‘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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‘The Forgotten Cecil Parkinson’, New Statesman, 26 January 2016

Posted on February 14, 2016 by tpbale

When most people who were around in the 1980s think of Cecil Parkinson, they will recall only one thing – his affair with Sara Keays and his subsequent resignation.  But he actually deserves to be remembered for far more than that.  Indeed, few Tories have contributed as much to their party’s success.

Cecil Parkinson was one of a number of ‘grammar school boys’ promoted by Margaret Thatcher.  He stood out from people like Norman Tebbit, Norman Fowler and Ken Clarke, however, because of his considerable (but entirely self-made) personal wealth and his silky-smooth people skills – all of which, along with the fact that he was very much on Margaret Thatcher’s ideological wavelength, made him perhaps the best Tory Party Chairman there has ever been.

When he first got the job in 1981, Parkinson wasn’t exactly a household name, even among Conservatives. He later rather disarmingly confessed that, although he knew Central Office (the Tories official Headquarters) was located in Westminster’s Smith Square, he was unsure as to exactly where it stood, while the people sent out to welcome him let him walk right past as he was looking for the building because, since he hadn’t been a senior minister, they didn’t know what he looked like.

The job of Chairman – at least back then – was a huge one.  In addition to overseeing Central Office, running campaigns, helping to raise money, and generally geeing up the troops, the Chairman was (or at least became under Parkinson) one of the most important public faces of the party – a figure called on by the media to explain and defend the government’s actions and standing, often where colleagues would and could not.  This put an increased premium on communication rather than executive, organisational skills. Parkinson was one of only a handful of Tory Chairman throughout the Party’s long history who genuinely possessed both in equal measure – one reason why, as well as being one of only three MPs apart from the PM to appear in the Party’s 1983 TV broadcasts, he was able to persuade Mrs Thatcher just before polling day that year not to go ahead with a million-pound, last-minute advertising splurge to win an election that he was confident was already won, and won easily.

Parkinson, who had a background in commerce and chartered accountancy, helped during his time as Chairman to corral Central Office staffers into properly planning and budgeting for the human and other resources needed to fight a general election – a move typical of the business acumen he brought to the job. He also halted the incipient decline in the party’s field operations – what would now be called its ground game. And, back at HQ, he was an early pioneer of IT in politics and also set up its first real Marketing Department. That said, getting constituency associations to fully share their sometimes considerable financial assets with the party in London proved beyond even Parkinson’s considerable talents.

Those talents were later put to good use at the Departments of Energy and Transport – where, regardless of what one thinks of privatisation, he was an effective operator – although after the revelation of his affair with Sara Keays, it has to be said that it was never quite ‘glad confident morning’ again for one of Thatcher’s favourite sons.

Still, Parkinson enjoyed something of a swansong in the autumn of his political career. When William Hague became leader in 1997 and needed someone who could keep both grassroots and the grandees onside while he drove through crucial changes to the Party’s organisation, it was almost inevitable that he would turn to Cecil Parkinson – by that time very much a grandee himself.  Parkinson, who had by then been elevated to the Lords, possessed both the credibility and the emotional intelligence required to get buy-in to reforms that many Tories resented and might otherwise have resisted. Those reforms didn’t, of course, help the Conservatives return to the glory days of the eighties, but they at least gave the Party something to build on once it got itself a credible leader – David Cameron – in 2005.

 

Originally published at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/01/forgotten-cecil-parkinson

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‘Labour can’t win with Jeremy Corbyn – but he’s not the one to blame’, New Statesman, 21 January 2016.

Posted on February 14, 2016 by tpbale

I’m not so sure the commentariat as a whole got it wrong, but I do know that I did. I’m supposed to know something about the Labour party, but I didn’t see Jeremy Corbyn coming. In my book, Five Year Mission: the Labour Party under Ed Miliband, Corbyn is not only not suggested as a possible successor to Miliband but is not mentioned at all.

Indeed, it wasn’t until YouGov published its first poll of party members that I began to believe he might actually win. Even then, it took another poll to persuade me that, far from the love affair between Jezza and Labour’s grassroots being a holiday romance, it was going to last right up until September and beyond.

That’ll teach him, you’d think. But, shamefully, it hasn’t. Notwithstanding the confession above, I remain arrogant enough to assert right here, right now, that Labour cannot possibly win, nor even come close to winning, the next election unless it somehow gets shot of Corbyn in pretty short order.

