Election 2010

New Politics: The Prime Minister Speaks

2010-06-07T01:40:00.000-07:00

“Britain can do better. Britain can be better than this.

…

Building the greatness of our nation through the greatness of its people.

No more squandering the nation’s assets.

No more sleaze ..

No more lies.

No more broken promises.”

(Tony Blair, 1997)

Prof Chris Pierson

Same candidate elected, in two different constituencies, for two different parties

2010-05-28T05:51:00.000-07:00

The parliamentary constituencies of Feverford in Kent and Trough in Hertfordshire are not especially well known. But linking these two seats - one Conservative, one Labour - is one astonishing fact, somehow missed in all the acres of coverage about the election. They are represented, with the aid of a false beard, by the same person.
In fact, the election of James Stewart-Blundel (the Conservative) and Jim Blundel (Labour) occurred over 50 years ago and is (of course) a work of fiction. This most strange of political coalitions, two parties embodied in the same person, is contained in the 1953 novel Gentian Violet by Edward Hyams, best read as a commentary on the stifling atmosphere of 1950s consensus politics. For more on political fiction, including toilets and killer robots, try this article, in the latest edition of Total Politics.

Professor Philip Cowley

Why we need a stronger Electoral Commission

2010-05-24T04:34:00.000-07:00

The election may be over – Thirsk and Malton notwithstanding – but the fall out from the polling station queues continues. The Electoral Commission’s Interim Report came out last week. It makes for fascinating – and at times, revealing – reading.
Problems occurred at 27 polling stations, across 16 constituencies. The Commission estimate that they involved at least 1,200 people. As a proportion of the 40,000 polling stations in action during the day (or the 29.6 million people who voted), they are a tiny proportion, but some of the administrative cock-ups found are pretty dire.

Most of the headlines have gone to the Report’s recommendation that the law should be changed to allow people to vote as long as they were in the queue by the time the poll closed. This is, relatively speaking, the easy bit to fix – although it poses some interesting questions about whether exit polls will be allowed to be published when people could still be queuing (a question, curiously, which the Report doesn’t address).

But fixing the problem with the queues is dealing with symptom, not the cause. It’s when you look at the cause of the problem – why the queues occurred in the first place – that you get some of the more interesting findings. As previously pointed out here, there’s no excuse caused by any ‘surge’ in turnout, because there was no surge – turnout was lower than at any election between 1922 and 1997. Instead, as the Report shows, some of the planning by (Acting) Returning Officers was quite astonishingly incompetent. As the Commission noted, ‘the common factors were inadequate planning processes and systems – in particular unrealistic, inappropriate or unreliable assumptions; and inadequate risk management and contingency planning (p.25). Some (A)ROs ignored guidelines about the correct ratio of population to polling stations.

In one of the worst cases, in Sheffield, the St John’s Ranmoor polling station had some 4,469 electors (excluding postal voters); the Electoral Commission recommends 2,500 as a maximum. Others didn’t allow anywhere near enough staff –allocating just one Presiding Officer and Poll Clerk to each polling station regardless of the size of the population being serviced (again, despite the Commission’s advice being that the more densely populated need more staff).

Most jaw-droppingly of all, some councils – the Electoral Commission spares their blushes by not naming them – based their assumptions of turnout on the levels seen in ‘local government elections since 2006’. This is just Grade A Incompetence. Whoever was responsible should never be allowed near an election – of any sort – ever again.

The Commission had reminded councils that parliamentary elections see higher levels of turnout than do local elections, although, frankly, anyone who needs reminding of this is too stupid to be allowed to run a party in a brewery, yet alone an election. The Commission’s report dryly notes that ‘plans were not always based on robust, reasonable assumptions about the possible levels of turnout’ (p. 27). That’s putting it mildly.

The Electoral Commission can rightly argue that it both advised of the correct procedures and indeed that it proposed a change in the law, to allow late-voters, back in 2004. The trouble is that the Electoral Commission always reminds me of that quote of Baldwin’s about the press: ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the age’.

Except the Electoral Commission suffers from the opposite problem: responsibility without power. It’s more a eunuch than a harlot. It can advise, as it did, but it has no power to enforce, and (A)ROs can simply ignore it, as some of them clearly did. Yet when things go wrong – as here – it is the Chair of the Commission, Jenny Watson, who gets hauled round the TV studios, to be shouted at. The answer – contrary to all those who called for her head, or (even worse) for the Commission to be scrapped – lies in a stronger Electoral Commission, one with the power to enforce its advice, and to take direct control of electoral administration in councils which are too incompetent to deliver the basics required by a modern democracy.

Professor Philip Cowley

The next Great Reform Act? Pull the other one, Nick.

2010-05-20T04:27:00.000-07:00

Nick Clegg has called the new government’s measures to reform politics ‘the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great reforms of the 19th Century’, indeed since the Great Reform Act of 1832.

"...for someone who says he has embraced a new way of doing politics Clegg’s grand rhetoric bears all the hallmarks of the spin and over-selling which the previous Labour administration was said to be guilty of..."

The parallels with 1832 are a bit unfortunate. For many who passed the Reform Act gave middle class men the vote so that working class men need not be enfranchised. It brought in new groups of property owners into a system that remained otherwise unreformed. If it was the first step towards one-person-one-vote it was a journey that took over a hundred years to complete, one that at every stage was bitterly contested.

Many will welcome most of Clegg’s proposals. The repeal of various measures said to infringe liberty – and the rejection of ID cards – will raise a cheer, for now. These are however second order issues – for by invoking 1832 Clegg implies that his reforms will do more than alter existing laws but will actually redistribute power, from Westminster politicians to the people.

While his speech was called the ‘New Politics’ his actual programme builds on the incremental reforms started by New Labour. It is disingenuous of him to not accept this. The record of the last government was certainly mixed but it does include the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the creation of the London Assembly.

Labour also gave the Commons more powers over the executive. Moreover had Gordon Brown been re-elected he would have introduced the final stage of Lords reform and held a referendum on the Alterative Vote, significant elements in Clegg’s own programme.

The extent to which AV – surely meant to be the jewel in the crown of these proposals - marks any real shift in power is highly debatable. Clegg’s embrace of AV mark a significant step back for most advocates of electoral reform: quite how it will alters the people’s relationship with their elected representative is open to question. What has happened to the LibDem’s long-standing commitment to more radical electoral change?

Some might think that the real novelty in what amounts to a mixed bag of incremental reforms is that the leadership of the Conservative party supports them. For a party that opposed devolution and Lords reform surely this marks a real change of attitude? Maybe. But the Conservatives have embraced reform when they felt it could not be resisted or might exploited for party advantage. Hence the 1867 Reform Act that gave votes to skilled working men and the 1928 Reform Act that gave votes to women on the same basis as men.

So, Clegg has not unveiled a new Great Reform Act. Moreover, for someone who says he has embraced a new way of doing politics Clegg’s grand rhetoric bears all the hallmarks of the spin and over-selling which the previous Labour administration was said to be guilty of – by its Conservative and LibDem opponents.

Professor Steven Fielding

The new Baldwin?

2010-05-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

"I for one think that the past is as much of a guide to the future as our current neophilia. On that basis, LibDems beware!"

Few Liberal Democrats have put their coalition with the Conservatives into historical perspective. This is partly due to all politicians’ intoxication with the supposed novelty of any situation these days, something they share with most of their fellow citizens. How many times did Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg assert their embrace of a ‘new politics’?

There might also be another reason. For as Charles Kennedy, one of the leading opponents of the deal has pointed out, the precedents are, for the LibDems, pretty bad.

When the Liberals split over Home Rule in 1886 the Liberal Unionists were soon assimilated within Conservative ranks, helping to ensure that the latter’s grip on power lasted until 1906. Liberal Unionists however continued to pretend – to themselves as much as anybody else - to be members of a separate organisation until they formally gave up the ghost in 1912.

The formation of the National Government in 1931 provoked another split in Liberal ranks with the resulting Liberal National Party helping the Conservatives retain office for the rest of the 1930s. After 1945 however the party’s significance declined to being little more than an annex of Conservatism, and it died an unlamented death in 1968.

Of course the present coalition does not follow nor does it look like precipitating a split within LibDem ranks. Even Kennedy has not yet proposed forming a splinter group. It is however early days.

But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the beneficiary of these coalitions has always been the senior partner, then as now, the Conservatives.

Within the First Past The Post system both Labour and the Conservatives have long tried to annex the Liberal vote – rather than the Liberal party – to clear their path to a Commons majority. Until Margaret Thatcher, the overlap between Liberals and Conservatives was however always the greater.

The SDP-Liberal merger also changed the nature of the centre party, making it more inclined to collectivist solutions. From the late 1980s the notion of a ‘progressive coalition’ of Lib-Lab forces became much more potent, an idea successfully mined by Tony Blair.

The current coalition, then, marks the return to an established pattern – much to the discomfort of those LibDems, like Kennedy but also Simon Hughes, schooled in 1980s politics. In contrast, Nick Clegg – whether he was or was not a Conservative at Cambridge – was a member of the Orange Book group that in 2004 stressed the importance of the free market to liberalism.

This was meant as a criticism of Kennedy’s leadership, which saw the LibDems stand to the left of New Labour on many issues. The group was however also concerned that under David Cameron a ‘decontaminated’ Conservative party would reclaim voters lost in the 1980s. Stressing the market (along with getting rid of Kennedy) was their way of protecting the party from that possibility. Ideologically therefore the LidDems have never been closer to the Conservatives: it wasn’t just Commons arithmetic that prepared the ground for this coalition.

But what of the Conservatives? As soon as he became leader David Cameron described himself as a ‘liberal Conservative’ and called on LibDem voters and MPs to join his party. Cameron’s often reiterated description of himself as a ‘progressive Conservative’ was however aimed at voters more than leaders – he wanted to form his own government not to create a coalition.

The ease with which Cameron embraced the prospect of coalition after the election suggests he saw the strategic possibilities inherent to it, showing a grasp the wily Stanley Baldwin would have appreciated. Few will now remember Baldwin and even the experts that do rank him as a mediocre Prime Minister.

Baldwin it was however who in the interwar decades encouraged many Liberal voters and leaders to become comfortable with voting, joining or collaborating with his Conservative party. While this infuriated many of Baldwin’s back benchers who cavilled at his moderation it was the basis for a strategy which succeeded in keeping Labour on the political margins.

Is the coalition a ‘new politics’? Have the tribal instincts of the Conservatives and LibDems been put aside in favour of the ‘national interest’ and a novel pluralistic political leadership? Believe that if you want to. I for one think that the past is as much of a guide to the future as our current neophilia. On that basis, LibDems beware!

Professor Steven Fielding

And the election should be called....

2010-05-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

"The election battle will be succeeded by the battle of the election books..."

Philip Cowley has asked us what we would call the last election? I think we should name it the Don’t Know Election.

Ipsos MORI have just produced an overview of the election. One of the most staggering findings is the extent to which prior to the campaign people did not know which party had the best policies. Some of this is understandable: generally people were more likely to not have an opinion if they thought an issue unimportant.

Even so, giving the rankings of importance in brackets, it is still striking how little people knew about the parties’ policies: 58 per cent on climate change (12th); 46 per cent on immigration (4th) as well as defence (16th); 40 per cent on benefits (8th); 37 per cent on crime (7th) as well as unemployment (6th); 36 per cent on the economy (1st); and 34 per cent on health (2nd).

Of course some of the blame should be attached to the parties – they were obviously not communicating well (and on immigration that might have been deliberate) but I suspect a lot of people were not listening.

Widespread ignorance of the issues is nothing new. In that by-gone and probably mythical age when people were said to vote on class grounds they did not decide which party to support on policy grounds but out of inbred loyalty. This meant that sometimes solid Labour voters were unknowing Conservatives and vice versa.

Now the short cut people use is their assessment of the party leader – which is why the leaders’ debates was such a significant innovation, and played such a crucial role in the campaign. It is personality as much as policy that now influences people – another finding from the Ipsos MORI overview – if only because it’s easier to make those kind of judgements.

However, that’s just one view. Others will emerge over the coming months as academics come to terms with the campaign, its very peculiar course and idiosyncratic outcome. The election battle will be succeeded by the battle of the election books.

Philip Cowley is associated with one, the so-called Nuffield study (even if neither of the authors is now based at Nuffield). I am associated with another, a bit of a latecomer into the field, as while Nuffield is a series that goes back to 1945 the Geddes and Tonge series started in 1997 (although that now does seem a long way away).

Those contributing to this book – to be published in Parliamentary Affairs in October and by Oxford University Press as a book soon after - will be gathering to discuss the election at a workshop hosted by the Centre for British Politics at Nottingham on June 4th. Some of the leading experts in the field will be there. If you would like to attend more details are available.

Like voting, it’s free.

Professor Steven Fielding

How bad was the election...really?

2010-05-18T04:36:00.000-07:00

"There is a saying in the Philippines that no one loses in elections, there are only winners and those that are cheated. Arguably the cheating has simply entered the digital age..."

How much effort did you put into voting? Did you even vote? Perhaps you strolled down to your polling station in your lunch hour, marked your X and left. It is unlikely you were too inconvenienced. In this respect at least UK democracy does not demand too much of us.

On 10 May this year, four days after the UK elections, the Philippines held their presidential elections. For the first time an automated system was used that aimed to speed up the election process (it had taken six weeks to announce Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as the winning Presidential candidate in 2004) and limit corruption and cheating in the voting process.

Filipinos were required to mark not one X but over 170 as they voted for a range of national government and local mayoral seats. As a member of the International People’s Observer Mission (in the Philippines, a broad based non-partisan group of 87 foreigners and Filipino hosts, I had a bird’s eye view of the election process on the ground.

Would you have waited up to 8 hours in temperatures averaging 37 degrees to vote? Would you have queued in the direct sun? That this is what many Filipinos did.

The new automated system was not fit for the purpose in terms of volume of voters, up to 1000 per PCOs (precinct count optical scan) machine, and the whole system backed up. In some voting precincts (schools) voters were waiting until midnight to vote, despite the fact that voting was meant to finish at 6.00pm. The 6.00pm sunset timing is important, as it is much easier to buy votes, harass people and generally wage a campaign of dirty tricks after dark.

Can you imagine sauntering down to your polling station and finding yourself in the middle of a shoot out? That is exactly what happened to the election monitors in Lanao del Sur in Mindanao. Would you ‘vote through the window’ if the price was right? That is, pick up your ballot paper, hand it out of the polling station window for someone else to fill in as they saw fit and then submit your votes?

One man we saw was in tears because of this, caught between hunger and integrity, he sold his vote. He said he felt ‘cursed’. However the long queues and the resolution to wait out the intolerable conditions are testament to the Filipinos commitment to the democratic process and civic duty.

Smartmatic, the company, who makes the PCOs machines issued full page self-congratulatory advertisements in the national press post election. They ignored the brown outs, papers jams, queues and technical failures that marred the election process. Smartmatic, was actually not so smart.

Meanwhile despite the seeming landslide presidential victory of Noynoy Aquino (son of martyr father Ninoy whose assassination in 1983 heralded the eventual ousting of dictator Marcos and revered President mother Cory), various interest groups are now preparing to contest the election results on the based of electronic cheating or what is now being called ‘Hocus PCOs’.

There is a saying in the Philippines that no one loses in elections, there are only winners and those that are cheated. Arguably the cheating has simply entered the digital age. This story is set to run and run.

Dr Pauline Eadie

But what would you call it?

2010-05-17T04:15:00.000-07:00

"...if you were going to name the 2010 election, what would you call it?"

The opening book in the ‘Nuffield’ election series – The British General Election of 1945 – lists a series of ‘named’ elections: 1874, when the Liberals went down in a flood of gin and beer; the Midlothian election of 1880; the Khaki election of 1900; the Chinese Slavery election of 1906; the People's Budget election of 1910; the 'Hang the Kaiser' election of 1918; and the 1924 ‘Zinovieff letter’ election.
It’s noticeable that since then, it’s difficult to think of similarly ‘named’ elections. February 1974 is sometimes called the Who Governs Britain? election, but that’s about it.

Why is this? Re-reading the 1945 study (whilst preparing the 2010 study), I was struck by the fact that even then, the study’s authors, R. B. McCallum and Alison Readman, were sceptical that in reality these issues had ever been so dominant. They point out that in 1945, the key issue of the election was housing – yet no one will know it as the housing election.

My theory (and that’s all it is) is that the reason we don’t name elections in the way we used to is largely because we now know so much more about what how the public vote, what drives them (or not), and we know that their motivations are usually so mixed, and complex, if not often contradictory, that it’s ludicrous to think that any one thing decides an election.

Take 2005, for example. That could easily be labelled as the ‘Iraq election’, given the extent to which national debate focussed on the consequences (and justifications) of the 2003 war. But we know that for voters Iraq came relatively low down the list of concerns.

Similarly, this one could have been called the ‘Expenses Election’, although again we know that expenses was relatively low on voters concerns, and – a handful of seats aside – it’s difficult to see much evidence that expenses mattered. Even with the 1983 contest, which could easily be known as the ‘Falklands Election’, there is plenty of good evidence which argues that the Falklands war was much less significant than people think.

But if you were going to name the 2010 election, what would you call it?

