Why Cameron couldn’t modernize his party: the electric fence

by Sunder Katwala    
April 19, 2010 at 8:08 pm

Asked what he thought of western civilisation, Gandhi replied “I think it would be a good idea”. That is the attitude which non-Tories should take to claims of a progressive Conservatism.

Yet Cameronism in 2010 is a less centrist or modernising creed than appeared likely when he became leader in 2005. Until 2007, Cameronism was primarily a conservative project of accomodation to the New Labour legacy. Yet his party enters the election campaign declaring Britain a “broken society”, manipulating statistics to try and deny that violent crime and teenage pregnancy have fallen.

The financial crisis and recession changed Cameronism. The Keynesian tradition of Macmillan’s progressive Conservatism was decisively rejected. As ex-Tory MP and Cameron-sympathetic columnist Matthew Parris put it, when the Tories rediscovered their voice, “it was, as it turned out, the old faith: a faith that Margaret Thatcher would recognise”.

The limits of Tory modernisation

Yet the spectre of Thatcherism has haunted Tory modernisation for rather longer. Before the Conservatives decided that they did not need a “Clause Four” moment, they did try to have one. The limits of Tory modernization were set a decade ago, in April 1999, when deputy leader Peter Lilley tried to lay the Thatcherite ghost and failed.

Lilley’s R.A. Butler lecture now reads like a litany of mild Cameronite truisms, primarily that the party would never be trusted on public services if voters believed they were essentially hostile to a publicly funded welfare state. Lilley seemed to have the right Thatcherite credentials to mildly suggest not any form of apology, but that the party should stop “glorying in past successes” or “refighting battles” it had now won.

Yet all hell broke out. Party reaction at every level was “overwhelmingly negative”, as Tim Bale details in his excellent new book The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron. Among the most vituperative voices was Michael Gove, later to become a leading moderniser.

Gove wrote that “no location is as undignified as being ‘in the centre’, where the lowest common denominator and the highest public spending meet … an arid region where no principles can take root … a particularly shameless place for politicians to be”. For Gove, government could never spend better than “freer citizens liberated by a smaller state”.

This had two long-term effects. That it delayed any Tory rethink until two more defeats is well known. Less noticed is that the neuralgic reaction to Lilley set an electric fence to demarcate the limits of Tory modernisation: no Conservative frontbencher has offered any substantive critical assessment of the Thatcher legacy since.

So Cameronism has been primarily an often successful exercise in “brand decontamination”. Every means of modern political communications was central to the project. What was off limits was any substantive or contentful critique of the party’s recent past or its deeper ideological commitments.

By contrast with New Labour, which created the sharpest of breaks with the party’s history in its caricature of “Old Labour”, the ProgCons have had no account of their recent history at all. This also cuts them off from reclaiming the party’s pre-Thatcher political and intellectual traditions which thoughtful modernizers like David Willetts wish to revive.

After all, Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher could hardly have been clearer about the scale of the rupture the New Right would make with soggy, consensus Conservativism of the post-war period. “Before 1974, I had not been a Conservative at all”, as Joseph famously wrote.

Society and the role of the state

This central ambiguity of Cameronism – whether he seeks to break with Thatcherism, or rehabilitate it for gentler times – is encapsulated in his signature soundbite: “there is such a thing as society: it’s just not the same thing as the state”.

The mood music is Thatcher-distancing. Tory aides tell journalists the phrase was coined by Samantha Cameron, presented as a refreshingly untribal influence. But the leader’s wife is not the original author. Proper credit should go to another influential Tory woman: Margaret Thatcher. Her Keith Joseph memorial lecture of 1996 argued that “To set the record straight, once again, I have never minimised the importance of society, only contested the assumption that society means the State rather than other people”.

David Cameron often reaches out to progressive audiences, and he goes to great lengths to avoid uttering a syllable of criticism of Thatcherism when doing so. So he skipped out the 1980s entirely when talking about poverty across the last century in his Hugo Young lecture at the Guardian.

He does not therefore contradict himself when telling right-wing audiences that he finds the Thatcher record “awe inspiring”, that he is “basically a Lawsonian” on flatter taxes, and that “those who ask whether I am a Conservative need to know that the foundation stones of the alternative government that we’re building are the ideas that encouraged me as a young man to join the Conservative Party and work for Margaret Thatcher”, as he wrote in the Telegraph.

