Liberal Conspiracy » Sunder Katwala

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

Sunder Katwala — Sat, 28 May 2011 16:47:45 +0000

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.

So the Tories would certainly not want an election without the new boundaries. And the reason for the LibDems to not want an earlier general election is, at present, rather more existential.

Hence the return of the idea of “confidence and supply”.

But can it work? The conundrum there is how the LibDems would explain that they no longer believe that they should be part of the government, and prepare to campaign against it, while being still responsible for sustaining a Tory government.

That could simply cost them the support of those voters who thought they did the right thing in the first place, without winning back the trust of lost LibDems who feel betrayed.

Still, the LibDem case for support if the Coalition lasts right up to a May 2015 campaign is quite difficult to articulate too.

In this endgame scenario, the post-Coalition Liberal Democrats would naturally need new leadership in order to seek to differentiate themselves from their erstwhile partners in government.

That makes it impossible to see how the Liberal Democrats can attempt an amicable divorce without current leader Nick Clegg having previously made his own decision that he would prefer a new challenge on the international stage to defending Sheffield Hallam at the next General Election

Chris Huhne’s availability is now in doubt, making Tim Farron the likely frontrunner for a party looking for new direction and leadership.

How to achieve that within 12-18 months is more difficult. So the risk is that the party might do even worse if it seems to be running away from its record in government, rather than running on it, so exacerbating the damage of having been in the government during its most unpopular phase, and then absent when the war-chest is unlocked.

If it looks like a case of ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ then that conundrum will be causing plenty of headaches among Liberal Democrats at Westminster.

A long time before 2015.

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A longer version of this article is on Next Left

Did 9/11 really change the world as much as journalists claim?

Sunder Katwala — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:03:31 +0000

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.

Yet, at a stroke, this Autumn’s retrospectives on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 will now become ever more an exercise in contemporary history, rather than current affairs. The political protagonists – Osama bin Laden, as well as Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, Blair and the rest – now belong to the history books.

Yet perhaps bin Laden’s death can bring a sense of closure partly because, a decade later, 9/11 changed the world rather less than we intuitively think that it did. If we ask the ‘what if?’ question, and try to gauge the shape of our world if 9/11 had never happened?

The geopolitical and public mood of the last ten years would have been dramatically different. Yet the forces doing most to reshape our world now – the global shift in power eastwards to China and India, the consequences of the financial crash of 2008, and the shifting demographics of western societies – were little affected by the disruptive impact of 9/11, and their impacts seem likely to long outlast it.

If 9/11 had been prevented, certainly much would have been different in the short-term. It shaped the international politics of a decade, but it no longer looks as transformative as 1917, 1945 or 1989.

Al Qaeda itself would have not had the need nor notoreity to catalyse its shift so quickly from organisation to ‘brand’, where followers might attempt to emulate the achievements of bin Laden, without central direction or control.

What really changed the geopolitical scene was less the Afghanistan war – which had extremely broad international support, and was unimpeachable in international law- but than the war with Iraq.

My strong hunch is that the Bush administration would have found a route to Baghdad, though they may have needed to secure a second term to do that, perhaps closer to 2005 rather than 2003. If that is the case, then perhaps the confrontation with Saddam and the missing WMD, the impact of the Bush-Blair alliance, Europe divided, and the rise of Obama would indeed occur anyway.

But it would not then have taken the terrorism of Osama bin Laden to provoke it. This is not to argue that Osama bin Laden didn’t matter. Nobody ever did more to promote a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the Islamic world and the west.

Citizens of the west have had good reason to fear our societies becoming more fractured, as extremist Islamist and white far right minorities put effort into mutually stoking and fuelling each other’s fears and grievances.

But one of the many reasons to take hope from the Arab Spring is that the protests ultimately increase the possibility of bin Laden’s Islamist extremism being marginalised across the Middle East too, as popular grievances take a genuinely democratic form.

We can be somewhat secure that bin Laden’s failure if we can indeed demonstrate that his vision of fear and conflict is further away from being realised in 2011 than it was in September 2001.

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A longer version is at Next Left

Libdems could have no women MPs at election

Sunder Katwala — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:10:09 +0000

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?

Even if the election takes place on the Coalition’s schedule in 2015, it is quite likely that the LibDems will find themselves with a more male dominated party than their 1930s predecessors, when one out of ten Liberal MPs was a woman.

The reasons why the LibDems are now likely to go backwards on gender, even if they recover some lost support in the polls, are reported in The Guardian by Allegra Stratton, based on Fabian Society and Fabian Women’s Network research by myself and Seema Malhotra.

So why do LibDem women specifically face such a dramatic meltdown threat, compared to the party’s male MPs? You can read our Fabian Review article below. This will appears in the gender equality special issue of the Fabian Review, published later this week.

The LibDems have only seven women MPs out of 57. Yet five of the LibDem women hold seats among the dozen most vulnerable for the party, while they hold none of the party’s 20 safest seats. And the party leadership has failed to realise that its decision to support a cull in the number of MPs has effectively cut off any chance of progress at the next election.

Women MPs in the dozen most vulnerable LibDem seats

1. Lorely Burt (Solihull) 0.3%, 175 votes
2. Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset) 0.6%, 269 votes
3. Norwich South 0.7%
4. Bradford East 0.9%
5. Tessa Munt (Wells), 1.4%, 800 votes
6. St Austell 2.8%
7 = Sarah Teather (Brent South) 3.0%, 1345 votes
7 = Somerton 3.0%
9 St Ives 3.7%
10 Manchester West 4.1%
11. Burnley 4.3%
12. Jo Swinson, 4.6% (East Dunfermline), 2184 votes

Other LibDem women MPs

Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey & Wood Green), 12.5%, 7875 votes
Jenny Willott (Cardiff Central), 12.7%, 4576 votes

In an early election held on current boundaries with current MPs where the party lost only 12 seats – a much stronger result than anybody would predict from the polls – the LibDems would (on a universal swing) return with a Parliamentary Party of 43 men and 2 women – a drop from 12 per cent to just 4.5 per cent of the party’s MPs.

In practice, it could even be worse. The two ‘safer’ seats held by LibDem women are both pretty vulnerable to political responses to the Tory-LibDem Coalition. Both were gained in 2005 from Labour, through appeals to students and voters disillusioned with Labour over Iraq and other left-of-centre issues. The LibDems expect to lose Cardiff Central in the Welsh Assembly election on May 5th.

But there is little sign that the party’s internal debate has acknowledged how likely a further sharp reduction in female representation has now become, nor has the leadership apparently understood how the Coalition’s policy of a smaller House has set their chances of progress back.

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A longer version of this blog, with the full Fabian Review piece, is on Next Left

Why we need a public inquiry into the phone-hacking revelations

Sunder Katwala — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:02:08 +0000

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.

There are certainly positive features in having a non-deferential and even aggressive media culture in Britain. But none of us want to believe that Britain is a society in which some organisations are so powerful that believe that they can break the law with impunity, and appear to have good reasons to do so.

