Ashcroft’s so-called research is always a load of unreliable bunkum. Don’t know why you bothered wasting your time on it.

If people say they trust Cameron and Osborne more on the economy after yesterdays figures, then Labour has no hope.

Steven

You might want to try reading the article before commenting next time. Your comment is either very stupid or based on not having read the article.

Re:

“You might want to try reading the article before commenting next time. Your comment is either very stupid or based on not having read the article”

As a reaction to this comment:

“Despite no longer saying they would vote Tory, comfortable majorities of defectors still say they trust Cameron and Osborne more than Miliband and Balls to run the economy”

Steven’s comment seems PERFECTLY reasonable.

I reckon you owe him an apology…

I think today all parties have a pool of voters who have given up, I suspect in the end one party will either get a small majority or we will see a battle to get the Liberals on board.

I’ve a feeling we may be heading for a long period of either small majorities or even hung governments.

If the Tories do have a pool of people who state they will not vote then do, Labour in trouble, it will depend a lot of the policy review, and which way labour intends to lean

Steven refers to “people” generically, the post is talking about Tory defectors, which is a subset of a subset of “people”.

I think a big problem here is that you have to separate the rhetorical positions that people hold an what really affects their voting behaviour. This is a continual problem when reading polls. Defectors may be rhetorical Tories, but they might not vote for them as they see their living standards continually reduced …

Keith

I suspect Gastro George has addressed perfectly well why you are wrong and thus why steven is either stupid or hadn’t read the article.

You on the other hand quote the article, suggesting you have read it – so what alternative explanation (ie not stupidity) do you have for not understanding?

@Robert

I think things are more complex than you describe. Remember the New Labour days? They lost many many voters through disillusion. But what percentage of those actually voted Tory – not many I would guess, many more went to the Lib Dems.

To the extent that Labour policy matters to these people, it would be more to do with “de-toxifying the brand” a la Cameron, rather than any particular policy. Which means that pandering to right-wing sentiment a la Blair is not a necessity.

I’ve just had a quick look on wiki at the election results for Doncaster North (Ed Mili) and Doncaster Central, two typical Labour strongholds. The figures since 1997, indicate that the conservative vote remains constant, in fact increasing over-time. Conversely the Labour vote has decreased massively, nearly 40% in the case of Doncaster North.
If this pattern was to continue, Labour would struggle to get a majority, if not in the next election, certainly the one after, and though most of the old core Labour voters would not vote tory under any circumstance or even libdem, parties such as UKIP and the English Democrats are becoming increasingly popular in both the above constituencies.
Labour need to think up a better strategy than relying on a few pissed-off tory voters.

steveb

in this contexts it’s not really useful to look from 1997 – the high watershed for Labour. Labour lost votes everywhere since then, but working out why means going back before that date. Some were lost because they decided Labour were not right wing enough. Some were lost because they decided Labour were not left wing enough. Some were lost on specific policies. Some were lost on personalities. And so on.

What is more useful is to look at 1992, and before that 1987 – to see what voters Labour attracted in the run up to 1997 in those seats – so we can see if the voters lost since 1997 are the same as the ones gained (they came and went) or whether those that quit on the party were the older core, while the ones attracted up to 1997 have become the new core.

It’s 2012. Mid-2012.

“What is more useful is to look at 1992, and before that 1987 – to see what voters Labour attracted in the run up to 1997 in those seats”

I don’t think that’s useful at all. Labour won because the Tories were dead in the water. A donkey could have led Labour to victory in 1997. Some would argue that a donkey did.

gastro

That doesn’t make any sense. If we want to know anything about the voters lost since 1997, we need to know whether they were voters gained in the preceding ten years or they were voters that had been labour since the ware.

m4e

Looking at the raw data for voting in the constituencies I mentioned @9 cannot tell us who voted in each election, but we can see that in Ed Miliband’s constituency, the votes have declined sharply since 1997, indeed, I would go as far as saying that the figures are a disaster.
I would add that it’s the same pattern for the other Labour strongholds in South Yorkshire, but ultimately, it isn’t who votes but the number of votes cast which wins or loses elections.

As for South Yorkshire, it used to be absolutely certain that all four district councils would be Labour controlled but that no longer holds.

Sheffield council is now under LibDem control from time to time and Doncaster council is run by an executive mayor who comes from some obscure fringe party.

How come Labour now fares so badly in South Yorkshire? It can hadly be because Labour is deemed insufficiently “left-wing” as the Socialist Labour Party attracts miserable support at elections. For whatever reason, local electorates seem to have become disillusioned with Labour.