Indeed, if he lasts very much longer as leader then there is every chance that Labour will gift the Tories control of government for a decade or more to come, so great will be the damage done to its already fragile brand.

The ecstatic Labour delegates sitting around me in the Brighton Centre listening to Jeremy Corbyn give his first party conference speech as leader were lovely people. But they were utterly deluded. All the research I’ve seen suggests that the party lost the 2015 election—something Corbyn neglected even to mention—because it wasn’t trusted on the economy, because its leader wasn’t seen as a credible candidate for Downing Street and because it was still seen as a soft touch on welfare and immigration.

It will not win an election five years later by being even less determined to balance the books, by being led by someone who looks and sounds even less prime ministerial, and by being seen as an even softer touch on welfare and immigration. Throw in being regarded as a danger to the defence of the realm and the security of its people, too, and you have a recipe for total and utter disaster.

That said, there is clearly something to the Corbynite critique of what the Labour Party had become by 2010 and continued to be right the way through to its second defeat on the trot in 2015. Talk of millions of lost voters (the exact figure seems to vary depending on how left-wing those citing it see themselves as) may be overblown. But Blair and Brown undoubtedly presided over a hollowing out of the party’s support, particularly in parts of the working class that might once have been seen as Labours core vote, as well as among those who wanted a rather more direct challenge to Britain’s traditionally Atlanticist foreign policy and to what they insist on calling—accurately or otherwise—neoliberalism.

Ed Miliband’s failure, as least as the Labour left saw it, to mount a full-blooded assault on austerity didn’t help bring these people back. Nor did the fact that he and his colleagues—widely accused of being part of the same hermetically sealed ‘political class’ as their Lib Dem and Tory colleagues—looked and sounded pretty similar to their Coalition opponents. Little wonder, then, that, even though the evidence suggests that trying to win back the lost millions would be a fools’ errand, there was an appetite for something more authentic, less nervy, boxed-in and, quite frankly, boring than the festival of waffle on offer from the irredeemably beige candidates who stood against Corbyn in the summer of 2015—three frontbenchers who could think of nothing more inspiring to say to Labour members than that they were supposedly more electable than he was.

Nature abhors a vacuum and Corbyn turned out to be the phenomenon to fill it—the man to match the latent demand for change on the part of a Labour party membership (old as well as new) which, post-election party members surveys showed, was much more left-wing, much more dissatisfied and much more firmly entrenched in the public sector than many of us had imagined. Had the moderates (or the right, whatever you want to call them) managed to find somebody more charismatic to stand against Corbyn, it might perhaps have made a difference. But, equally, it might not have. Yes, he was elected faute de mieux. But it was about far more than that.

Put bluntly, its thirteen years in power had made the Labour party’s mainstream lazy. Rather than continuing forcefully to make the case that their ideas were practically and even morally superior to those of the left, they simply fell back on the argument that those ideas made them more electable. This allowed all manner of nostalgia and delusion to survive and even thrive beneath the surface—indeed, not so very far beneath the surface after they were lent an additional degree of credibility and legitimacy by Ed Miliband’s occasional nods and nudges (never full-blown lurches) to the left after 2010. As a result, when the suited and booted and desperately dull approach turned out not to be electable after all, its advocates found they had no other rationale to fall back on—nor very much support, either. There was, to coin a phrase, ‘no there there’.

Given all this, those whose instincts are closer to the majority of the electorate, and whose proposals are more workable in the real world than those of the Corbynistas will ever be, need to come up with big ideas as well as big politicians. True, Labour needs someone with a CV that includes something more than working in and around Westminster for most of their adult life. But it also needs people capable of supplying that man or woman with solutions and stories that move beyond the Blairite, the Brownite, and the supposed verities and virtue-signalling that have always passed for policy on the left of the Labour party.

Whether they are able to carry out that task within the party as it is currently (or soon may be) configured is another matter.

Whether Corbyn himself shares their aims or not, many of those around him are determined to change the party’s rules so that the authority of the parliamentary party and the shadow cabinet can be transferred to the National Executive Committee, or else to the leader appealing direct to party members over their heads, with a wave of deselections to follow. If that happens, and the unions approve, then the game really could be up.

Few, if any, in the commentariat currently believe that a full-blown split between Labour’s socialists and social democrats is possible. But (who knows?) it may be the next big thing they get wrong.