The most plausible hypothesis to explain News International’s approach to the crisis to date is that the media group retained confidence that they had sufficient leverage over policemen, politicians and press watchdogs to be able to make any awkward questions go away, partly on the grounds that they command sufficient fear that those supposed to be powers in the land may well be rational to fear the professional and political consequences of getting on their wrong side

Most national media outlets has shown considerably less interest in these issues than it would have done had the allegations of illegality been made against a bank, law firm, supermarket or quango. (And just imagine if it had been the BBC!).

Despite crucial interventions from individual politicians, such as the persistence of Labour MP Tom Watson and the willingness of Tory select committee chair John Whittingdale to reopen the issue, it would be wise not to rely on the political parties to ensure that the truth comes out.

Labour communications chief Tom Baldwin’s memo to shadow cabinet members was testimony to how each of the major parties will remain wary of tangling with a wounded beast. The departure of Coulson should have made it easier for Conservatives to treat the issues on their merits, but the desire for good relationships with the Murdoch papers and a fear that the issue could still rebound on David Cameron.

So civic voices may have to take the lead, and seek to build support from all political perspectives too. Brian Cathcart is quite right to say that a public inquiry is needed. He notes that former Tory party chairman Norman Fowler, now a peer, has made a similar call.

If we want to get to the heart of these issues, we will need to find coalitions of voices in civic society and prepared to work across party boundaries to build support for a robust investigation into the affair and the cover-up.

Any inquiry would also need to be headed by a figure whose personal integrity is respected across the political spectrum.

May I be the first to propose one excellent candidate: the former Conservative Prime Minister Sir John Major.

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Cross-posted from Next Left, which has a longer version

Would those opposing intervention in Libya also do so for Ivory Coast?

Sunder Katwala — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:30:28 +0000

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?

Kristof is also right that invoking the Responsibility to Protect will often lead over time to stronger pressure for effective international engagement in other crises.

The Ivory Coast is a case in point, as the political and humanitarian crisis in that country deteriotated sharply over the last week.

The Independent on Sunday had an unimpressive editorial on a fairly standard ‘whataboutery’ ticket.

However, the complaint about an “international shrug of indifference” towards Ivory Coast was badly undermined by an extremely loose grasp of the basic facts, such as placing as “last month” the elections which were held in October and November, leading to last December’s dispute over whether the result.

The international community has been rather more engaged in attempting to secure Gbagbo’s departure than the IoS acknowledges – and it is unfair to imply that France has been disengaged – though the failure to secure the transition to power the elected President is all the more striking after several months.

With the country’s civil war having been reopened, there is a very good case that the Security Council should have given the 9000-strong UN peacekeeping forces a stronger mandate, as Ecowas argued last month, having suspended Gbago last Demcember. France and Nigeria have also been pursuing this at the UN, but with Russia reported to be sceptical about more intervention.

The objectives for the international community – led by the west African and African Union multilateral bodies, with support from other nations and the UN – ought to be fairly straightforward.

* To ensure the democratic election result is upheld, and to expedite this, including tougher measures against the illegitimate government.
* To investigate human rights abuses, and to refer these to the ICC, from whichever source.
* To promote preventive measures to protect human rights, including external support for domestically-led reconciliation moves where appropriate.

If those making ‘whatabout’ arguments want to oppose all forms of foreign pressure and engagement, I struggle to see how the scale or nature of what they wish to ignore in Ivory Coast has much if any bearing on what they propose to ignore in Libya.

I imagine this would also probably be opposed by many or most of those who oppose the Libyan intervention.

So it would be interesting to hear more from opponents of the Libyan intervention, about what they believe should happen in the Ivory Coast.

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cross-posted from Next Left, which has a longer version

Boris Johnson was for student violence before he was against it

Sunder Katwala — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 07:50:04 +0000

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….

While Mr Edward Miliband was doubtless a rather diligent student, Boris was certainly not above indulging in a bit of pointless violence to brighten up a night out.

In his youthful days, Boris was more than quietly satisfied when his Bullingdon pals threw a flowerpot through a restaurant window. Indeed he was so proud of the incident that he even invented the tale of being arrested over it, as Jim Pickard of the FT has reported in exquisite detail, even though Friends of Boris have since revealed that he scrambled away through the flowerbeds to avoid being caught.

The story of the arrest was simply a bit of bigging up bravado which grew in the retelling.

What should certainly help Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s rehabilitation revolution is that three of the Bullingdon pals involved in that night of window smashing flowerpot hi-jinks were to take up places on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons, a suitably lofty vantage point from which they can (rightly) condemn those students who emulate their violent antics today.

To be fair, government ministers do not seem to have indulged in the same kind of silly partisan knockabout as Boris, whose comments so badly fail the test of treating democratic protest with respect, on which Stuart White blogged so well here on Saturday night. (Credit to Tory policing minister Nick Herbert whose sensible statement clearly distinguished support for peaceful protes and condemning violence, saying that “The policing of the main rally shows how peaceful protest can be supported when the organisers work with the police”).

Of course, the Bullingdon boys indulged in violent antics for no cause greater than the nihilistic thrill of smashing the glass. I am not convinced that much more can be said of those given the rather lofty title of “anarchists” in reports of Saturday’s violence.

Why is the government imposing ‘Big society’ on academia?

Sunder Katwala — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:54:43 +0000

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.

The report also captures growing tensions over how to protect academic freedom while enabling scrutiny of how public funding is spent at a time of fiscal restraint.

There is growing anger at what the Royal Historical Society (RHS) described as a “gross and ignoble” move to assert government control over research in favour of what one academic labelled a party political slogan.

Professor Colin Jones, president of the RHS, said the move was potentially dangerous for the future of academic study in the country. “It seems to me to be absolutely gross,” said Jones.

“In a way, the AHRC should be congratulated for securing a good settlement in a difficult spending round, but there is something slightly ignoble about making the ‘big society’ a research priority.”

He added: “It is government money. They have the right to spend it on what they want, but there is a degree of anxiety about the strings being put on. They are being strengthened, which could be dangerous for independent research.”

A principal at an Oxford college, who did not want to be named, said: “With breathtaking speed, a slogan for one political party has become translated into a central intellectual agenda for the academy.”

…

It is understood that Oxford University intends to discuss the imposition of “big society” research at the next meeting of its sovereign body, the Oxford congregation, in May.

Even Tories know Osborne’s tax changes won’t help lower paid

Sunder Katwala — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:20:23 +0000

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.

A powerful and informed argument against the tax threshold change was made by George Osborne’s Cabinet colleague David Willetts, who offered a punchy critique of why the policy wouldn’t help the poor, but would increase inequality for The Times back in 2005.

Here’s what Willetts wrote then.

Many people assume that there is an easy way of cutting taxes and helping the poorest people — we should raise the income tax allowance. At the moment people start paying income tax at about £5,000 a year. What if we increased that to £10,000 a year — wouldn’t that transform the situation of the poorest people?

