‘Picking up on populism: playing with fire, or putting out the flames?’, Policy Network, 15 January 2014

Posted on January 22, 2014 by tpbale

The centre-left is still missing a popular critique, particularly on the economy. Picking up on populism may be playing with fire but, done carefully and, dare one say, responsibly, it could very well do social democrats more good than harm

Interviewed by the BBC in late December 2013, the UK’s Business Secretary, the Liberal Democrat politician Vince Cable, poured a mixture of doubt and scorn on Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal to reduce the entitlement of EU citizens to come and live and work in Britain.  But he also confessed he was not entirely surprised. ‘There is a bigger picture here’, he told his interviewer. ‘We periodically get these immigration panics in the UK. I remember going back to Enoch Powell and the ‘rivers of blood’ and going back a century there was panic over Jewish immigrants coming from Eastern Europe. The responsibility of politicians in this situation when people are getting anxious is to try to reassure them and give them facts and not panic or resort to populist measures that do harm.’

Politicians on the right were quick to condemn what one of those Tory MPs leading a rearguard action to persuade the government not to lift restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians, called Cable’s ‘ridiculously over the top and ill-judged remarks’.  Privately, however, there may have been some sympathy with his views.  Tory modernisers may be something of an endangered species these days but the tone of some of their party’s talk on the issue must surely have grated if not dismayed.  

Meanwhile, neo-liberals – at least those who haven’t yet allowed their Euroscepticism to trump their enthusiasm for the market – must surely worry about fettering free movement in what they themselves like to think of as ‘a global race.’  

Finally, those with even the faintest familiarity with twentieth-century British history may have blanched at Cable’s mention of Enoch Powell, but would have had to agree with his point that public concern over immigration is not merely a function of numbers but is also primed by politicians and the press and that it therefore tends to move in cycles: hysterical in the early 1900s, rising again in the late 1950s, rumbling on (and off) until the late 1970s, then dropping in the 1980s and 1990s, until the panic over asylum and massive labour migration from the accession countries kick-started it again at the turn of the century

Cable’s fellow Liberal Democrat ministers were more supportive than many might have imagined: this time, it seems, the Tories really may have gone too far even for Clegg and co.  Labour’s reaction, however, was even more interesting.  Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, clearly decided it was better not to intrude on family grief by mentioning Cable specifically, but was quick into print to predict that what she called the government’s ‘frenzy of briefings on immigration’ wouldn’t work, claiming that the ‘last minute rush and ramped up rhetoric looks more like panic than plan’.  Rather than ‘chasing headlines that increase concern and hostility,’ she suggested, ‘David Cameron should concentrate on sensible policies to help.’  Labour, she added, wasn’t about to ‘join a Dutch auction of tough language that helps no one.’

To many of those who followed the twists and turns of migration and asylum policy under the last Labour government, when headline-chasing briefings on both issues were regularly accompanied by ramped-up rhetoric, her words may provoke an ironic smile.  But they should surely also provide a measure of reassurance.  Her main point, after all, was that her party was determined not to strike poses but at the same time was prepared to admit that it ‘got some things wrong on immigration in government’ – in particular on transitional controls and on the impact the huge number of East European migrants who came to the UK after 2004 had on public opinion and on low paid workers. Labour, she assured readers, had ‘listened and learned.’

But to and from what – or whom?  While the economic arguments over the pros and cons of mass immigration were (and are) more finally balanced, a simple reading of any poll published this millennium could have told Labour politicians, when they were still in office, that they were on the wrong side of an increasingly anxious electorate.  Yet that was insufficient either to persuade them to admit their mistakes or to prevent them, at least in Gordon Brown’s case, from resorting to rhetoric – ‘British jobs for British workers’ – apparently more redolent of the BNP than a serious political party.  Surely something else must have happened in the meantime to prompt the new approach?

Losing power inevitably made a difference.  So too did the economic downturn.  It’s one thing to read that people responding to opinion polls say they don’t think much of you or your policies, but it’s quite another for them to vote you out of office.   And what happened after 2007 – and, indeed, what happened to real wages at the lower end of the income distribution even before then – has given lots of Labour people pause for thought. Just as allowing the financial and property markets to let rip in return for a share of their revenues no longer seems like social democracy in action, nor does allowing in huge numbers of migrants to help turbo-charge growth without stoking inflation.

Farage’s favours to Labour 

Yet something important is still missing if we want to explain Labour’s conversion to a more restrictive immigration policy but one couched in more restrained rhetoric.  That something is the populist critique – the notion that politics-as-usual conducted by a self-satisfied elite which presumes to know what’s good for us, has to undergo fundamental change if democracy is to deliver what people really want.  Practically woven into the DNA of Britain’s tabloid press, and flirted with by almost every Tory leader since Benjamin Disraeli, it has, since 2010, gained new momentum and resonance after being picked up and run with by UKIP under Nigel Farage.  So much so that a critique whose appeal to ‘common sense’ and charisma have indelibly associated it in continental Europe with the insurgent extreme has now become part of mainstream politics in the UK.

But it’s not just by helping to persuade Labour to take some of the drawbacks of mass migration more seriously that Farage has done the Party a favour.  For one thing, by causing the Tories to panic about his eating into their vote, he has pushed previously liberal Conservatives like David Cameron and Theresa May into adopting measures and rhetoric in government that would have horrified them in opposition – measures and rhetoric which alienate the well-heeled, well-educated voters they were once so keen to want to win back at the same time as failing miserably to convince the rest of the electorate that they really mean it like Nigel means it.  

Clearly, the Tories were ill-advised to promise such a huge reduction in net migration in the first place. But, having done so, they should have stuck to their guns rather than undermining the very real progress they have (rightly or wrongly) made by taking second, third and fourth bites at the cherry, thereby sending the message that what they’ve done up till now isn’t nearly enough.  This is a lesson for Labour, and one that probably applies just as much to crafting its line on welfare as its line on immigration.  By all means listen to and learn from the populist critique.  Even meet it half way.  But half way is far enough.  Any more than that you end up in a race that you can never win and overpromising and under-delivering rather than, as it should be, the other way around.