Professor Philip Cowley

Forget the 55% rule. This is what will really limit Parliament

2010-05-16T03:48:00.000-07:00

"...the routine defeats of the government by the upper House, and the subsequent negotiation and compromise between the two – could still be seriously limited..."

Leave aside for now the fuss about the 55% rule and its impact on parliament. For all the talk about preventing votes of no confidence from dissolving parliament, defeats on votes of confidence are already extremely rare. The truth is that most votes of confidence are dull affairs, in which all the MPs of each party simply rally to the flag, and the government survives.
There are two other aspects of the coalition agreement that will have much more impact on Parliament. The first is that the ‘Wright Committee’ recommendations will be implemented. As the coalition agreement notes:

The parties will bring forward the proposals of the Wright Committee for reform to the House of Commons in full – starting with the proposed committee for management of programmed business and including government business within its scope by the third year of the Parliament.

These reforms had been overwhelmingly voted through the last Commons, but had then been lost in the ‘wash up’ at the end of the parliament. Most advocates of a stronger House of Commons will raise a glass to the Wright reforms.

There is, however, one serious countervailing factor – which is the coalition itself. One piece of conventional wisdom in the run up to the election was the belief that a situation in which no party has a majority helps strengthen parliament, because it makes the outcome of votes less certain and thus empowers individual MPs. As I said in the Hansard Society’s prescient report into this back in 2008, this is probably true of a situation in which there is a minority administration. It is, however, much less certain once there is a post-election coalition deal.

A coalition deal will restrain rather than enhance the power of parliament for two reasons. First, because it may make those parties involved in the coalition place an even greater emphasis on unity: there is little to be gained from a coalition deal if the party leaderships fail to deliver their supporters in important divisions. It may be difficult to deliver such unity but the pressure for it will increase nonetheless.

But the second – and probably more important – reason why a coalition might limit parliamentary influence is because it will dramatically reduce the influence exercised by the House of Lords. Since reform in 1999, the House of Lords has become an increasingly assertive check on the executive, and one which has defeated the Government on more than 400 occasions. The 1999 House of Lords Act created what is effectively a permanently hung second chamber. In theory, there are lots of winning coalitions in the Lords, but in practice, as Meg Russell and Maria Scaria showed in the journal British Politics, it was the Liberal Democrats who were the key swing voters, deciding whether a policy passes or falls.

A coalition thus delivers simultaneous success in the lower chamber and in the upper chamber. At a stroke, the ability of the Lords to cause governments all sorts of difficulties is largely removed. Legislation might well therefore navigate Parliament much easier under a coalition government than under a situation in which one party has a majority in the Commons but faced a hung chamber in the Lords.

Even here there are imponderables. Perhaps under such a scenario the crossbench peers (who have always punched below their weight in terms of voting) will become more important, stepping into the political vacuum. It may also be even harder for the coalition partners to deliver unity in the Lords, where the sanctions for those who defy the whip are practically non-existent, in which case the coalition may not be as dominant in practice as it appears on paper.

But nonetheless, one of the commonplace events of the last decade – the routine defeats of the government by the upper House, and the subsequent negotiation and compromise between the two – could still be seriously limited.

Professor Philip Cowley

What’s happening to the BNP?

2010-05-15T04:33:00.000-07:00

"It’s tempting to write the BNP off...but...one of Griffin's saving graces will be the distinct lack of leadership calibre among potential would-be-successors..."

Aside from a bigoted woman in Rochdale and the rise of Nick Clegg, one of the stories of the 2010 campaign was the prospect of a breakthrough by the BNP. This was especially true in outer-east London, where all eyes focused on the ‘Battle of Barking’ between Labour incumbent Margaret Hodge and BNP leader Nick Griffin. Eyes also focused on local elections, where the BNP looked poised to take control of Barking and Dagenham council.
As I predicted in an earlier blog, the performance was a disappointing one. When all votes had been counted Griffin was pushed into third while his party lost every one of their seats on the local council. The BNP went from being tipped to take over the borough to being kicked out in one night. Their activists went from anticipating control over a £200 million budget to being, in the words of Griffin, “heartbroken”. What happened?

Before answering the question a reframing exercise is needed. Despite media claims which have followed the election, the core BNP vote did not collapse. The party more than doubled their number of votes, saved more than 60 deposits and their average vote in seats contested stood at around 3.8 per cent, down only 0.5 per cent on the result in 2005 despite standing more than three times as many candidates. The party also polled well in several seats where there was little or no campaigning on the ground. Even in Barking, Griffin attracted more BNP voters than in 2005 and, in fact, received more votes than any BNP candidate in the party’s history.

These votes, however, were swamped by a resurgent Labour vote and a boost of 11 per cent in turnout. This turnout enabled Hodge to increase her majority in a contest which saw almost 100 Labour MPs lose their seats. The mobilization of the Labour and anti-fascist votes owed much to the activities of the Hope Not Hate campaigners in and around Barking.

Reflecting the changing nature of anti-fascist opposition, these campaigners even recruited the help of an Obama strategist and employed innovative techniques to mobilize the anti-BNP vote. The campaign was also geared around Margaret Hodge, who took the campaign and Griffin’s challenge incredibly seriously and personally. In the face of this approach, the BNP’s pavement politics didn’t have a chance.

Yet there were internal problems too. In the weeks leading up to polling day, a court had ruled that the party’s membership policy remained discriminatory, a leading activist allegedly threatened to kill Griffin and the party became engaged in what many activists saw as an unnecessary dispute with Marmite (an early version of the BNP broadcast had featured a Marmite logo and, unsurprisingly, Marmite took legal action). Nor did footage of a BNP organizer brawling in the street with Asian youths improve prospects.

These factors combined to stifle the breakthrough. After returning from the count in Barking, Griffin perhaps took his mind back to 1979. The parallels between the performance of the BNP in 2010 and the National Front (NF) in ’79 are striking. Like the NF, Griffin ignored calls for a more targeted approach and went ‘all out’ by fielding 338 candidates, the largest number in the history of the extreme right. And like the NF, when this strategy failed to deliver the party descended into their favourite pastime: infighting.

This infighting has since escalated to the point of rival activists setting up their own website to call for far-ranging changes inside the party. Some of these activists are very influential and respected voices. The changes they propose are organizational rather than ideological: greater financial competence and transparency are the main ones.

But they also provide a striking insight into the political incompetence which has been at work inside the BNP. For instance, some claim that over the past year the BNP has distributed in the region of 30 million leaflets which feature a mobile phone number that was no longer in use.

This infighting will head in one of two directions. Either the activists coalescing under the banner of greater professionalism and financial transparency will exit and establish their own organization. Or, Griffin will hang on and be forced to make significant internal changes to acquiesce their concerns, most likely by opening up party accounts or distancing himself from a businessman in Belfast who has grown increasingly influential within the party.

It’s tempting to write the BNP off. But I said this week in The Guardian, one of Griffin’s saving graces will be the distinct lack of leadership calibre among potential would-be-successors. Some have too much baggage; others have sat in a council chamber but flounder in the face of media scrutiny. Griffin might have handled Question Time badly, but he’s easily the best of a bad bunch. He’s also keenly aware of the mistakes made in the 1970s, and his leadership is based on a party constitution which makes it virtually impossible for him to be removed. Success or significant internal reform will need to be delivered, and delivered promptly if the party is to endure in their current form.

Matthew Goodwin

What’s 5% between friends?

2010-05-14T01:35:00.000-07:00

One of the most striking statements of the last few days was William Hague’s claim that ‘the next general election will be held on the first Thursday of May, 2015’. That is, by the way, 7 May. One for the diary, maybe? And it’s all because of this clause in the coalition agreement:

The parties agree to the establishment of five year fixed-term parliaments. A Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government will put a binding motion before the House of Commons in the first days following this agreement stating that the next general election will be held on the first Thursday of May 2015. Following this motion, legislation will be brought forward to make provision for fixed term parliaments of five years. This legislation will also provide for dissolution if 55% or more of the House votes in favour.

This has provoked a series of complaints, about being its supposedly undemocratic nature. It would, for example, stop a government defeated by one vote on a vote of confidence, as Callaghan was in 1979, from having to go to the country.

Although it’s not very clear from the coalition agreement, what the scheme is doing is decoupling two concepts: ‘confidence’ and ‘dissolution’. So a government that lost a vote of confidence (like Callaghan’s) would still be expected to resign. But, unlike at present, that would not trigger an (almost) automatic general election. Instead an alternative governing majority would be sought, perhaps under a new Prime Minister, perhaps under a new arrangement of parties. If no alternative could be found, then parties would come together to trigger the 55% dissolution requirement and an election would be held.

One problem that many of those arguing against this have is that fixed term parliaments were a manifesto pledge for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats (though not the Conservatives). And here’s the problem: if you have fixed term parliaments, then you need a mechanism of some sort that prevents the governing party ending them at will. Else, how do you simply stop the government deliberately losing a vote of confidence, and triggering an election, whenever it likes? A fixed term parliament, without some mechanism to stop that sort of manoeuvring, isn’t fixed at all.

But even if you accept that the ideas are worth considering, there are still all sorts of interesting questions:

1. Why 5 years? Most recent UK Parliaments have lasted for four years. Moreover, Scottish, Welsh and London elections are on a four-year cycles, establishing Westminster on a four-year cycle as well – and starting now - would also ensure that they didn’t occur on the same days.

2. Why 55%? If the aim is to stop a party collapsing its own government, then 55% seems very low. Whilst it would work in this particular parliament, in most recent elections (including 1983, 1987, 1997, and 2001) the government would have had enough MPs to trigger the 55% hurdle on their own. The Scottish Parliament, which has a similar scheme, has a 66% hurdle, and that would be more significant.

3. How is this to be embedded? It is not clear what this ‘binding’ resolution is. Westminster doesn’t have binding resolutions, or laws. What is to stop a government – with a majority, but not 55% - simply repealing the bill establishing fixed parliaments, and then triggering an election? It might look a bit shifty, but it could always be justified in the ‘good of the country’ or something similar.

4. Did anyone consult the Queen about this, since formally dissolution is in the hands of the Monarch?

5. And what effect will this have on party discipline? Before, governments always had recourse to making an issue a vote of confidence, which would make all but the most recalcitrant MPs come back into line, for fear of triggering an election. Under the proposed scheme, losing a vote of confidence might bring down the administration, but as long as it could muster 55% it wouldn’t need to go to the country.

These are interesting times to be studying the constitution; they might also be interesting times to be studying party discipline.

Professor Philip Cowley

An end to New Labour...

2010-05-12T01:59:00.000-07:00

"Would either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown want to claim the paternity of the Lib-Con coalition..."

The New Labour government is now, finally, at an end. After thirteen years, it passes into history – and in a strangely anti-climactic way. There was no sturm und drang, no (with the greatest of respect to Jacqui Smith) cathartic Portillo moment for its opponents on election night, no flag waving on Downing Street for the incoming government, although I am sure plenty of Bolly will be spilt in the pubs and clubs of Notting Hill over the next few days.

One reason for this lack of drama is that the end has been so long in coming. Since 2008 few could have had any expectation that Gordon Brown would win a fourth victory for his party. How he must be regretting not holding that much-trailed election in the autumn of 2007. The other reason is that – apart from the brief flurry of hope yesterday – since the results were confirmed on May 7th there was really only one game in town, and it wasn’t one to which New Labour was invited to play. And finally, there is the context for the election itself – continuing financial instability and the generally agreed need to cut government spending on an unprecedented scale. Things can only get better? Not until they get very much worse.

When Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994 he talked of making sure the twenty-first century would be the ‘progressive century’ in the same way as the twentieth century had been the ‘Conservative century’ given how long that party held national office. The basis for this progressive century was to be a new relationship between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. For division between these two parties Blair – following David Marquand and many others – claimed had allowed the Right to rule.

For a time Blair brought the two parties together – and even offered Paddy Ashdown a place in his Cabinet and created a Cabinet sub-committee on which Labour ministers and leading Liberals discussed policy. There was also, most crucially, Lord Jenkins’ Independent Commission on the Voting System, which proposed AV plus – a half way house between Proportional Representation and the Alternative Vote. Blair however backed off from putting this to a referendum as he had promised, in part because his Cabinet – where Gordon Brown had a very loud voice – rejected the need for electoral reform. At the time Labour had a majority of 179 and was confident of at least two more election victories under the old system.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but there is an irony, then, in the events of the last few days. New Labour leaves office with the Liberals in coalition with the Conservatives, a party now led by a man who has described himself as ‘progressive’ and has said his government will be, above all things, ‘fair’.

Margaret Thatcher has claimed that one of her greatest achievements was – by destroying socialism - the creation of New Labour. As Thatcher also said on the verge of leaving Downing Street for the last time as Prime Minister: ‘It’s a funny old world’. Would either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown want to claim the paternity of the Lib-Con coalition? Probably not; not just yet anyway.

Professor Steven Fielding

The Alternative Vote, why bother?

2010-05-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

The campaign for and the outcome of the General Election has put electoral reform firmly on the political agenda. Somewhat surprisingly the alternative vote (AV) has become the most discussed option for replacing the current first-past-the-post system (FPTP), embraced by Labour, and even allowed by the Conservatives to be voted upon in a referendum. This potential acceptance by the two major parties is understandable, as AV is for them the safest option, and least likely to break their joint hegemony over British politics.

When thinking about the different ways in which elections can be organised, the first question to be answered is whether one wants each constituency electing only a single MP, or multi-member constituencies.

Elections for single member constituencies can be organised in three fashions: first-past-the-post, alternative vote, and approval voting. But irrespective of which of these is used, all single member constituency systems are prone to disproportional outcomes, which means that the shares of votes and shares of seats can diverge widely.

AV thus does not solve the problem of dis-proportionality that lays at the root of many demands for electoral reform. It may even turn out less proportional than FPTP. In other words, it is also likely to yield parliaments where a vote share of only 35% yields 55% of the seats (as was the case for Labour in the previous parliament). because Labour and the Conservatives are most likely to be in a position to benefit from this, it is quite understandable that they favour AV if the call for electoral reform cannot be stifled any more.

What is ‘solved’ by AV is a ‘problem’ that hardly anyone cared about, namely that an individual MP be elected with fewer than 50% of the votes in his/her constituency. AV changes this by asking voters to rank their preferences for the candidates. If no candidate has an absolute majority of first preferences, then the one with the fewest first preference votes is eliminated, and his/her votes are allocated to the other candidates on the basis of the 2nd preferences on those ballots. Applying this, if necessary repeatedly, will guarantee that the eventual winner will have been supported by a majority in the constituency (a ‘majority’ that then consists of a mixture of 1st preferences, plus added 2nd preferences, possibly 3rd preferences, and so on). But this does not do anything to diminish the discrepancy between vote shares and seat shares across the country as a whole, and which motivates much of the support for electoral reform.

AV may even prevent a party that is more preferred than any of its competitors from winning in a constituency. Take, for example, a constituency with three candidates on the ballot, let’s call them Harriet, Chris and William. Voters are asked to rank their preferences for these on their ballot papers. A possible outcome would be the following:

40 % of the voters give 1st preference to Harriet, 2nd preference to Chris, and 3rd to William.;

35 % give 1st preference to William, 2nd preference to Chris, and 3rd to Harriet;

25 % give 1st preference to Chris, 2nd preference to William, and 3rd to Harriet.

Because none of the candidates has more than 50% of the 1st preferences, Chris is eliminated because he got the smallest number of 1st preferences. The 25% of the ballots which ranked Chris first are now allocated to William and Harriet, depending on the second preferences. In the example above, everyone who ranked Chris first ranked William second, so all these votes are transferred to William, who thus obtains a comfortable majority of 60% (35% + 25%) and wins the seat.

But actually, Chris, who was eliminated, was more preferred than either Harriet or William! 65 % of the voters prefer Chris over William (40% + 25%), while 60% prefer Chris over Harriet (35% + 25%). All that this shows is that the ‘majority’ with which William would be elected under the AV system, is an artificial one.

All in all, AV does not solve the biggest problem that leads to the call for electoral reform. It does not yield more proportional outcomes than the current FPTP system, which is exactly why both Labour and Conservatives can conceivably live with it without giving up their dreams of an absolute majority of the seats. And finally, AV can easily lead to the elimination of a candidates who is more preferred than any of his or her competitors.

In a next contribution to this blog more about other alternatives to FPTP.

Professor Cees van der Eijk

Clingendael 1 LibDems 0

2010-05-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

"Would you buy a second-hand car from Mr. Clegg? In the end, it depends on how desperate you are to get on the road..."

With a group of eager-to-learn postgraduate students on an MA Programme in International Relations, I recently undertook a one-day crash course in negotiation at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations at Clingendael.

Here’s what I learnt.

First, zero-sum negotiations are hard. What you gain, I lose - and trust is a problem. It’s like buying a second-hand car from a stranger. What we really want is positive-sum or ‘integrative’ negotiation. I trade what I value less for what you value less and vice versa. We package different issues so that we can both win. That’s all pretty straightforward.

Slightly less intuitive is the route to optimising the outcome when the negotiating partners have unequal resources. The weaker party may maximise their own benefits by allowing the stronger party to take more. Looking for equality may be sub-optimal for the weaker party.

For all of this to work, however, there are some background conditions that need to be secured: a clear negotiating mandate, clear priorities, commitment to a relationship that extends across time, measurable outputs. Could any of this help Mr Clegg on the neatly-chiselled points of his painful dilemma?