 

 

Originally published at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/01/labour-cant-win-jeremy-corbyn-hes-not-one-blame

 

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‘Ideology is in the eye of the beholder: How British party supporters see themselves, their parties, and their rivals’ (with Paul Webb and Monica Poletti), LSE Politics and Policy,8 January 2016

Posted on February 14, 2016 by tpbale

If British Election Study figures are anything to go by, those feeling close to the country’s six biggest parties – the Conservatives, Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems, UKIP and the Greens – make up around 15 per cent of the 45, 325,078 people registered to vote in May 2015.  That’s getting on for seven million people.

Just after the general election, and as part of our ESRC-funded project on party membership in the twentieth-first century, in conjunction with YouGov we conducted surveys not only of members of these parties but also of their most enthusiastic supporters who, for whatever reason, weren’t actually members.  The results were fascinating.

We gave the six parties’ biggest fans a scale running from zero (very left-wing) to ten (very right-wing) and asked them to place themselves somewhere along it.  We also asked them to place the party they support on the same scale. Then we asked them some more detailed, ideologically-charged questions, the answers to which allowed us to put together what could be said to be a more objective measure of where they are located on that same scale. We did this by asking them whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements: “government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well off; big business benefits owners at the expense of workers; ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth; there is one law for the rich and one for the poor; and, management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance.”

If we combine the answers to all these questions, and recall that zero means very left-wing and ten very right-wing, we get the following results, summed up in Table 1, which shows average scores for strong supporters of the six parties.

What’s worth noting straight away is that, with a couple of exceptions (namely, that on the ‘objective measure’ Labour supporters are more left wing than Greens and UKIP members slightly more left-wing than Lib Dems), the relative ordering on all three measures is the same: from left to right, it runs Greens, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, UKIP, and Conservative.

We also asked those strong supporters where they would place not just their own but other parties on the same left-right spectrum.  Their answers are summarised in Table 2.  We also include a mean score – one which excludes the score that supporters of each party give to their own favourite. Once again the relative ordering is very similar, except that this time UKIP are seen as the most right-wing party.


What strikes one immediately is how ideology, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  For instance, we saw in Table 1 that diehard Conservative supporters locate their party at 7.82 on the zero to ten left-right scale.  But, as Table 2 shows us, strong supporters of parties traditionally considered to be to the left of the Conservatives locate the party even further to the right. Keen Lib Dem supporters don’t see them as quite so extreme – partly because they are less left-wing than keen supporters of the Greens, the SNP and Labour, and partly, perhaps, because their party had spent five years in coalition with the Tories.

Conversely, enthusiastic UKIP supporters think the Conservative Party is more left wing than its own enthusiastic supporters think it is.  The same effect is observed at the other end of the spectrum: keen Labour supporters locate their party at 3.44, but keen Green and SNP supporters think it’s more right-wing than that (4.67 and 4.77 respectively). On the other hand, enthusiastic Conservatives are having none of it – to them Labour is far more left-wing than its own enthusiastic supporters think. Indeed, Tories think Labour (which they place at 1.98) is more left-wing than those Labour supporters think the Conservative Party is right-wing; they even see Labour as more left-wing than the Greens – perhaps not unreasonably given where our ‘objective’ score places them.  Keen Tory supporters are also interesting in that, contrary to keen supporters of all the other parties, they think UKIP is less right-wing than they are – possibly because they realise many devotees of the ‘People’s Army’ are actually quite ambivalent about business and shrinking the state.

If that is their suspicion, it is well founded as Table 1 shows.  Enthusiastic UKIP supporters might see themselves as pretty right-wing when asked to place themselves on a left-right scale (6.77), but their underlying attitudes – the ones we tap into with our more detailed questions – suggest they actually sit to the left of centre (at 2.62). This difference between where parties’ strongest supporters place themselves is particularly pronounced but it is not unusual. However, it seems to affect left-of-centre and right-of-centre parties in different ways.

As Table 1 shows, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem and Green supporters are, on that ‘objective’ measure at least, actually even more left-wing than they think they are, while Tory supporters, like UKIP supporters, are not as right-wing as they see themselves. When it comes to the latter, this is almost certainly explained, at least in part, by the fact that the ‘objective’ measure we use to determine left-right placement, although very much a standard one, only satisfactorily taps into the economic rather than the ‘social’ (or more specifically Green-Alternative-Libertarian/Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist) dimension. UKIP supporters are very possibly ‘welfare chauvinists’ with a populist (as opposed to class-based) antipathy toward big business. Perhaps, then, they are not so very left-wing after all.