Progressive futures?

The Conservatives have long expected to win the election. So defeat would be an enormous, traumatic shock, and present an existential choice: whether to deepen Cameron’s modernisation or abandon it. That also remains an unresolved choice, to be played out more gradually, were the party elected to government.

The right is confident of prevailing over time. For many, Cameronism was primarily an electoral project. This is what is known as the “politics of and” theory, particularly promoted by Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome: that expressing concern for poverty, green issues and development gets ‘permission’ to promote a Tory agenda of lower tax, immigration and Euroscepticism: the politics of controlled immigration AND international development.

The key argument is that broadening the message should not entail compromise on core Tory goals like lower taxes and a smaller state, and that a Tory manifesto of 2015 should demonstrate the party’s confidence that it can move rightwards more openly.

There is evidence that the face of the Conservative Party is changing but that its views are not. David Cameron emphasizes his welcome achievement in selecting more non-white and female candidates.

But candidates’ views are largely to the right of the leadership, or the manifesto on which Cameron wrote for Michael Howard in 2005. ConservativeHome convincingly declares the next generation to be “modern Thatcherites” based on detailed candidate surveys. Another ComRes/New Statesman candidates poll found 72 per cent believe fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership to be a priority in office; 91 per cent favour an immigration cap, while only 28 per cent believe government should legislate to make people greener.

But there might be three ‘progressive’ barriers to the triumph of the right.

Firstly, public opinion on key issues. The leadership, shaped by the defeats of 2001 and 2005, is less confident than its activists in the popularity of eternal Tory verities, particularly in fearing that lower taxes are not popular if public services are cut. Indeed, pressure to cut spending will only demonstrate how difficult it is to win public support for doing so; a Tory government telling activists that some tax rises are necessary is more likely than it plotting a long-term fall in the size of the state.

Secondly, the reality of governing. The right presses on key totemic public issues – the traditional trio of Europe, tax cuts and immigration, increasingly joined by climate skepticism. But governments have to govern across the range of policy.

Beyond the overall pressure towards sharp spending restraint, the overall direction of policy will more often be continuity than change, initially at least. With the exception of schools reform, the Conservatives have developed relatively little policy beyond symbolic manifesto pledges: wanting more health visitors substitutes for any coherent health policy.

Thirdly, the evident insufficiency of a laissez faire ideology to address policy objectives the party says it accepts. The principle “less state and more market” offers little coherent purchase on how to meet legally binding climate emission targets, fund long-term social care, or improve public services while aiming to reduce health and educational inequalities.

For a progressive Conservativism to go deeper than symbolism, the central test is whether and how progressive ambitions do anything to constrain or change the decisions the party would make if in office.

The initial published draft of Cameron’s Built to Last statement of party principles said that “The right test for our policies is how they help the most disadvantaged in society, not the rich”. The reference to the rich was dropped before party members voted on it, with a reference to the limits of the state added. Still, testing every budget on whether its distributional impact is pro-poor, or regressive would be a central “good faith” test of whether ProgCon rhetoric makes any difference.

Similarly, though Michael Gove once talked of challenging the “sharp elbowed middle class parents” in school admissions, though many expect the Tory backbenchers to see that off. A willingness to join that fight properly would merit backing from Labour and Lib Dem voices.

The test of meaningful green credentials should be whether these change the balance as to whether market interventions, previously dismissed as ‘distortions’, can ever be justified on sustainability grounds. Could the party pursue its climate commitments without proving allergic to close EU cooperation in pursuit of a fair global deal?

There will be issues – on the real threat of climate change, or the need for British engagement in the EU – where the progressive faultline may fall within the Conservative Party. “The politics of and” suggests a Progressive Conservatism combination of true blue principles while ‘engaging’ with progressive non-party campaigners, from Friends of the Earth to the Child Poverty Action Group, mostly in a spirit of respectful disagreement.

Progressive campaigners outside the party may have good reason to fear that any allies within it are isolated and outnumbered. There are reasons to worry that the Conservatives haven’t changed very much; it would still be a good idea if they did.