It is true that poor people pay a shockingly high amount of tax. The richest 20 per cent of households lose 35 per cent of their incomes in tax. The poorest 20 per cent of households lose 37.9 per cent of their incomes in tax. In fact the poorest 20 per cent pay a higher proportion of their incomes in tax than any other slice of the population. No one seriously planned for this bizarre outcome.

But the tax that poor people pay isn’t income tax. The poorest 20 per cent of households sacrifice 28.5 per cent of their income in indirect tax, of which the biggest single item is VAT. All direct taxes take 9.5 per cent and of this the biggest item is council tax, which takes 4.6 per cent. Income tax, taking 3.5 per cent of their income, is responsible for less than one tenth of the taxes paid by the poorest fifth of households.

The inclusion of 40p taxpayers as gaining from the threshold change is an interesting reversal of this government’s policy to date.

Doing this makes the tax threshold change even more regressive. (And the policy already became more regressive when the Coalition ditched LibDem plans to pay for it from progressive tax measures).

However, removing 40p taxpayers from gaining from this policy (by bringing the 40p starting point down by a similar amount) would create a car crash with the goverment’s decision to take higher rate taxpayers from child benefit.

That would add further to the 750,000 people brought into the 40p rate of tax, with important knock-on effects as the government cutting child benefit from any household with a higher rate taxpayer from 2013.

Osborne claimed in announcing the policy that the change would not hit those households until somebody was earning over £44,000, but he has not said if he will keep this promise. His current policy will hit people earning several thousand pounds less than that.

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A longer version is at Next Left

Banning soup kitchens is only the start of the attack on London’s homeless

Sunder Katwala — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:59:01 +0000

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”.

Coming so soon after much ‘big society tsar has too little time for the role’ satire, the big idea could certainly do without another existential credibility controversy, while Steve Hilton seeks to patiently nurse it back to health.

There is legitimate debate about the role of soup runs in providing help to the most vulnerable. The LSE produced a balanced report on the issues in Westminster. While homeless charities are keen to promote alternative provision, it seems very unlikely that civic voices which are widely trusted would support the ban as a way to do this.

Westminster Council dropped a push for a London-wide soup run ban in 2007. Critics suggest one foreseeable effect of the current proposals will be to push rough sleepers to other boroughs.

Homelessness will return as a political issue this year – and this may come to be seen as one early skirmish in a much broader policy and political battle. As I has noted before, the Tory-led Coalition government is quietly planning to weaken current statutory homelessness provisions.

Westminster Council has been leading the push on this – lobbying ministers over a series of specific ways in which the government might weaken the legal duties of councils to house the homeless, believing that this will be necessary to handle the fallout from their housing benefit changes.

This is not a discussion that Coalition Ministers are keen to have in public at this stage – and Liberal Democrats with an interest in social housing, such as Simon Hughes, or local government will be put on the spot if and when the plans are unveiled.

Lord Freud has publicly suggested that the legal duty to provide “adequate housing” could be redefined, as it may seem rather too strong.

Westminster Council is claiming its proposed bye-laws are motivated only by what is best for the homeless.

You can be pretty sure that the Coalition government will claim the same, when it does produce plans to weaken statutory duties to assist those who are homeless.

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A longer version is at Next Left

How Cameron’s new modernising advisor sees the Conservative party

Sunder Katwala — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:28:55 +0000

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.

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A longer version of this article is at Next Left

Most Libdems have also started to shift against the cuts

Sunder Katwala — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:30:04 +0000

The Independent on Sunday/Sunday Mirror ComRes polling yesterday brought bad news for the Coalition, as John Rentoul sets out, with opinion shifting against the government on every front.

The long lost “fair cuts” argument haemhorrages further. Trailing by 28-57% on whether the government is cutting too severely and too fast suggests the these ‘cuts are necessary’ case is in increasing trouble too.

A very narrow plurality of the public as a whole (41-38) now say that the governing parties are exaggerating the cuts for party political reasons. It is interesting that this is the only question in the poll where those voters who still intend to vote LibDem take the government’s side of the argument (by 51-31).

Also worth noting:

» Even still loyal LibDems break 35-50 against the government on the cuts being “too severe and too fast” (where Tories back the government 63-22). LibDem voters were split equally (42-42) on this question in November.

» LibDems break 25-55 against the government on the fairness of cuts across society (where Tory voters are content, by 55-26), with 60% thinking they poor will be hit worse (55% of Tories disagree). LibDems disagree by 50-26 that the vulnerable are being protected by the Coalition; Tories by 50-23 think the opposite again.

» By 38-28, LibDem voters think the Big Society is merely cover for spending cuts. Tories disagree by 15% to 46%. LibDems think the Big Society is a gimmick by 48-20%. (Tories just manage to reject this, 31-30). The party is committed to localism, but their voters do not think the big society will foster a culture of voluntarism (17-45) or redistribute power from central government to citizens (17-40). Tories think it might do both (tied 24-24 on voluntarism, and positive about a shift from government, 32-25)

» On all of these questions, the sharp polarisation of Tory and Labour opinion means that the attitudes of LibDem voters often fairly closely reflect the (government sceptical) views of the electorate as a whole.

A lot of attention has been paid to the loss of LibDem support in the polls from the 23% that they polled in May 2010. While the party is now on 11%, compared to 13% in the poll last November, today’s poll breakdown shows a shift against the government’s deficit strategy among those LibDem voters who remain.

Anxious LibDems (who agree with Labour rather than Tory arguments over the deficit) now make up a clear majority of those who still intend to vote for Nick Clegg’s party.

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A longer version is at Next Left.

Work with us to stop Pickles, say Labour councillors today

Sunder Katwala — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:30:55 +0000

A government source confirms to The Times (£) that Eric Pickles’ relationship with local councils has become dysfunctional.

They hate him and he hates them.

As a result, LibDem council leaders have asked Nick Clegg to step in so that they don’t have to deal with the Tory Community Secretary.

The paper reports that LibDem LGA leader Richard Kemp, who helped coordinate yesterday’s Times letter warning against the scale and front-loading of local cuts, has requested on behalf of colleagues that they should deal with Clegg and other Cabinet office ministers so as to “minimise” contact with Pickles, with whom their working relationship has collapsed.

In a further letter to The Times (£), most of Labour’s senior council leaders welcome yesterday’s LibDem letter, and call for cross-party cooperation on this “urgent issue”, arguing that residents “are relying on councillors of all parties to work together in the interests of the public and be their voice during tough times”.

The letter is signed by councillor David Sparks, Leader, Labour Group, Local Government Association and 130 colleagues, including many Labour council leaders (listed here).

They write:

David Cameron acknowledged in a speech in 2009 that “local government is officially the most efficient part of the public sector”. As councillors and elected mayors we will work to continue to drive down the costs of delivering quality public services. However, we feel that the Secretary of State for Local Government, Eric Pickles, has been disingenuous about the impact his cuts will have on our ability to provide services. The design and depth of the cuts to local authority budgets will undoubtedly hurt local economies and damage frontline services.