The other favour Farage has done Labour is to help it rediscover its own penchant for populism.  It is easy to forget that even in 1997, Labour achieved its victory not just because it trespassed into supposedly Tory territory by promising to be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ but also because it stood for a Britain ‘where merit comes before privilege, run for the many not the few’, in so doing echoing its promise in 1945 to ‘win the Peace for the People’ and its pledge in 1964 ‘to provide the whole people with the high living standards, the economic security, and the cultural values which in previous generations have been enjoyed by only a small wealthy minority’ – one represented by the irredeemably ‘grousemoor’ politicians of its Tory opponents.

Labour’s popular appeal on the economy

The current crop of Conservatives and their friends in the media will of course dismiss all this as ‘left-populism’, typical of a party being led back to the seventies by ‘Red Ed’.  Moreover, there are, as Policy Network’s own Roger Liddle has pointed out, some genuine risks involved: a party needing to rebuild its credibility and reputation for economic competence can’t afford to forget the difference between keeping it simple and sounding simplistic; it also needs business on its side rather than feeling sore at being branded a special or vested interest.  And that’s just in opposition.  In government, to return to a theme we’ve already touched on, both Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, like French President François Hollande more recently (and more swiftly), paid a price for encouraging expectations they could never realistically meet.

Sometimes in politics the pendulum can get stuck.  Populism can help get it swinging again.  Inevitably, however, it also has the potential to make that pendulum swing too far the other way. We may have reached that point on immigration – and on welfare too.  When it comes to the economy, however, there is probably some way to go, particularly given the lack of serious structural change and sanctions that the financial meltdown of 2007 onwards has occasioned in the private, if not the public, sector – something that many voters have noticed even if some of their representatives haven’t.  Picking up on populism may be playing with fire but, done carefully and, dare one say, responsibly, it could very well do the centre-left more good than harm.

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Four reasons Ed Miliband is still a good opposition leader, Guardian, 16 January 2014

Posted on January 21, 2014 by tpbale

Ed Miliband’s numbers are bad – so bad that apparently anyone presenting on polling to the shadow cabinet isn’t allowed to talk about them. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s doing a bad job as Labour leader. Nor does it mean his party can’t win a general election. Indeed, the fact that it’s still in with a reasonable chance suggests that Miliband has actually done almost everything a politician in his position can do in order to win back power.

The leader of the opposition is currently entitled to a salary of £132,387. A nice little earner, some would say, and certainly enough to put the post’s occupant beyond the fabled “squeezed middle”. It’s not enough, however, to offset its reputation as one of the most difficult jobs in British politics. But difficult is not impossible. And the job description is pretty clear. So how does Ed Miliband measure up?

1. Showing your party has changed

This involves both policies and people. Miliband has been lucky in that he’s not, like Neil Kinnock, weighed down with radical, electorally unpopular commitments he can’t junk quickly. Labour’s reputation for profligacy, especially on welfare, remains a problem, if not necessarily an unprecedented or insuperable one. But Miliband is trying hard to get some distance between the Blair/Brown era and his own regime, in particular on immigration – a touchy subject that recent psephological research suggests may have been as important as the economy in losing Labour votes last time round. And although some of Labour’s big beasts are seemingly untouchable, its leader has won (and now exercised) the right to bring in fresh faces of his own choosing, including the young guns who are making big speeches this week fleshing out Labour’s new offer.

2. Holding your party together and maintaining it as a fighting force

All the above has been achieved without letting the inevitable internal arguments generated attract the attention of the vast majority of voters who don’t follow politics 24/7. Given what’s happened to Labour when it’s been chucked out of office before, this is no mean achievement. Of course, this could all change if the bad blood already created by Miliband’s decision to recast his party’s relationship with the trade unions ends up on the carpet, but – partly because both sides seem to have decided that discretion is the better part of valour – this currently looks unlikely. Certainly, Tory strategists would be unwise to bank on the union organisers who contribute so much to Labour’s electioneering sitting this one out. Labour also has a party membership which is almost certainly bigger, more energetic and in better heart than the Conservatives’, partly because Miliband has told them enough (but arguably not too much) of what they want to hear.

3. Setting the agenda, or at least putting the government off its stroke

The party (or parties) in power have a massive advantage in this respect: the media is far more interested in them and their legislation than in the opposition. But Miliband, despite having the odd shocker at prime minister’s questions, has proved capable of making Cameron squirm and the government think again, most obviously on press regulation, on bankers’ bonuses, on gas and electricity prices, on the minimum wage, on payday lending and on military action against Syria. And his now unrelenting focus on the cost of living may still do something to blunt the electoral impact of economic recovery, particularly if he can persuade people that its fruits are going not to them but to the kind of people who helped get us into this mess in the first place. After all, a little populism can go a long way – for the left as well as the right.

4. Looking like you’re in touch with the concerns of ordinary people

The extent to which people take account of party leaders when casting their ballot is hotly debated by psephologists and pollsters. So, too, is which characteristics count most. However, recent research suggests that, while looking like you can be trusted and that you know what you’re doing is important, being seen to be “in touch” may be even more important, particularly if your rival isn’t. The fact, then, that this is where Miliband (perhaps simply because of who he is rather than anything he’s actually done) beats Cameron, may not be quite as irrelevant as many assume.

Whether what he’s done (or what he is) will eventually take Miliband all the way to No 10 is anyone’s guess. But let’s not write him, or his chances, off just yet.

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Alan Bown’s Ukip polling only tells half the story, Telegraph, 18 December 2013

Posted on December 20, 2013 by tpbale

I’m not entirely sure how Ukip’s latest sugar-daddy, Alan Bown, has chosen the constituencies in which he’s commissioned polls, but they were presumably picked because they’re easily portrayed as precisely the sort of seats the Tories need to hold on to if they’re to have any chance of remaining in power after the next general election. As such, the results – even if we remember that smaller sample sizes mean higher margins of error – pack quite a punch, at least at first glance.