Finally, what does Table 1 reveal about the gap between where strong supporters place themselves ideologically and where they place the parties with which they feel such an affinity? First and foremost, it shows that it’s not that big – only 0.28 on average if you do the calculation – suggesting there’s no great mismatch to worry about. Just as interestingly, Table 1 also reveals that in the clear majority of cases, the parties’ strongest supporters see themselves not as more radical or extreme than the parties they support but actually as more centrist. There are only two exceptions.  Keen Lib Dem supporters, as many of us might have guessed, see themselves as sitting to the left of their party, although the difference is very small. The real outliers, though, are enthusiastic Labour supporters, who not only see themselves as more left-wing than their party but as markedly so. One reason, perhaps, why Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership contest last summer, and why he continues to command the affection and the loyalty of so many of the party’s biggest fans today, was that he was preaching to the already-converted.

Originally published at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ideology-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/

 

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‘David Cameron has borrowed Harold Wilson’s tactics – will he share his fate?’, 7 January 2016

Posted on January 9, 2016 by tpbale

David Cameron was always going to do a Wilson. Pressed, like the political maestro who led Labour between 1963 and 1976 into holding a referendum as a last resort, he too has conducted a renegotiation which his opponents condemn as cosmetic and has announced he’ll allow his Cabinet colleagues to campaign on either side of the argument. And presumably he’s hoping the parallels won’t end there: on 5 June 1975, UK voters decided by an overwhelming margin to keep the country in what was then the EEC.

However, those parallels aren’t by any means exact.

True, Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – then the Tories, now Labour – is overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in Europe, which should help ensure the support of a good chunk of otherwise hostile voters.

But it nevertheless looks like it might be much closer this time round. Eurosceptic attitudes are now much more mainstream than they were back in the mid-seventies. There is now a third party in the country which garnered four million votes at the last election and is dedicated to getting Britain out of the EU. Business backing isn’t quite as solid as it was back then. The resources both sides can bring to bear are likely to be much more evenly matched than they were in 1975. And, unlike then, the print media is, on balance, more inclined to recommend people vote out than in.

Still, in spite of all this, Cameron stands a decent chance of pulling off a win – mainly, just as Wilson did, by convincing enough of his own, as well as floating, voters that, firstly, he’s got a good-enough deal out of Brussels and, secondly, that Brexit just isn’t worth the risk.

Ironically, however, that’s when some very astute analysts are forecasting that the parallels between the first and second European referendums could get really interesting and, if you’re a Tory, really scary.

Labour, they point out, failed to put itself back together again after a vote which saw its radical true-believers campaign on one side and its moderate, pragmatic centrists campaign on the other. After losing, first, its ingenious (but exhausted) leader and then its shaky parliamentary majority, it limped on as an increasingly fractious minority government until it was finally defeated by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
Worse, Labour’s misery didn’t end there. The struggle between the party’s right and left grew so bitter that some MPs in the former camp left to form the SDP in 1981, and in 1983 Labour, on a manifesto which called for withdrawal from Europe, suffered a catastrophic election defeat, helping to ensure that, after four years in opposition already, it would stay there for a further fourteen.

But are the parallels between what happened to Labour after the 1975 referendum and what might happen to the Tories after 2016 or 2017 that persuasive?

Probably not. For a start, Labour’s divides over Europe were symptomatic of divides across a whole range of issues, both ideological and organisational. Although, when it comes to the Tories today, there’s some limited evidence to link particularly hardline Eurosceptic views with views on other economic and social questions, particularly among MPs, the contemporary Conservative Party simply isn’t as fundamentally split as Labour was four decades ago.

Secondly, the Tories, both at the grassroots and at Westminster, are supremely confident that they are going to win the next election – in marked contrast to their Labour counterparts in the late seventies and early eighties and, indeed, their very own predecessors in the Major years.

That confidence could, of course, breed complacency and carelessness, particularly if indulged during a closely-fought leadership contest. Yet it’s far more likely to encourage those Tories with any ambition who end up on the losing side of the referendum to cut their losses and get with a programme based around keeping the state small, regulation light and taxes low – causes that almost Conservatives can happily unite around.