Because of the costly long-term impacts these cuts will have to our communities and our local economies we believe it is important that we keep the discussion with the Government open. We therefore invite Liberal Democrat councillors to join us in writing to their fellow Liberal Democrat, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, to ask him to ask Eric Pickles to look again at the unfairness of the Tory-Lib Dem Government’s cuts.

Meanwhile, one Tory councillor from Wookey Hole in Somerset begs to differ, and writes to the paper to attack the LibDems for failing to live in the real world, while congratulating Eric Pickles for his “Churchillian resolve”.

Eric Pickles’ crusade in Whitehall is being exposed for its unfairness

Sunder Katwala — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:49:58 +0000

Many of the most senior Liberal Democrats in local government have attacked the government’s local government spending settlement, publicly declaring no confidence in the fairness of the government’s approach to cuts and in Communities Secretary Eric Pickles who the LibDems accuse of “gunboat diplomacy” in an extraordinary letter to The Times (£).

As The Times reports (£):

The grassroots of the Liberal Democrats have declared open revolt over the scale and pace of cuts to frontline local services.

In a serious blow to the unity of the coalition, 88 Liberal Democrat council chiefs have written to The Times today warning that services for the most vulnerable will have to be cut. The 17 local authority leaders and 71 local party heads say that the spending reductions are too big and are being implemented too quickly.

Local government is the powerbase of Nick Clegg’s party and the move suggests that loyalty to the leadership has been strained to the limit.

The Communities and Local Government Secretary was also yesterday being criticised and briefed against by senior Conservatives in Downing Street for his approach to cuts which endanger the big society.

But Pickles has stonewalled Downing Street plans to save the Big Society, as well as the repeated calls from councils not to front-load the deep cuts in the local government settlement.

The BBC ten o’clock news last night highlighted just how much the new local government settlement will hit poorer areas harder, with BBC home affairs editor Mark Easton showing that the cuts will be worth £210 per adult in deprived Hackney compared to £2.86 per person in affluent East Dorset.

Those councils with high levels of deprivation, and so which are more dependent on grant funding from central government to reduce inequalities, are being hit very hard, while councils which have a strong local economic base from which to raise their own resources will be relatively protected.

A ministerial source tells Easton that the government’s intention was to “unwind the process” whereby more deprived areas got more support under Labour. This government thinks that was unfair, and so is seeking to reduce the amount of redistribution towards poor areas in the local government settlement.

The argument highlights an ideological clash between fairness as promoting redistribution and equal opportunities between more and less deprived parts of the country, and fairness as localism, in proposing that different areas should get to keep more of their own resources.

There is a political dimension too. By proposing a formula which will hit poorer areas harder, the government is doing more to protect areas of Conservative political strength and to hurt Labour ones, showing how the pattern of public spending and cuts could well increase geographical polarisation in British politics.

—
A longer version is at Next Left

How voters see Cameron, Clegg and Miliband on the political spectrum

Sunder Katwala — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:12:40 +0000

Voters no longer believe that David Cameron is more centrist than the Conservative party as a whole, having changed their minds about this since May. That is one of the striking and potentially politically significant findings of a YouGov/Prospect poll (see graphic here).

Voters are asked to use a 200 point scale, with 0 as the centre, and where -100 is very left-wing and +100 is very right wing.

The average voter continues to think of themselves as very close to the political centre, though there has been a mild lean leftwards among the electorate.

The January 2011 survey now puts the average 3 points to the left-of-centre, compared to 1 point right-of-centre in May 2010. There are other interesting findings too.

Cameron is now as right-wing as his party, according to voter perceptions
At the time of the General Election last May, voters placed the Tory party at 48 points to the right of centre on a 0-100 scale, but perceived Cameron as being somewhat more centrist, placing him at 37 points to the right.

This month, Cameron has a +48 score, having moved 11 points to the right in voter perceptions, while perceptions of his party remain pretty steady at +47, shifting one point left on the index.

Conservative voters – at 33 points to the right last May, and 32 points today – considered themselves more moderate than how either Cameron or the party were seen by the electorate as a whole. But Cameron was perceived (by all voters) as being quite close to this position, just six points away from Tory voters to their right; he is now seen as being 16 points to the right of Tory voters.

Voters now see Nick Clegg as having flipped to the right
Voters believe that Nick Clegg has flipped from the centre-left to the centre-right, moving 23 points to the right in voter perceptions since May 2010, beginning 13 per cent along the left scale and moving to 10 points right of centre.

This post-election rightwards shift in perceptions of Clegg is more than twice as big as that of Cameron, though Clegg is seen as much more centrist than Cameron having been perceived as somewhat left-of-centre, and considerably closer on left-right positioning to the median voter than either the Tory or Labour leader. (The opinion polls show that being closer to the median voter is not always everything in politics, as Kellner notes).

In May, the LibDems were seen as a centre-left party, 17% from the centre along the left-wing scale. Voters no longer think that this is the case. The Coalition has shifted perceptions of the party 18 points to the right, and they are now almost dead centre, 1 point to the right, as a party.

LibDem voters in May placed themselves 17 points to the left-of-centre – with five times as many voters placing themselves left as right. The smaller number who say they still intend to vote LibDem still place themselves 7 points left of centre, but this shift rellects the loss of many left-leaning LibDems, with the party now routinely polling at half of its May 2010 level.

Ed Miliband seen as to the left of his party, yet still closer to the median voter than Cameron
Ed Miliband is perceived as shifting his party some way leftwards. He is placed 45 points left of the centre, with his party at 39 points to the left, a shift of 12 points from 27

Labour voters place themselves 33 points to the left, having been 31 points left last May.

Voters placed Gordon Brown and his party 27 points to the left of centre last May.

It is interesting that polling consistently showed that the electorate thought Gordon Brown significantly more centrist than David Cameron, since you may have struggled to find many newspaper colunmists who knew this. (Next Left did note that Cameron was placed twice as far from the centre as Brown back in Autumn 2008, reporting a Populus survey of left-right perceptions).

Voters place Miliband 42 points left of where they, on average, place themselves, and Cameron 51 points to their right. Miliband is placed 12 points to the left of his own party’s supporters, and Cameron 16 points to the right of his.

What the Prospect piece doesn’t reveal is where different groups of voters place politicians.
For example, both Cameron and Milband’s ratings could well be driven by political opponents placing them further right/left respectively than their own supporters do.

The Ed Milband/Labour findings may create some grumblings inside his own party, though the findings reflect a lack of public knowledge of the Labour leader after his first few months.

Future perceptions of the Labour leader and his party, after four months, are likely to be considerably more malleable than those of David Cameron, who has had more than five years.

—-
A longer version of this piece is on Next Left

How do lefties prevent people like Boris getting a tax cut?

Sunder Katwala — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 18:35:04 +0000

The Daily Telegraph secured an interview in Davos with the newspaper’s own columnist Boris Johnson, who also works as the Mayor of London.

His political prescriptions are often rather vague. He wants the government to show a bit of Thatcher and Tebbit – taking on the unions – but rather more Heseltine too, in having a proper plan for growth.