It’s clear that the junior partner in any negotiation can overplay his hand – and end up with nothing (or, rather, nothing more than he began with). But, of course, the senior partners also have a very great deal to lose in walking away.

Uncertainty has a place in any real world negotiation but in Mr Clegg’s circumstances this is multiplex almost to the point of bewilderment. It’s possible to lose and the stakes are very high but the value of a win may justify some very high-risk behaviour.

Would you buy a second-hand car from Mr. Clegg? In the end, it depends on how desperate you are to get on the road.

Professor Chris Pierson

ConDemnation?

2010-05-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

"But what was it that Karl Marx said about History repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce?"

Amidst all the speculation regarding negotiations about the creation of a post-election arrangement between the Conservatives and LibDems I haven’t seen any reference to the last time the Liberals (as they were then) put in a minority government.

Actually, they did this twice in the 1920s, first in 1923 and then in 1929. Neither time will give Nick Clegg much comfort.

After the 1923 election Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin resigned as his Conservative government had lost its majority, although with 258 seats (and 38.5 per cent of votes) his remained the largest party in the Commons. After some hand wringing Henry Asquith decided that his 158 Liberal MPs should allow Ramsay MacDonald to hold office, the two parties sharing a common position on free trade. They supported Labour on a supply and confidence basis. The MacDonald government however lasted just ten months, after losing a vote of confidence, having achieved very little of substance.

The resulting 1924 election saw Baldwin return to power with a working majority. The Liberals, having angered many of its supporters for enabling Labour to hold power for the first time, lost 118 seats and its share of the vote collapsed from 29.7 per cent (and virtual parity with Labour) to 17.8 per cent. They would never again enjoy such a strong position as that held in 1923.

After five years as Prime Minister Baldwin lost the 1929 election. This time Labour had become the largest party in the Commons but at 287 seats MacDonald was still short of a majority. The Liberals, by now led by David Lloyd George, had 59 MPs (albeit elected by 23.6 per cent of voters) and again allowed Labour to take power. This time, however, there were some strings attached – specifically a royal commission on electoral reform. Unfortunately for the Liberals by the time Labour left office in 1931, amidst a grave financial crisis, it had failed to pass any legislation.

Of course, just because this earlier Liberal experience of supporting minority governments was so miserable does not necessarily mean it will be in the future. But what was it that Karl Marx said about History repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce?

Professor Steven Fielding

Oh dear...

2010-05-09T06:16:00.000-07:00

"It turns out to be all leaflets and trudging and stubby pencils..."

Anyone who doesn’t enjoy politics would be well advised to avoid today’s papers. Not only is there the masses of detailed analysis of the election results that always follows an election – loads of wonderful pie charts, tables, and multi-coloured maps – but there’s also story after story about hung parliament discussions and possibilities.

I would, though, recommend one piece in particular: Suzanne Moore’s column in the Mail on Sunday. Moore stood as a candidate at this election, in Hackney North and Stoke Newington. She is a little coy about her performance (she got 285 votes, or 0.6%), but the piece is worth reading for the insights that standing gave her about politics:

It is easy enough to watch The Thick of It and read spin-doctors’ diaries and look at blogs and imagine endless sophisticated strategising. It turns out to be all leaflets and trudging and stubby pencils and rows of people counting paper under strip lighting. It’s not about grand policy statements but listening to people rant about parking. Or the arms trade. Or their burst pipes. Or their rents. Or Afghanistan. Politicians, I now realised, over-promise because somehow punters ask them.

To which, the only response is: welcome to politics.

Perhaps all columnists in major papers – especially those who frequently pontificate about the political process – should be made to go through a similar experience, so that they understand what it is that they write about.

And yes, the same would apply to politics academics.

Professor Philip Cowley

Despite expenses, incumbent MPs do well

2010-05-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

One of the most intriguing – and unexpected - features of Thursday’s election was the relative success of local, incumbent, MPs. The BBC/ITN/Sky exit poll found that in Labour held seats with new candidates, the Con-Lab swing was 7.5%. But in seats with incumbents, the swing was just 4%. The former would have been enough to win a majority for the Conservatives.

The latter was not. In other words, all the work put in by the much maligned incumbent members of the Parliamentary Labour Party over the last few years in their constituencies – holding surgeries, answering letters, dealing with constituents’ problems and so on – may have been enough to prevent a Conservative majority.

Of the top 100 Conservative targets, there were just nine Labour-held seats which the Conservatives did not take. Of these nine, eight were held by incumbent MPs.

You can see this in seats close to the University of Nottingham, where one popular hardworking local MP, Vernon Coaker, survived, despite holding exactly the sort of seat that the Conservatives were winning elsewhere. And in Broxtowe, right next door to the University, another equally hard working and popular local MP, Nick Palmer, almost hung on, limiting the Lab-Con swing to just 2.6%, and losing by a mere 389 votes.

Of course, there can be other factors involved. Lots of these target seats had relatively large non-white populations, for example, and there is some evidence that those types of seats also performed better for Labour.

What’s surprising, though, is that there is any effect at all. A growing incumbency factor has been building up in recent elections, but most people suspected that the expenses scandal would counter-act that this time – that this may be the very worst election to be an incumbent, and the best to be a challenger. Not so. It may be that with many of the ‘worst’ expenses offenders gone, expenses was nullified as an issue – and that those remaining MPs were able to dig in.

Professor Philip Cowley

Localised elections, localised incompetence

2010-05-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

“An Englishman, even if he is alone”, said George Mikes, “forms an orderly queue of one.” Some of Thursday night’s queues to vote appear to have been a bit less than orderly. Of all the claims made about the problems at polling stations, the most ludicrous is that poor electoral administration prevented a higher turnout.

Obviously this is literally true, but to secure a rise of just one percentage point in turnout requires more than 400,000 extra voters. Nothing in the reports so far indicates that we are talking about that many people; I’ll be surprised if the numbers proved to have been ‘denied’ their vote even hit 4,000, if that. That would represent a rise of 0.01% in the turnout.

The second bizarre claim is that the problems were caused by a ‘surge’ in turnout. There was no surge. Estimates of turnout put it at about 65%, just four percentage points up on what it had been in 2005. This is a lower turnout than in the 75 years at every election between 1922 and 1997.

We managed then without turning people away; competent electoral administrators should have been able to manage yesterday. The problems seen are on Thursday are much more to do with localised incompetence -- and penny pinching by councils – than any great surge in voting.

No doubt the Electoral Commission will get it in the neck for this. If there’s a national commission dealing with elections, then it’s inevitable that that is where the finger will point. Yet although the Commission provides oversight, much of the delivery of elections is decentralised, run by local councils – and it’s here that the problems appear to have been.

Here’s the interesting thing: one of the big ideas in British politics is that of localism, decentralisation, the idea that the centre shouldn’t always run things. That’s exactly how the UK runs its elections. And whilst most councils run elections very well, others don’t. What you saw on Thursday was localism in action, for good or ill.

UPDATE: A comment below makes the point that the population has grown in recent years. True, and in total more people voted on Thursday than in elections up until the 1970s. But at the same time, we now have much more widely available postal voting – 15% voted by post during the last election, most people think the figure will be higher this time – and so the footfall in polling stations on the day will still be less now than in almost all post-war elections. (Without knowing the precise number of postal votes, it’s difficult to say, but even if the rate stays the same as in 2005, I estimate you have to go back to 1945 before you find fewer people passing through polling stations on the day). Also, polling stations now stay open for longer (it used to be until 9pm, now it’s 10pm), so there’s even less excuse.

More importantly, I wasn’t arguing that this was unimportant, and that people shouldn’t be annoyed. Merely that, when blame is being apportioned, it should go where it is deserved – those councils that cocked-up – and not where it doesn’t. This is localised incompetence, and we should deal with it on that basis.

Professor Philip Cowley

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

2010-05-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

This has been, without question, one of the most intriguing and unpredictable of elections in living memory. For political scientists and media commentators alike, it generated huge anticipation and a real sense of excitement about the outcome.

Blog sites like this one have attracted much attention, particularly from journalists looking for insight and new angles.

The television debates also injected a sense of dynamism and freshness to the well-worn routine of election campaigning, which used to be dominated by morning press conferences, poster launches, and carefully stage managed events.

However, for all the excitement amongst the commentariat, academics and other assorted anoraks, it appears that the wider public has not been so engaged. When I talked recently to BBC East Midlands chief political correspondent, John Hess, we both noted the lack of posters in windows and the absence of car-stickers compared to what was once commonplace in previous elections.

Highly impressionistic, of course, but there did seem to be a mismatch between the way the election was generating interest amongst analysts and the lack of visible evidence of much popular engagement. This was probably reflected in the very high number of 'don't knows', ‘not quite sures’ and ‘might change my minds’ right up to the eve of voting.

Vindicating that lack of connection between people and politics, turnout looks like it will be about 65 per cent. This is better than the 61.4 per cent in 2005 and the even poorer 59.4 in 2001. But those were elections where the outcome was never really in doubt.

This time round, we expected that electoral uncertainty – combined with the interest generated by the TV debates - would lead to a much higher figure. In some places, turnout did exceed 70 per cent – people were turned away from the polls in the end - but the overall figure looks much worse than in every other election since 1945, none of which saw turn-out drop below 71.4 per cent.

The campaign, then, has not reversed the deep-set popular disillusionment with the political class, one made only worse by the 2009 expenses scandal. Only time will tell what effect the parties ongoing attempts to resolve the present Parliamentary stand-off will have on this continued sense of disenchantment with those who exercise power in our name.

Professor Paul Heywood

“A Nation Divided ..”

2010-05-07T07:12:00.000-07:00

This blog, which has offered something for everyone, from the anorak to the anarchist, has come in for some criticism for its neglect of the smaller parties. Here’s nearly a last chance to put this right.

The Scottish Jacobite Party stood two candidates in the General Election and mustered a grand total of 290 votes. Following the party’s strategy for government is not entirely straightforward (no pledge card or contract with the voters here) but its proposal to re-draw the boundaries of Scotland to include much of northern England (allowing for the inclusion of four additional clubs in the Scottish Premier League) is surely an interesting and innovative move.

It’s clear following the results across the U.K. that there is a swathe of non-metropolitan England that wishes for ever to be ruled by Tories. The rest of the island would seemingly be happy to be under the governance of almost anyone else. Rather than reform the voting system, why not just re-draw the national boundaries? The few disaffected Scottish Tories can move to Witney or Henley. Marooned Lib Dems and Labour supporters could just head north. The South-land could become Victoria and the north country could become, well, how about Sweden II - or maybe just Utopia.

As they all say, it’s time for a change.

Professor Chris Pierson

The Unintended Consequences of Electoral Reform

2010-05-07T04:41:00.000-07:00

Once the nature of the May 6th poll became clear, Labour figures have keenly reiterated their party’s support for a referendum on electoral reform, seeing this as the means of creating a ‘progressive alliance’ with the LibDems. As Steven Fielding noted back in February on this blog, it was precisely in anticipation of a hung Parliament that led Labour came out in support of the Alternative Vote.

A more proportional electoral formula would certainly provide fairer representation and bring Britain into line with other European democracies. But if – a big if - the LibDems are open to talks, then careful attention must be paid to which of the many alternatives to first-past-the-post should be adopted. The unintended consequences of electoral reform need to be confronted now.

I have noted in previous blogs that the public has consistently placed immigration as the most important electoral issue after the economy. During the campaign however the main parties did their best to park the issue. Our current electoral system allowed them to do this, as it exists on the basis of a two (sometimes three) party cartel.

A more proportional formula could change this cosy set up. First-past-the-post has many faults but it has prevented anti-immigration parties from winning Commons seats. As Matt Goodwin has noted here the BNP has won an increasing number of council and European Parliament seats. So far in 2010, UKIP and BNP together have received 5% of the popular vote, compared to 2.9% in 2005, indicating some rise in support—and these figures are probably suppressed by tactical voting.

But the BNP still remains marginal in terms of the national debate on immigration. However the experience of many other European countries—France, Denmark, the Netherlands, for instance—shows that once installed in a national parliament the ability of parties like the BNP to set the terms of the immigration debate is immeasurably increased. This has had the result of intensifying a particularly negative focus on the place of Muslims within their respective national identities

So, while some Labour and LibDem sympathisers might hope that their two parties can come to some ‘progressive’ agreement based around electoral reform they need to be aware that the consequences may be far from progressive because they might create longer term grounds for the further rise and growing influence of the anti-immigrant right.

Dr Lauren McLaren

Electoral chaos and surprises aplenty

2010-05-07T01:52:00.000-07:00

The most significant outcome of this election campaign is - undoubtedly - the  Conservatives' inability to win an outright majority in the House of Commons. This in spite of the first-past-the post electoral system, which consistently boosts the proportion of seats of the largest party on the basis of votes won (with some 36 % of the votes, the Conservatives stand to get about 46% of the seats). If this was the most significant outcome, it is then one of the least surprising, given the dynamics of the 2010 campaign.

Some of the more surprising outcomes of election night have been:

• the failure of the SNP and Plaid Cymru to make significant gains

• the large local variations around a general swing

• the Greens winning their first MP

• Peter Robinson’s defeat in Belfast East.

• And last, but not least, the failure of the BNP to gain any seats (in spite of them getting more than twice as many votes as the Greens)

Perhaps the most surprising – and worrying – discovery has been how badly organized the electoral process has been in some parts of the country. The queues of people waiting – and some times failing – to vote tell their own story.

The rise in turnout compared to 2005 was modest: what would have happened if it had reached even 1990s levels of more than 70%? Bearing in mind problems with an outdated registration system in much of the country and well-established postal vote fraud, Britain’s elections must now rank as  amongst the worst run of the world’s developed democracies.

Professor Cees van der Eijk

Election of losers

2010-05-07T01:38:00.000-07:00

This has been an election of losers. David Cameron failed to seal the deal and Gordon Brown has seen Labour lose over 90 seats. The biggest losers however are the LibDems. Yet while the high hopes of Cleggmania have taken a very hard knock, they still have a chance to clutch victory from defeat.

During the campaign Clegg made some very unwise pronouncements – about not dealing with Gordon Brown and how the party that won the most Commons seats and most votes should be given the chance to govern. The logic of what Clegg said means that the LibDems now have apparently no option but to rebuff any overtures from Labour and support the Conservatives who will not deal with Gordon Brown. Maybe Clegg will decide his personal credibility rests on living up to his words. Maybe his fellow MPs will decide otherwise when they meet on Saturday.

For – poorly though they performed on May 6th – the LibDems have a once-in-a-generation chance to get electoral reform – and the only party offering that at the moment is Gordon Brown’s Labour party. As projections stand Labour and the LibDems together still fall short of a Commons majority – but one wonders how the SNP and Plaid look upon a return of the Conservatives to power.

The Daily Mail and the Sun will all scream that Cameron has won. He hasn’t. No-one won the 2010 election. But do the LibDems have the political fortitude to ensure they win the post-election campaign? It will be an interesting meeting on Saturday.

Professor Steven Fielding

Philip Cowley - reactions to results

2010-05-06T14:06:00.001-07:00

The BBC/ITN/Sky exit poll shows no one party with enough seats to form a majority. The Conservatives have done well, putting on almost 100 seats, but not well enough. But - if the exit poll is right - there are also not enough Labour and Lib Dem MPs to form a coalition majority either. Most importantly, however, the poll shows things to be on a knife-edge, and close enough so that any strange results could tip the balance. It promises to be one of the most exciting election nights in living memory.

12:05am
The first three seats - the three Sunderland seats - have seen turnout rise by about 5 percentage points. If that is repeated across the country, overall turnout will remain below 70%. However, it is perfectly possible that turnout will be more variable, and the increase will be greater elsewhere.

Professor Philip Cowley

What counts as a majority?

2010-05-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

In all the pre-election discussion, much attention focuses on the number 326. It’s half of 650 (which is the number of seats in the new House of Commons), plus one. And anyone who reaches 326 is therefore guaranteed of a majority in the Commons.

But there’s good reason to be sceptical about 326 being the target number.

For one thing, the election in Thirsk and Malton is not taking place today – because of the death of the UKIP candidate. It is, or should be, a safe Tory seat. But until it actually counts, who knows? (I mean, who knows what it would be like were it be contested in by-election-like conditions, as the difference between a hung parliament and a Conservative government?). As of today, 649 seats are up for grabs.

Then there’s Sinn Fein MPs, who don’t take their seats. At present, there are five of those. If we assume they hold all five seats, and make no gains, that makes 644 seats actually up for grabs. (It’d be one of the ironies of a really close election that Sinn Fein gains would actually be good for David Cameron...)

And then there’s the Speaker and three Deputy Speakers, who don’t vote (except in tied votes). Assuming John Bercow is returned in Buckingham and continues as Speaker. That leaves three Deputy Speakers, two of whom have retired. Assuming the one remaining Deputy Speaker, the Conservative Alan Haselhurst holds his seat and continues in office, that leaves two to be filled. The Conservatives could attempt to argue that both have to be from the ranks of the Opposition (given that there is normally parity across the four, and that both Haselhurst and Bercow represent Conservative seats, albeit formerly in the case of the latter). That effectively reduces the number of seats in play by another one.

That makes 642, rather than 650. And means a majority of 322 would provide David Cameron with a majority, at least until the end of the month. And figure of 323 would mean he had a majority whatever happens in Thirsk.