The main message of the latest round of polling, summed up nicely in Mr Bown’s Telegraph advert yesterday (see below), looks clear enough: Ukip is coming soon to a town near you and is on course to do some serious damage to the Conservatives in 2015.

Image

And that’s not all. Apparently, Ukip is also stealing support not just from disillusioned Tories but from voters for all parties and none. Adding the scores from different constituency polls together suggests that over two thirds of those saying they would vote Ukip either backed someone other than Mr Cameron’s party in 2010 or else didn’t bother to vote at all. Even worse, it looks as if warning them they could end up handing Ed Miliband the keys to Downing Street won’t quite do the trick. Only a third of them say they’d be swayed by such an argument, while over half say it won’t stop them plumping for Mr Farage’s outfit. That, according to Ukip’s polling, is because getting on for two thirds of those saying they will vote for the party are driven by support for its policies rather than by any desire to register a protest vote.

So is Alan Bown the Grinch who’s stolen the Conservatives’ Christmas? Probably not.

For one thing Tories can take comfort from other polls which are beginning to hint that, nationally, Labour’s lead may be shrinking. Of course, one or two robins don’t make a festive season. But it could be that – at long last – economic growth, along with the fact that the Opposition still seems to be taking the rap for the global economic meltdown, is beginning to work in the Government’s (or at least the Conservatives’) favour. Clearly there’s many a slip twixt GDP numbers and a genuine feelgood factor. And Labour can continue to take comfort in the fact that Ukip’s polling, like Lord Ashcroft’s before it, suggests it’s doing much better in many marginals than nationwide surveys suggest. Nevertheless, a rising tide may ultimately lift just enough boats to see the Tories end up as the largest party in 2015.

For another, although there are a number of respected analysts who also make the point that Ukip attracts support from people who voted Labour or who didn’t vote at all, these latest polls still suggest the party is currently tempting more than twice as many erstwhile Tories as it is former Labour voters. Nor should anyone place too much faith in Ukip’s ability to mobilise those who were either ineligible to vote or uninterested in voting last time round. Pound to a penny, many in both groups won’t bother next time either.

For yet another, eagle-eyed Tories will note from the small print in the Telegraph ads that the claims made about how they are motivated by policies, not protest or how they can’t be persuaded by the “Vote Ukip, get Miliband” line are based on questions asked in some constituencies and not others. Quite why this is isn’t made clear. And even if this weren’t the case, some purists might argue that aggregating particular constituency samples isn’t the same as conducting a properly weighted nationwide poll. They can also criticise some of the methods used as likely to boost Ukip’s support.

Finally, as with all polls, Ukip’s research can only reflect, firstly, the image people want to project to whoever is asking them the question and, secondly, what people are thinking right now. It can’t discount for the fact that we all like to pretend we rationally weigh up parties’ policy offers and vote accordingly, when decades of deeper research suggests that we don’t. Even more importantly, it can’t – because none of us can – predict what we’ll be thinking, and doing, in 18 months’ time.

The European elections next year may, indeed, pile the pressure on David Cameron. But they could just as easily allow us one final fling with Ukip before we settle down to the serious business of choosing who’s actually going to govern us for another five years. Mr Farage and his friends are, indeed, coming soon to a town near you – especially perhaps if you live in Thanet South, Folkestone and Hythe or Boston and Skegness. And doubtless they will end up doing Tories some damage. Whether it’ll be fatal, however, remains a moot point.

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How the countryside could lose David Cameron the 2015 general election, Telegraph, 1 November 2013

Posted on November 2, 2013 by tpbale

Quite how they conducted their poll, I’m not sure – they never got back to me.* But the Countryside Alliance is claiming that around a fifth of its members have fallen out of love with the Conservatives. And not just because David Cameron shows precious little sign of keeping a promise to repeal Labour’s ban on hunting with dogs.

As with the end of any affair, there are any number of reasons why things have turned sour. Apparently, the inability (or unwillingness) of the Government to do much about energy prices is also driving freezing-cold country-dwellers to despair, as is its refusal to think about extending fuel subsidies currently enjoyed by, among other far-flung places, the Scilly Isles to the rest of rural Britain. And the Coalition’s apparent determination to stick to its guns on HS2 and to make it easier to build on rural land are doing it no favours either. So much so apparently that, while two thirds of CA members still see themselves voting Conservative at the next election, some 13 per cent are now toying with the idea of voting Ukip.

If all this is true it represents, as others have noted, not so much a threat to the Tories’ hold on their heartlands – the kind of seat where the Conservative Party could put up a fox as its candidate and still win handsomely – as to their chances in more marginal seats. That’s because it’s claimed (who can tell if it’s true?) that in 2010 between 12- and 15,000 CA supporters took part in a campaign organised by Vote-OK, to help Tory candidates unseat vulnerable Labour (and Lib-Dem) MPs, on the assumption that, once safely (or, in some cases, precariously) installed at Westminster, they would then obediently vote to let the hunting dogs out.

Quite how much difference their efforts really made to getting Dave into Downing Street, only for him (and those victorious newcomers) to turn round and ignore all those promises, is actually a bit of a moot point.

Claims that they were responsible for winning 36 battleground seats are just that – claims. The only pukka research I could find on the impact of Vote-OK goes back to the election in 2005, where it was estimated that they may have been worth just over 1 per cent on average – admittedly handy but probably not that crucial in that many contests.

Of course, Vote-OK’s impact may have been greater in 2010, although, as in 2005, we’d also have to consider those voters actively put off voting Tory by a knock on the door from the green welly brigade. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that the thousands of pounds worth of DVDs that they delivered (you can see the invoices here) will have persuaded many people to change their mind.

