Tim Bale's Blog

What constitutes a good week for a party leader during an election campaign depends very much on which leader you are talking about, as well as the kind of campaign they have made up their mind to fight.

David Cameron, for instance, is clearly intent on pursuing a classic incumbent strategy — so much so that Stanley Baldwin’s (unsuccessful) “Safety First” campaign of 1929 or Harold Macmillan’s (successful) “Don’t Let Labour Ruin it” warning in 1959 look daring and, indeed, positive by comparison.

For Mr Cameron, every high profile broadcast appearance is as much a threat as it is an opportunity. Think of the prime minister as a wartime bomber pilot: if he manages to drop a few incendiaries somewhere near the target and make it back to base in one piece, then it is mission accomplished.

So far, despite taking flak during a TV interview with Jeremy Paxman, Mr Cameron has come through pretty much unscathed, even if he can’t claim to have inflicted as much damage on the enemy as Bomber Command (in the shape of Lynton Crosby) might have hoped for. Certainly, Labour will be worried about polling showing that the prime minister’s job approval ratings have moved into positive territory for the first time in four years. This suggests that what he is doing, while it may be spectacularly dull, might actually be proving effective.

Given his plan to play the “Happy Warrior” in last week’s televised debate, it is tempting to extend the military metaphor to Ed Miliband. In fact, perhaps appropriately with the Grand National almost upon us, it is the sport of kings that provides a better analogy. Before the off, Labour’s leader wasn’t much fancied. But, since then, punters who previously weren’t paying much attention have noticed that there’s more to him than they had realised. Indeed, rather than fading, let alone falling at the first fence, Mr Miliband seems, if anything, to be gaining strength: polls show he is still unpopular but markedly less so than before the campaign proper began to raise his profile.

For the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, it’s not so much a question of raising his profile as raising himself from the dead. Somehow, he has to remind voters that, to quote Mr Cameron on Tony Blair, “he was the future once” without at the same time reminding them of how he betrayed the promise he displayed and the promises he made back in 2010.

Just as problematically, in order to be able to distance the Lib Dems from the once-again-wicked Tories and yet still trumpet his party’s achievements in coalition with them, the deputy prime minister somehow has to place himself firmly at the scene of the crime as the very same time as coming up with a convincing alibi.

“Good luck with that!”, some will cry — particularly if they are Labour sympathisers long since driven to distraction by the deputy prime minister’s infuriating blend of sanctimoniousness and self-abasement. However, some of the instant polling from last week’s debate suggests that less partisan voters may be a little (although only a little) more willing to swallow his man-in-the-middle-doing-the-best-he-can act. Mr Clegg’s ratings are still poor, but at just over minus 30, they are, like Mr Cameron’s, the best they’ve been since 2011.

Judging by the numbers, Nigel Farage’s shtick seems to be working too. Like an ageing rock star playing yet another moneymaking stadium gig, he has clearly decided to give his fan base the songs they have come to hear rather than risking any new material in a misguided attempt to reach out to a new audience. Polls suggest that his so called “shock and awful” strategy to mobilise his “grumpy old men” base will not prevent UK Independence party suffering some sort of squeeze. But it may mean it can avoid dropping into single figures.

Single figures is where the Green party will almost certainly end up, despite the fact that its leader Natalie Bennett can at least claim to have avoided another “brain fade” moment in the course of the campaign so far. This will suit Mr Miliband just fine. Sadly for him, however, the award for best actor in a leading role in the first fortnight has nevertheless gone, by common consent, to a woman — the Scottish National party’s Nicola Sturgeon.

Mr Miliband, though, can perhaps take some small comfort from the fact that, while Ms Sturgeon’s assured performance will do nothing to help Labour in Scotland, it may make it harder for the Conservatives to argue that she should have no say in who forms the government of the UK. Come May 8, that could prove crucial.

[This article was originally published at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7b04f38e-dec5-11e4-8a01-00144feab7de.html]

Imagine this. It’s Sunday 18 June 1815 near a little-known place called Waterloo. Battle lines are drawn when word comes down the line that Napoleon Bonaparte is to be declared the winner without a shot being fired. He, after all, has about 73,000 soldiers at his disposal, making his army larger than the one commanded by Wellington, who can only boast 68,000 (a sizeable proportion of whom aren’t even British). Never mind that Blücher’s Prussian force, supporting Wellington, is some 50,000 strong. The French, as the largest single contingent, have every right to run the show.