————————-
This essay appears in the Fabian Review election special

Is YouGov ‘push-polling’ for the Tories?

by Sunny Hundal    
April 19, 2010 at 3:04 pm

Stephen Tall at LibdemVoice highlights a comment made by YouGov survey responder.

Just done a YouGov, Mostly about Clegg & LD

Here was one of the question

“Nick Cleggs says the other parties are to blame for the MP scandals, he has taken money from a criminal on the run, many of his MPs have been found guilty of breaking the rules and his own party issued guidance on how to fiddle the expenses system?”

I’d say that was fairly direct!

Is it possible that YouGov is push-polling? (“in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of respondents under the guise of conducting a poll”).

I’m sending an email to Peter Kellner to ask.

Update: Tom Freeman highlights an explanation by Anthony Wells of YouGov:

Firstly, neither those VI or those question were anything to do with polling for newspapers or publication. Secondly I’ve brought the poll up on the system now to double check, and voting intention was the first question as it should have been. The other questions were right at the end of the political section of the poll, as they should have been.

If this question came at the end then its impact on actual voting intention would be non-existent. But it still looks like a leading question.

Update 2: Peter Kellner responds by email to say:

As with all agencies, we ask all kinds of questions for all kinds of clients; some public, some private. For purposes of testing theories, messages or policies we will often test statements phrased one way for some respondents and phrased differently for others.

This is entirely separate from our public daily polls or other research conducted for media consumption so will have no bearing on our voting intention polls published by the media.

It doesn’t clear up whether the question was asked or not, but it looks like the poll may not have been related to the daily polling for News International.

Update 3: Stephan Shakespeare, CEO of YouGov, responds over at ConHome, but curiously doesn’t mention the question which is the subject of debate.

How British is Nick Clegg? Who cares?

by Unity    
April 19, 2010 at 1:15 pm

Sunny’s already flagged this up in the daily round-up post, but in case you haven’t picked up on it, Sunder Katwala has posted a pretty good commentary on the Mail on Sunday’s attempt to attack Nick Clegg for not being British enough.

As for me, well I must admit that I was rather more intrigued by the Daily Mail’s previous foray in the murky realms of ‘Britishness by blood’ than by its new, empty-headed ‘birther-lite’ attack on Clegg:

Although the figures from the Government’s Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants.

The thing that puzzled me at the time was that of the reasoning behind making your grandparents the arbitrary cut-off point for the Mail’s definition of British?

Why stop there when, thanks to rising life expectancy over the last century or so, an increasing number of British families span four living generations? My own kids having a living great-grandparent and were they an immigrant – they’re not, BTW – then my kids would know perfectly well that at least part of their genetic make-up had arrived here from overseas.

So what, if anything, is the rationale behind this?

I ruminated on this at the time for, ooh, all of a couple of minutes before alighting on the obvious answer – the Royal family.

And, sure enough, if you mooch through the list of the last four reigning monarchs and their consorts then you’ll find that the Mail’s preferred cut-off point convenient allows them to classify the present Queen as British by blood. Both of the Queen’s grandparents, George V and Mary of Teck were, conveniently, born in the UK – even if Mary’s familial title comes from Germany – and they were the first members of the royal family to take a British familial name, Windsor, since the Glorious Revolution of 1689. However, if you take things back just that one extra generation, to Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark, then the family name was still that inherited from Edward’s father, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Alexandra was actually born in the Yellow Palace Copenhagen – all of which would make the present Queen an immigrant.

None of this, of course, lets the present heir to the throne off the hook. However you want to slice its, Chuck the Hippy’s dad was born Prince Phillipos on the island of Corfu and is as British as retsina and doner kebabs, so its only going to take the one state funeral to kill off this particularspecious line of reasoning.

There are, of course, even more absurd ideas out there than even this ‘British by blood’ nonsense; and none more so thnt the ridiculous allusions to British ‘folk races’ that the BNP incorporated into its constitution in an effort skirt around Britain’s anti-discrimination laws.

The very concept of a ‘folk race’ isn’t British. It’s an idea that emerged out the German Counter-Enlightenment of the late than and early 19th century and found its clearest possible expression in the infamous slogan ‘Ein Volk, ein Riech’, so let’s not be under any illusions as to where Griffin’s been nicking his ideas from. There really is nothing British about the BNP at all – even their main concept of what Britishness mean comes from Germany.

