties. It’s possible to find a handful of Tories who, while they don’t buy wholesale into the European project, are prepared to give it its due. Likewise, there are a few Labour Eurosceptics. But any divisions within the parties pale compared with the division between them. The EU really is much more an inter-party split than an intra-party one.

For all this, though, there is widespread and perhaps surprising agreement on one thing among MPs on both sides of the House. Regardless of how they themselves are going to vote, clear majorities of both Conservative and Labour MPs think that the referendum will result in Britain remaining part of the EU.

Particularly on Planet Tory, that thinking could have big implications for the referendum itself. Many Conservative MPs, especially those in the 2010 and 2015 intakes (quite reasonably, given the favour Labour has done them in electing Jeremy Corbyn) are thinking about promotion. As a result, they are bound to wonder, whatever their real feelings, whether there’s much point campaigning for what so many of them evidently reckon is a lost cause.

If that’s the case, David Cameron may find he has rather less trouble on his hands than his opponents hope, especially if he manages to secure a deal from Brussels on migrant benefits and costly red tape – two things that, according to our survey, Conservative MPs are particularly bothered by.

That doesn’t, of course, mean it will be plain sailing for Mr Cameron from here on in. After all, sceptical Tory MPs have quite a lot in common with voters – surely an advantage for those brave enough to come out for Brexit – as long, that is, as they take care not to appear too obsessive.

But while Mr Cameron may end up taking many of his parliamentary colleagues with him in the referendum, any victory will be far from permanent. Judging by our results at least, Planet Tory will always be emotionally, as well as ideologically, deeply Eurosceptic.

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