That said, we shouldn’t dismiss all this out of hand as a classic bit of push-polling that garners its instigators a nice bit of publicity for their particular issues – for two reasons.

First, it is one of those straws in the wind – yet another illustration of the disillusionment felt by self-styled traditional Tories with a leadership made up of, in their view anyway, metropolitan, even metrosexual liberals. That’s a sentiment which may bite the party on the proverbial at the European elections, a time when voters are either too apathetic to care or else much less shy about giving their regular choice a bit of a kicking.

Second, it’s a reminder that boots – even Wellington boots – may well count more than ever at the next general election. Both main parties are furiously trying to copy the sophisticated voter-identification techniques pioneered by the Republicans and particularly the Democrats during the last US Presidential election. But that game is a game of two halves.

It’s one thing to find out, in minute detail, who is most likely to vote for you. It’s another to have enough people to do the phoning, facebooking, and knocking on doors required to actually get them down to the polling station to put their cross in the right box. Labour’s relationship with the unions may be a little rocky right now, but it will almost certainly remain good enough to ensure that, with the additional assistance provided by its slightly bigger (and probably younger) membership, it will perform as well in the second half as the first half of that game.

Even if the economy is going gangbusters by the spring of 2015, winning an overall majority at the next election is going to be, as they say nowadays, a big ask for the Tories. That means they’re going to need all the help that they can get. Losing a little support in the shires might seem worth it as long as what loses Mr Cameron that support helps him gain it across the nation as a whole. And more building, lower spending, and foregoing the chance to kill more foxes probably all fall into that category. But it might not be as simple as all that. And anyway, as countryside Conservatives, especially if they’re church-goers too, might well remind the Prime Minister, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

 

*Tim Bonner, the Countryside Alliance’s Director of Campaigns, did kindly come back to me later in order to let me know that the polling of its members was conducted by ORB, which is reassuring.

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Get a sense of humour: the Tories and Coalition, Spectator, 5 October 2013

Posted on October 8, 2013 by tpbale
Like so many pundits before me, I had earnestly hoped never to begin a piece on coalitions by quoting Disraeli.  But since I was asked by Bright Blue and the Electoral Reform Society to join Mrs Bone’s husband, as well as Ms Hardman and Mr Oborne of this parish, on the Tory fringe in Manchester to discuss whether the country would ever love coalitions, it has sadly proved unavoidable.  I can only apologise.

My answer to the question, in case you were interested, was that England might not learn to love coalitions but that, like Scotland and Wales before it, it has very quickly come to accept them and that, rather than being grudging, that acceptance was phlegmatic – ‘it is what it is’, ‘we are where we are’, etc., etc.

Fans of medieval medicine (and who isn’t?) will recognise in that rather distasteful term one of the four humours that our forebears believed determined personality, the others being (needless to say, I’m sure) sanguine, melancholic and choleric.

It’s actually the latter that I’m most interested in because it might explain why there is one section of society whose refusal to accept what has happens borders on denial and delusion.  I am talking here about large parts of the parliamentary Conservative Party and many (but by no means all or even most) grassroots members.

My scholarly training (by which I mean some dim recollections of reading The Alchemist for A-Level and a quick look at Wikipedia, first resort of the academic scoundrel) tells me that those of a choleric disposition are suffering from ‘an excess of yellow bile’ (do the Lib Dems really hate you so much?), are ‘fundamentally ambitious and leader-like’, and full of aggression, energy, and/or passion.’ ‘Task oriented people’ who are ‘focused on getting a job done efficiently; their motto is usually “do it now”.’  They like to take charge so ‘can become dictatorial or tyrannical.’  As a result, ‘they can quickly fall into deep depression or moodiness when failures or setbacks befall them’.

The Conservative Party’s failure to win the election and consequent need to govern in coalition with the Lib Dems was one such setback.  But its ongoing inability to grow up and get over itself is – at least to an outside observer for whom Conference’s secure zone isn’t simultaneously a comfort zone – not only a question of character but one of sheer common sense.

If you are a Tory, repeat after me.  The two-party vote is in long-term secular decline.  We are still seen by too many people as the party of the rich.  We are effectively locked out of many, sometimes densely populated parts of the country and have made barely any inroads into ethnic minority communities.  We face an electoral system that discriminates against a party which piles up votes in safe seats and a system of boundary review that takes too long to catch up with population movements out of the cities and into the suburbs.  Another hung parliament is therefore a distinct possibility.  Such an outcome may – just may – even become the new normal.

Tories could also help themselves by setting aside a couple of pervasive myths that make it doubly difficult for them to cope with the trauma.  First, with the exception of those Conservative MPs who missed out on being ministers, the only people shafted by the coalition deal were the Lib Dems: they were vegetarians negotiating with carnivores; you gave them virtually nothing either in terms of policy or portfolios; you won; they lost; get over it.

Second, there was no possibility of a Conservative minority government in 2010.  Not simply the survival but the very installation of such a government relies on other parties not voting it down – permission they will only give if they can’t see any serious alternative.  In 2010 there almost certainly was: a Lib-Lab government with anyone-but-Brown as PM supported by smaller regionalist parties who would have screwed far more out of it than they’ve been able to screw out of this one.  The same may well be true in 2015.

Fortunately, it seems, the refusal of so many Tories to accept these painful realities isn’t, in the end, as profound – or as damaging to the Party’s governing prospects – as it might first appear.  In a survey of grassroots members we conducted this summer, we found that while two thirds of them regretted David Cameron’s decision to go into coalition with Nick Clegg last time around, over three-quarters of them would do it again if that’s what it takes to hang on to Number Ten.  Character – at least as defined by medieval medicine – is not destiny after all.

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What was the point of the party conferences? The Conversation, 2 October 2013

Posted on October 4, 2013 by tpbale

“War – huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing”, sang Edwin Starr back in the sixties. Most people say the same about party conferences. They take up half a week. They cost a fortune. They don’t actually decide anything important, especially when it comes to policy. And hardly any ordinary party members, or for that matter even MPs, even turn up to them these days.