But the headline is that Boris is again calling on George Osborne to set out a plan to cut taxes, in which he seems to be mainly thinking about the 50p rate on earnings over £150,000 for the top 1% of earners.

I understand about 50p tax politically but there has got to be a sense of where we are going and where we want to be as a country.

At least Johnson tacitly acknowledges that the 50p tax rate is widely seen as fair, especially at a time of fiscal pressures. This point is often missed by commentators whose idea of the “centre-ground” somehow can’t accomodate a policy which has strong majority support across every party, class and region in the country.

However, those who want to defend the principle of a higher rate at the very top should think harder about how to make the case against what is certain to be a sustained campaign to drop it.

Rather more could be done to make the popular fairness case for the policy in terms which most people intuitively understand.

For example, discussion of the “50p rate” seems to leave some people under the misconception that the highest earners are having half of their income taxed. Rather, more public emphasis should be placed on nobody paying the top rate on the first £12,500 that they earn each month.

Citing this monthly figure is probably more effective in capturing how far up the income scale this is, since numbers above 150,000 often just turn into telephone numbers for many people.

Besides, ditching the 50p rate entails defending the idea that a government which says it can’t afford to keep its promise to keep child benefit universal, removing it from households where anybody earns not much over £40,000, should prioritise a £2000 a month tax cut for Boris Johnson.

—
A longer version is at Next Left

Five similarities between Hillary Clinton and Ed Balls

Sunder Katwala — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 16:12:38 +0000

As Ed Balls takes up the key role of Shadow Chancellor for the Labour Opposition, in many ways the politician he most resembles is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Here are five parallels between the two.

1. Scenes from a political marriage: Both Balls and Clinton have faced the challenge of establishing their own political identities having first exercised influence as unelected players in a powerful political partnership. Hillary spent eight years in the White House as First Lady, while the Brown-Balls era from 1997 to 2004 was the closest thing to a political marriage the Treasury is likely to see.

2. Champions of the tribe: Both Clinton and Balls both have public reputations as polarising politicians, not afraid of political combat. Clinton controversially hit back at a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. Balls has been the Labour figure keenest to take on the Conservatives. On the major political clashes of the day – the ‘culture wars’ in the US; the deficit argument in Britain – they have been the figures most associated with their partisan position by both supporters and opponents. (Given Balls’ key role in shaping New Labour’s macroeconomic strategy, it is a relatively novel experience for him to be so vociferously championed by the party’s Keynesian left).

3. The incumbency disadvantage: Both Clinton and Balls were unsuccessful in their bids to lead their parties – in the 2008 Democratic primaries and the 2010 Labour leadership race – because of a perception of incumbency. That they were perceived to offer continuity rather than change, enabling internal opponents to mobilise new cohorts of activists and members in particular. (Though Balls was never the frontrunner, unlike Clinton, and so Ed Miliband campaign’s riff on a ‘movement versus the machine’ theme with younger party members was aimed primarily at framing David Miliband as the candidate of the party establishment).

4. The value of expertise: Balls and Clinton also share a reputation for experience and expertise. Clinton’s global profile and network has assisted her diplomacy as Secretary of State. Balls is acknowledged by friend and foe to be Labour’s most formidable economist (with even his sometime adversary Tony Blair paying tribute to Balls as “really able” in his memoir).

5. The team of rivals: Ed Miliband has, by both personal inclination and political circumstance, followed a similar “team of rivals” approach to that of Obama, (channelling Lincoln). The close leadership result saw Miliband place emphasis initially on the supporters of his brother.

However, the successful Obama-Clinton partnership in the current US administration would perhaps provide a closer analogy to a David Miliband-Ed Balls alliance than this one between the two Eds. There is something of a contradiction between those fretting about a repeat of Blair-Brown tensions between the two Eds and another group worrying about a so-called Brownite takeover. The first group worries that the two Eds won’t see eye-to-eye and the second group that they are too similar.

Indeed, a “team of rivals” approach to pluralism at Labour’s top table would be strengthened if Ed Miliband were to succeed in bringing both David Miliband and Jon Cruddas back to the political frontline as the next election looms.

—
A longer version is at Next Left

Ed Balls and the Tory trap

Sunder Katwala — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:50:18 +0000

Those Conservatives who are over-excited about Balls’ appointment for this reason risk luring themselves further into the trap of preaching only to the converted.

If their core problem in May 2010 was that running against Gordon Brown was not enough, it seems rather curious to hope that it might be their salvation in 2015.

Last May, three-quarters of the public wanted a change from Labour. Where the Conservatives failed was in making their own case.

As Tory pollster Andrew Cooper has pointed out, the failure to resolve the strategy or message always sent the party scurrying back to a “relentlessly negative” anti-Brown argument.

In 2011, never mind 2015, banging on about Gordon Brown and the last government is going to seem to many people like a very poor substitute for a missing strategy for economic growth.

Of course it will resonate with some people. It will be popular on the Tory blogs, among signed-up commentators and on the Tory constituency rubber chicken circuit.

It might appeal to the 30% of the electorate who are very happy with the government and its economic strategy.

But, to everybody else, it risks looking ever more evasive with every month and year that passes, with Ministers repeating the mantra on Question Time and Any Questions ever more likely to be heckled.

Ed Balls’ challenge as Shadow Chancellor will be to ensure that it is this government’s economic record which comes primarily under scrutiny, and not only that of its predecessor.

—-
A longer version is at Next Left

Labour’s huge Oldham victory in context

Sunder Katwala — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:23:06 +0000

Congratulations to Labour’s Debbie Abrahams who has won the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election with an increased majority in the party’s first by-election outing under Ed Miliband’s leadership.

The result is a disappointment for LibDem candidate Elwyn Watkins, following his successful court challenge to ex-Labour MP Phil Woolas.

Strikingly, Labour’s majority and vote share was higher than in the 1997 General Election. The Coalition parties saw their joint share fall from 58% to 44.7% (-13.3 on 2010). The swing from the joint LibDem and Conservative to Labour was 11.8%, which is similar to the current opinion poll standings.

This is the result for the major three parties (out of ten candidates).

Debbie Abrahams (Labour) 14718 42.1% (+10.2)
Elwyn Watkins (LibDem) 11160 31.9% (+0.3)
Kashif Ali (Conservative) 4481 12.8% (-13.6)

UKIP: 2029 (5.8%)
BNP 1560
Green 530
Monster Loony: 145
English Dems: 144
Pirate: 96
Bus Pass Elvis: 67

Labour majority: 3558
Turnout: 34930

Turnout at 48% in a by-election held in the first fortnight in January has been higher than most commentators anticipated.

The Liberal Democrats are taking consolation from holding their vote share up. But election expert John Curtice has cast doubt on the importance of this, given that it seems to have been achieved through the collapse of the Tory vote share. This, Curtice argues, is a weak indicator of how most LibDem MPs will perform against Conservative opposition.

Curtice has told the BBC “it is a night of quiet pleasure for Labour if not necessarily riotous celebration” and a worrying result for the Conservatives.