In practice, on day-to-day business there’s also the fact that the other Northern Irish MPs often have lowish turnouts in Commons votes, which could also bump up his majority by a handful.

These sort of minor details often go unnoticed. But in an election which is going to be this close, every seat could matter.

Professor Philip Cowley

A cautionary note about penultimate polls

2010-05-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

"Nothing about a trend ensures its continuation – but beware..."

We’ve had a massive nine opinion polls, on the eve of the election. That’s almost double the number we had in 2005.
The Conservative lead varies from four points (TNS BMRB) to 12 (Angus Reid), although the shares of the votes being predicted for each of the three parties are more stable.

The Conservatives shares range from 33-37, although all but one are 36+/-1.

The Labour shares ranges from 24-29, although all but one are 28+/-1.

And the Lib Dem shares range from 26-29, although all but two are 28+/-1.

None of these polls – assuming a uniform national swing – would give the Conservatives a majority of seats, although they’d be pretty close on some. We suspect anyway, that there won’t be a uniform swing, and all the indications are that the Conservatives are doing better in the Con-Lab marginals they need to win. But maybe not by quite enough to win outright.

But here’s a trivia question. In the last four elections, there have been a total of 21 similar polls. How many have under-stated the Labour vote? Answer: just one.

At the last election, four of the polling companies over-stated Labour’s performance, whilst one, NOP, got it spot on. In 2001, all six over-stated Labour’s performance, as did five companies in 1992. In 1997, four companies over-stated Labour’s share of the vote. Just one, ICM in 1997, has a polling company under-stated Labour’s eventual performance. Nothing about a trend ensures its continuation – but beware...

The BBC/ITN exit poll will be out at 10pm.

Professor Philip Cowley

“Were you up for Balls?”

2010-05-06T05:30:00.000-07:00

"So it is a fifteen-times-in-a lifetime event – and there are not many of those! Perhaps in these anti-political or post-political times, we still think that somehow it matters..."

“Were you up for Portillo?” became a sort of catchphrase in the aftermath of the 1997 Election. Those who could say ‘yes’ were deemed to be those who really cared. Hah! The Enfield result was declared at 2.41 a.m. Barely past bedtime.

My son was up for Portillo – and he was five at the time! “Were you up for Freeman?” (Kettering; Friday, 1.37 p.m.) is a much more real benchmark. Only at this point could the committed really consider turning in (expect for those in Northern Ireland, whose vigil still had some way to run).

Why do it? Personally, I was convinced that if I went to bed at any time on 1st/2nd May, 1997, I would wake to find that I had dreamt up the whole thing. Perhaps elections still have a rarity value? I calculate that the average British adult may get to vote in about fifteen General Elections.

So it is a fifteen-times-in-a lifetime event – and there are not many of those! Perhaps in these anti-political or post-political times, we still think that somehow it matters.

We may be deeply disillusioned about what we get but we may still reckon that it’s important, even if we are not quite sure how and why. Perhaps, we just like the human drama or the catharsis that comes when the mighty are fallen. “Were you up for Cameron?”

That’s one that would really make you pinch yourself!

Professor Christopher Pierson

Would a hung parliament be bad for business?

2010-05-06T02:38:00.000-07:00

According to an online survey - run by The University of Nottingham Institute for Enterprise and Innovation (UNIEI) - businesses are worried about the potential impact of an inconclusive election, according to an online survey.

A survey suggests a majority of smaller business owners feel that a hung parliament would be bad for the economic situation.

The quarterly UK Business Barometer found that those who were pessimistic about the situation following a hung parliament outnumbered the optimists by three to one. Out of more than 100 respondents, almost 55 per cent felt a hung parliament would worsen economic prospects ‘somewhat’ or ‘greatly’, compared with 18 per cent who thought it would improve the economic situation.

In a parallel survey, the UK Business Adviser Barometer, the split was even more pronounced. Among more than 180 business advisers questioned, 59 per cent felt economic prospects would worsen if there was no outright winner on May 7th, compared with 13 per cent who felt they would improve.

Professor Philip Cowley said; “In comparative terms, there's nothing for business to worry about with a hung parliament or a coalition. There's no evidence that economic performance is any worse in political systems that have hung parliaments, or coalitions.

“Indeed, in the past advocates of proportional representation always used to argue that one reason for Britain's relatively poor economic performance in the 1970s was that we had single party government – and thus saw regular u-turns in key policies – compared to countries such as Germany which had coalition government and were thus more stable. The extended periods of one-party government that we have seen in the UK since 1979 (first under the Conservatives, then under Labour) mean that we hear that argument rather less these days.

“The fear for business is not so much the hung parliament itself, but the reaction of the parties to it. What businesses (especially in the City) fear, is a government unable to take difficult decisions, a period of drift and indecision, caused either by a party trying to govern in a minority administration (and thus looking ahead to a second election) or an unstable coalition. But a stable coalition could be as able to take difficult economic decisions as a single party government.

“It is therefore the reaction of the parties to the result, rather than the result itself which is the problem.

“Moreover, there is a problem in seeing this issue as a clear divide between a government with a majority or one without. A Conservative majority of, say, 10 will not in practice be very different to a Conservative minority government, short of a majority by 10. Neither would be especially stable. A small Conservative majority will be easily hit by backbench rebellions – as happened the last time the Conservatives were in power with a small majority.”

The UKBB and UKBAB surveys, which are completed online, assess current business conditions through a series of topical questions aimed at smaller businesses. The questions change each time the surveys are circulated.

The surveys assess current business conditions through a series of topical questions aimed at smaller businesses and their advisers. The surveys are issued bi-monthly and more information, including results and analyses, can be found on the web at www.ukbb.ac and www.ukbab.ac. Businesses and advisers wishing to contribute as panellists on the project should visit the appropriate barometer website to register.

Does the level of turnout matter?

2010-05-05T01:28:00.000-07:00

"...does it matter for the prospects of the parties how many people will flock to the polls? "

It is generally expected that turnout in the general election will be somewhat higher than in 2005, when it reached 61%. It is unlikely, though, to reach levels in excess of 70% which were common in the 1990s and earlier.

An increase is expected because the feeling that the election will be one of the closest since a long time, and that there is still everything to play for. The expectation that there is much ‘at stake’ possibly in the form of unprecedented political change will also contribute to a likely increase in turnout.

But does it matter for the prospects of the parties how many people will flock to the polls?

If the tendency to abstain is not the same for the potential supporters of the different parties, the level of turnout will affect election results, in terms of vote shares and possibly also in terms of seats. Politicians and political advisors (and journalists too) are fully aware of the possibility of turnout affecting the outcome.

In many elections we see that politicians who did poorly at the polls point to low turnout amongst their supporters to ‘explain’ the disappointing results. It almost seems as if they derive some solace from this interpretation that says that their supporters stayed home, but did not ‘defect’. But do such explanations hold water? Can the level of turnout be blamed for any particular party’s disappointing electoral showing?

Assessing the consequences of abstentions for the overall result is difficult, because it is impossible to ‘rerun’ reality with different numbers of people going to the polls. Researchers have therefore invented a number of different ways to estimate what would have happened if turnout had been lower than it actually was, or higher.

Reviewing a large number of such analyses Lutz and Marsh conclude that “The main finding ... is that turnout does not matter a great deal, no matter what method, dataset or period of time the authors apply”.

In our own research we asked non-voters what their choice had been had they voted after all. We did so in the context of last year’s European Parliament elections, which are a excellent occasion for such studies as turnout was only 34% (in the UK) as compared to 61% in the 2005 general election.

This 27% difference in turnout should give an excellent opportunity to find whatever effects exist on vote shares. If in the European elections of 2009 the same level of turnout would have been obtained as in the general election of 2005, the vote shares of the various parties would hardly have been different, for each less than half of 1 percent.

Obviously, the effects on vote shares would have been smaller yet for smaller differences in turnout. This finding replicates what had been found earlier for other elections in the UK (see, e.g., van der Eijk and van Egmond, 2007), and for other elections in the western world.

Low levels of participation may be bad for all sorts of things –bad for the development of a feeling of citizenship, bad for the inclusiveness of the political system, and bad for the development and strengthening of partisanship.

It does not mean, however, that the composition of Parliament would be different or the colour of the ensuing government, with different policy majorities, if only more citizens would have been motivated to turn out and vote.

Cees van der Eijk and Eliyahu Sapir

Looking both ways at once

2010-05-04T01:12:00.000-07:00

Last week, we pointed out the interesting finding lurking in a ComRes poll, which showed that on one of the central dividing lines of this election, the public appeared to have contradictory views.

Some 61% wanted the Government to “maintain current public spending plans in order to keep the recovery going”, whilst 57% wanted them to “cut public spending now to avoid higher taxes later”. The public seemed to want both of two completely contradictory stances.

Amusing (or depressing?) as it was, of course, this didn’t tell you how many of the public held such contradictory views, merely that the ‘public’, in the aggregate, did. Thanks to Andrew Hawkins of ComRes, however, who has now supplied some more detailed data, we can identify Britain’s confused voters in a bit more detail.

First, there’s a handful of respondents who refused to answer one or both of the questions, along with 15% of the sample who said that they didn’t know to one or either option.

That leaves four more substantive groups. There were those who a) wanted spending maintained and not cut (26%), and there were those who b) wanted spending cut and not maintained (21%). That makes 47% of the survey who took a logically consistent position.

But a full 31% of the sample came out in favour of both options. That is, they wanted spending both cut and maintained. That is more than came out for either a) or b).

There was also some 7% who rejected both options. In itself, this isn’t illogical (and certainly not as illogical as wanting both options). I might reject both options because in fact I favour increasing spending, an option that wasn’t provided.

Or I could favour maintaining spending but not ‘in order to keep the recovery going’, but for some other reason. Similarly, I might want a cut in public spending, but not ‘to avoid higher taxes later’. So we should assume some of those 7% are answering logically.

Equally, however, we suspect that some are just inconsistent. With no other way of dividing them, let’s split them 50/50.

That makes roughly 50% - just half – of voters who gave consistent answers to those two questions, whilst 35% - or more than a third – who gave inconsistent answers. And remember: this was hardly some minor, trivial, issue, but one of the key dividing lines between the two main parties.

Who’d be a politician faced with voters like that?

Professor Philip Cowley

Politician in sex denial shock

2010-05-03T07:53:00.000-07:00

I watched the last of the prime ministerial debates with a group of lively postgraduate politics students in a hotel in Leuven, the beautiful medieval town twenty miles from Brussels. No-one showed much interest until David Cameron turned to the subject of inheritance, when he delivered this gem: “passing your family home on to your children” is “the most natural human instinct of all”.

This unrepresentative sample of the British electorate could think instantaneously of at least three human instincts that were by any measure more natural than passing on the family home, at least one of which was also much more fun.

Gordon Brown made much in the debate of the Conservatives’ proposals on inheritance tax as a millionaire’s charter. But none of the mainstream parties can claim to have promised to do very much on the question of inheritance.

As they huffed and puffed to make much of the fag-paper’s breadth that divides them on this as on many other issues, it was clear that no-one in the political mainstream will seriously address this question of the transmission of privilege (and disadvantage).

In fact, and at least for three or four years after 2000, Labour’s record on the reduction of (especially child) poverty was not at all bad (though it has slipped back since then, as the recent Joseph Rowntree Trust report made clear.

In its early years, it introduced Sure Start and the Child Trust Fund. But these were overwhelmed by the traffic carrying income inequality in the opposite direction. On social mobility, the record is one of grim under-achievement; made to look tolerable only by the still worse record of the Tories who preceded them. For just the latest depressing round of evidence, see the Marmot Review.

Inheritance is not natural. Some of the keenest defenders of private property throughout history have scorned the idea that we have a right to that which our parents earned (or stole or themselves inherited).

Seneca and St. John of Chrysostom provide two classical sources. A thoroughly modern liberal like John Stuart Mill was a severe critic of inheritance. It was once regarded as in the mainstream to argue that the increment in land values that adjacent development brought belonged not to the lucky landowner but to the community at large.

But such a view now seems to be off-limits, at least to politicians; though, by contrast, see Phillipe Legrain’s recent article in the Financial Times.

And yet more, much more of a radical stance on questions of property is required of us if we are even to pretend to takes seriously the issues of environmental change and is social consequences which stand before us as an inconvenient (if still, for some, an unproven) truth.

But we have almost certainly lost the capacity to think this big. We don’t want to address questions of social mobility because we hope to be able to transmit such advantages as we now have to our own children in what looks like a very uncertain world, one in which we have largely lost faith in our capacity to forge effective collective solutions.

When we hold up our politicians for ridicule for their small-mindedness and unwillingness to think of the long-term and the big picture we should remember this. If there was a real popular will to address these things, there’d be a politician to stand for it. When we see our politicians, we are not just viewing a screen or a gazing up at a podium, we are looking in a mirror. Who is to blame if we don’t like what we see?

Professor Chris Pierson

Philip Cowley in Reuters debate on hung parliaments

2010-05-03T07:42:00.001-07:00

Sound quality is iffy for for the first few seconds - bear with it!

Watch live streaming video from ilicco at livestream.com

Hung!

2010-05-02T03:05:00.000-07:00

"This brief tour through of Britain’s political past reveals something else: to be Prime Minister you do not need to be a party leader or the leader of the biggest element in a coalition..."

The prospect of a hung Parliament has provoked the Conservatives – along with their allies at the Daily Mail - into trying to scare the living daylights out of us.

Some horror stories have a basis in fact. Does this one?

David Cameron in particular claims to fear for our country’s future should the election not produce a party with a working Commons majority. He also has longer-term concerns should any resulting coalition government abandon the ‘decisive’ nature of the current electoral system.

Cameron asserts that changing first-past-the-post means perpetual hung parliaments. That of course would depend on which electoral system replaced the one we presently have.

But to what extent has first-past-the-post delivered ‘decisive’ outcomes? And when it hasn’t – and even when it has - what has been the result?

How decisive were the governments elected with apparently workable majorities as recently as 1992 and 2005? In both cases internal party divisions often brought the business of government to a halt. Colleagues at Nottingham have in fact made a name for themselves analysing parliamentary rebellions and establishing quite how far the Parliamentary Labour and the Conservatives are often coalitions of the unwilling.

But let’s look further back in history, to the start of the twentieth century. So indecisive was the election held in January 1910 another one followed in December, which saw the Liberals and Conservatives finish on virtually the same number of seats. The Liberals led by Asquith however stayed in power thanks to the support of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs. Despite that, it was this Liberal government that brought Britain into the First World War – quite a decisive act all things considered.

A wartime coalition was created in 1915. A year later Asquith was unseated as Prime Minister by his erstwhile colleague Lloyd George. The former however remained party leader and many Liberal MPs refused to support the new coalition, which was now mostly composed of Conservatives. Lloyd George = still a the Liberal - led this Conservative dominated coalition to victory in 1918 and continued to govern until 1922.

The 1920s saw the Liberals, Conservatives and Labour contest four elections - 1922, 1923, 1924 and1929 – on relatively equal terms. In fact, only two of these saw a party win a working Commons majority – three party politics is certainly not conducive to decisive outcomes.

The minority Labour government elected in 1929 and supported by the Liberals ended in 1931 after the Cabinet split over how best to balance the budget. Prime Minister MacDonald was however persuaded (by himself more than anybody) that the world recession required him to form a coalition government including all Conservatives, some Liberals and a small number from his own party. This ‘National’ government went on to win the 1931 and 1935 elections. Despite not leading the biggest party in the coalition MacDonald remained Prime Minister until 1935.

It was this government that in May 1940 gave way to the Churchill coalition. Neville Chamberlain who gave way to Churchill after Labour said it could not work under him remained Conservative leader until his death in November: only then did Churchill become both Prime Minister and party leader.

We associate the post-war period with two party politics and decisive general elections. We are right to do so - except for 1950. And 1964. And February and October 1974. Even at its supposed height of effectiveness ‘first-past-the-post’ was unreliable.

Cameron is wrong, then, if he thinks that first-past-the-post invariably delivers ‘decisive’ results and ‘decisive’ governments. Sometimes it does and sometimes – as in 2010 maybe - it does not.

This brief tour through of Britain’s political past reveals something else: to be Prime Minister you do not need to be a party leader or the leader of the biggest element in a coalition. Nick Clegg the next Churchill? Ramsay MacDonald more like.

Professor Steven Fielding

But what do they believe in?

2010-04-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

"Perhaps party manifestos or leaders speeches could contain a short utopian vision of a better world..."

Utopias tell us about people’s visions and dreams of a good life. People who create utopian visions think about what’s wrong with their world. They identify core problems with the present and cast their minds forwards to imagine a world in which these problems have been solved.

They tell us what’s wrong with the now. And they take responsibility for trying to offer alternatives: they tell us about the about the good life. They offer social and political criticism, vision and detailed alternatives. Perhaps party manifestos or leaders speeches could contain a short utopian vision of a better world.

This could give us an idea of the kind of world desired by our potential leaders. It might help us to see the differences between them more clearly. Nowadays, utopias are mostly written by musicians and creators of fiction – here’s one from Alanis Morrissette...

...and another from Bianca Paras...

...and the science fiction write Kim Stanley Robinson has written several, exploring climate change, testing different scenarios and imaging in different futures for humans and the natural world.