And yet. And yet. Year after year they go on, albeit more often in big city centres than spa or seaside towns (although this year I got to sample both, nipping over to Brighton with Labour and up to Manchester with the Tories). Presumably, then, there must still be a point to them.

In fact, there are several. The dirty little secret is that for at least some of the parties, they may well be money-spinners. That explains why so many of those attending these days work for pressure groups, lobbyists (sorry, I mean public affairs companies) and think tanks. These guys are paying top dollar to attend and then more of the same if they want a stand in one of the cavernous (the Conservatives) or cosy (Labour) exhibition areas, where they are joined by retailers selling books, jewellery, clothes, trinkets and tat, companies flogging their services and caterers providing the refreshments that everyone seems to need, whether or not they’ve managed to grab (depending on the time of day) a handful of Pringles and a glass of wine or similarly free cookies and coffee at one of the various fringe meetings (most of them commercially-sponsored) going on around the place.

Fringe benefits

For some attendees, the fringe is where it’s at. Indeed there are plenty of people who rarely and perhaps even never venture into the conference hall itself, except perhaps to listen to the one celebrity politician whose ‘day it is’ – Monday, George, Tuesday, Boris, Wednesday, Dave, etc, etc. At the Tory conference, there were hundreds of these smaller meetings – many of them packed to the rafters, notwithstanding the fact that they often seemed to covering an issue that had been covered the day before, would be covered the day afterwards and might even be being discussed at exactly the same time in a different room.

Perhaps it said something about the Tories’ will to win this year that there seemed to be so many meetings in Manchester addressing exactly how they were going to pull it off, given squeezed household incomes, an electoral system massively biased to Labour, and a complete failure to make inroads into northern, urban and ethnic minority communities. Most of the panellists – at least at these events – were politicians, print-journalists, think-tankers and pollsters. For good or ill, academic experts on voting behaviour were conspicuous by their absence. Whether they are missing a trick or are well off out of it, I’ll leave it to others to judge.

Ritual gathering

Nearly all of these events could have taken place – indeed, often do take place – in London. Indeed, there is a sense in which Conference is partly about letting people who live elsewhere actually see (and ask questions) of those they already read day-in-day-out and, for the most part, agree with. Whether many minds get changed here – or in the conference hall – is pretty doubtful.

And that, in some ways, is the point. Conferences are still a gathering of the tribe for a ritual that may have morphed over the years but is still essentially a symbolic reaffirmation that those who attend are not a strange and/or beleaguered minority. This is as crucial for mobilising the few genuine activists still left in seats that are safe or winnable as it is for helping to ensure the renewal of direct debits by those living in towns and cities (like Manchester, in the case of the Tories) where the party is thin, bordering on non-existent on the ground. Conference also offers the chance of a handshake, maybe even a quick chat with an MP or even a (Shadow) Cabinet Minister. It may seem strange to people who don’t take an interest in politics but these people – to members anyway – are celebrities. It’s a buzz to meet them and a warm fuzzy memory to take home, and maybe even drop casually into the conversation with friends and family (particularly political friends and family) back home.

Ups, downs and bounces

For non-members, of course, the motives and incentives are different. For think-tankers and lobbyists it may offer a chance to show funders and clients that they’re supposedly getting the agenda or having an influence with the politicians who really matter (or at least their special advisers). For journalists, it’s a chance to “take the temperature of the party”, to see who’s up and who might be going down – perhaps in the reshuffles that might take place between the end of the conference season and the start of the new parliamentary term. And for politicians, it’s a chance to prove their chops, if they’re up and coming, or that they’ve still got it, if they’re big beasts.

And for those at the very top of the tree (the leader and his or her entourage), conference presents one big media opportunity – made all the more special by the fact that all the parties have an unspoken pact with each other to give each other a free run. That opportunity is capped of course by the leader’s speech – a way to rally the troops, convince the journalists (and through them the folks at home) that you, and not your opponent, has what it takes. Talk of a “conference bounce”, however, in the end is largely misguided: either they all end up balancing each other out or any increase in support only lasts a few weeks before a party’s poll ratings return to their long-term trend.

For the vast majority who don’t go to party conference and who pay them next to no attention, then, they may as well not take place. But for those who attend, they fulfil a whole bunch of functions. Certainly, with the odd exception (and there wasn’t one this year), they leave pretty much everyone there feeling good about themselves, and maybe, in the grand scheme of things and in an otherwise cynical world, that’s no mean achievement.

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For his speech, David Cameron will surely lean on ethos, pathos and logos, Guardian, 2 October 2013

Posted on October 4, 2013 by tpbale

The pressure is on. David Cameron’s closing speech to his party’s conference will be his eighth as Tory leader, and his MPs and grassroots supporters are hoping that he can top Ed Miliband’s effort in Brighton last week. While they are bound to be wondering whether he too can come up with two or three potentially game-changing announcements, the fact is he’ll inevitably be judged as much by his presentation as his policies.

If previous years are anything to go by, however, Cameron is likely to pass this particular test with flying colours – and not simply because he possesses a modicum of stage presence, a good memory and often pitch-perfect delivery. It’s also because, with more than a little help from his speechwriters, the Conservative leader is something of a dab hand at the ancient arts of rhetoric and oratory. What better way to explore his techniques, then, than through the classics?

The first thing anyone reading about rhetoric learns is that ethos, pathos and logos aren’t the names of the three musketeers but rather the primary modes of persuasive appeal outlined by the Greek polymath, Aristotle. Ethos is about establishing credibility; pathos is forging an emotional connection; and logos is reasoned argument.

As far as ethos goes, Cameron’s main concern, right from the start, has been not so much to assert his authority as to stress his authenticity. In order to scotch the pervasive notion that he is little more than a slick, metropolitan posh boy, the Tory leader characteristically emphasises both his traditional values and his simultaneous willingness to confront his party’s prejudices. He routinely recalls the adversities his family has faced. Occasionally, he resorts to the “this is the real me so who needs notes?” trick that helped win him the leadership in the first place – although that probably pays fewer dividends now that the leader of the opposition has got in on the act too.