2010
Labour: 31.9
LibDem: 31.6
Tory: 26.4

Labour majority 103

The by-election majority is larger than the 1997 General Election result (despite the turnout then being 25 points higher).

1997
Labour: 41.7
LibDem: 35.4
Tory: 19.7

Labour majority 3389
Turnout 73.92%

2001
Labour: 38.6
LibDem: 32.6
Tory: 16.1

Labour majority 2726
Turnout 61.0%

2005
Labour: 41.4
LibDem: 33.2
Tory: 18.2

Labour majority 3590
Turnout 57.3%

The constituency was new in 1997 – and the results since can be found here.

Conservatives and the media are being left behind on public opinion

Sunder Katwala — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:05:06 +0000

An 8 point lead for the Labour Party in one opinion poll is just one poll, though the party has good reasons to be confident about its prospects not only in Oldham East and Saddleworth on Thursday, but also in national elections in Scotland and Wales as well major local elections in four months time.

But this may tell us something about how the government is turning voters off – and about how most media commentary has missed how they have done so for most of the last six months.

“There is no alternative” isn’t working – and it will now have diminishing returns with people who aren’t core supporters of the government.

A common argument among Coalition MPs, newspaper columnists who support the government, and right-of-centre bloggers is that all reasonable people know that the government’s spending cuts are necessary and unavoidable. So it is claimed that only small groups of refuseniks deny this obvious reality, which risks leaving Labour, the unions and other coalition-sceptics out of touch.

There isn’t a shred of public attitudes evidence for this.

Quite the opposite.

The government has spent six months always and only preaching to the converted. Its opponents have been much more persuasive with both don’t knows, and with a large number of those who were ready to give the government a hearing and a chance in May.

So opinion has moved steadily against the government, though the cuts have yet to bite in most cases, and the Labour leadership is still in the early stages of setting out an alternative argument.

Government approval tonight is -20 with 33% approval and 53% disapproval, having fallen pretty sharply in the last few weeks of last year. So it is somewhere short of the (inadequate) Tory share in May 2010, still less even the reduced vote of the Coalition parties.

They are now miles behind on whether the cuts are fair. Having been miles ahead on whether cuts to reduce the deficit was good for the economy last June, they are now trying and perhaps struggling to hand on to parity.

“Blame it all on the mess we inherited from Labour” got the Coalition a pretty good run for most of a year. Its increasingly a turn-off. As we get into 2011, expect to hear more heckling and booing when it is used on Question Time, as happened late last year to Liam Fox.

Listen to Osborne, Cameron or Clegg on the TV or radio. You are going to believe it if you already believe it. If you’re not sure, the absolutist certainty seems ever more likely to put voters off.

We have to embrace our differences when opposing cuts

Sunder Katwala — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:46:22 +0000

Saturday’s first netrootsuk conference was an interesting attempt to bring people together to discuss the links between online and offline campaigning.

My central point was about the limits of marching-in-step unity give the scale of the diverse and plural coalition we will need. The event brought together hundreds of people, representing organisations and networks with the ability to mobilise many tens of thousands.
[links to round-up of coverage below]

I argued that we should be confident about our ability to persuade the public – based on our success in winning the fairness argument over the last six months, as I set out at Left Foot Forward yesterday. It is the “there is no alternative” argument which was increasingly preaching only to the already converted.

We are never going to agree about everything – and have to make that a strength for a broad coalition whose job is to persuade 15 or 20 million people that these cuts aren’t inevitable or fair. There is a shared project. False Economy articulate the common ground succinctly:

False Economy is for everyone who thinks the coalition is cutting too much, too fast and wants to do something about it.

How we handle inevitable disagreements within that will be one essential test of whether the movement can be a sustained and successful one. My point was along the lines of: “If you want to oppose the closure of your local library, you don’t have to produce and cost an alternative Comprehensive Spending Review, while its different if you are the Shadow Chancellor: people will expect at least the broad brush strokes of your an alternative budget”.

There are three broad points to make on this:

1. We come to these issues because we are motivated by different things. Some people want to stop their local library closing; a small number of people still hope all of this will somehow lead to the revolution. More of us will want to elect a Labour government; build up the Green party, or perhaps try to shift the LibDems towards the kind of party that many of their voters thought that they were.

2. So we are going to disagree – sometimes over really quite big questions.
Some people will think stopping half of the cuts would represent tens of billions of pounds of real change in people’s lives. Others would think that would leave tens of billions of further cuts which should be stopped too. That’s going to be an important policy argument.

For me, the biggest test of our ability to find common ground and then disagree with respect within a broad campaigning coalition is that we agree that we share responsibility for shifting public opinion against the government on the question of whether its cuts are both necessary and fair.

3. We’re not going to do is create a unified leadership that agree on everything. So I think it would be a mistake to think that it is somehow a failure on the part of Ed Miliband, Caroline Lucas, Polly Toynbee, the unions or anybody else if they haven’t somehow articulated the alternative plan for a fairer, greener economy and society which can bring everybody who opposes the government’s cuts on board.

The argument “we must have complete unity – and we will get there on the basis of everybody agreeing with me” will be futile, whether it is made by Alan Johnson, Brendan Barber, Caroline Lucas, Sunder Katwala, Laurie Penny or indeed SWP-style perspectives, perhaps captured by the passionately anti-Labour speaker from the floor, who lambasted Labour as a complete sell-out over Iraq and everything else, before saying “Of course, we want Left Unity but it will have to be about Labour coming to us”.

There is not going to be a central coordinating committee where UK Uncut, the trade unions, Age UK, Greenpeace, the Green Party or the Labour frontbench get to agree or veto the advocacy of other groups.

Obviously, my argument entails that it is entirely legitimate for everybody else to advocate entirely different strategies to both shifting public arguments and producing radical alternatives.

But I am going to (respectfully) disagree with campaign tactics or policy arguments which seem to me likely to make winning those public arguments more difficult, and I will try to reserve head-on and vocal challenges only those contributions made in a language of “betrayal”, especially where these seem designed to close down the space to build alternatives, and to persuade people to choose them.

However, disagreement with respect is going to work better where we can disagree on the basis of what people are actually arguing, rather than to caricature or misrepresent arguments, even if this facilitates Penny’s further (and entertainingly) polemical claim by Laurie Penny on Twitter that:

We’re listening politely whilst appointed arbiters of the centre-left mow the grassroots into a neat, acceptable bourgeois lawn

Not my project – though I will admit to being enormously sceptical about “bourgeois” as a rhetorical tool of political persuasion. Beyond its hoary, coalition-narrowing desire to brand all non-prole participation as illegitimate, there is some considerable dissonance in that being deployed by somebody who so identifiably represents an emerging strand of the Staggers’ proud – mainly middle-class – radical traditions.

The middle-class left have historically been one significant strand of many effective campaigns – from anti-slavery and votes for women to the creation of the NHS and the welfare state, the abolition of the death penalty, liberal equalities campaigning on feminism, apartheid and gay rights. Can anybody identify any major social change from the French Revolution onwards which did not depend on a cross-class coalition of support?)