Absurd, no? Yet, if we fast forward two hundred years, this is exactly the argument that’s being made to support the idea that, should the Tories emerge as the largest party in another hung parliament after 7 May, they are somehow entitled to govern the UK for another five years or, at the very least, to get first go at trying to form a coalition or a minority administration.

This might be the common wisdom. But it is nonsense, nonetheless. As Napoleon found to his cost, you may have more troops than your nemesis; but if he’s managed to put together an alliance that outnumbers you then you will end up the loser, even if, to quote Wellington, it turns out to be a damned nice thing – “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”.

Numbers count. Of course they do. But when it comes to forming governments, physics always trumps maths. Who gets to govern depends on what force they exert within the system, singly and collectively. Clearly, having large numbers of MPs helps. But so too does being (to use the political science jargon) pivotal – capable of deciding, by virtue of your ability as a party to jump either way, which one of a number of potential combinations can actually govern.

That is why, even though they underplayed their hand woefully in the ensuing negotiations, the Lib Dems were actually in a very powerful position in 2010, especially once they’d decided they wanted to be in government rather than merely support one from the outside.

That is also why the Lib Dems (along with, if the polls are correct, the SNP and also the DUP) may well be in an equally (if not more) powerful position in 2015 – even if, this time around, they end up with only half the seats they won then.

But, some purists will cry, what about the constitution? Wasn’t Stanley Baldwin, with 258 MPs, allowed to “face the House” in 1924 before giving way (after losing a confidence vote) to a minority Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, with just 191 MPs?

Well yes, but what of it? For one thing, Baldwin was playing a highly sophisticated game, having already made up his mind that it would be in the long-term interests of the country, as well as the Conservative party, to allow “the Socialists” their first crack at government under controlled conditions. For another, it was all a very long time ago – a precedent, maybe, but hardly a convention that can bind 21st-century politicians.

To think that those same politicians will be bound by the civil service’s cabinet manual is equally absurd. The manual is not holy writ. It can suggest but it cannot prescribe. Ultimately (to use the pol-sci jargon just one more time) it’s a case of freestyle bargaining. Coming out of the election with more MPs than any other party doesn’t grant you any special rights, even if you’re the sitting prime minister. Those outraged by all this may come up with one last argument, namely that the UK’s proverbial sense of fair play will be offended if the party with the most seats doesn’t get to govern, or at least get first go.

But why, either inherently or rhetorically, would that be any less fair than handing power to a party with what would still be less than half of the seats in the House of Commons and only just over a third of the votes in the country?

Right now, those most determined to create a self-fulfilling prophecy (or at least a degree of momentum) in favour of the largest single party are Conservatives – presumably because they believe they will be that party. It is perfectly possible, however, that Labour will finish just ahead of the Tories – and perfectly possible, as the result of choices made by the “minor” parties, that Ed Miliband might nevertheless be unable to wrest the keys to No 10 from David Cameron’s patrician grasp.

The UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, it seems, is no longer able to prevent either its party system or its parliament from looking more European. So we need to realise, as they do on the continent, that sometimes those who “win” elections can still end up on the losing side.

[This article was originally published at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/06/napoleonic-truth-coalitions-most-votes-doesnt-win]

As TV debate postmortems continue into the weekend, we would do well to step back and ask ourselves a simple question — one that’s far more fundamental than who won and who lost on Thursday night. Do party leaders really matter when it comes to people deciding which way to vote?

The answer, at least according to decades of research by political scientists, can be summed up as follows. Leaders probably do matter. But they matter more to some voters than to others, they matter more in some countries than in others — and we are still arguing about precisely how much they matter.

Some people, it seems, are more easily swayed by leaders than others. If you are not particularly into politics, if you don’t identify very strongly with any of the parties, and if you watch a lot of television, then there’s more chance that your vote will be influenced by the men and women at the top. Given that all this is true of a large, maybe even an increasing, number of UK voters, then, clearly, leader effects in this general election cannot be easily dismissed.