Finally, it’s difficult to believe – especially in the light of Ukip’s failure to convert its support into parliamentary seats and the lack of any serious prospect of electoral reform – that a bunch of Tory MPs, in the highly unlikely event that they are persecuted post-referendum, will do a Williams, Owen, Jenkins and Rodgers and jump ship.

It may be that some Labour people, convinced (as some Tories were convinced back in 1975) that they’re saddled with a leader who the public won’t warm to, are praying that a government split over Europe will eventually see it implode. If so, those prayers look set to go unanswered.

Originally published at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/01/david-cameron-has-borrowed-harold-wilsons-tactics-will-he-share-his-fate

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‘David Cameron’s EU free vote concession is inevitable, but important’, Telegraph, 6 January 2016

Posted on January 9, 2016 by tpbale

On a scale of one to ten, starting at crushingly predictable and running all the way through to complete and utter shock, David Cameron’s announcement that his colleagues would be permitted to campaign on either side of the EU referendum surely registers at no more than a two or three.

Harold Wilson, the last British Prime Minister to hold a nationwide vote on Europe back in 1975, did exactly the same thing – and for exactly the same reason. To have done anything else risked prompting resignations on a scale that would inevitably call into question not just the government’s authority but his own leadership, too.

Just because Cameron is bowing to the inevitable doesn’t mean that we should dismiss his decision too lightly

But just because Cameron is bowing to the inevitable, that doesn’t mean that we should dismiss his decision too lightly. For one thing, it is tantamount to confirmation – if anyone really needed it – that he himself intends to campaign against Brexit. For another, it represents an admission of defeat, at least in the sense of his being unable to persuade a significant slice of his own Cabinet that whatever concessions he extracts from Brussels will not come even close to the kind of fundamental change which they regard as vital.

Quite who will decide to come out openly for leave once Cameron declares his renegotiation is complete remains to be seen. That won’t, of course, stop the speculation, with Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling doubtless topping hastily-produced lists of those cabinet ministers supposedly bound to campaign to quit the EU.

Most interesting to watch, however, will be those who no-one, including the PM himself, can be quite sure of – high-profile ministers like Theresa May, Philip Hammond, and Michael Gove, as well as Sajid Javid, currently rather lower down the pecking order but fancied by some as a future leadership contender.

“There are – at most – only a handful of individuals who could swing people one way or another.”

Anyone on the Leave side who reckons that recruiting such people to their cause will make much difference to the outcome of the referendum, however, should get real. Research has shown, time and time again, that hardly any of those politicians whom journalists routinely describe as “big beasts” are familiar to the voting public, the vast majority of whom have much better things to do with their lives than pay attention to who’s up and who’s down in Tory Party politics.

There are – at most – only a handful of individuals who could swing people one way or another.

David Cameron is one of them and so, believe it or not, is Jeremy Corbyn: a fair few voters take their cue from the leader of their preferred party, so what those two do and say may well count for something.

So, too, will Nigel Farage, although given how toxic he is to some voters, he may well be as much of an asset to the Remain campaign as he is for Leave.

Indeed, apart perhaps from George Osborne, whose pronouncements on the economic costs of quitting the EU (presuming he ever gets off the fence and actually makes some) might be influential, the only other Tory who might make a difference isn’t even in the Cabinet.

Boris Johnson has sufficient cut-through with ordinary punters that a decision on his part to plump for Leave might take a few floaters with him. He’ll only do that, however if he believes that he won’t end up on the losing side and thereby hurt his chances of snatching the leadership from Osborne.

That said, Brexit might now be the only thing capable of stopping the Chancellor from taking over when David Cameron steps down, meaning Boris has some hard thinking to do – and possibly only a few weeks to do it in.

But all this is for the future. Right now, it’s fair to say that the PM has done just about the only thing he could do in the circumstances. True, it will make for a fractious campaign. But it will probably ensure that, by preventing dissent over Europe bleeding into every aspect of the government’s business, the Cabinet – and the Party – can ride out the storm and emerge on the other side in such a way as to make it possible to come together convincingly afterwards.

All this presumes, of course, that Cameron, and Remain, wins the day. If they don’t, then all bets are truly off.

Originally published by UK in a Changing Europe, at http://ukandeu.ac.uk/of-course-cameron-was-going-to-allow-his-cabinet-to-freely-campaign-in-the-eu-referendum/

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