Still, whereever the unruly, unmowed grassroots can successfully shift attitudes and appetites for greater equality, let a thousand flowers bloom, and no doubt one or two weeds too.

—–
A longer post is at Next Left

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Speeches from the event
Nigel Stanley challenges for campaigners.
Sunder Katwala on how the government lost the fairness argument at LFF.
Clifford Singer on potential alliance with angry middle of the Daily Mail.
Luke Bozier has posted his netroots presentation on engaging locally online
Jessica Riches on organising the UCL occupation.

Bloggers coverage
The Guardian’s Matthew Taylor blogged across the day
OurKingdom’s preview from Niki Seth-Smith on how far online activism has come.
Shamik Das sums up the opening session – and which arguments we’re winning.
Duncan Robinson says the central theme was hacktivists of the world unite
Useful summary from Nick Anstead on both speakers and audience debate.
Nick Anstead on engaging with politicians online
Jon Worth say we could learn more from netroots Sweden than the US.
Mark Pack talks about how to do that.
Gethyn Williams has a delegate’s report and lots of handy netroots links and resources too.
Caroline Crampton found delegates wanted more practical advice and less commentary.
LFF on how freedom of information can help anti-cuts campaigns.
Raven reports for London Masala and Chips
John’s Labour blog has a quick post, with a promise of more today.
Will Straw on the growth and future challenges of the netroots movement.

Carl Packman has a report from Netroots
At Third Estate, Owen also has brief thoughts
Richard Murphy From Tax Research also writes about Netroots.
Gary Banham did not appreciate the Labour speakers.
Sam Smith thinks the networking was the best part.
Michael at Red Pepper thinks a new front is opening up in a broader social struggle.

Reuters reports on Brendan Barber’s opening contribution on building new alliances

George Osborne talked tough on bankers but didn’t deliver

Sunder Katwala — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 09:10:56 +0000

Not long ago, our Chancellor George Osborne was talking tough on the banks that caused the financial crisis.

When it comes to the Government and the banks, surely the public are entitled to ask why the Government talk tough and make promises, but then fail to deliver. As we wait to see bonus payments over the coming months, we will remember the Prime Minister’s promise that the era of the big bonus is over.

Osborne will naturally expect his comments to be remembered now that, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he can do something about it.

If he talks tough, surely he can deliver now?

We also had assurances last month from Nick Clegg that he won’t stand idly by if banks pay out billions in bonuses, as though little or nothing had changed.

The banks should not be under any illusion, this Government cannot stand idly by.”It is wholly untenable to have millions of people making sacrifices in their living standards, only to see the banks getting away scot-free.”

But that was then.

The BBC’s Robert Peston has the latest:

The government has become reconciled to British-based banks paying out bonuses running to many billions of pounds in the forthcoming bonus round.

After weeks of talks between ministers and senior bankers, the best that ministers are hoping for from the banks is a statement from them – possibly at the end of next week – that they will pay out less than they would otherwise have done.“They are looking for some words from us that prove that the negotiations have achieved something,” said a senior banker. “I fear however that there may be more spin than substance to what we say.”

Is “Government seeks spin not substance over bank bonus billions, say bankers” the headline George Osborne was looking for? Osborne may have a good claim to the accolode.

He, rather curiously, had been trying to water down disclosure regulations he claimed were too weak. He’s introduced what he says is a pretty tough bank levy.

Strange, then, that the Wall Street Journal reported under the headline UK Levy Not Taxing for banks that the bankers could “count themselves lucky” to get away so lightly, with one senior banker telling the paper that anything under £5 billion was a “rounding error”.

—
cross-posted from Next Left

Clegg could make education fairer by taxing private school fees

Sunder Katwala — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:47:10 +0000

The ‘pupil premium’ is a good idea about to be sacrificed on the altar of austerity.

The Government has failed to keep the promise in the Coalition Agreement that this pledge – intended to spend more money on disadvantaged pupils – would be funded “from outside the schools budget”. Instead, the Education Secretary Michael Gove has acknowledged that the ‘premium’ will be funded by redistributing money within a shrinking schools budget, which means that most schools will see their funding cut.

Ministers face an unenviable choice: do they risk a backlash from most parents, unhappy at seeing less money spent on their children, or do they let down the worst-off children, whom they pledged to help?

But there is a fair way to keep the promise of new money, without cutting funding for most schools. A real pupil premium could be funded by putting VAT on private school fees, and dedicating the resources to an educational mobility fund.

It could raise £1.5 billion per year for the pupil premium – and would also help to stop the funding gap between state and private schools widening sharply, and setting social mobility back.

A research study ‘Level Playing Field’, published by the CfBT Education Trust, found state spending per pupil had been 50% of private spending in 1997, rising to 58% by 2009/10. In real terms, what state schools were spending per pupil by 2010 had caught up with what private schools had been spending in 1997, though of course the private schools had by then raced further ahead.

Maintaining this ’12 year time-lag’ required state school spending increases in real terms of 3 per cent per year, if the gap was to neither widen nor narrow. But now we know that state school funding will fall in real terms and the spending gap will widen.

The fairness case for levying VAT on private school fees is this: whenever £10,000 is spent on private school fees, £2000 would go towards narrowing the gaps in opportunity and mobility. Every parent paying £30,000 per year at Eton would be contributing £6000 to the pupil premium, still leaving a hefty £24,000 to be spent on the best schooling that money can buy.

It is unlikely private schools would raise their fees by 20%, as the market would not sustain that. Say increases were kept to between 5 and 10 per cent instead, the shortfall would be made up by private schools spending less per pupil. The move would therefore provide a one-off narrowing of the spending gap, which is otherwise about to accelerate sharply, and constrain the chances of a runaway widening of the gap over time.

A forgotten secret is that New Labour seriously considered levying VAT on private education in 1997, with David Blunkett strongly in favour, as Alastair Campbell’s diaries recount. The case is considerably stronger now given fiscal constraints.

This policy proposal is almost certainly too radical for every party.

Yet if we take seriously Clegg’s anger about the hoarding of chances for the pupils of Eton and Westminster, and Cameron’s commitment to every child sharing the chances he had, then they must yearn to be more radical.

—-
This is an extract from the Fabian Review this quarter. The full essay is on the Fabians site

Is Labour still unclear on what needs to change?

Sunder Katwala — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 13:30:56 +0000

Party leaders will never be in want of unsolicited advice. Ed Miliband rightly argues that a party which polled just 29% of the vote after 13 years in office should open everything to scrutiny, and begin a policy review from a “blank page”.

In rewriting the script, he should welcome more open debate, and disagreement too, wherever that is constructive. The leader must persuade his party to embark on a journey of change.

The initial contours of his thinking make strategic sense but require public animation: the need to regain economic credibility, while developing a post-crash political economy; drawing on Labour’s own mutualist traditions to develop a less statist agenda, while defending the necessary role of government from reckless retreat; a party which is secure about its own mission of a fairer and more equal society, and so is able to operate more conifdently in a more plural political environment.

There is no off-the-peg model of party leadership for Miliband to emulate which fits Labour’s challenge today.