This idea of ‘folk races’ is that never really caught on Britain, muich beyond a bunch of odd ball Victorian antiquarians who spent most of their time fabricating twee, carefully santitised, cultural ‘traditions’ for the people of the Celtic fringes, occasionally at the behest of parliament. Where once ‘North of the border’ meant hoardes of blue painted, hairy-arsed Scots with claymores, by the time the Victorians had finishedwith Scotland, all that was left was a bunch of shortbread box tartans, grouse shooting on the moors and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. That led, in the fullness of time, to  Brigadoon and Moira fucking Anderson at five past mdnight on the BBC on New Year’s Day, every fucking year – which proves the despite our best efforts to suppress the buggers, the Scots still manages to extract a measure of revenge.

These are the kind of  ‘traditions’ that the BNP are alluding to when they refer to ‘folk races’ of Britain – a bunch of made up stuff that’s less than 200 years old tacked on to a couple of languages that should try using a few more vowels… os it that something else the English took from them? The vowels, I mean…

Pretty much every other trace of indiginous culture on the Celtic fringes was wiped out by the English after the buggers had the nerve to fight back andalmost all what people think of, today, as Scottish or Welsh culture dates back no further than the mid-19th century and the beginning of the Welsh and Scottish nationalist movements. It’s a mid-Victorian fabrication and, arguablly, a very early example of what, today, might well be described as ‘Disneyfication’.

That said, the whole notion of’ Britishness’ is, in its own way, an equally artificial concept.

‘Britishness’ is nothing more than a civic identity created and used for manifestly political reasons over the course of the last 300 years or so. If you look at ‘British history’ before the Act of Union, and particularly before the Stuarts ascended to the English throne in 1601, then all that British really meant for most of the preceding 500-600 years was the English trying to batter the Scots and Welsh into submission in to create a Greater England, albeit one that borrowed its name from the Romans.

What ‘British’ meant to out ancestors and what it means to us today are two entirely different things. My own view of what ‘Britishness’ is very different from that of my mother and father and about as far from removed from the way my grandparents saw things as it is from the views of the Victorians or even earlier generations. Indeed, I’ve got every expectation that my own kids will, as they get older, see things very differently from the way I do. ‘Britishness’ changes with every generation, which is why its a waste of time trying to define it or pin it down to a particular set of supposedly unchanging and immutable traditions and values, least of all one’s made up in the last couple of hundred years that try pretend that they’re much, much older.

So, does it really matter that Clegg’s moth is Dutch and his father half Russian?

No. It’s who and what he his is now that we should be interested in – everything else is irrelevant.

Why it’s important for Greens to win Norwich South

by Guest    
April 19, 2010 at 11:00 am

contribution by Adrian Ramsay

I read Adam Ramsay’s piece on Norwich South with great (admittedly vested) interest.

It is true that a victory over Charles Clarke here in Norwich would show that there is public opposition Labour’s lurch to the right: their encroachment on our civil liberties, their commercialisation of the NHS with crippling PFI repayment programmes, and their rendering of higher education more exclusive through top-up fees.

Charles Clarke either supported or was instrumental in implementing these policies, and has publicly mentioned his support for increased fees and user-charging on the NHS.

However, it would not only send a message to New Labour. It would also be the opportunity to vote positively for policies we believe in, rather than settling for less with parties that have let us down again and again.

So what will Green MPs achieve at Westminster? Firstly, Green MPs bring fresh ideas. For example, we propose a scheme to insulate every home in the country for free. Paid for by a windfall tax on the oil companies, we could save households around £150 per year on their fuel bills, create new jobs and reduce carbon emissions by insulating every home.

Secondly, we will hold the other parties to account over their failures to act on pressing issues, such as clean energy, job creation, unfair trade, biodiversity loss, bankers’ bonuses, animal welfare, inequality in education… the list goes on.

Thirdly, Green MPs will oppose damaging policies. Here in Norwich, we see the consequences of the failed Private Finance Initiative (PFI) at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.

Everyone values our hospital, but it costs the taxpayer £19m more every year under private borrowing than it would have done under public borrowing. This money is going into the deep pockets of private finance companies rather than helping our hospital care for more people.

It’s true that you would be sending a message by voting Green, but not only that.