Still, being PM makes ethos much less of a problem since it derives as much from status as it does from character. Mind you, the former provides plenty of additional chances to prove the latter, not least because of all the opportunities it gives Cameron to show how he’s standing up for Britain. Expect more of the same this time.

Cameron tends to seek pathos in very predictable places: his children and his parents – and their disabilities – being the most obvious examples, although they are sometimes joined by “real people” he’s met or who have written to him. For all that, Cameron is actually pretty cautious about trying to conjure up melodramatic images, or enargia.

Cameron is well aware, however, that an emotional connection can be achieved by laughter as well as tears. His jokes are almost always corny and contrived, although less so, interestingly, when he’s feeling brave enough to tease his own traditionalists. He even tries now and then to be a touch risqué – or at least what passes as such in Conservative circles. And for someone often thought of as preternaturally arrogant, he actually does self-deprecation pretty well.

That said, Cameron’s most consistent and characteristic effort at pathos revolves around his appeals to optimism, particularly (though not exclusively) in perorations ladled with anaphora (one sentence after another beginning with the same word or phrase) that sometimes blur not only second and first person, plural and singular, but also party, voters and nation.

What is noticeable, however, is that since moving into No 10, Cameron has put a lot more emphasis on logos, as he did last year in Birmingham when he made a sustained case for the need to get this country fit for the “global race”. Yet even when making a conspicuously reasoned argument, Cameron still relies just as much on supposedly self-evident truths as on the detailed (sometimes statistical) evidence he increasingly inserts into his speeches.

In the end, though, we can’t say for sure what Cameron will come up with this time round. After all, to the truly skilled orator, decorum (appropriateness) and kairos (timeliness) are crucial considerations. Each and every party conference speech presents a slightly different challenge – Cameron will almost certainly rise to this one.

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What happened to Tory modernisation, Telegraph, 30 September 2013

Posted on October 4, 2013 by tpbale

As David Cameron finally delivers on his promise to recognise marriage in the tax system and announces yet more action on immigration and welfare, it seems like a good time to ask whether – despite the valiant efforts of commentators like Ian Birrell and Matthew d’Ancona and think tanks like Bright Blue – it’s all over for Tory modernisation.

To work out what has become of modernisation and to guess where it might be going, however, we first need to appreciate that it was always a contingent, ambivalent affair that was latched on to rather than actually led by Cameron and which presented a challenge to Conservative instincts that was always more limited and less head-on than some of its standard-bearers liked to imply.

The ambivalence was there even in its earliest and most easily recognised focus on cultural and social liberalism – the idea that the party should face up to the fact that society had changed in ways that could not be reversed and which, therefore, ought not to be railed against. On one hand, the party was urged to declare an end to its war on single parents. Yet on the other hand, it insisted that society was somehow “broken” and that many of its problems were rooted in poor parenting and family breakdown.

Arguably, however, Tory modernisation was at its most ambiguous – critics would say disingenuous – when it came to public services and public spending – and, indeed, the economy more generally. Insofar as it was a response for a coming to terms with the Britain that New Labour had helped to usher into being, modernisation was also a recognition that pledging ever-lower taxes and keeping the nation’s health, education and pension systems on shorter and shorter rations was no way to run the country – or to convince voters that the party knew how to run it in the way they wanted.

Given that it was in part the product of a more benign economic climate and that its advocates failed in opposition to fully persuade more than a minority of their party colleagues and supporters of its merits, it is hardly surprising that in government and in an age of austerity, modernisation seems to have stalled rather than snowballed.

But not everything that was solid – or at least halfway solid – about the project has melted into air. As if to provide proof of its centrality, parts of modernisation’s socially liberal agenda have been pursued to the last and to the letter. Legislating for gay marriage and sticking to the commitment to ring-fence overseas aid spending sent out a signal that Cameron and those around him retain at least some of the principles that gained the Tories’ “permission to be heard” by some, if not all, of the well-educated and well-heeled voters the party needs onside in order to win elections. The problem is they don’t make much sense to large numbers of Conservative MPs and grassroots members, or indeed to a fair few members of the general public.

It may be no coincidence, then, that the area in which Tory modernisation may end up achieving the most – albeit under the radar of voters – is not policy but process. Nor, perhaps, is it a coincidence that the man at the cutting edge of changing the way government goes about its business is Francis Maude – surely the modernisers’ moderniser. There is no guarantee, though, that the very inertia and vested interests that Maude hopes to overcome in Whitehall and beyond won’t end up doing for his plans. The same is true – in spades – for another Tory determined to tell it like it is, Nick Boles, whose supply-side reforms strike at the heart of small-C countryside conservatism.

In other important areas, the picture is decidedly mixed. Some of the Government’s policies on immigration and education are simply traditionalist measures that can claim little or no convincing connection with modernisation other than the fact the ministers introducing them – Theresa May and Michael Gove – were associated, at least in a previous life, with that cause. And even those which can make a claim to be truly modernising, such as speeding up things for firms wanting to recruit the ‘brightest and the best’ and introducing free schools, go comfortably and conveniently with, rather than against, the grain of traditional conservatism.

Whether or not individual government policies can be convincingly connected back to Tory modernisation, it is worth noting that their chances of making a real and lasting impact are unlikely to be overly affected by whether Cameron stays on as leader in the long term – primarily because he has always been more about selling than designing and driving them. Whether, then, modernisation would receive a new lease of life under another leader – be it a “ground-floor” moderniser like Gove or simply one of those who “got it” early on, like May – would be interesting to see.

It may be, of course, that “modernisation mk II”, like the Conservative party itself, is simply waiting for Boris. Even if the current Mayor of London ends up winning, however, his talent for being all things to all Tories means that anticipating what that win would mean for the party, let alone for modernisation, involves seeing through a glass very, very darkly indeed.