Modern politicians tend to shy away from them, partly because utopia has become a term of derision: unrealistic, excessively idealistic or naive In a vox pop session on Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning someone said that The Good Society “sounds like a good idea but is unrealistic”.

And that’s a real stumbling block for utopias in our society. Politicians don’t want to look silly. In fact, the whole point of utopias is not their realization. Utopias are imaginary spaces in which to think about what’s wrong with the world and how it could be made better.

They are (literally) noplaces. ‘Nice ideas’ that are unrealistic can have a real value. They can help us to think about where we would like to be, offer inspiration and perhaps catalyse action.

It’s a big mistake to think that utopias are visions of perfection that can be created in the real world. Dangerous things happen when people think like this. Some people would say that Hitler had a utopian vision, for example.

A despicable one: a world purged of ‘imperfections’. This was a utopia that justified mass murder. And the same pattern informs some religious fundamentalism today. So utopias can be a really dangerous and deadly political tool.

But, used carefully, they can be illuminating, inspiring and exciting. They can help us to work out what kind of world we want to life, and what a good life might look like. I think that could be useful.

Lucy Sargisson

Nothing more disagreeable

2010-04-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

"We say we want the truth, we say we want them to be honest; but we don’t really – we want them to make us feel good about ourselves..."

‘The trouble with the public is they’re f*cking horrible’. That’s what Peter Mannion, the made-up – and rather sympathetic – Conservative in The Thick of It said after being confronted by the people’s ill-considered – some might even say bigoted - opinions about his own good self.

Of course a real politician would never express such a view. Not in public anyway. Not while they’re still seeking office. Yet, the only real shock about Gordon Brown’s ‘bigot’ comment is not that he said what he said but that so many claim to be shocked that he – or indeed any politician – said it.

Consider for a moment the situation. A hugely motivated individual whose every waking hour over the last months has been devoted to sucking up to people whose ill-formed views will decide his fate finally comes face-to-face with the beast. Actually she isn’t being especially unreasonable, but he cannot say he disagrees with some of her views for it’s her vote he needs. Instead he must smile, nod like an idiot and quietly die inside. No wonder he explodes in private. You don’t have to be psychologically flawed to do that, just a normal human being.

It has always been so.

Anthony Trollope used his own miserable time as a Liberal candidate in the 1868 general election to inform his depiction of campaigning in The Duke’s Children (1880). There the author says of canvassing that: ‘[p]erhaps nothing more disagreeable, more squalid, more revolting to the senses, more opposed to personal dignity, can be conceived’. For it casts, he stated, poor men and women as the ‘flattered’ instead of the ‘flatterers’, leading the ostensibly solicitous candidate to privately hate those whose rudeness he had to publicly indulge.

Of course Trollope wrote as a snobbish member of the upper-class – elections turned the world upside down he moaned - and he was, frankly, a terrible candidate.

Eighty-five years later however Dennis Potter’s 1965 BBC television play Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton mirrored the humiliation and physical discomfort sketched out by Trollope. Potter – a socialist and working class boy made good who contested a constituency in the 1959 general election - depicted the travails of a young intellectual Labour candidate. Barton’s cynical agent sniggers: ‘canvassing can make you throw up if you’re the sensitive type’. This Barton proceeds to do, in some poor soul’s front garden after meeting voters who are completely dismissive about politics; support his party, but for all the wrong reasons; or set a large dog on him.

When politician meets public anything can happen – which is probably why until this week Brown only met loyal party members. But if Brown’s episode says a lot about him it also says much about us, the voters, and what we expect from politicians.

We say we want the truth, we say we want them to be honest; but we don’t really – we want them to make us feel good about ourselves, and by the way we can be as casually insulting about them as we like. But if a politician lets the mask slip, then God help them. Potter’s play ends brilliantly – and disturbingly – when his agent turns to camera and addresses the television audience: why are our politicians so flawed he asks – it is, he says your fault.

Professor Steven Fielding

Small earthquake in Chile

2010-04-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

"We might think that what happens in Chile is merely a small earth quake of no significance for us but perhaps it tells us a lot more than we might think about the end of New Labour..."

We seem to be in the twilight moments of the dominance of the Third Way in British Politics with Labour running consistently third in election polls.

Explanations for this decline largely focus on the weaknesses of Gordon Brown’s leadership and the impact of the recession. But look elsewhere, and you see that New Labour’s problems are echoed across the globe.

It might have escaped many people’s notice in this country, but the paradigmatic Latin American Third Way Government of the Concertación in Chile recently came to an end. It had been in power for 20 years. A look at its experience can give us some clues about why New Labour’s electoral success was always likely to be ultimately self-defeating.
.
The Concertación Government was a coalition of the Centre Left. During the Pinochet Dictatorship (1973-1989) the party leaderships went through a process they called ideological ‘modernisation’, premised upon an embrace of liberal democracy and the liberal market and a rejection of structural alternatives of the social democratic and socialist kind. This it is argued by the party leadership resulted in their electoral success.

But as I have demonstrated in relation to the Chilean Socialist Party (PSCh), the party of the popular classes of the Concertación, modernisation brought about a closing of ideological and political space: alternatives to neoliberalism were dismissed as outdated. Thus when unions protested about the privatisation of pensions or the introduction of fees in University they were labelled irrational. There was an individualisation of social ills; social problems such as unemployment and crime were re-framed as due to a lack of skills and/or civility. Crime and insecurity became key features in political debate. Party elites focused on governing as opposed to maintaining their relationships with their party base with parties becoming activated only at election time and internal elections an affair between elites behind closed doors. Sound familiar?

For the parties of the Concertación this resulted in a hollowing out of internal democracy, decline in membership, disillusionment between activists and leaderships and the increasing disenchantment of their union allies. For the Government of the Concertación their relationship with society moved from the mediation of collective interests to a televised relationship with individuals in the electorate. Socially there was a move to the right in sections of the working and under-classes in relation to questions of crime and insecurity accompanied by an erosion of past left-wing political identities and loyalties. Again, it is striking how much of the Chilean experience echoes that of the UK.

For the Concertación their process of modernisation ultimately undermined their political identity and unity leading to the election of a coalition of the political right ‘La Alianza por el Cambio’ (Alliance for Change) who argued that Chilean politics needed change, to reconstruct 'Chileaness' and to combat insecurity and crime

We might think that what happens in Chile is merely a small earth quake of no significance for us but perhaps it tells us a lot more than we might think about the end of New Labour and the rise of the political right in British politics.

Dr Sara Motta

The Nice Party Turns Nasty?

2010-04-28T03:27:00.000-07:00

In her foreword to the Green Party manifesto, Caroline Lucas suggests that the Liberal Democrats have dumped their positive attitude towards government intervention, in favour of the view that ‘the state is a problem’. The ‘nice party’, she writes, ‘have just got nastier’.

The implication that the party has abandoned its cuddly social liberalism in favour of a mean-minded economic liberalism is intended as a slight, but will be music to the ears of many Lib Dems.

Not least among these will be David Laws, who has been arguing for some time that his party’s economic liberal tradition has been suffering from benign neglect. In the opening chapter of The Orange Book, published in 2004, Laws wrote that between the 1930s and the 1980s the old Liberal Party had embraced ‘forms of soggy socialism’ at the expense of a commitment to ‘free market principles’. The Liberal Democrats now had to reclaim those principles.

If the Lib Dems of 2010 seem ‘nastier’ than their predecessors, one might think, it can only be because Laws’ project to restore economic liberal values to their rightful place has succeeded.

One might think that – but one shouldn’t, for two reasons. First, because you cannot reclaim something that you never lost. Although the party certainly did experiment with ‘soggy socialism’, the Liberals never dispensed with economic liberalism in the way that Laws suggests.

Through the 1950s and beyond the party provided a political home for numerous economic liberals – not just sometime leader Jo Grimond, but also figures like Arthur Seldon and Alan Peacock – many of whom played a significant role in shaping Liberal thought.

Publications like The Unservile State and Radical Alternative, although now long forgotten, show the clear imprimatur of these economic liberals.

Second, because any reassertion of ‘nasty’ economic liberalism that has taken place has not obviously dampened the party’s commitment to ‘nice’ social liberalism. The Liberal Democrat manifesto is more explicitly redistributive than its Labour or Conservative counterparts, and reveals an obsession with fairness which borders on the pathological.

Although the party may no longer have the headline-grabbing tax policies of 1997 or 2005 – no penny for education, no fifty pence rate for the highest earners – it is no less socially liberal for their absence. A pledge to cut tax for the poorest is arguably more progressive than a pledge to raise tax for the richest – though, as it happens, present Lib Dem policies would do both of those things.

None of which is to say that a Liberal Democrat government would be ‘nice’. Whichever party is in government after May 6th is going to be forced to make cuts, and Nick Clegg has already signalled his intent to be as ‘savage’ as the situation demands. But there is no reason to believe that the Lib Dems are any ‘nastier’ than they ever were.

Matthew Francis

Proportional (mis-)representation?

2010-04-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

"...it’s the beauty of politics that predicted outcomes are often confounded..."

The surge is support for the Liberal Democrats has prompted much talk about proportional representation. One of the received wisdoms about PR, one which has been stressed especially by Cameron’s Conservatives, is that it leads automatically to coalition and therefore weak governments.

Leaving aside the question of whether coalition governments are necessarily weak (there is plenty of evidence from our European partners that they do not have to be), is it true that PR always leads to coalitions?

It might be instructive to look at the example of Spain. There, the architects of the post-Franco democratic constitution deliberately established a PR-based system in the very hope that it would create coalition governments.

Their aim was to ensure there was no repetition of Spain’s previous experience of democracy under the Second Republic in the 1930s, when the President was able to intervene in politics in such a way as to undermine the elected premier.

So, the 1978 Constitution under a restored monarchy gave the prime minister very extensive political powers to ensure political stability, but then sought to temper those powers by designing an electoral system which would ensure the need to build politically inclusive coalitions.

As so often, the best laid plans went awry. What has been Spain’s experience of coalition government? In practice, it has been non-existent: since the return of democracy, there has not been a single national-level coalition government in over thirty years of democracy.

To be sure, there have been several minority administrations, which have depended for survival on a series of deals with minor (usually regional nationalist) parties – but no formal coalitions.

Indeed, four of Spain’s ten administrations since 1977 have enjoyed absolute majorities, and only three have relied on any formal support from other parties. Moreover, there has been remarkable political stability at national level, with just five premiers since 1977: Adolfo Suárez (1977-81), Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo (1981-82), Felipe González (1982-96), José María Aznar (1996-2004) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (since 2004).

How do we explain that? In part, it is down to the particular form of proportional representation chosen. Spain, in common with several European democracies (and as also used in European parliamentary elections), operates the d’Hondt system – a somewhat complex list system named after Victor d’Hondt, the Belgian mathematician and lawyer. Under d’Hondt, seats are awarded one at a time according to the highest average, obtained by dividing the number of votes by the number of seats plus one in a given constituency until all seats are allocated. (There’s an online guide to calculating d’Hondt outcomes).

But the real key to the explanation lies in the way that electoral boundaries were drawn. In Spain, a crucial element was to draw boundaries in such a way as to over-represent rural votes, in the hope of countering the expected left-leaning urban vote and thereby favour the centre-right. In technical terms, there is a high ‘index of disproportionality’ in Spain, reflected in the fact that it takes far more votes to elect a deputy in Madrid than it does, for example, in Soria.

What happened in practice was that the Socialist party increasingly picked up rural votes, leading to their crushing electoral majority in 1982, which ushered in fourteen years in power (and four consecutive elections wins).

The key point here, though, is that proportional systems vary in their degree of proportionality. It’s a question of design: there are many different possible systems out there, and how proportional they are varies widely.

It may be that the particular system favoured by the Liberal Democrats – Single Transferable Vote – would encourage coalitions, but there is no law that says PR necessarily leads to coalitions.

What’s more, once it’s in place, people’s voting behaviour may well change. But it’s the beauty of politics that predicted outcomes are often confounded.

Professor Paul M Heywood

Trust the people?

2010-04-27T04:17:00.000-07:00

"As Andrew Hawkins of ComRes noted in his commentary, ‘clearly a lot of people are very confused......’"

Sunday’s ComRes poll for the Independent on Sunday/Sunday Mirror contained two questions designed to tap into one of the central dividing lines of the election – what to do about public spending. Its findings are very revealing.

First, they asked this: “The Government should maintain current public spending plans in order to keep the recovery going”

Agree: 61%
Disagree 29%

Perhaps not surprisingly, younger people and those in poorer social groups were most likely to agree. Good news for Labour, you might think, given that this is their stance, and they appear to have almost two thirds of the public behind them.

But then they asked this: “The Government should cut public spending now to avoid higher taxes later”.

Agree 57%
Disagree 34%

As with the previous question, younger people and those in poorer social groups were the most likely to agree.

These are two totally contradictory stances – and yet the public want both of them. They want public spending both maintained and cut.

As Andrew Hawkins of ComRes noted in his commentary, ‘clearly a lot of people are very confused......’

Professor Philip Cowley

New Labour and the unions

2010-04-27T01:43:00.000-07:00

When New Labour came to power in 1997, British trade unions were jubilant. Immediately upon entering office, the Labour government signed up to the Social Chapter of the European Union and introduced the minimum wage.
Nevertheless, the statutory union recognition legislation was watered down and social partnership was not institutionalised beyond the Low Pay Commission. European social legislation was implemented in a minimalist way and Britain continued to function as an obstacle to a further development of the Social Dimension in the EU. Most importantly, however, New Labour did not repeal the anti-trade union laws by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. Trade unions still have to run a highly complex and rigorous ballot of their members before announcing a strike and must give an advance notice of seven days of any strike action to their employer. A complete ban on solidarity and secondary action has remained in place.

In the case of recent strikes by British Airways cabin crew, key figures in the Labour government even went on air criticising Unite, the trade union organising BA cabin crew. Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the strike “unjustified and deplorable” and the Transport Secretary Lord Adonis referred to the planned strike as “totally unjustified”.

Yet several British trade unions, including Unite, continue to support New Labour in the run-up to the current general elections. There is, for example, Unite 4 Labour; the endorsement by the General Secretary of the GMB union; and a poster campaign by Unison.

Such a trade union commitment to support labour parties is not uncommon in Europe. Historically, labour parties and trade unions emerged in tandem as the two arms of the increasingly organised working class at the end of the 19th, or the beginning of the 20th century.

This historical legacy continues to have a strong impact on trade unions. In Sweden, although the Social Democratic government implemented a whole range of neo-liberal policies between 1994 and 2006, the main trade union confederation LO regularly put its bureaucratic apparatus at the disposal of the Social Democrats during election campaigns. In Germany between 1998 and 2005, the Social Democratic-led coalition government under Gerhard Schröder introduced a whole range of restructuring measures within the so-called Agenda 2010, including drastic cuts in pension and unemployment benefits. Trade unions did not like it, they organised demonstrations, but they refrained from criticising the Social Democratic Party openly during election campaigns.

Norwegian trade unions are a noticeable exception here. They have shown how a more independent position can result in more influence on policy-making as well as a revival of the close relationship with the Social Democratic Party. In 2000 and 2001 the then Social Democratic led government implemented several measures of neo-liberal restructuring against the wishes of trade unions. When the party then experienced one of its worst defeats in the 2001 elections, trade unions did not simply turn round and renewed their pledge to the party. On the contrary, prior to the 2005 elections they put forward their own political agenda, submitted related questions to all political parties and then endorsed those parties to the electorate, which had responded favourably. It was this focus on policies, rather than unquestioning support of the Social Democratic Party, which made clear to the latter that it first needed trade union support, if it wanted to return to power and second, that it could not take this support for granted, but needed to earn it with pro-labour policies.

Importantly, the policy programme by the trade unions rejected any kind of ‘third way’ policies. They made clear that only parties, which opposed any further privatisations or the outsourcing of public services to private sector providers, would receive their endorsement. While accepting that reform of the public sector was needed, unions put forward the Quality Municipality Project as their alternative, which focuses on reform through changes within the public sector including the incorporation of the expertise of the workforce. Trade unions have clearly been able to move the Social Democratic Party to the left again. Since the return to power by the Norwegian Social Democratic Party at the head of a three party coalition in 2005, old ties with the trade unions have been strengthened, the Prime Minister meets the President of LO, the main trade union confederation, on a fortnightly basis to discuss policies and any neo-liberal restructuring measures such as privatisation of the public sector are off the table.

Perhaps a similar, more independent strategy would also be more fruitful for British trade unions?

Professor Andreas Bieler

Pick and Mix

2010-04-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

With less than a fortnight to go, here are some of the highlights of the blog over the last two weeks:

The manifestos compared – can you guess which one talks about chaos more?

Why the ippr don’t get the BNP – and why the BNP targets Islam.

Why Newnight Review don’t understand political fiction

How the polls aren’t really moving as much as you think

Why you should be sceptical about all the talk of this being an internet election

Plus:

Labour’s secret weapon: the World Cup

The benefits of attack ads

Gordon sings a song

And how to lose a TV debate, even if your opponent has punched a child in the face.

Professor Philip Cowley

The absence

2010-04-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

News that Labour is set to change its campaign strategy, moving Gordon Brown more centre stage, brings to mind David Hare’s play Absence of War.