In our strongest constituencies in the country, such as Norwich South, Brighton Pavilion and Lewisham Deptford, we have a great chance to get people elected who will fight for social justice and fairness every day Parliament is in session

——-
Adrian Ramsay is deputy leader of the Green Party and their candidate for Norwich South.

Are polls understating Labour & Libdem support?

by Sunny Hundal    
April 19, 2010 at 9:40 am

The US polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com – which was spot on and consistently excellent during the Obama campaign, has published two articles analysing voting patters in the UK.

They suggest that support for the Libdems and Labour may be understated.

1. In the first analysis they look at the proliferation of ‘mobile-phone-only’ households.

In the UK, at least 13 percent of households fall into the mobile-only category as of 2008, with lower income Britons far more likely to be mobile-only (23 percent) than wealthier people (8 percent). In addition, younger people are far more likely to live in mobile-only households, including more than a quarter of the youngest demographic group (15-24) and a fifth in 25-34 year olds.

Lower income households are more likely to be pro-Labour while the youth vote is moving strongly towards the Libdems. Most pollsters other than YouGov call households in order to gauge opinion.

If mobile-only households are left out then that could mean an understatement of Labour and Libdem support. In the US – pollsters understated support for Obama by about 2-3% due to this practice. But it does require the youth vote turning out for Clegg for this to hold true.

2. The second post concentrates on older voters and internet polling – carried out principally by YouGov.

They point out that since its mostly more educated people who are online, there is a danger that richer and more conservative voters are over-represented in older voters demographic. This doesn’t apply to younger voters as most of them are online anyway.

But what about poorer pensioners? Are they filling out YouGov polls? Are they being under-represented? Could this mean that the polls are understating Labour support in this category?

I’m going to email Peter Kellner of YouGov to ask.

Peter Kellner replies only to say that:

Taking everything into account, our figures are representative of the electorate by age, gender, social class, political affiliation and newspaper readership. That is why our results are consistently accurate.

Labour talks coalitions, but it won’t work while Brown is around

by Sunny Hundal    
April 19, 2010 at 9:01 am

In an interview on Saturday with Alan Johnson, the home secretary said:

Can he imagine Labour going into coalition with the Lib Dems? “I am a supporter of PR and so I believe we have to kill this argument that coalition government is dangerous. Leaving this election aside, I don’t have a horror of coalitions. You see what happens in many other progressive countries.”

I’m surprised this didn’t get more attention.
Today, Peter Mandelson is pushing the idea too.

Lord Mandelson, who heads Labour’s campaign, criticised some Liberal Democrat policies but made clear that a coalition government would not be a disaster. It is the first time a senior Labour figure has spoken about a Lib-Lab coalition, in which Liberal Democrats would sit in a Brown Cabinet. In a memo to Labour members, Lord Mandelson said: “I am not against coalition government in principle and for Britain, anything would be better than a Cameron-Osborne government.”

There are two problems when Labour ministers talk about entering into a coalition with the Libdems.

First, it looks like Labour politicians want their cake and eat it too. There’s no indication in either interviews of what concessions they’ll make other than perhaps electoral reform. Sorry guys but that horse has bolted – electoral reform is now almost certainly on the cards and won’t be enough to entice Clegg.

He can wait for the electoral system to collapse and virtually demand it.

And patronising Libdems by saying they’re weak on defence and asylum seekers isn’t going to win Labour any new Libdem or left-wing voters either.

Secondly, this talk solidifies the new Tory narrative that if you vote Libdem you get Labour. Cameron is going to be repeating this like a parrot over the next few weeks so Labour had better stop reinforcing that narrative.

Clegg will sooner or later have to push back against Cameron’s narrative. If he’s not offered anything meaningful by Labour then he may even push back and say he won’t enter into a coalition with New Labour under any circumstances.

Either way – Gordon Brown is finished.

The Libdem resurgence makes it harder for the Tories to get an outright majority but it also virtually guarantees Labour without a majority.

And it’s even less likely that Clegg will talk with Labour while Gordon Brown is leading it.

I’m not saying that Labour should ditch Brown before the election – that would clearly be ludicrous. But the Labour party needs to start taking the Libdems seriously in terms of concessions. It should stop openly talking of concessions, but be prepared to ditch Gordon Brown if a majority is not achieved.