Tony Blair, from 1994 and 1997, was the most successful post-war opposition leader. Miliband can learn much from how the early Blair made a resonant public case that Britain was too divided and fractured.

But much heavy lifting had already been done for Blair before 1994, as the Kinnock policy review ditched the 1983 platform; John Smith’s OMOV victory, which was a bigger risk than replacing clause four, and the emergence of a new generation of Labour women.

After four successive defeats in 1992, much Labour opinion shared an analysis of the barriers to electability. In 2010, after three victories and a heavy loss, there is not yet any shared analysis of what needs to change.

Ed Miliband’s position rather more resembles that Margaret Thatcher on becoming Tory leader in February 1975, inheriting a Shadow Cabinet which had overwhelmingly supported Ted Heath. She did not define Thatcherism in 100 days: her most important public engagement in her first months was to campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum which kept Britain in Europe.

Thatcherism took shape much later, especially after the 1981 purge of the “wets” from the Cabinet. Ed Miliband’s instinctively more collegiate approach to leadership should be welcomed by a party disfigured by factional conflict.

David Cameron’s party leadership offers Miliband as many lessons in failure as in success. Cameron’s bold first hundred days, which focused on photo opportunities designed to change the Tory brand, helped to get his party a hearing. Four years later, the public remained unclear as to what the Tory leader had anything to say.

74% of voters in 2010 agreed it was time for a change of government, yet only 34% thought Cameron had made his case for change. In circumstances more favourable to the opposition than 1997, Cameron won only 3% more than Michael Howard had in 2005. He squeezed into Downing Street by default.

Tory commentators who say that the next election is in the bag for Cameron have never explained how he failed to win the last one. The Tory leader was kept awake by the strength of focus group findings that the Tories, in a crisis, would stick up for the rich. For all of the coalition sunshine of May, has the government’s austerity agenda done more to challenge that perception or to reinforce it?

So there is all to play for in 2011.

Labour begins the year slightly ahead in the polls, with one-third of LibDem voters having switched in six months. Labour’s challenge – to construct an alternative and persuade people to choose it – remains great. It is not a challenge for the party leader alone.

—
Editorial from the new Fabian Review, published January 5th. It also previews the Fabian New Year conference on Saturday 15th Jan. Illustration copyright of Adrian Teal.

More Libdems say Tory policies are a mess

Sunder Katwala — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 08:45:41 +0000

The Telegraph has more revelations today of what LibDem ministers really think of the Coalition.

Ed Davey warns that the government’s changes to housing benefit would “put people below the breadline”, something which he calls “deeply unacceptable”.

Nobody could seriously claim that it isn’t true that the HB changes will increase adult and child poverty – the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates the housing benefit changes will increase child poverty by 100,000. Moreover, while the government claims its policies will lead to no net increase in child poverty, the IFS finds that “the discrepancy is entirely accounted for by the fact that IFS researchers have considered the impact of the government’s planned reforms to Local Housing Allowance on poverty rates, whereas the Treasury did not”.

It is good that Davey thinks that some of the changes are “unsupportable”.

He particularly singles out the arbitrary, top down, one-size-fits-all 10 per cent reduction in housing benefit after 12 months.

There are five changes to housing benefit and there are two I find unsupportable.

One which would come in in 2012-13 is where if you were unemployed for 12 months and you were still passing the government test which is actively seeking work to get jobseekers’ allowance, which is £80 a week, something like that, so you can eat, you have to show you are looking for work. So imagine somebody who has been unemployed for 12 months, you are passing the actively seeking work test, the government is saying your housing benefit will be cut by 10 per cent just because you have been unemployed for 12 months.

I don’t understand why. You are on the breadline, you’ve been trying to look for work, you’ve been passing all the government tests [about actively seeking work], and suddenly you’re going to have your rent, which is your highest cost, your help with that, taken down by 10 per cent. No logic behind that whatsoever … So the system doesn’t work but I don’t think you kick people when they are down.

Davey should be congratulated for his clarity and effective critique of government policy.

We identified back in June this arbitrary and illogical measure – which saves only £100 million – as a natural issue on which Simon Hughes and LibDem backbenchers should press for change, with Labour and civic non-partisan support.

Scottish Secretary Michael Moore says the child benefit cut was “blatantly not a fair or consistent thing to do”.

Again, it is difficult to disagree with that.

Welfare minister Steve Webb wrote to the Chancellor to complain because “the details aren’t right”. Indeed. The policy is a complete mess – for at least 10 reasons. The much under-discussed 100-300% marginal tax rate problem is one reason why it is difficult to see it being implemented.

The Telegraph report confirms that a number of LibDem government ministers knew nothing about the child benefit change before it was announced – demonstrating the back of the envelope nature of the botched announcement – but it was already pretty clear that the Tory Home Secretary didn’t know much in advance either.

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A longer version is at Next Left

Blast from the past: when Michael Gove wanted to restrict and privatise education

Sunder Katwala — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:45:42 +0000

Will the government’s fees hike put off poorer potential students? Many people have worried about that. But what about those who rather hope the fees hike will put potential students off?

Such as the current Education Secretary Michael Gove, if we are to judge by his views for the Times before entering Parliament back in 2003 – arguing that £21,000 or more in fees is “a bargain”, that anybody who is deterred is simply too stupid to go to a top university, and that the only vision for Britain’s universities he believes in is to privatise them.

The Government is about to introduce a new test for those considering a university career. The central question will be punishingly direct. Do you want to run up a debt of £21,000 in order to go to the best British universities?

Some people will, apparently, be put off applying to our elite institutions by the prospect of taking on a debt of this size. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is all to the good.

The first point that needs to be made about the so-called deterrent effect of a £21,000 loan is that anyone put off from attending a good university by fear of that debt doesn’t deserve to be at any university in the first place. Incurring such a relatively small debt to pay for the huge economic benefit conferred by proper higher education is a fantastic deal.

Over a lifetime, the direct financial benefit in higher earnings is around £400,000. Those who attend our best universities can expect to earn even more. Borrowing £21,000, at preferential rates, to secure twenty times that sum, is an offer you’d have to be a fool to turn down. And if you’re such a fool that you don’t want to accept that deal, then you’re too big a fool to benefit from the university education I’m currently subsidising for you.

If Mr Gove’s government gets its way, the State and taxpayers will not be paying anything towards the tuition costs of most undergraduates’ tuition at all. Which gets us much closer to the Gove idea of a university, according to the op-ed.

First-rate universities with superb research facilities do bring benefits to the nation, economic and cultural. But the only way Britain can match America in boosting such institutions is by freeing them from the State, allowing them to charge reasonable fees and giving academics the autonomy professionals deserve; in a word, by privatisation.

That has the ring of serious and heartfelt sincerity.

But will the Education Secretary try to say he was just trying to entertain and shock his readers – and the piece does not in any way reflect what he has ever really thought, still less what he still secretly thinks now?

Or might his Times piece have just, in fact, revealed how at least some members of our government think about access to university?