Why the Libdems won’t last in the Coalition until 2015

by Sunder Katwala    
May 28, 2011 at 5:47 pm

So each of the Coalition parties are currently entertaining the theory that they would be better off dividing a good way before the short election campaign. But it is less obvious that they can both be right.

The shared problem for each is the threat of a General Election.

The Conservatives are more nervous about the path to a Parliamentary majority than they appear in public – not least because none of their leadership team shared the confidence of the party and its press supporters that it was heading for a clear victory next time.
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Did 9/11 really change the world as much as journalists claim?

by Sunder Katwala    
May 2, 2011 at 5:03 pm

September 11th 2001 was the day the world changed.

That journalistic truism will be endlessly repeated this week in the wake of the killing of Bin Laden, some 3520 days after Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on New York on Washington. This will now symbolise closure for many people on those terrible and shocking events.
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Libdems could have no women MPs at election

by Sunder Katwala    
April 25, 2011 at 11:10 am

A General Election in 2011 is no longer unthinkable, argues Jackie Ashley in The Guardian. Few LibDems would relish the prospect.

But how many realise that, if such an election took place, they would face a serious risk of ending up with no women MPs at all?
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Why we need a public inquiry into the phone-hacking revelations

by Sunder Katwala    
April 11, 2011 at 9:02 am

The News International statement admitting culpability over widspread phone-hacking at the News of the World – and the failure to properly investigate it even after a reporter was sent to jail – was an extraordinary development.

However, the most troubling questions are not for News International, but for the police (non-) investigation. Why the Metropolitan Police appear to have had a quiet determination not to notice evidence and to ignore leads raises more troubling questions about the effectiveness and non-partiality of the rule of law in this country.
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Would those opposing intervention in Libya also do so for Ivory Coast?

by Sunder Katwala    
April 4, 2011 at 11:30 am

I have been deeply sceptical about ‘whataboutery’ when it is used an argument for consistent inaction on human rights everywhere.

Nicolas Kristof captures a central point in his last New York Times column:

Just because we allowed Rwandans or Darfuris to be massacred, does it really follow that to be consistent we should allow Libyans to be massacred as well? Isn’t it better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none?

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Boris Johnson was for student violence before he was against it

by Sunder Katwala    
March 29, 2011 at 8:50 am

Mayor of London Boris Johnson badly overstepped the mark yesterday, ludicrously claiming that Labour leader Ed Miliband will have been “quietly satisfied” by the violence in the capital which risked overshadowing the TUC’s March for the Alternative on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Boris can hardly be surprised to be accused of silliness and hypocrisy for a response in the lower traditions of student politics, though Shelly Asquith misses out what is surely the most hypocritical about the claim….
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Why is the government imposing ‘Big society’ on academia?

by Sunder Katwala    
March 27, 2011 at 10:54 am

Is this the latest “big society” paradox? The Observer reports that senior academics are deeply concerned about the way in which a department of state is alleged to have insisted on the ‘big society’ as a major academic research theme as a condition of renewing academic funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

This report of about rather top down insistence on studying the bottom up doctrine speaks to a recurring tension as to how government can get traction for its ‘big idea’ without undermining the point.
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Even Tories know Osborne’s tax changes won’t help lower paid

by Sunder Katwala    
March 23, 2011 at 10:20 am

Osborne will use the increase tax threshold to claim that he has lowered personal tax bills, and is trying to take the poor out of tax.

That the claim is misleading was obvious as soon as this key budget pledge was pre-spun on 1st March – as the claim relies on ignoring the VAT rise.
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Banning soup kitchens is only the start of the attack on London’s homeless

by Sunder Katwala    
February 28, 2011 at 8:59 am

The richest Tory-run Council in the country is seeking to ban soup kitchens for the homeless from an area around Westminster Cathedral. Labour Uncut has provided the documents to prove that they really hadn’t made up the story with a “you couldn’t make it up” feel to it.

A controversy over banning soup kitchens could prove particularly toxic for the “big society”.
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How Cameron’s new modernising advisor sees the Conservative party

by Sunder Katwala    
February 16, 2011 at 8:28 am

Andrew Cooper is to become Downing Street director of strategy, having been head of the pollster Populus.

There was a nervous reaction from Tim Montgomerie, the influential editor of ConservativeHome, who quickly tweeted:

Andrew Cooper once described the Tory grassroots as “vile” to me. And now he’s head of strategy for David Cameron.

There is good evidence that they have substantive reasons to be nervous.

The new director of strategy certainly takes a pretty much diametrically opposed view of why the Tories fell short at the last election to that offered in the ConservativeHome post-election inquest.

Cooper strongly supports the thesis that the Conservatives fell short because voters did not feel that they had changed enough – which does indeed cast the Tory party as much more the problem than the solution.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the evidence that Cameron is no longer seen as more centrist than his party by the public. But Cooper will probably fear the truth in Ed Miliband’s observation that “we are seeing the recontamination of the Tory brand“.

This was how I reported Andrew Cooper’s critique of the Tory election campaign for the New Statesman.

He said last night that the strategic weakness of the Tory campaign was always to respond with an “unremittingly negative” attack on Gordon Brown, which failed to take on board how far the decisive electoral question remained voters’ doubts about the Conservatives. This meant that they failed to secure enough support – most notably in Scotland, in London (particularly among non-white voters), and among public-sector workers and the less well-off, where those who agreed it was time for a change remained repelled by the risk of the “same old Tories”.

As the Tory leadership realised this, they began to make “much more detailed preparations for a hung parliament than anybody realised”, Cooper said.

Cooper was, in effect, voicing a significant criticism of George Osborne’s approach to electoral and campaign strategy. Osborne was the voice of the “relentlessly negative” messaging which, on Cooper’s analysis, simply poured energy and resources into an argument the Tories had already won.

After the 2005 election, Cooper produced a presentation which emphasised that 79% of Tory voters felt the party was “on the right track to get into power before too long” but only 28% of non-Tories agreed.

Cooper and Michael Gove offered a route-map, according to Tim Bale’s book, for the Cameroons.

1. Always try to see ourselves through the voters’ eyes.

2. Talk about the issues that matter most to voters (not the issues that we’re most at home with).

3. Use the language of people, not the language of politicians.

4. “Tell people what we stand for – not (just) what is wrong with Labour. Unless we give voters new reasons to support us they won’t.

5. Remember Tim Bell’s rule: ‘if they haven’t heard it, you haven’t said it’ – so repetition is vital.

6. Respect modern Britain. If we seem not to like Britain today, the feeling will surely be reciprocated.

7. Don’t be shrill or strident – that’s not how normal civilised people behave.

8. Remember that whatever we are talking about, the most important message is what we are saying about ourselves.

9. Face the fact that we lost people’s trust because of how we behave (and sound) as well as what we say”.

10. Focus on the voters we have to win, don’t preach to the converted.

11. Be disciplined and consistent.

The focus on turning the Tories into ‘normal civilised people’ does suggest a particular view of the party as mainly containing idiosyncratic, swivel-eyed ideologues.

What is also striking now is just how strongly the emphasis is on etiquette and behaviour, and just how little there is on political content.

Perhaps one of the lessons of David Cameron’s incomplete and shallow modernisation of his party is that good manners are important, but not a substitute for a political strategy.

—
A longer version of this article is at Next Left

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