A full version of this article is published by IPPR in Juncture.

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Cameron and the Conservatives: a start of term report, PSA Blog, 27 September, 2013

Posted on September 29, 2013 by tpbale

Assurances over the summer that David Cameron was well on the way to healing relations with some of his backbenchers (via a combination of Number Ten BBQs, economic recovery and the PM’s support for the EU Referendum Bill) look a little optimistic in the light of last month’sCommons rebellion on launching military strikes on Syria.

Clearly, there were reasoned objections to taking part in any mission against Assad on the part of those who voted against their own government.  But a look at the list of those who did so reveals that many of them had form.  Few, then, would bet against some of the same people deciding to give Cameron another bloody nose and forcing him into future climb-downs on other issues. Obvious possibilities here include reforms to the planning system or HS2, both of which touch a sore nerve even with backbenchers more favourably inclined to their party leader.

On the other hand, while Syria may have been a humiliation, it was by no means the PR disaster that many anticipated.  Partly due to Cameron more or less gracefully accepting defeat and thereby appearing to have listened to the great British public (who are clearly not up for going to war on this issue) and party because of the Tories’ effective media operation against Ed Miliband’s supposed perfidy and indecision, the Prime Minister and his party actually emerged relatively unscathed from the affair.  Indeed, a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times published on 8 September suggested 41% think Cameron responded well, with only 27% thinking the same about Miliband.

In fact, on virtually every measure that counts, the Prime Minister remains not just an asset to the Tories (in the sense of being more popular than his party) but way ahead of the Leader of the Opposition.  Of course, many observers recall that such a gap did not prevent Mrs Thatcher from beating Jim Callaghan back in 1979 or Ted Heath from doing the same to Harold Wilson in 1970.  But this is to forget that – before the polls began to narrow in the government’s favour as election day approached – the Opposition had in both cases been recording leads that were much bigger than Labour has achieved since 2010.

This is not to say that the Conservatives are on course for an overall majority at the next election; but there remains at least a reasonable chance that they will emerge as the largest single party, giving Cameron first go at forming another government.

To achieve that goal, the Tories are clearly sticking to an obvious but possibly very effective strategy, namely convincing people of three things. The first is that, owing to their tough love, the economy is on the up and that to allow Labour back in would be a huge risk.  The second is that Labour is led by a guy who’s supposedly not up to the job, in hock to the unions, weak on welfare and immigration, surrounded by many of the same people who allegedly made such a mess of things in the first place, and, after his conference promise to freeze utility bills and grab land to build houses, a seventies-style left-winger.  The third is that fears about what a Tory government would mean for schools, hospitals, pensions and the police have not in fact come to pass.

On the economy, the main challenge (one taken up a recent speech by George Osborne) is to convince people that the recovery they are hearing so much about these days is actually real – something they can feel, touch and taste – which is why the Tories know they cannot allow Labour to make the running on the cost of living.  Economic pessimism is falling and optimism is rising, opinion polls suggest, but real wages – often a crucial indicator when it comes to electoral success – are not.  There is little the government can or is willing to do about this: wage rises mean extra costs for businesses only just beginning to get going again; the utility companies appear to be untouchable (unless, that is, Miliband’s promises prove so popular they provoke a Tory counter-offer); and there is – to a prudent Chancellor anyway – limited scope for tax cuts.  In short, it may be that the Conservatives have to rely on their rhetoric to some extent trumping reality – one reason why, inevitably, they will be doing as much, à la 1992, to undermine their opponents as trumpet their own record.

On Miliband and Labour, the Tories seem, with a little help from their supporters in the media, to have won the battle of perceptions, even if those perceptions do shift a little in the light of the Opposition’s successful conference.  In the longer-term, even if Ed does manage to win some sort of symbolic victory over union leaders, there is no guarantee that it will resonate with the public as much as some Labour supporters hope.  And anyway there is no way that such a victory will somehow shame the Conservatives into making less use than they otherwise would do of the election war chest they have amassed, thereby rendering any shortfall in union funding even more damaging.  On the other hand, all polling suggests that the six or so percentage points’ worth of erstwhile Lib Dems that Labour has gained since 2010 is going nowhere, especially perhaps after the vote on Syria.  That makes it difficult to see, given how stacked the electoral system is against him, where Cameron is going to get the extra five or so additional percentage points he needs at minimum to form a Tory majority government.

Retaining voters’ trust on public services could also prove trickier than many Tories assume.  Most problematic in this respect are schools (in particular the pressure on primary pupil numbers) and hospitals (in particular the pressure on A&E this winter).  Both issues can be used to cast doubt not just on the Tories’ commitment to publicly-provided education and health but, just as damagingly, their competence too.  The announcement of extra funding for A&E departments and the extension of free school meals may help, but they won’t be silver bullets.

That said, the Conservative Party can claim to have upped its game when it comes to communications.  Lynton Crosby has clearly helped simplify the message.  Jim Messina may help too.  And making Graeme Wilson, the deputy political editor at The Sun, Cameron’s Press Secretary might also be a smart move.  Sharpening up the campaigning and communications operation, however, might not entirely make up for lack of boots on the ground at the election, particularly if it proves to be a very close contest.  Although Labour’s trade union troubles (and the Tories’ cash reserves) may eventually redress the balance, the marginals look…well…marginal.

And then there is UKIP.  His party conference may have been derailed by Geoffrey Bloom’s remarks about sluts, but Farage is likely to come roaring back at the Europeans, and still stands a reasonable chance of finishing first.  The crucial question, then, is whether Cameron can then keep him out of any television election debates.  If he can’t, they may not take place at all.  If he can, the Tories may still not recover the five or so percentage points’ worth of former supporters who have succumbed to Nigel’s charms.  If most of them remain under his spell, and if those previous non-voters and first-timers who currently claim they would vote UKIP do the same, then the Tories’ worst fears may be confirmed.  Trying to counter UKIP by copying its policies, however, may well be a fool’s errand, running the risk of losing as many voters in the centre as it attracts on the right.