Full latest YouGov poll: Libdems top again

by Sunny Hundal    
April 18, 2010 at 8:15 pm

Latest daily polling figures by YouGov (fieldwork 17th-18th April) are:

* Liberal Democrat 33%
* Conservative 32%
* Labour 26%
* Others 8%

“The Lib Dem surge continues, with them moving into first place, mostly at the expense of Labour, down to 26% in today’s poll.”

The general election will be held on May 6. On a scale of 0 (certain NOT to vote) to 10 (absolutely certain to vote), how likely are you to vote in the general election?
0 – Certain NOT to vote: 4%
1: 0%
2: 1%
3: 2%
4: 1%
5: 3%
6: 1%
7: 3%
8: 5%
9: 11%
10 – Absolutely certain to vote: 68%
Don’t know: 2%

Additional questions

All three main parties say they will reduce government borrowing sharply over the next few years, by raising taxes and/or cutting public spending. Leaving aside whether you support any of the particular policies the parties are putting forward, do you think, in each case, that their sums add up – that, if they implement their policies will they hit their target for reducing government borrowing?

Conservatives
Yes, their sums probably do add up: 21%
No, they probably don’t add up: 56%
Not sure: 23%

Labour
Yes, their sums probably do add up: 24%
No, they probably don’t add up: 52%
Not sure: 24%

Liberal Democrats
Yes, their sums probably do add up: 26%
No, they probably don’t add up: 36%
Not sure: 37%

Here are some proposals that have been made in the current election. In each case, do you support or oppose it?

Tax: Scrap income tax on earnings of less than £10,000 a year. The £17billion cost of this will be paid for by a tax on bigger houses, a tax on airline flights, restricting tax relief on pensions savings for higher-rate taxpayers, and attempting to clamp down on tax avoidance.
Support: 66%
Oppose: 20%
Don’t know: 14%

Defence: Replace Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons system and develop a variant that is a lot cheaper but less powerful and possibly easier to detect and stop.
Support: 37%
Oppose: 37%
Don’t know: 26%

Europe: Give the European Union more powers on justice issues, bank regulation, the flow of asylum seekers, limiting climate change and cooperate more on security and defence.
Support: 18%
Oppose: 65%
Don’t know: 17%

Euro: scrap the Pound and join the Euro when the conditions are right.
Support: 21%
Oppose: 65%
Don’t know: 14%

Immigration: Give an amnesty to 1 million illegal immigrants who have lived in Britain for ten years, speak good English and don’t have a criminal record.
Support: 35%
Oppose: 49%
Don’t know: 16%

Prisons: Allow 58,000 criminals a year to do community service instead of going to prison by banning jail terms of less than six months.
Support: 33%
Oppose: 50%
Don’t know: 17%

Public sector pay: Limit pay rises for public sector workers for the next two years to £400 a year.
Support: 57%
Oppose: 24%
Don’t know: 19%

Higher education: scrap university tuition fees over six years, and increase taxes to pay for this.
Support: 31%
Oppose: 48%
Don’t know: 20%

Voting: Change the voting system for electing MPs, so that individual constituencies become much larger and parties are represented in parliament broadly in line with their national vote.
Support: 54%
Oppose: 16%
Don’t know: 29%

Energy: Stop any new nuclear power stations from being built and attempt to solve the energy crisis by coal-fired power generation plants and wind turbines instead.
Support: 32%
Oppose: 41%
Don’t know: 27%

Additional question (fieldwork 18th April):

Leaving aside how much you like or dislike them, how much do you feel you know what the following party leaders stand for?

Gordon Brown
I know a lot about what he stands for: 27%
A fair amount: 42%
Just a little: 17%
I know hardly anything about what he stands for: 14%

David Cameron
I know a lot about what he stands for: 20%
A fair amount: 42%
Just a little: 23%
I know hardly anything about what he stands for: 15%

Nick Clegg
I know a lot about what he stands for: 15%
A fair amount: 36%
Just a little: 29%
I know hardly anything about what he stands for: 19%

Is the Indy about to endorse the Libdems?

by Sunny Hundal    
April 18, 2010 at 3:50 pm

I tweeted earlier today that the Libdems should ideally be looking to get endorsements from the Guardian (somewhat unlikely) and the Indy.