I say ‘brings to mind’ – as a result of working on a forthcoming Radio 4 documentary on representations of New Labour I have just seen the 1995 television version of Hare’s play, sadly only available from the BBC Library.

After gaining unique behind-the-scenes access to Labour’s 1992 campaign Hare wrote about a Labour leader during a close election, which (spoiler alert) the party loses. Hare’s ‘George Jones’ is a kind of Neil Kinnock – a firebrand socialist whose rhetoric and commitment had once touched audiences.

However, as leader, Jones imposed discipline on an anarchic party to make it electable and in the process his closest aides had imposed discipline upon him, afraid he would revert to type and say the wrong thing.

As the campaign begins Jones is then trapped behind words and phrases that were not his own. He is also being undermined by some of his closest Parliamentary colleagues. This caution means that Labour’s campaign goes nowhere. To save the party from defeat Jones decides to go back to how he used to be, speaking not from notes written by others but from his own heart.

Yet at a major rally he discovers that his heart can no longer supply those inspirational words, so enmeshed had he become within an inauthentic politics and he is forced to read out his speech like a good little leader.

There is no suggestion that Brown is about to be set free like Jones, even though he threatening to invoke God against the Conservatives. Hare’s protagonist mouthed platitudes in which he did not believe: Brown does not seem to have that problem.

There are however wider echoes between the play and the current campaign. About Labour at a particular time, The Absence of War also addressed a more general proposition – that the more parties package themselves, in the hope of improving their electablity, the less they are true to themselves and so stop engaging the passions of the electorate.

Now, maybe things are not as simple as Hare presents them – but does he not have a point? For, after a second leaders debate in which Brown’s case was reduced to one word (‘Risk!’), Cameron’s to ‘New’ and Clegg’s to ‘Different’, the relationship between politics and authenticity must be worth discussing.

Professor Steven Fielding

They think it’s all over…

2010-04-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

"Could Clegg win the World Cup? If ever there was a moment to ask that question, just perhaps … it is now..."

With poll after poll putting Labour in third place, it is surely time for those bunkered in Labour HQ to reach for their secret weapon: the FIFA World Cup.

Although political science lacks many truly iron laws, it is indisputably the case that England has only ever won football’s most cherished prize under a Labour Government. Indeed, the same truth holds for the Rugby World Cup (snatched from under the very noses of the Australians in 2003). With the South African tournament just a few weeks away, Labour may well feel that this is the best shot left in its locker.

Of course, it’s not such a clear vote winner outside England, though a variant could be prepared for use north of the border: the only party ever to have presided over Scotland’s defeat of the World Champions at Wembley with a rather cheeky performance from Jim Baxter. More recently, we might recall that the great Ashes win of 2005 (‘the finest test series of all time’) was preceded by New Labour’s third successful electoral outing.

Of course, it’s not all one-way traffic. Credit for Margaret Thatcher’s win in 1983 is often attributed to her success in the Falkland’s War (a claim the psephologists have long played down) but too little attention is surely given to Botham’s Ashes win of 1981.

And who fails to notice that the decline of England’s test fortunes against the old enemy in the 1990s neatly coincided with the long electoral decline of the Conservative Party?

At the same time, no-one over fifty will fail to recollect that the unbearable humiliation of England by West Germany in Mexico on 14th June 1970 was followed just a few days later by Heath’s surprise win over Wilson.

What are the precedents for the Liberal Democrats? Well, they are not entirely encouraging. Last time we had a Liberal government we were still inventing games for the colonies. Hobbs (Jack rather than Thomas) was opening the batting for England and tennis was being run by a bunch of amateurs. North of the border, little has changed: the Scottish Football League had just been won by Rangers from Celtic (or vice versa). The Liberal Democrat leader is an untested force. Could Clegg win the World Cup? If ever there was a moment to ask that question, just perhaps … it is now.

Professor Chris Pierson

Why is no one criticising Nick Clegg’s Vietnam War record?

2010-04-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

"The Daily Mail trumpeted the Conservatives’ success in raising £1.5 million in the first week of the campaign, but Obama could raise that between sneezing and blowing his nose..."

For those of us who treat elections as a spectator sport, the general election campaign is bubbling up nicely. But for a politics-as-sports fan like me, it lacks something in comparison with presidential campaigns in the United States. Sure, we’ve got our own ‘Yes we can’ (albeit ‘probably not’) dynamic going on. And the debates have been fun. But unlike the US, we don’t get to enjoy candidates’ paid-for advertising campaigns.
In particular, we’re missing out on juicy attack ads—30 seconds of dramatic narration enumerating an opponent’s real, implied and imagined transgressions, character flaws, voting record etc.

There are Party Election Broadcasts of course, but PEBs don’t give the same thrill as the 30 second spot. In the heat of battle where is David Cameron’s soft-on-crime Willie Horton? Where is the shady support group ready to step up and challenge Nick Clegg’s Vietnam War record?

Consider too, the people who are rendered redundant by the absence of paid ads in our election culture: the undergraduates, pensioners and other would-be focus group types; the political scientists and grad students with papers to write; the ad-watch and fact-check bloggers. Think of the atrophying creativity of our best advertising people.

And spare a thought for the wasted youth of our frustrated YouTube parody-makers. How do you parody a PEB?

What would this general election campaign look like if candidates ran paid ads? With other 4000 candidates, if every single one ran ad campaigns on TV it would be chaotic and unbearably parochial, but at the party level, with three competitive candidates, a trailing incumbent and two parties emphasizing a break with the current administration but also less likely to form a coalition with each other, conditions are ripe for a fantastically negative campaign.

And given the brevity of the UK campaign, the concentration of attacks would be spectacular. It is interesting to imagine what British campaign ads would look like. Would we see Daisy girl reinvented to remind us of the dangers of European integration? Would Gordon Brown emphasize his superiority over Nick Clegg in taking care of business at 3am? Or would ads be more inimitably British? Picture Gordon Brown as Stevens from Remains of the Day—surely a creative advertising type could take that idea and run with it?

More importantly, would campaign ads be good for the UK? And especially, would it make more people vote? Negative campaigning gets a bad press, but recent research in the US suggests that exposure to attack ads can sometimes mobilize voters to turn out and is often a source of substantive and documented information.

Negative messages stimulate stronger affective responses, are more memorable and signal to people that something important is at stake. They also help voters to differentiate between candidates—an important issue for less sophisticated citizens who say the candidates are all the same and therefore don’t vote.

In many ways the information environment available to voters during UK campaigns is very good. However, there is one area where politics is yet to fully penetrate: the commercial break. This is a niche that campaign ads were literally born to fill and might be able to reach less politically engaged voters who, even now, may be surprised to learn that there is an election coming up.

Rather than confining politicians to the news and shopping centres, why not unleash them on people waiting for Desperate Housewives or Masterchef to come back on? Since we can now access our preferred entertainment so efficiently, people who choose to avoid information about the election can do so with little effort. Running ads on Dave or E4 might just get more fans of Friends repeats informed and engaged in the electoral process.

It wouldn’t be cheap. Airtime at commercial rates isn’t cheap. At 2008 prices, a 30 second spot run nationally on ITV during Coronation Street would cost £75K. With the Electoral Commission’s limit of £20 million on campaign spending this is probably not a cost effective use of resources, especially given that there is no systematic evidence that negative advertising actually works electorally: small dents in an opponent’s support are offset by diminution of support for the sponsor of an attack.

Yet this doesn’t deter candidates and parties around the world, who continue to run negative ads in hope of striking it lucky. Lyndon Johnson’s Daisy Girl, the most famous and perhaps successful ad of all time, ran just once, albeit in the pre-multi-channel, pre-internet era when audiences were effectively captive.

Reaching audiences in our current fractured media environment is expensive and difficult—which is why we see such enthusiasm for experimentation with internet communication tools. Cost effectiveness is clearly an issue for parties in the UK, where raising campaign funds is more difficult than in the States: The Daily Mail trumpeted the Conservatives’ success in raising £1.5 million in the first week of the campaign, but Obama could raise that between sneezing and blowing his nose.

Dr Jon Sullivan

The Ghost at the Feast

2010-04-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

"How do these three men in a boat see the world, and our place in it?"

In Roman Polanski’s film, The Ghost, currently doing the rounds, Pierce Brosnan plays a recently retired British Prime Minister, sequestered in his American home-from-home, hard at work on his tennis and his memoirs. With his uncertain accent, impossible tan, ersatz charm, pectoral presence and petulant glamour, Pierce Brosnan makes an unconvincing Tony Blair. He is in good company. Tony Blair makes an unconvincing Tony Blair, for precisely those reasons.

Blair’s appearances have been fleeting enough of late, save for the well-rehearsed apologetics of the Chilcot Inquiry – will anyone mention the Chilcot Inquiry in the Prime Ministerial debate? – yet he haunts the stage as if there were a fourth podium, or perhaps a hobgoblin with a rictus grin and a glassy stare, whispering devilishly in the ear of each heir, ‘A force for good’ ....

No European leader of his generation spoke so unblushingly of good and evil. In this worldview, the US is a force for good, which is to say that Washington is worthy of love, actually. For the Prime Minister, this means making a conquest of the tenant of the White House, whoever that may be. Britain too is a force for good, naturally, and also the British Army. This is goodness militant. Tony was a true believer in the mission of the moment.

Does any of this survive him? Are any of the contenders prepared to talk in these terms? Of doing good in the world; of responsibilities to others (beyond stranded passengers); of humanitarian intervention; of bare-faced internationalism? Is liberal war a thing of the past, even among liberals, however perky and cosmopolitan they may be? Are there still causes worth breaking a lance for, out there in the world?

How do these three men in a boat see the world, and our place in it? Who will they talk to, internationally, and when? Who will they consort with? Do they care to pull their weight as a member of the EU, or they resigned to irrelevance? Are they prepared to say candidly what can be achieved in Afghanistan? What of the reckoning with the dark side of the war on terror – ‘extraordinary rendition’, ‘enhanced interrogation’ – torture? Will they commit to an independent inquiry on that?

And what of the lance, in our straitened circumstances? Among other great unmentionables, is the British ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, that threadbare totem, finally to be consigned to the dustbin of history? A strategic defence review is unavoidable. What direction should it take?#

Perhaps they have a haiku for us. In another tract for the times, Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega, there is a character who wanted ‘a haiku war’ in Iraq: a war in three lines –

‘A great power has to act.
We were struck hard.
We need to retake the future.’

As it happens, haiku
Are
All the
Rage.

The President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, a famous Belgian, has just published a book of them (and genuine ones too, not like the bastardised versions above). Prime Ministerial candidates could surely manage one each.

Professor Alex Danchev

Blame is the Spur

2010-04-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

"The honeymoon period is over Rab. We want results"

With the nation swept away on a tide of Cleggmania, it is tempting to think that real life really is stranger than fiction. But for those who cannot get enough politics from the election campaign the arts are doing their bit to help fill the gap.

Roman Polanski’s new film based on Robert Harris’ novel, The Ghost is currently on release whilst Posh and Stiffed are playing the theatres. The latest edition of The Review Show sought to place these and other recent political fictions in context and explain their attitude.

The focus was almost solely on New Labour and Tony Blair and this led to the conclusion that, in the words of Toby Young, since 1997 the once ‘illusioned had become disillusioned’.

It’s hard to deny that New Labour have been at the sharp end of the satirists’ and playwrights’ pens over recent years. But even before Blair took office, BBC 2 screened Guy Jenkin’s comedy Crossing the Floor, the story of a Tory Home Secretary who sought to further his career by deserting and beleaguered Government and joining a renewed Labour Party.

The Labour Party are shown as craven in their attempt to take on this Tory turncoat and we learn that the Labour leader is ‘young, charismatic, handsome and only slightly demented.’ Tory/New Labour cross-dressing and media-driven mad leaders might seem commonplace today but were in fact seen as hackneyed even in 1996.

A review in the Independent bemoaned, ‘its cast of sleazy Tories and sleek New Labour spin-doctors (the baddies here) is so over-familiar that one can only hope for a surprise Lib Dem victory to give us some fresh targets.’ Fourteen years on, the reviewer’s wishes may be about to come true.

Indeed, take a step back from the 1990s and you notice that disillusionment and ideological strife have always been at the heart of fictional depictions of the left and its struggles with parliamentary socialism whether in the prime time ITV drama Bill Brand or pre-war novels such as Company Parade and Clash.

Apart from documenting these struggles, political fiction has also been a useful reflection on (and indeed is sometimes used as a tool for) an immanent critique that has a grand place within parts of the British left: ready to see betrayal and compromise on behalf of the leadership around every corner.

Not long after Blair’s election, the 100th anniversary of Nye Bevan’s birth was marked by Trevor Griffiths’ TV play Food for Ravens. As well as marking the man’s life it was clearly seen as an early warning about the principles New Labour was abandoning Bevan often plays this role.

But go back over sixty years and the same thing – this time deploying another totemic figure in Labour Party mythology, Ramsey MacDonald, thinly disguised as Hamer Shawcross – can be seen at work in the Boulting Brothers’ film adaptation of Howard Spring’s novel Fame is the Spur.

The film critic Raymond Durgnat wrote that the film was a direct attack on the Labour Government of the time but released in 1947 - and taking account of production time - this doesn’t quite seem right. Rather the film is better read as another precursory salvo, warning how Labour Governments will always let you down.

The last word should be left to Rab C. Nesbitt’s pal Jamsie Cotter. Raising a toast to the scenes on the TV of Blair entering Downing Street for the first time he’s reminded that his Giro hasn’t arrived, ‘Aye, I blame that bastard Labour Government…The honeymoon period is over Rab. We want results.’

Matthew Bailey

Mr Clegg Goes to Washington

2010-04-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

"This ignorance was, it turns out, Clegg’s greatest weapon..."

When most people turned on their televisions to watch the first leaders’ debate they probably knew – or thought they knew - all they wanted to know about Gordon Brown and David Cameron. For good or bad their images had already been firmly fixed in their minds.

Of Nick Clegg however many were blissfully ignorant. This ignorance was, it turns out, Clegg’s greatest weapon. For when the viewers saw this seemingly nice young man with the striking yellow tie talk direct to camera and distance himself from the two ‘old parties’ and offer them a ‘new politics’ they had no reason to disbelieve him.

If only because they had had not been paying much attention to politics, so far as many voters were concerned, Clegg had no past, he was new: if not The Man With No Name, he was The Man With No Image.

Pity, if you will, the other two. For to be leader of either the Labour or Conservative parties is to be – no matter how hard your spin doctors work – a man mistrusted. One index of quite how bad are their images is their representation in fiction.

As I argued in the Guardian recently Tony Blair has an awful set of fictional representations. You might think that he deserved them. But these do not all originate from reactions to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, soon as ‘Tony Blair’ set foot on the stage, page or screen – even before 1997 - he was cast as media-obsessed, spin-centric and disingenuous. This might have said something about the real Blair – but it also said something about how writers represent those who seek and hold political power.

The Deal, Peter Morgan’s 2002 play for Channel Four, imagined the Brown-Blair relationship and speculated about how it was that the latter lost out to the former in 1994. In 2002 Gordon Brown was the hero – if Blair was superficial, Brown was substantial; if Blair was the blow-in to Labour, Brown was rooted, soaked in the party’s ethos; if Blair was disloyal it was Brown’s loyalty to John Smith that cost him the leadership. But look at Brown as depicted in The Trial of Tony Blair and Confessions of a Diary Secretary both of which were broadcast in 2007: childish, petty and sulky.

Right from the start Cameron too has got the sharp end of the stick. In Confessions of a Diary Secretary he is presented as a silly ass suffering some severe problems with his cycling shorts. In the 2009 documentary-with-made-up-bits When Boris Met Dave things are even worse: as a student he shown liking Sade.

Where is Nick Clegg? Nowhere to be seen. When politics is screened the LibDems as a whole hardly get a look-in.

The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, broadcast on BBC1 in 2006, reduced the 2005 election campaign to two middle aged Labour and Conservative candidates fighting in a supermarket car park. The LibDem turns up just as the police arrive.

As it happens he is also given a flea in his ear by our heroine but then this series was about Pritchard, who wins the election after creating a party of similarly politically disenchanted women. In 2010, Nick Clegg is our Mrs Pritchard – or more likely our Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

Frank Capra’s film might have been released in 1939 but it reverberates through not just US but also UK politics. Showing how an idealistic young man untouched by politics (for which read corruption and selfish ambition) cuts through the party games to actually stand up for the interests of the people, it is the model for any number of later screen fictions about politics.

Mr Smith has also been consciously or unconsciously evoked by plenty of politicians – both Obama and McCain did it in 2008 - keen to present themselves as the ‘outsider’ candidate. It is an image which in these disenchanted times can be pretty potent.

For Clegg the danger is that this is a one-off – how can you preserve your image as the outsider when the whole purpose of your being is to get inside?

Professor Steven Fielding

The Harrods Deterrent

2010-04-22T00:29:00.000-07:00

"Perhaps a nuclear deterrent from Homebase would be more fitting than a future one from Harrods?"

In Yes Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby reassures the Prime Minister that Trident is the sort of nuclear weapons system that Harrods would sell. This was a good analogy at the time, relevant to the follow-on system that the Blair government announced in 2006.