The Tories, then, have reasons to be cheerful but no room for complacency.    

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The dwindling Tory party: is anybody out there?, Telegraph, 21 September 2013

Posted on September 22, 2013 by tpbale

David Cameron’s enemies have been quick to pounce on figures which suggest that the Conservative Party’s membership has almost halved since he took over as Tory leader back in 2005. The drop simply proves, they argue, what they have been saying all along – that the Prime Minister is a pussy-footing metrosexual, hopelessly out of touch with the traditional views and values of his grassroots who are deserting the party in their droves, thereby rendering an unlikely outright victory in 2015 even more unlikely.

If only things were so simple. The fact that the Tories now only have 134,000 members – and many of us would like to see their detailed workings before accepting that figure as gospel – is only the latest chapter in a sorry tale that began long before the current leadership took charge.

It is undoubtedly the case that Cameron’s kind of Conservatism – socially as well as economically liberal – sticks in the craw of many members. That much is obvious from a survey of party members that I helped – in conjunction with YouGov – to conduct this year. Six out of 10 opposed legislating for gay marriage, with a similar proportion disappointed at the Government’s refusal to extend restrictions on immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania. Two-thirds wanted to scrap the ring-fence around Britain’s overseas aid spending, and over half of all members didn’t think that the leadership respected them.

Remember, though, that these people were sticking with the Conservatives, Cameron or no Cameron. Simply disagreeing with the party’s top-brass, in other words, clearly isn’t enough to prompt mass desertions. True, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that those who have departed have done so because they despaired of Cameron. But given that nearly half of current members devote no time to the party, then many former members will have slipped away silently, leaving us none the wiser as to their reasons for going.

In any case, if it were simply a case of Tory leaders giving their rank and file what they wanted – either in terms of policies blue in tooth and claw or victory after victory at the ballot box – then membership would have held up nicely under more Right-wing or electorally more successful leaders. But it didn’t. It’s been dropping ever since the mid-Fifties – a long-term trend that showed no signs of slowing even under Margaret Thatcher, surely a leader who ticked all the boxes.

The decline may appear to have accelerated recently, but that impression is exaggerated by the fact that the party now has so few members that losses seem so much worse. By the same token, it’s easy to forget that the 2.8 million members the party could boast in the early Fifties were a historical blip – the result not just of a determined post-war membership drive on the part of an exceptionally gifted, national treasure of a chairman, but also of a part-rational, part-emotional reaction among the middle classes to the threat posed to their pre-war property and privileges by a relatively radical Labour government.

While it’s possible, then, that the Prime Minister may not have done much to help, it’s unlikely that all of this is his fault. David Cameron, no less than every single one of his predecessors as Tory leader since Winston Churchill, is swimming against a tide that seems unlikely ever to turn.

Even a cursory glance through the party’s archive in Oxford’s Bodleian Library soon reveals that its falling membership, and the growing reluctance to turn up for anything on the part of those who did carry on paying their subs, have been bemoaned by its bureaucrats and bigwigs for over half a century now – all to no avail.

Clearly, some of the reasons why the Conservative Party finds it more difficult to recruit and retain members are by no means unique. Indeed, not only are Labour and the Lib Dems in similar trouble but so are mainstream parties all over the developed world. Admittedly, the UK, where only around 1 per cent of the population is a member of a political party and which has seen that proportion drop by two-thirds over the past 30 years, seems to be in slightly more trouble than most. But it may just be leading the way where others are bound to follow.

To some extent, parties only have themselves to blame. For a long time, convinced that campaigns could no longer be won locally and on the ground but had to be fought nationally and on the air, they may have regretted the passing of mass membership. But they didn’t really regard it as a tragedy – especially since they could more than make up for lost subscriptions by soliciting donations and state funding. Indeed, between 2005 and 2009 the former (along with legacies) made up 59 per cent of Conservative Party income and the latter 15 per cent; membership fees accounted for just 3 per cent.

By the time tougher legal regulation began to impact seriously on donations and spending, and by the time that academic research began to suggest that local effort could pay off at elections, it was simply too late. The ship had sailed – although some brave souls, including Tory chairman Grant Shapps, argue that social media, “big data” and a more fluid definition of what constitutes membership can somehow compensate.

But it takes two to tango, or rather to break off the dance. In the immediate post-war period, parties helped us do things that we can now do in other, probably better, ways. Belonging to a party – particularly, some would say, the Conservative Party – used to be a precious way of staving off suburban boredom, especially for non-working women, and meeting not only people of like-mind but also of the opposite sex.

Television, the Swinging Sixties, and women’s entry into the labour force put an end to that, and, while free time is under pressure, opportunities for leisure (and pleasure) have expanded massively ever since. So, too, have opportunities to express ourselves politically on single issues and through new technologies, some of which only reinforce our contemporary fear of potentially dull and demanding commitments.

And then there is class. In an age where there was so much less stuff, belonging to the Tory party used to be a quick and convenient way of badging oneself as having made it, or at least wanting to. Over the decades, that has become so much easier to do by conspicuous consumption – the cars we drive, the holidays we take, the magazines we buy, even the food we eat and the drinks we drink. Even if they weren’t toxic, as brands, parties simply cannot compete.

Moreover, the rewards of loyalty to those brands, especially when one is paying for the privilege, now seem laughably limited. Sure, Tory members still get to select parliamentary candidates, and even the party’s leader, every so often. But they have no say in deciding policy. That may not have mattered much in more deferential decades gone by but it rankles now we’re routinely asked for our opinion about almost everything else we buy or belong to.

Maybe, then, instead of worrying about why people are abandoning the party, Tories – whether they be friends or enemies of Mr Cameron – should ask why anyone who doesn’t harbour political ambitions would bother joining in the first place.

 

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