A contact at the newspaper soon emailed me to say that editors at the Indy have already been in discussion about endorsing the Libdems and may end up making an announcement very soon.

This wouldn’t be surprising since the Independent endorsed the Libdems in 2005, principally over the Iraq war.

It would obviously be another piece of good news for the Libdems and carry on their positive news cycle.

But if the Indy does indeed endorse now, it could be a good publicity coup for them as the broadcasters are likely to pick it up as part of their ongoing coverage of the ‘resurgent Libdems’.

Do Conservatives have the upper hand over Libdems?

by Paul Sagar    
April 18, 2010 at 12:06 pm

At first glance it might seem a mistake for the Tories to be nasty about the Lib Dems. After all in a few weeks they might be trying to broker a power-sharing deal with Clegg, Cable and Co. In that eventuality, it may look publicly and privately stupid to have been calling the Lib Dems nasty names.

Then again, the Tories have the upper hand in an important respect. They know they are still likely – once the Lib Dem bounce evens-out – to end up with the most votes on polling day, if not the most seats.

The pressure on Clegg to join them in a coalition will be huge. If Labour does not win the most votes (even if it does win the most seats due to our antiquarian electoral system) Clegg would be seen as an anti-democratic king-maker if he kept Brown – or even a replacement figure like David Miliband – in power.

Cameron would have the greater democratic legitimacy, and it would be hard for Clegg to refuse his proposition.

This gives the Tories considerable bargaining power. As at present, they can aim to bully the Lib Dems knowing that when it comes to the crunch, circumstances may dictate that the Libs acquiesce to the Cons. But what might such a deal look like?

Predicting politics is a mug’s game, but here are some not-unlikely scenarios.

Firstly, Vince Cable is given the Chancellorship. He is widely popular and seen as a very safe pair of economic hands. Certainly most Tories will hate his economic policies – but on the other hand their own are an incoherent and insane shambles, leading to an increasingly hardened view that the Conservatives can’t be trusted on the economy.

With Ken Clarke as Treasury Secretary, this would inspire faith in the City (who consider “Boy George” Osborne a lightweight) and potentially put Britain on a strong road to recovery away from advertised Tory derailment.

However pretty much the last thing the Conservatives will relinquish is their stranglehold on an electoral system that put them in power 70 years out of 100 in the last century. A switch to PR would likely result in near-permanent Labour-Liberal coalitions once the Tories fell from office, so Cameron is least likely to budge on electoral reform.

The big thus question emerges: Would Nick Clegg accept a period in power – gambling that in the long-run this will boost his party sufficiently that one day they win via the present unfair system – even if electoral reform were denied him?

We’ll have to wait and see. As these polls get ever more unpredictable, the election gets ever more exciting – and significant for Britain’s long-term future.

‘I love Migrants’ campaign launches in London

by Newswire    
April 18, 2010 at 10:38 am

A new ‘I Love Migrants’ campaign has been launched by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants to influence political discourse in the lead up to the General Election.

At the heart of the initiative are ten key facts showing that migration has been a boon for Britain, leading to economic growth, adding to the public purse and supporting vital public services including the National Health Service.

Habib Rahman, Chief Executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said:

I am a migrant myself and all my life has been dedicated to improving civic and social cohesion.

Without migrant doctors the NHS in London would not function. So the last thing this country needs is for political parties to pander to the hidden racism behind some of the immigration debate in order to shore up a few votes.

The campaign will culminate with an event at the legendary Foundry venue in Old Street, east London with international music and food.

Philippe Legrain, author of ‘Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them’, will speak alongside University of London president elect Clare Solomon on 29th April.

This is a great campaign. Immigrants have very few champions these days, so the JCWI’s tireless work to protect the rights of people coming to contribute to Britain more important than ever.

Among the contributors are immigration minister Phil Woolas MP, IPPR migration expert Tim Finch and former Big Brother housemate Carole Vincent.

Woolas has written on the site: “When I walk down any high street in the UK, I am proud of the vibrancy of our multicultural society, and the skills that people bring to local businesses. Migrants can also have a positive impact on public services.”

http://ilovemigrants.wordpress.com/
@ilovemigrants

From a press release

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