“For whatever reason, local electorates seem to have become disillusioned with Labour.”

Given the record of New Labour, I’d ask the question why traditional working class areas wouldn’t become disillusioned with Labour. What did they ever do for them?

Yes, Gastro, but the extent of the declining support for Labour in South Yorkshire is unprecedented. I was asking about the local factors which contributed to this. The usual mantra – Labour isn’t sufficiently Socialist – won’t wash in the light of the miserable support in elections for the Socialist Labour Party, which usually polls less than the BNP, as I recall.

Bob B -
There are lots of people looking for a credible non-neoliberal centre left alternative, just pointing to the results of some tiny fringe party with zero public profile doesn’t prove anything at all. Opinion polls show a great deal of public support for a rolling back of out-of-control privatisation for instance.

(for example, are you seriously saying that if labour made a very public cast iron guarantee that they would roll back privatisation of the NHS and the railways, and set up an inquiry into utility nationalisation, they wouldnt improve their standing with their former voters?)

17

The thing is, most people (including many on LC) don’t know what socialism is and the majority of working-class people supported the Labour Party because they were seen as the party which would fight for a bigger share for the working person in the existing economy, the working-class generally are not revolutionaries.
Without going into reams of history about the original purpose of Labour, socialism was an end product based on slow, evolutionary measures which started with the nationalization of certain industries. In hindsight, The LP probably did more for the cause of capitalism, but that is a debate in itself.

Joe: “Opinion polls show a great deal of public support for a rolling back of out-of-control privatisation for instance.”

Quite so. And the coalition government has responded to prudential concerns:

A proposed £1bn sale by the Government of its 49 per cent stake in the National Air Traffic Services is understood to have stalled.

The Treasury is believed to be backing off the idea of selling the air traffic control provider amid fears that German air bosses would move in to take over UK airspace.

But insiders add that a second threat comes from the seven predominantly UK airlines selling their jointly held 42 per cent share to the Germans.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2150035/Treasury-backs-National-Air-Traffic-Services-sale.html

“Ministers announced two years ago they were minded to sell off all or part of this golden share, retained when the last Labour government sold off 51 per cent a decade ago to the airlines, staff, and airport operator BAA.”

Evidently, second thoughts have prevailed. Recap: Ted Heath’s Conservative government nationalised Rolls Royce in 1971 to save the company from collapse, which would have done no end of harm to Britain’s credibility as a producer of high-tech capital goods and would have handed American companies a hold on the global production of advanced jet engines for airliners. After it was turned around, Rolls Royce was privatised in 1988.

The bottom line is that we need to consider policy options without ldeological blinkers.

Steveb: “The thing is, most people (including many on LC) don’t know what socialism is . . ”

That is hardly surprising. As history shows, there are at least 57 varieties of Socialism. I’ve no idea whether what you intend to mean by “Socialism” is the same as what I think you might mean. “Socialism” is just a label on a pile of baggage so we have to unwrap the baggage to learn about the contents, which might include gulags, for all I know.

21

It’s true that there are various models of socialism but the one common denominator is the absence of private ownership of the means of production. It’s clear that state ownership was initially the plan of the Fabians but, of course, that isn’t marxism.
There is even further confusion when we consider the welfare state, Beveridge (a Liberal) modelled it on the Utilitarian principles of The New Poor Law, and Keynes was hardly know for his socialist tendencies.
Then we come to neo-liberalism, which from a distance looks quite a lot like the state intervention associated with Labour’s evolutionary socialist goals but it’s more Keynes, generally it attempts to support the wheels of capitalism.
But this is all very academic for the majority of working-class voters who tend to support the party which stands-up for their interests, and around 5 million voters (many live in South Yorkshire) have concluded that New Labour was not that party.

Steveb: “But this is all very academic for the majority of working-class voters who tend to support the party which stands-up for their interests, and around 5 million voters (many live in South Yorkshire) have concluded that New Labour was not that party.”

With Ed Miliband’s leadership, Labour is doing wells. Some of us think the issue was not so much New Labour as Tony Blair’s leadership. Labour lost 4 million votes between the 1997 and 2005 elections while he was leader.

It has to be admitted that the competence of the Labour government 1997-2010 was and is an issue – the Iraq war apart, the failing regulation of the financial services industry, the boom in consumer credit with the associated house-price bubble – which made housing less affordable than 50 years ago – and the ensuing collapse in house building when the bubble burst.