On the other hand, those effects are mitigated by context. Leaders seem to matter a little less in parliamentary than in presidential systems, in media environments where the tone is set by public rather than purely commercial broadcasters, and in political cultures that can be characterised as consensual rather than majoritarian.

Even after five years of coalition government, one would be hard-pressed to classify the UK along with Europe’s Nordic or Germanic polities, where compromise is prized above winner-takes-all. But given the UK is a parliamentary democracy where television’s treatment of politics continues to assume it should educate as well as entertain, then even those leaders with a realistic chance of running the country are unlikely to have as much influence on voters as their US counterparts.

Just as importantly, as Ohio State University’s Anthony Mughan stresses in a recent academic article, voters do not (because realistically they cannot) completely separate leaders from their parties. Nor, for that matter, can they possibly judge one leader without at least implicitly comparing them to their opponents.

As a result, the chances of a voter deciding to change their vote simply because they are impressed by one party’s leader are slimmer than is often assumed. For that to happen, said leader, especially if their party is not highly regarded and especially if their opponents are not utterly hopeless, has to be very impressive indeed — which is why the Conservatives may end up disappointed if they attempt to frame this election as all about a choice, not just between competence and chaos, but between David “when it comes to who’s prime minister, the personal is national” Cameron and Ed “just not up to it” Miliband.

Neither during the first week of the campaign proper, nor in either of the televised showdowns, has Mr Cameron stood so head-and-shoulders above everyone else that thousands, let alone millions, of voters who might otherwise have steered clear will be flocking to his party.

Indeed, detailed polling suggests that it is Mr Miliband who has done himself and his party a few favours, managing to significantly erode (although not to completely override) widespread doubts about his strength, his decisiveness, and whether he would be up to the job of prime minister.

Moreover, he seems to have managed this at the same time as strengthening his claim — an important one for challengers, research suggests — that he is more “in touch” with the electorate than the incumbent.

Tory strategists will hope that this is a one-off boost rather than the beginning of a trend. They will also hope that Nicola Sturgeon’s impressive turn on Thursday night doesn’t blunt their bid to persuade the English electorate that the SNP should have no part to play in governing at Westminster as well as Holyrood. If they are wrong, then they could be in serious trouble.

[Originally published at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a3e07878-d9f7-11e4-9b1c-00144feab7de.html]

Labour will:

• Focus as much as possible on measures contained in three of its five rather vague pledges – particularly on its popular (if not necessarily workable or sensible) offers on university tuition fees (a heat seeking missile aimed directly at those tempted to drift back to the Lib Dems or over to the Greens), on energy prices, on zero-hours contracts, on apprenticeships, on subsidised childcare, on smaller class sizes and, of course, on the NHS. On the latter, expect to hear a lot about ‘joining up care from home to hospital’ as well as more doctors and nurses with ‘time to care’. Labour, after all, can’t afford to be all doom and gloom – ‘over-delivering’ is all very well once you get into government, but too much ‘under-promising’ and you may not make it back there in the first place. Whether the public will warm to the words ‘better plan’ as they are repeated again and again (and again), remains to be seen.
• Concentrate its attack operation on a) ‘the extreme cuts George Osborne doesn’t want you to know about’ and b) the apparent threat posed to the Health Service (notwithstanding its currently high public satisfaction levels) by another five years of Tory government and by UKIP, whose views on the issue supposedly prove it’s ‘more Tory than the Tories’. At the constituency rather than at the national level, transport – for which read the daily misery suffered by commuters – may also feature. Whatever, expect to hear the word ‘extreme’ as much as the words ‘better plan’. Extra points will be awarded to frontbenchers using them in the same sentence or two.
• Point out, on the economy, that any recovery has not made up for the decline in living standards suffered by ‘the average family’ since 2010 and is only likely to benefit ‘the few’ rather than ‘the many’. Labour has no choice but to try and re-frame the economy in this way and, although evidence (admittedly from the US) shows that this rarely works for challengers, these are exceptional times: governments don’t normally contrive to preside over such a long-lasting stagnation in real wages.
• As far as possible, avoid talking about issues ‘owned’ by other parties, most obviously immigration (UKIP) and cutting welfare to cut the deficit (the Tories). Political scientists have long argued that elections are essentially about ‘selective emphasis’ – about parties talking past each other rather than engaging with each other, about parties trying to up the salience of ‘their’ issues and downplaying their opponents’. For good or ill, this one will be no different. True, ‘balancing the books’ and ‘controls on immigration’ are, respectively, number one and number four of Labour’s five pledges. Stressing that every one of its spending commitments is fully costed and fully funded, and that it is promising to eliminate the deficit on current spending by the end of the next parliament, is important. But, like the promise to crack down on migrant benefits and exploitation, its primary purpose is to eliminate the negative – to close down debate by showing that Labour ‘gets it’ on the deficit, not to open up a new front.
• Carry on with its pink bus road-trip, the novelty value of which seems to be creating local media buzz and mobilising activists, even if its impact on women voters – where Labour hopes to press home its advantage among the young and early middle-aged – is less certain.
• Maintain and, where possible, improve on its voter contact operation in the marginals, worrying far less about winning back seats in ‘the South’ than in other (far less media-sexy but far more electorally fruitful) parts of England (including London as well as the North West and the Midlands), which often decide elections and where its prospects are generally brighter. Michael Ashcroft’s extensive constituency-level polling suggests that Labour’s belief that it has a better ‘ground game’ than the Tories, and that it can counter their money with its membership, is not always borne out in reality. That said, Ashcroft’s polling does suggest that Labour’s baseline activity is slightly higher, implying that the shift of resources out of London and into local organising presided over by General Secretary Iain McNicol may well have paid off. The release of trade unionists to help the party during the campaign itself will boost it further. It is also worth noting that, judging by research on constituency donations (by Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie and Dave Cutts), the party is better than its Conservative counterpart at channelling them to where they are needed.
• Mount what looks like a largely pointless rear-guard action to save seats in Scotland when it the party would arguably be better advised to cut its losses and divert resource to English marginals where it does stand a chance. Parties aren’t, however, wholly rational actors – and, even if they were, the Scottish Labour Party isn’t simply a branch operation that the UK Head Office can wind down in order to use cash and manpower more efficiently elsewhere. How much headspace should be taken up by fighting what looks like a losing battle north of the border can’t help but be an issue, however. Douglas Alexander may have to decide early on whether he’s going to do a Chris Patten and sacrifice his seat for the greater good of the party.
• Try to get to the media to acknowledge that, whatever the common wisdom – assiduously promoted (for obvious reasons) by the Conservatives – who gets to form the next government (or even who gets to have first go at trying to form it) is determined not by who emerges on 8 May with most seats in the Commons but by who stands the best chance of avoiding defeat in a motion on a putative Queen’s Speech. Given that UKIP is unlikely to win more than a handful of seats, and if it really is true that the DUP and the Lib Dems could go either way, then Miliband stands a serious chance of becoming Prime Minister even if Labour wins fewer seats (let alone votes) than the Tories.

Labour won’t:

• Be drawn any further on spending cuts that it might make. Those it will wheel out (for instance, scrapping police and crime commissioner elections) are clearly inadequate to the task, but are at least familiar and easy to understand. Moreover research suggests that most people cannot get their head around figures once the millions slide into the billions (or even when they don’t). Whether this will allow Ed Balls to escape the need to find replacement sources of revenue to fund Labour’s tuition fee and childcare promises now that George Osborne has pinched his plans on high-value pensions and bank taxes, who knows?
• Go as far as some might like to promote the idea of a team by pushing frontbenchers to the fore while Miliband plays deep. This isn’t his style, and it would look too like what it was – an admission that he can’t hope to compete with Cameron on leadership. Whether the party can prevent potential leadership contenders beginning to freelance and show their paces should it look like Labour is heading for certain defeat is another matter.
• Let go entirely of the accusation that Cameron is too scared to debate Miliband head-to-head, even though no-one now retains the hope that the accusation will somehow prompt the PM to change his mind.
• Match Tory attacks on Miliband personally with its own coordinated ad hominem attack onCameron. Even though there is scope for one (the PM’s lack of grip on detail; his continually appeasement of his backbenchers; his lack of capacity and success in foreign affairs; the fact that he supposedly doesn’t know how the other half lives etc., etc.), Labour seems to have concluded that it should camp on the (relatively) high ground on this one – or at least to do all it can to avoid making the election about leadership.
• Fret quite as much as it used to about the print media, even though it recognises its continuing power to set the broadcasters’ agenda. For one thing, the majority of newspapers are a lost cause (and have been since Miliband argued for Leveson-style statutory underpinning). For another, declining circulation (as well as increased attention paid to research on its limited effects) means that its spell, even if it hasn’t been completely broken, has (decades after it should have done), has at least begun to wear off.
• Publicly acknowledge the full extent of any latent or manifest threat on the part of the Greens orUKIP – not because the party is complacent about such threats but because it has no intention of providing those parties with free publicity. Cue plenty of ‘I’m not here to talk about the Greens/UKIP, they can speak for themselves, I’m here to talk about Labour’s policies on…(etc., etc).’
• Worry as much as people think about matching the Tories with clever on-line (and off-line) ads designed, as much as anything else, to so enrage your opponents that they end up talking about the issues which you, rather than they, own. Labour is more than capable of doing this – witness its ‘cut to the bone’ campaign launched at the end of last week. But much of its digital spend will be on below-the-radar direct contacts with targets and prospects to drum up both support and donation – although the ads can, of course, be usefully recycled for those, too.
• Admit that it actually needs UKIP to do reasonably (but not too) well – at or near ten per cent would do nicely – in order a) to nick a few marginals off the Tories and b) to help the Lib Dems defend some of their seats against Conservative challengers. By the same token, Labour knows (but won’t say) that, while it will be taking take no prisoners when fighting the Lib Dems in the north, it badly needs them to hang on in the south against Tory opposition. The question of whether it tacitly promotes tactical voting by Labour supporters in those seats is a tricky one. It makes sense; but it will be a big ask. Moreover, many would argue that, in order to avoid the scenario where Labour wins more seats but fewer votes than the Conservatives, the party should campaign for every vote it can get, no matter where.
• Admit that, although it seems unlikely it won’t achieve some sort of swing (the Tories, after all, will struggle to improve on their vote share in 2010 and Labour should poll around 31 per cent at worst), it has very little chance of winning more than around 280 seats or so. This is obviously nowhere near what it needs for a bare overall majority, let alone a comfortable one.
• Go any further than it has done on which parties it will consider entering into a coalition or confidence and supply arrangements with. Given that, on paper at least, Labour has more options in this respect, it would be foolish to throw away that advantage by ruling any of them out unnecessarily. Attempts by the media to insist that ‘the electorate has a right to know’ (etc., etc.) will be relentlessly parried with the same standard formulations that have been used, perfectly effectively, by their European counterparts for decades: ‘Let’s wait for the voters to deliver their verdict before getting into hypothetical discussions’ (etc., etc.).
• Lay out a list of ‘red lines’ – policies which it will not compromise on during any negotiations – unless, like refusing to scrap Trident, they are well-worn no-brainers. Maximum flexibility is the watchword. Attempts by the media to reduce it by demanding which policies are negotiable and which are not will be relentlessly parried with the same standard formulations that have been used, perfectly effectively, by their European counterparts for decades.
• Talk up its chances of defeating Nick Clegg in Sheffield Hallam too much, except of course in the constituency itself (expect plenty of ‘can’t win here’ from both sides); but it will work like mad, with the help of lots of students, to do decapitate him – not least because doing so could materially alter the ideological complexion of the Lib Dems’ parliamentary party, trigger the election of a more Labour-friendly acting leader, and therefore mean Ed Miliband has a better chance of persuading them (providing the arithmetic doesn’t point the other way) to put him, rather than David Cameron, into Downing Street.

[A revised and edited version of this post was published on 2nd April at https://theconversation.com/five-things-labour-will-do-in-this-campaign-and-five-things-it-definitely-wont-39662]