Trident D5 was designed for a superpower, guaranteeing the ability to evade enemy defences and offering such a degree of accuracy that it could be employed against the hardened military (that is, even nuclear) targets of an adversary. The successor submarines to the Vanguard class will have to come into service in the 2020s and will ensure interoperability with the American ballistic missile system long into the future.

Yet the Liberal Democrats have questioned the cosy consensus between the two main parties over proceeding with a ‘son of Trident’. Twice in the first televised debate between the party leaders, Nick Clegg poured scorn on plans to purchase a future nuclear weapons system of the ‘Cold War age’, at enormous cost.

In doing so, he is tapping into a vein of thinking that goes back to the time of Dr David Owen and the Social Democrat Party that questioned whether the UK needed such a highly capable nuclear system. At that time it advocated a deterrent in which nuclear-armed cruise missiles were fitted to some of the Royal Navy’s hunter-killer submarines.

Such an option could be pursued now. It would retain a nuclear capability in the face of an uncertain, proliferating world but would place it on a much more modest level. A cruise missile has undeniable drawbacks over its ballistic missile equivalent: it is more vulnerable to enemy counter-measures, it is of shorter range, it can carry only a single warhead and it impinges on the conventional role of submarines.

Nevertheless, it offers the prospect of remaining in the nuclear club with a submarine-based platform at a much reduced cost.

The Liberal Democrats are right to re-open a debate that was too swiftly closed down by the Blair government. With massive cuts in public spending in prospect and a black hole acknowledged within the defence budget, it is timely to put all issues up for debate. Both the Labour government and the Conservatives have said that the future of the strategic nuclear deterrent would be off-limits in the Strategic Defence Review that will follow the General Election.

But with the pressures of the war in Afghanistan and in an international environment in which the US and Russia have announced major cuts in their strategic arsenals, it is time to re-evaluate UK policy.

Perhaps a nuclear deterrent from Homebase would be more fitting than a future one from Harrods?

Professor Wyn Rees

Polls stability again (well, sort of)

2010-04-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

Again, the polls appear to be all over the place. Last night’s ComRes poll had the Conservatives in front by nine points, Populus by just one. You Gov had the Lib Dems ahead by three, Angus Reid had them ahead by just one. Lib Dem support had either ‘burst’ (ComRes had them back to 26%, albeit a level of support that many Lib Dems would have sold their souls for just a week ago) or was at its highest level (34%, with YouGov).

There’s no doubt that there’s some fluctuations. But, as with the pre-debate polls, there’s also some real continuity, once you take into account the margin of error you get from sampling.

The Conservative vote is the most stable of all. Since the Lib Dem surge, every poll has put the Conservatives on 33+/-2.

With one exception – yesterday’s Angus Reid poll – every poll has put Labour on 27+/-3.

And with two exceptions – yesterday’s ComRes and YouGov polls – poll survey has put the Lib Dems on 30+/-3.

And remember that each polling company conducts their surveys differently – different ways of doing fieldwork, and then (even more importantly) different ways of weighting and filtering the data – and so we should expect to see variation between companies.

If however we look at the spreads by companies, then we see even more stability. Excluding those organisations which have only done one poll since the Lib Dem surge:

ComRes have: Con: 33+/-2; Lab: 27+/-1; LD: 28+/-2.

YouGov have: Con: 32+/-1; Lab: 28+/-2; LD: 32+/-3.

Angus Reid have: Con: 32+/-0; Lab: 24+/-1; LD: 33+/-1.

ICM have: Con: 34+/-1; Lab: 20+/-1; LD: 29+/-2.

In other words, within polling companies, not a single poll has seen movement outside the margin of error, and the Conservative and Labour spreads are even more stable, the majority being just +/-1.

One other thing. The +/-3 margin of error is 95% accurate, but that means that one in every 20 polls will show variations beyond it. The phrase rogue polls is used wildly – as Mike Smithson of politicalbetting.com often says “a rogue poll is one whose results you disagree with” – but it technically refers just to those 5% of polls.

We are now seeing so many polls – 16 since the debates alone – that we should expect about one poll every five or six days to be a rogue.

UPDATE: This piece was written before the publication of today's Ipsos-MORI poll, but that merely confirms the argument above, with the poll nestling nicely near the mid-points, at 32/28/32.

Professor Philip Cowley

Put your clothes on Dave!

2010-04-21T03:40:00.000-07:00

The Conservatives’ new poster has been launched with the words “our new poster underlines our positive agenda on welfare reform”.

Yet the Tory manifesto is not nearly so hard hitting as represented here; the formation of local work clubs and those on job seekers allowance carrying out community work, might even have once been described as paternalistic. Moreover, while the policy to which the poster refers is in the manifesto, it is a policy of last resort.

And it is last resort to which the Tory leader would have appeared to have returned, a sop to a wing of the party who would probably have voted for him anyway. More importantly given the changing nature of the electorate it is a move that Tim Bale argued against two months ago.

The poster’s combination of image and text is also an odd one. Posters are at their most successful when image and text combine, one supporting the other in harmony. It is perhaps the Conservatives who have been best at this in the recent past, as with Labour’s Tax Bombshell (1992), which successfully combined slogan and text in 1992, to visualise an internal fear that many voters had:

The new Conservative poster makes no attempt to join image and word. We have the image of go-getting Cameron and a seemingly unrelated slogan, and while the two don’t contrast they also seem to have little rapport. The poster may prove to be successful, but as a piece of political marketing it is banal.

And then there’s Cameron’s wardrobe or indeed lack of it. Firstly we had Cameron in no tie, relaxed and informal he was the man we could trust. We now have him with no tie and no jacket, go-getting and eager to get on with the job.

How many clothes will he mislay before the election is out?

Christopher Burgess

Leaders debates - lessons from Romania

2010-04-20T23:40:00.000-07:00

"...finding a balance between using kid gloves and attacking your opponent is very difficult..."

Nearly all the pre-debate coverage last week tried to draw lessons from the US experience of presidential elections. But it’s not just the US that has them. Romania has had televised presidential debates since 1994, just four years after the revolution.

And to Romanian eyes, the British debates featured the typical British politeness of the candidates who barely engaged in any juicy attacks or cynical remarks, an audience so overwhelmed that the individuals asking questions had trembling voices when reading them from a piece of paper, the studio so grey it might remind one of the ’60s quiz games on black-and-white TV sets.

The most recent Romanian Presidential TV debate took place less than six months ago, on 4 December 2009, just two days before the vote, with 4 million people watching, out of a population of 22 million. And if there is anything to learn from it, it is that finding a balance between using kid gloves and attacking your opponent is very difficult.

Mircea Geoana, the leader of the Socialist opposition party, was leading in the polls for the whole period before the election. Moreover, footage had just been released on the incumbent Traian Basescu hitting a 10-year-old boy in the face at a presidential rally. Mr Basescu's campaign said the 18-second video that showed the president striking the boy was a dirty trick and the footage was "seriously altered", but by the night of the confrontation it had been shown dozens of times on television news channels, seen thousands of times online, debated incessantly, and become a major topic of everyday TV studio/ street conversation.

By assuming it had been vulgarized enough in the four days before the debate and that his winning card was talking mainly policy agendas and manifestoes, Mr. Geoana ignored the elephant in the room entirely. It was Mr. Basescu, who had all to lose in his bid for a second mandate, and with the leading two Romanian News TV channels against him, who brought it up. He found the balance between stressing the achievements of his administration, and accusing his opponent of protecting former “Securitatea” (Romanian Secret Police) and of running a dishonest campaign (with reference to the ‘fake’ video).

Basescu went on to win.

Oana Elisabeta Pop

A New Study on BNP Support: Why IPPR Got (Some of) it Wrong

2010-04-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

"Extremism of various forms and its support have much greater social and policy relevance than previous years..."

With each election comes a new wave of panic about the possibility of a BNP breakthrough. One problem with debate about the far right is that often remains completely detached from the rapidly-growing evidence base on what drives support for these parties.

We are not where we were in the general elections of 2001 or 2005: we now know a great deal about what motivates some Britons to vote BNP and the characteristics of communities where the far right tends to poll well.

A report released this week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) attempts to add to this evidence base. First, even though the report completely glosses the academic literature on this topic we should take a moment to applaud IPPR for trying to add to our understanding of this important issue. Clap clap.

The think tank community has something which some academics often crave: immediate impact and an ability to bend the ears of journalists and politicians who desire a quick digestible soundbite based on ‘the evidence’. If they play it right, think tanks can help shape agendas.

It is precisely for these reasons that think tanks need to remain as close as possible to the underlying evidence base which informs our understanding of questions like who votes BNP, or how can we explain the rise of the far right?

Unfortunately – as is the case with IPPR’s latest report on BNP support– sometimes this does not happen.

There are many things which are correct in this report and corroborate our existing work on these questions. Crime and unemployment have little effect on BNP voting. True. The party performs less well in areas where education levels are low.

True. We agree with these. But then there are other things in this report which are seriously problematic and need to be flagged.

We will highlight these flaws against the backdrop of the press release which accompanied the report. This release tells interested journalists and policy wonks that it is ‘not immigration but alienation and an ability to overcome social challenges such as isolation and low skills which are the main drivers for BNP support’.

It continues, ‘this important finding contradicts the argument that immigration is to “blame” for pushing voters into the arms of the BNP’. Enter the co-director of IPPR Carey Oppenheim who concludes: ‘What our findings can finally lay to rest is the mistaken popular belief that it is the experiences of immigration which leads to people voting for the BNP’.

Ok, so here are the problems as we see them.

Problem #1: The report tells us nothing about actual BNP voters or their motives because it is focused at the level of local authorities. This is a common approach in many early studies of the far right. It has potential to tell us something about the types of areas where parties like the BNP prosper, but tells us next to nothing about individual BNP voters and – crucially – their motivations.

By looking only at local authority level the report glosses over an enormous amount of heterogeneity and is susceptible to what academics call the ‘ecological fallacy’ whereby people start making inferences about the behaviour of individuals based on the characteristics of the communities in which they are based.

We are told, for example, that support for the BNP is less about immigration than political and social exclusion. Why then do BNP voters rank immigration the most important issue facing both their families and the country?

It might not be the direct experience of immigration which is fuelling BNP voting, but anxiety about immigration is a major driver of the party’s support, like it or not.

Problem #2: The methodology of the report is flawed, in several respects. First, the report has not corrected BNP support to account for ethnic diversity which means that they look at support for the party by looking at all voters rather than the ones who really matter here: white British voters.

The report compares support levels for the BNP among the entire electorate instead of support levels for the BNP among its target electorate of white voters .Unsurprisingly, this leads the researchers to find that the BNP does less well in ethnically diverse areas. Of course they do! Such areas include a large population that the BNP doesn’t target and which give it no support.

Problem #3: The report adopts a blanket approach to ethnic diversity. The claim is that ‘areas with larger numbers of non-white people are less likely to vote for the BNP’. Yet the report does not break ethnicity down by different groups, choosing instead to lump everyone into the category of ‘non-white’. As our research has shown, taking the time to make this distinction makes all the difference.

We (and other academics if the authors had read the existing literature) find a strong relationship between higher levels of BNP support and large Muslim communities. We also find that non-Muslim Asians have no effect on BNP support and that BNP votes are actually lower in areas with large numbers of Black voters (read my earlier blog).

Simply looking for a correlation between the proportion of non-white and BNP voting misses the point: support for the far right is far more complicated.

Problem #4: The report measures turnout by looking only at turnout in one general election (2005). This glosses the critical importance of local elections to explaining the BNP’s rise, where turnout has not always been low.

Initial local BNP gains in one ward in Burnley in 2002 took place against the backdrop of a rise in turnout, likewise in local elections in Barking and Dagenham over the years 2002-06.

Looking only at one general election and drawing conclusions about turnout and party support is risky business.

Problem #5: The report puts most of its chips onto the argument that there is ‘strong evidence that recent immigration is not driving people to vote for the BNP’, and that ‘immigration to an area appears, on the whole, to make people less likely to vote for the far right’.

The authors allude to the fact that it is less objective experiences of immigration which motivate far right support than subjective experiences of immigration, i.e. I might not have seen or interacted with immigrants on my street, but I’m concerned about the effects of immigration on my society.

This is a crucial point but is downplayed throughout the report. Instead, the ‘finding’ that objective experiences appear less important (which is itself based on limited evidence) is taken as evidence that immigration per se is not a major driver of support for the BNP – which run counter to all the evidence we have from actual BNP voters.

With these problems in mind, the point about all of this is that future research – whether from think tanks, academics or others – needs to think more seriously about ways of building on what we already know, rather than spinning out a convenient headline finding to journalists and politicians.

Despite the claims of IPPR’s co-director, no popular beliefs have been laid to rest here. We already knew most of this, while the ‘new’ claims lack the robust evidence which is required to turn them into facts.

Extremism of various forms and its support have much greater social and policy relevance than previous years. It is for these reasons that we need to think and research together in order to answer the challenges thrown up by these phenomena.

Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford

Multiple polling days

2010-04-20T01:51:00.000-07:00

"Postal votes will be landing on doormats soon. They could well be doing so when the Lib Dems are enjoying their best election campaign ever..."

A couple of months ago, I was chatting to a party strategist, and asked what he thought had done most to change the nature of British elections in recent years. His answer: postal voting.

Or more accurately, the increased amount of it, following the Representation of the People Act 2000, which allowed for postal voting on demand. Since then, the amount of postal voting has increased election-on-election, to the point where around 15% of the votes cast in 2005 were postal votes.

A paper published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (sub required, unfortunately) by Rallings et al argues that, for all the hooha, postal voting had relatively little impact on either turnout or party support at the last election.

But the reason that the strategist argued postal voting altered British elections was because they changed the focus and the structure, even if not necessarily the outcome.

Prior to the 2000 Act, everything the parties did built towards polling day. Whilst most things still build towards polling day, parties now also need to be aware of the significant chunk of voters who will be casting their votes before then. Widespread postal voting effectively creates multiple polling dates.

Postal votes will be landing on doormats soon. They could well be doing so when the Lib Dems are enjoying their best election campaign ever. Even if the Lib Dem surge subsides and Labour manages to pull back some of its support by the traditional polling day, a good chunk of voters will have cast their votes at the point when Labour were in third place.

UPDATE: Writing it, I thought 'I can't believe I'm the only person to think about this'. And then I saw this from the excellent UK Polling Report, which proved that I wasn't. Great minds, etc.

Professor Philip Cowley

Shorter, fairer, more polluted? The Lib Dem manifeso compared

2010-04-20T01:37:00.000-07:00

"At worst, the government has provided too much and voters will actively want less. Either way, other parties can make gains..."

Following on from the previous comparison of the Conservative and Labour manifestos, what about the Liberal Democrat manifesto?

The first thing to note is the comparative difference in size. Whilst the Conservative manifesto was nearly 29,000 words long, and Labour’s over 30,000 words, the Lib Dems come in at a relatively svelte 21,668 words.

Another striking difference is the massive disparity in the number of times the word ‘fair’ (or ‘fairness’, ‘fairer’, ‘fairest’) was mentioned in the manifestos. In the Lib Dem manifesto this was mentioned 99 times, compared to 64 for the Labour manifesto, and just 12 for the Conservative manifesto.

Given that the Lib Dem manifesto was nearly a third shorter than the Conservative manifesto, this makes the difference even starker.

In their manifesto, the Conservatives used the word polluting only once, whilst the Lib Dems mentioned pollution 14 times. This suggests a qualitatively difference in each parties’ perception of environmental issues. It may be the case that this is a result of the Conservatives making aspirational (perhaps utopian) appeals about the environment, whilst the Lib Dems are focusing upon an existing problem that needs to be managed.

Labour made no references at all to pollution. This may be a result of their focus upon a ‘green recovery’ (largely in economic terms) rather than a more dedicated ‘environmentalism’.

More generally, the Lib Dems were far less likely to use imagery relating to ascending (‘rise’, ‘rising’, etc.; 110% less uses) or height (‘higher’, ‘grow’, etc.; 54% less uses) than Labour. In this respect, the Lib Dems were similar to the Conservatives, between who there were no significant differences.

This is consistent with a relatively less positive vision of the UK in measurable areas (notably the economy) of both past performance and future prospects.

Again similarly to the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are less likely to use words relating to time (‘past’, ‘decade’, ‘time’, etc.) than Labour (34% less uses). Also similarly to the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are more likely to invoke ‘abstract thought’ imagery (‘belief’, ‘choice’, ‘plan’, etc.) than Labour (37% more uses).

This is probably a result of Labour attempting to play upon their past reputation for governing, whilst the Lib Dems (who have no recent governing experience) attempt to suggest alternate prospects.

Interestingly, this is a dangerous strategy for Labour. Recent scholarly work has shown that voters can have a ‘thermostatic’ perception of issues (discussed in more detail here). They vote for a party because the party offers them something that they want; once that want has been met other wants and needs come to the fore.

At best, the government has successfully given people what they wanted and they have ceased to want more. Playing on this in an election risks isolating voters by reminding them that you are no longer offering to fulfil new ‘wants’.

At worst, the government has provided too much and voters will actively want less. Either way, other parties can make gains. Attempting to trade on past performance – by looking back at the wants you have met in the past – may bring less reward than some in the party might hope.

All differences noted are significant at the 95% level, unless explicitly stated, and all percentage comparisons are corrected for relative differences in size. Absolute word usage numbers are uncorrected.