Somehow, I don’t think that the prospect of turning all houses into council houses to meet the public ownership aspiration of socialists will prove especially popular at elections.

23

You cannot seperate New Labour from Tony Blair and Ed Mili only managed to win around 1k more seats than George Galloway in the recent bi-election at Bradford West.
Agreed, New Labour were incompetent, but there never has been a programme that I am aware of which turns all houses into council houses, and neither have I heard of any socialist plan to do so.

Steveb: “New Labour were incompetent, but there never has been a programme that I am aware of which turns all houses into council houses, and neither have I heard of any socialist plan to do so.”

You did say that public ownership was an essential ingredient of all varieties of Socialism. In the early 1980s, I asked one of the revered Socialist elders in South Yorkshire where Labour had gone wrong. He said he thought the turning point had been in the growth of private ownership of housing.

I suspect that he was probably right about that – starting in the 1950s, the Conservatives certainly put a lot of emphasis in encouraging the growth of home ownership by tax breaks and by phasing out rent control, which Labour opposed.

25
Unfortunately I never met the revered socialist elder you refer to, however, existing private homes are not on the radar of most socialist ideas and public housing would remain just that.

In the official ideology of the late Soviet Union, state farms were regarded as superior to collective farms which were theoretically only cooperatives and therefore inferior.

The illuminating insight is that farm workers were permitted their own plots for cultivation and allowed to sell the produce from these plots on the open market. Evidently, this produce contributed a disproportionate share of Soviet food supplies. The Socialism of the Soviet Union – the official ideology never claimed that Communism had been attained – had recurring problems with agriculture. Hence Stalin’s policy of “eliminating the kulaks as a class” – announced in December 1929 – which led to famine of 1932/3 in the Ukraine: the death toll of the famine is estimated at c.7 millions.

Khrushchev was sacked as party secretary in 1964 for, amongst other reasons, failing to solve Soviet agricultural problems. In desperate straights by the early 1980s after a succession of bad Soviet grain harvests, President Reagan relaxed the embargo on exports of American grain to the Soviets.

Sadly, or otherwise, the hard evidence is that Socialism and public ownership really don’t work. In France, the largest and state owned bank Credit Lyonnais built up loses amounting to $17 billion by the mid 1990s.
http://www.prmia.org/pdf/Case_Studies/Credit_Lyonnais_1.pdf

The Labour Party won’t gain electoral credibility by becoming more Socialist. Its biggest problems are over disowning Blair and the apologies needed for the failings in the regulation of the financial services industry.

27

Interesting but what has the Soviet Union got to do with this debate? And as for the observation that the Labour Party won’t gain electoral credibility by becoming more socialist is a paradox really – most people would agree that New Labour lost around 5 million votes because they were not old Labour, y’know, the party of Fabian Socialism.

28

The Soviet manifestation of a variety of “Socialism” lasted from 1917 through 1990 so we can at least take it seriously as an experiment.

“most people would agree that New Labour lost around 5 million votes because they were not old Labour”

I certainly don’t buy that. Labour most likely lost the May 2010 election because its competence at government came into question but without much confidence in the alternative competence of the Conservatives, which is why we ended up with a coalition government.

If one of the Labour government’s main failings had been the “light-touch” regulation of the financial services industry, the Conservatives had long been pressing for even less regulation as the solution to almost anything.

I don’t detect any evidence that the floating voters, who basically decide the outcome of elections, would have gone for an avowedly “Socialist” government. I suspect most of them were a touch cynical about the whole Clause IV debate – it was pretty plain that neither Wilson nor Callaghan, previous Labour PMs, had much enthusiasm for sweeping nationalisation despite Michael Foot and the infamous manifesto for the 1983 election, aptly described by Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in history.

Wilson somewhere remarked that voters would need a deal of convincing that nationalising M&S would make it more efficient than the Coop.

29

In 2010, Labour managed to hold on to its’ strongholds despite losing a lot of support, in the case of Doncaster North, about 40% between 1997 and 2010. And, as you note @23, overall Labour lost 4million votes between 1997 and 2005, this was before the credit crunch, furthermore, Labour had lost over 3million votes by 2001 (before the Iraq war)
But floating voters aside, if Labour continue to lose support in existing strongholds at the same rate as the past 13 years they won’t have a hope of winning outright in any election never mind in 2015.

30

Try this recent assessment of prospects for a Blair comeback by Simon Jenkins:

Tony Blair may itch to return, but he faces a cruel reality check – Forget the comeback. Only an act of grovelling atonement would salvage the ex-prime minister’s reputation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/26/tony-blair-itch-return-reality-shock

IMO between the 1997 and 2005 elections millions of Labour voters in the electorate gradually woke up to the realisation that Blair was a monumental liability so they stopped voting Labour. It happened that this coincided with a low point for the Conservatives – Hague’s baseball cap followed by the IDS leadership disaster and then Michael Howard’s dog-whistle strategy for the 2005 election.

I really don’t see South Yorkshire as an electoral weather vane – it has too many special local factors, most recently this news report on the BBC website in July 2006:

The South Yorkshire Trading Standards Unit is to close on 31 July over a £14m shortfall in its accounts.

31

I have never stated that South Yorkshire was an electoral weather vane and I doubt if the closing of the local trading standard’s office will have any impact on future voting.

You are correct, Tony Blair is/was a liability, it was he who turned the Labour Party into New Labour, another neo-liberal party, which was recognized early on in his premiership and I would suggest that’s why Labour lost its’ biggest vote share during his first term in office.

But so far Labour have relied on its’ traditional voters (in their strongholds) not going elsewhere, which so far has worked but that cannot last, George Galloway eventually won Bradford West, attracting only 1k less than the current leader, Ed Miliband.

History shows that the tories cannot be underestimated (remember Major’s victory in 1992) and if Labour continue to alienate its’ traditional supporters, it won’t stand a chance of winning outright in 2015.

32

I don’t buy much of that. The £14m unaccounted for by the South Yorkshire Trading Standards Unit was only part of a long chain of junketing, fraud, and corruption reported in the local news.

Blairism was characterised not by neo-liberalism but by the Third Way (whatever that was meant to mean), liberal interventionism abroad – like the Iraq war – and light-touch regulation of the financial services industry, which is what led to the house-price bubble and the collapse of the banks with the ensuing recession and budget deficit. The credit for keeping Britain out of the Eurozone belongs to the Treasury and Gordon Brown. Blair wanted to sign up to join the Euro.

33
If you don’t know what ‘the third way’ is, how do you know it’s not neo-liberalism?

And what has South Yorkshire Trading Standards got to do with this debate?

A brilliant article and analysis – that is why talk about Labour – Lib.Dem coalition talks now are presumptuous to say the least and arrogant otherwise.

Well written article – and the third way is not neo-liberalism – and its often highlighted as triangulation – there is much more to third way in terms of positives. For example, unfortunately, under the strait jacket leftie dogma public education – the interest of teaching unions and teachers should equate with the interests of pupils. That has been proven disastrous on both sides of the Atlantic.

The living proof that a different way of approaching public education can deliver success are the Academies. A typical third way initiative focusing on using public resources to improve quality of lives of all pupils especially disadvantaged inner city students.

So third way is beyond just a balance between rights and responsibilities or triangulation – wish people knew more about what they start criticising.

35

The third way = ‘a varying synthesis of right-wing economics and left-wing social policies’ (wiki)

Perhaps you need to read ‘The Third Way; neo-liberalism with a human face’ Bob Jessop (2006)

‘wish people knew more about what they are criticising’

Don’t know if that’s targetted at me but my criticism of New Labour, and Blair in particular, was the move away from it’s goal towards a socialist economic base. It is impossible to have both a socialist and right-wing economic base.

34: “If you don’t know what ‘the third way’ is, how do you know it’s not neo-liberalism?”

Because: (a) I read some of the Third Way stuff by the guru in chief – Tony Giddens – and that wasn’t remotely connected with Austrian school economics, the supposed font of neo-liberal ideology; (b) years back someone posted online that the provenance of the Third Way went back to Mussolini.

That I couldn’t believe but since I don’t know much about Italian history, I thought to check. The second book I picked up was Martin Clark’s book on: Modern Italy 1871-1995 (Longman 2nd ed. 1996), p.250, where the author writes about the policies of Mussolini’s fascist government : “They seemed to offer ‘a third way’, between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression. …”

Note that this, by an academic historian at Edinburgh University, was published before the 1997 election which brought Blair to power. Presumably, the various academics and pundits who advised Blair on the Third Way were aware of this provenance. They would have checked, wouldn’t they?

There’s further evidence of the influence of Mussolini on Labour policy. Try this:

“However it was with the idea of a state planning agency that [Stuart] Holland (*) hoped to show the new possibilities open to a more just economy. He looked to the Italian example of the IRI (the Industrial Reconstruction Institute), set up by Mussolini and used by subsequent Italian governments to develop the economy. This had, of course, already been tried through the IRC (the Industrial Reorganization Corporation) set up as part of the National Plan [in Britain] in 1966, but the IRC had been too small to have much effect on the British economy. A revamped IRC in the form of a National Enterprise Board would, however, have a major effect in stimulating the private sector through an active policy of state intervention and direction.”
Source: Geoffrey Foote: The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (Palgrave, 1997) p.311.

(*) Stuart Holland: Labour MP for Lambeth, Vauxhall 1979-89, political assistant in Downing St to the PM 1967/8, and shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1987-9

“And what has South Yorkshire Trading Standards got to do with this debate?”

A potential influence on electoral preferences in South Yorkshire?

Labour may not have 41 MPs from Scotland – depending on how the 2014 referendum works out – to rely on.

That would, err, skew the results considerably would it not?

Why is it that no analysis from within the Westminster Bubble seems to deal with that possibility?

As the examples of Sweden and the Netherlands show, there is absolutely no need for schools to be in public ownership.

In both those countries, while schooling is paid for by the state, the schools may be in private ownership. What matters is not who or what owns the schools but the quality of schooling and the standards achieved. If schools inspectorates don’t approve of the standards of attainment then the contracts can be terminated after due warnings.

Public ownership of schools is not necessary to ensure good standards of schooling.

Much the same argument applies to ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. As the glaring example of Credit Lyonnais showed @27, public ownership of the largest bank in France didn’t ensure that the bank was operated in the interests of the French public rather than the management of the bank.

Bobby b,

Is there not the option of credit unions? Or just a decent regulatory regieme? It seems to me that printing money, as the BofE is doing, is not, necessarily, an avenue to pursue.

You ought to spell out your solutions rather than just sound off.

I have not been around here for a while. Perhaps you do have a solution. Which I have missed. At the moment it is not at all apparent. Unless it is more Libertarian shit.

Is it?

37

But you said @33 ‘Blairism was characterised not by neo-liberalism but by the Third Way (whatever that was meant to mean)’ so I assumed from the comment that you didn’t know, I suppose it must have been a rhetorical question.

I’m still at a loss to understand why the trading standards office in South Yorkshire could influence electoral preference, and even you wouldn’t be daft enough to propose that the people responsible for the fraud represent the electorate of South Yorkshire. I’m sure that with your attention to detail, you would have know that out of the three convicted, one came from Chesterfield and the other from Northampton.

39

Do not mistake socialism with a mixed economy, public ownership operating on a capitalist base will always be vulnerable to the culture of capitalism, the NHS is a glaring example.

Douglas Clark: “I have not been around here for a while. Perhaps you do have a solution. Which I have missed. At the moment it is not at all apparent”

I don’t believe that there is some silver bullet to resolve political problems and I do believe that all the “-isms” are just labels tagged on to heaps of baggage where the contents are unknown.

Writing manifestos is a wearisome task best undertaken by a committee of engaged members whereas I’m more inclined to be an inquiring skeptic.

Btw I’ve been away too for several months until recently.

Steveb: “I’m still at a loss to understand why the trading standards office in South Yorkshire could influence electoral preference”

The fraud conducted at the SY Trading Standards Units was not an isolated phenomenon but the last in a long series of events were public funds had been misappropriated and public trust abused. I assume, perhaps mistakenly, that the South Yorkshire electorate might be influenced by these manifestations when making electoral decisions.

42

It makes you wonder whether Jack the Ripper had any influence on voting outcome in Whitchapel.

43

Now you mention Rippers, the Yorkshire Ripper was caught and arrested in South Yorkshire although the murders he perpetrated were in West Yorkshire – or those officially recognised. Curiously, the arresting officers weren’t commended – and thereby hangs a story, or so I was informed by a local journo.

Try also this news report about the Police: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/206221.stm

And this Guardian report November 2001: “But as the 1960s wore on, isolated scandals began to tarnish the public image of the police. In 1962, a rhino whip was discovered in a locker that had been used on a suspect in Sheffield.” There was a public inquiry: Sheffield Police Appeal Inquiry November 1963 – Cmnd 2176

margin for error ,yes the tories were dead, but they were dead in 92 too, and the public just didn’t turst laobur despite there not bieng much diffrence between what laobur stood for in 92 and 97

Read this diatribe on Con Home its a shocker

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2012/07/hoods-and-islamists-essential-summer-reading.html#idc-container