Jonathan Rose

Life’s not fair, son

2010-04-19T02:38:00.000-07:00

"Would the Lib Dems prop up a government that had come third in the popular vote? Now, there’s a question many of us didn’t think we’d be asking when this campaign began..."

Three things have changed as a result of the Lib Dems poll surge following Thursday’s debate. Two are (fairly) obvious, the third less so.

Starting with the most obvious: the Lib Dem vote has increased dramatically. Today’s YouGov poll for the Sun puts them on 33. The last YouGov poll before the debate had them on 22. In other words, the party has increased its support by 50% in the space of just four days.

Today’s poll puts them in the lead, as did a bpix poll on Sunday. We’ve seen third party surges before, but not this close to a general election. No one knows whether the Lib Dems will manage to sustain this level of support, or whether it will fade (or even increase yet further). Anyone who does tell you they know is fibbing, for we are in unchartered waters here.

Second, and as a result, both the other two parties have lost support. Prior to the debates, every opinion poll during the campaign put the Conservatives on 38+/-3, every poll put Labour on 30+/-3. That is no longer true. The Conservatives have been on 31 in two of the post-debate polls. Labour have dropped as low as 26. The two-party share of the vote in today’s poll – in what used to be seen as the archetypical two-party system – is just 58%.

The third consequence is the least obvious. When I was growing up, and used to complain that something wasn’t fair, my Dad would reply: life’s not fair, son. That applies in spade to the British electoral system. Projections of seats from votes should always be treated with caution – especially now – but most projections of seats based on recent polls would put Labour third in votes but first in seats. And the Lib Dems, first in votes, would come third in seats.

Prior to the debates, whilst most polls pointed to a hung parliament it was one in which the Conservatives would most likely have emerged with most seats. No longer. On most projections from the post-debate polls (and the precise details differ depending how you make that projection), we will have a hung parliament but with Labour as the largest party in terms of seats. And that is the real game changer from Thursday.

If they can push on, and increase support, then the Lib Dems might break through this barrier, and begin to be properly rewarded in seats. But they need around 37/38% to become the largest single party, and around the 40% mark to form a majority. And short of that, the Lib Dem surge hurts the Conservatives more than it hurts Labour.

This does, however, pose a problem for Nick Clegg. The Lib Dem position is that, in the event of a hung parliament, they are prepared to reach agreement with whichever party has the most obvious ‘mandate’ from the voters.

Nick Clegg, has, however always been very careful not to specify whether mandate means votes or seats, arguing that this is a hypothetical discussion, the sort of thing that nerdy academics worry about but which didn’t worry normal folk much.

In fact, it has always been a real possibility that Labour might emerge with more seats but with fewer votes. And on today’s poll is looks even less hypothetical.

Would the Lib Dems prop up a government that had come third in the popular vote? Now, there’s a question many of us didn’t think we’d be asking when this campaign began.

Professor Philip Cowley

Letters From Economists

2010-04-19T01:24:00.000-07:00

"The tale of the 364 may simply illustrate that the backing of economists – though rhetorically useful for politicians – is not a reliable guide to good policy..."

Those following the on-going debate about how and when to reduce the deficit will have seen a letter printed in last Thursday’s Daily Telegraph. Signed by almost sixty academic economists, it is the second to back Labour’s plans to delay spending cuts until ‘the recovery is well underway’, and warned that Conservative plans to cut immediately could ‘imperil not only jobs but also the prospects for reducing the deficit’.

It serves as a response to similar letters from business leaders and yet more economists warning that the Labour Party’s approach to managing the economic recovery poses exactly the same risks as the Tory strategy for cutting the deficit.

Those with longer political memories, though, will recall a similar letter of March 1981, when Geoffrey Howe’s monetarist, deflationary budget provoked howls of derision from professional economists. In the depths of a recession and at a time of growing unemployment, Howe and Margaret Thatcher had proposed substantial increases in taxation alongside substantial cuts in public borrowing – precisely the reverse of the counter-cyclical policies advocated by the Keynesian economists who then dominated the profession.

The response to these measures was a letter to The Times, signed by 364 academic economists from universities across Britain, condemning the budget as having ‘no basis in economic theory’ and as posing a significant risk to ‘the industrial basis of our economy and… its social and political stability’. The signatories urged the government to ‘reject monetarist policies and consider urgently which alternative offers the best hope of sustained recovery’.

The letter had been signed by a cross-section of the most eminent names in economics – including James Meade, Amartya Sen, Alec Cairncross, and Nicholas Kaldor, alongside the present Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King (not to mention one of my former tutors) – and appeared to demonstrate the utter intellectual isolation of the government. When challenged, Mrs Thatcher was able to name two economists who supported the measures in the budget – her own advisors, Alan Walters and Patrick Minford – but one civil servant is said to have quipped afterwards that it was a good job she hadn’t been asked to name three.

Nearly thirty years on, however, the conventional wisdom would have it that the 364 economists were wrong and that Howe and Thatcher were right (although some of the signatories continue to defend their position). Although unemployment continued to rise, and would not peak until 1986, the prophesised depression never arrived. Indeed, an economic recovery began within weeks of the letter’s publication and seemed to make a mockery of the economists’ predictions.

The tale of the 364 may simply illustrate that the backing of economists – though rhetorically useful for politicians – is not a reliable guide to good policy.

Matthew Francis

Clegg is Cripps not Churchill shock

2010-04-18T03:43:00.000-07:00

"Nick Clegg will have to show that he is more than that if he really is going to rival Churchill...."

The Sunday Times quotes a YouGov poll that says Nick Clegg is nearly as popular as Winston Churchill.

Wonderful stuff for those responsible for the story, the justification for which is that in 1945 Churchill had an approval rating of 83% while Clegg’s is currently 72%. The only sting in this particular tale – for Clegg anyway - is that Churchill went on to lose the general election - rather badly I seem to recall - a few months later.

Actually the best historical figure with whom to compare Clegg is not Churchill but Sir Stafford Cripps. Stafford Who you may ask? Those with some history behind them might know that he was Clement Attlee’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man of severe moral rectitude, a teetotaller and vegetarian.

That however did not stop his Conservative opponents referring to this paragon as ‘Sir Stifford Crapps’ after a BBC radio announcer committed one of the funniest political spoonerisms, ever.

Crapps – sorry, Cripps – is less well known for something else. In 1942 he was nearly as popular as Churchill. I wrote about this a while ago but it is worth retelling the tale.

At the start of 1942 Britain was in trouble militarily and Churchill had his back against the wall. There was a popular mood that castigated all parties as to blame for the country’s troubles. Along comes Sir Stafford. Having been expelled from the Labour party before the war he was not attached to either of the two main ‘old’ (as Clegg might put it) parties.

Returning home in January after ending his stint as Ambassador to Moscow he gave a BBC radio speech. This struck a loud, clanging chord with a disenchanted British public – half of whom heard the speech and 93% of those approved of its message, which when boiled down was just an appeal for greater individual effort to win the war.

Almost as vacuous as Clegg’s contribution to the leadership debates, you might think. Even so, this one speech catapulted Cripps to the front rank of politics: at the peak of his popularity 34% of people wanted him to replace Churchill at Number 10.

So, what happened? I don’t recall Cripps becoming Prime Minister. Reality happened. Churchill brought him into government where he promptly got lost in administration while El Alamein helped restore faith in his government.

History teaches no lessons but it does show in this case that radio (and television) might create political stars who shoot across the firmament but they need more than that if they are to stay there. Cripps was merely a temporary repository for a public narked off with all politicians: Nick Clegg will have to show that he is more than that if he really is going to rival Churchill.

Professor Steven Fielding

Now that's what I call a poll

2010-04-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

"Who said elections were dull?"

Until the debates, every opinion poll during the election had shown the Conservatives on 38+/-3, and Labour on 30+/-3. The YouGov poll published in the Sun today is the first to show movement beyond the sort of fluctuations you get from sampling error.

And how. It puts the Lib Dems in second place, with 30%, behind the Conservatives on 34%, with Labour now trailing in third (28%).

There are multiple reasons to be at least cautious about a) assuming that things will stay like this, or b) trying to work out what that means in terms of seats. These are explained very well at the superb UK Polling Report website.

But the one thing we can be certain of – it’s certainly livened things up. Who said elections were dull?

Professor Philip Cowley

Creating the Big Society?

2010-04-17T05:30:00.000-07:00

"There are many problems with localism, from its potentially damaging effects on democracy and equal and universal services to a bias towards certain groups..."

Despite Labour’s odd choice of cover, it was the Conservative manifesto that looked the most unusual last week. It was presented as an invitation to ‘join the government’ – to set up our own schools, to elect local police chiefs, to run the local post office, and to form co-operatives to deliver local public services.

In itself, this could just be dismissed as an attempt by a party to offer something different without requiring any extra spending, but it’s not just them. Although each party wants to paint the other as returning to their big or small state roots, there is in fact now a consensus in British politics around the agenda of localism.

Partly, the roots of this lie in Thatcherite individualism and Blair’s ‘choice’ agenda. But New Labour, influenced in the 1990s by think tank Demos, also introduced the idea that creating connected communities was the answer to many of the problems of our increasingly individualistic society.

Social capital was Blair’s ‘magic ingredient’. Increased funding for community organisations, Local Strategic Partnerships and teaching schoolchildren to be ‘active citizens’ were all meant to empower communities, and inviting co-operatives and social enterprises to run health services, and individuals and businesses to resurrect failing schools as Academies were all Labour policies.

There are many problems with localism, from its potentially damaging effects on democracy and equal and universal services to a bias towards certain groups becoming more involved. But the most obvious issue at the moment is its workability: how do you create empowered local communities without greater state intervention or expenditure?

Crucially, research suggests that civil society has to be built up over time in order for it to have a positive impact on politics. It is not created simply through reductions in the size of the state, something that Cameron, despite some of the rhetoric, does seem to have realised.

He says that ‘collaborative democracy’ and an army of community organisers can march us into a new era of localism. For this to happen, however, he needs all of us to start volunteering. What could provoke this kind of change?

The Conservatives keep repeating one word: responsibility. They have been involved in research into the moral development of character and say they want a ‘cultural change’. Though they don’t go into detail, they even say they’ll use ‘the latest insights from behavioural economics’, whatever that means, to foster participation.

Indeed, is imposing one set of values on the population ever a good idea? ASBOs and the New Deal have already attempted to enforce certain behaviour, but most people are unlikely to voluntarily respond to Cameron’s invitation unless there is a clear benefit for them.

It’s not only about a lack of time (as the Guardian’s Jackie Ashley has argued), which can be bit of an excuse, but about the situation people find themselves in.

During the recession, volunteering has increased, but without resources and support these people will stop when they can find jobs.

The Big Society has to exist before you remove the state, and it takes time, money, and recognition to build. If people don’t feel part of communities or engaged with their local area, they will not be encouraged to do so by being given a ‘right to bid’ and run services or a ‘right to buy’ the local pub.

What is needed is reform alongside funding. In their manifesto the Tories acknowledge that this means an ‘active role for the state’. We probably need more of this to help society grow.

Chris Wood

Still not talking about immigration?

2010-04-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

"...this may backfire by pushing at least some voters to the BNP and other small parties, as well as contributing to large-scale public resentment..."

In last night’s debate, the first question put to the three main party leaders was about immigration. Based on the responses, the differences between the parties on this issue are likely to be perceived as relatively marginal.

All three argued for controls on migration. Gordon Brown emphasised the recent controls that his government put in place based on a points system and pointed out that net migration had already been declining in the past couple of years. David Cameron claimed that immigration was still too high and needed to be reduced further and that his party would introduce an immigration cap, as well as reforming the border policing system. Thus, while his approach is more restrictive than Brown’s (Brown is opposed to an arbitrary cap), there is also no (or little) attempt to appeal to potential far-right voters in any of what he said.

Perhaps ironically, Nick Clegg’s policy – to allow migrants only to go to regions that need them economically – is an approach with the potential to be the most restrictive. Spain’s 1985 Foreigners’ Law, which introduced similar additional regional/provincial bureaucratic processes for legal entry into Spain to work, has been claimed to encourage illegal migration because the legal procedures were so onerous. It also potentially resembles old guest-worker policies in places like Germany, where labour migrants were tied to a particular job and were not allowed to work for other employers once they had been granted entry into Germany.

Despite this early discussion of immigration in the debate last night, it is clear that, as predicted, none of the three wished to make immigration a key issue. It was not mentioned in any of their opening or closing statements. Rather than ‘playing the immigration card’, Cameron in particular (but the other two leaders as well) focused on the technical details of immigration policy, with none arguing for an immediate halt to migration.

Yet immigration was the second most important issue after the economy mentioned by British citizens in the March Ipsos Mori poll. As argued previously, ignoring the issue like this may backfire by pushing at least some voters to the BNP and other small parties, as well as contributing to large-scale public resentment at a political class that seems unwilling to address one of the issues that has been of major concern to the British public in the past decade.

Dr Lauren McLaren

Spot the politician

2010-04-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

"Yet the internet and social networking sites remain poor relations when it comes to political communication..."

One thing you might not have noticed about Labour’s first two election broadcasts of this campaign: there were no politicians. The first consisted of a man facing a crossroads played by one of Britain’s more accomplished actors, with a voice-over from a former Dr Who. The second consisted of Eddie Izzard. But there was not a glimpse of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Harriet Harman, or anyone else from Westminster.

This, in fact, has been the pattern for party election broadcasts since the 1980s, which is perhaps why the absence of politicians did not give rise to any comment. Occasionally a party might give viewers soap opera-style insights into their leader’s background and private life. What was dubbed ‘Kinnock: the Movie’ set that particular template, being so effective Labour showed it twice during the 1987 campaign. But these are rarities, and no one is expecting Labour to give Brown the Hollywood treatment this time.

The British Film Institute is now showing examples of ten past election broadcasts on its screenonline website, with introductions written by Philip Cowley and myself. What you will see there is how far their character has been transformed, from what (to modern eyes) are fairly tedious and incredibly long, straight-to-camera addresses to the pocket dramas we now take for granted.

The first election broadcasts were transmitted in 1951, when there were only 750,000 sets in the country, concentrated in affluent homes in South East England. This is why Labour’s first go consisted of two of its posher members making a pitch for the middle class vote, safe in the knowledge that no workers were watching. The broadcast also contained the first example of a rabid rebuttal, when Christopher Mayhew delicately corrected what he assured viewers were the undoubtedly honest mistakes contained in Sir Anthony Eden’s broadcast for the Conservatives the previous evening.

For a time, political commentators credited election broadcasts with a profound sway over voters' minds; by the mid-1960s the consensus was that they did not play a decisive role in changing voting intentions, although they might reinforce them. Sometimes, they could actually harm a party’s chances – as when the ‘war of Jennifer’s Ear’ derailed Labour’s 1992 campaign.

In our multi-channel world, the importance of the election broadcast has probably diminished: they are very easy to avoid these days. Perhaps one reason why the main parties have agreed to participate in the leaders' debates is because they need newer means to engage the voters.

The television producer Peter Bazalgette recently argued that now each party has its own YouTube channel, election broadcasts were redundant. He proposed that if the parties wanted to make their case on television they should pay the commercial rate. I am sure ITV would like the extra revenue. It is certainly notable that Labour first showed its broadcast this campaign on Youtube before they were shown on TV. Yet the internet and social networking sites remain poor relations when it comes to political communication. An insight into the changing nature of how the parties try to appeal to the people, the party election broadcast looks likely to stay with us for a few more elections yet.

Professor Steven Fielding

The BNP and Islam

2010-04-16T01:47:00.000-07:00

"It might be tempting to dismiss this strategic shift as political opportunism and move on, but there are good reasons to take the BNP’s embrace of Islamophobia seriously. "

As Nick Griffin made clear in one interview this week, Islam remains a top issue for the BNP during the election. Like similar parties elsewhere in Europe, the BNP has increasingly shifted its discourse away from the crude ‘anti-black’ racism of its predecessors toward placing much stronger emphasis on Islamophobia.

The BNP first launched its ‘Campaign against Islam’ in the hours following the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. Griffin has since recruited sympathizers within the Sikh community to communicate the party’s position on Islam to voters, such as during the BNP’s election broadcast for the 2004 European elections.

It might be tempting to dismiss this strategic shift as political opportunism and move on, but there are good reasons to take the BNP’s embrace of Islamophobia seriously.

Our study of BNP voting – ‘Angry White Men’ – provides evidence that Griffin’s party recruits higher levels of support in constituencies which have a large Muslim community. Moreover, we find that the presence of non-Muslim Asians has no significant effect on BNP voting and that support for the BNP is actually lower in areas with large black populations (nor are we the only researchers in Europe who find this relationship). The point is that the drivers of support for the far right are changing and becoming more complex. As we argue in our study, the appeal of Griffin’s BNP is more subtle than the crude racism and xenophobia of the old 1970s National Front.

The ‘traditional’ approach to the far right has been to talk tough on immigration and undercut its support (as with the classic reference to Thatcher saying voters are feeling ‘swamped’ about immigration). But branding the BNP simply as “anti-immigrant” misses the point and won’t appease the modern day BNP voter who is driven by a diverse array of concerns over perceived threats to ‘British’ values and culture. Anti-immigrant the party is, but in some parts of the country the BNP is also successfully mobilizing intolerance toward Muslim communities. These communities are already settled and are not going anywhere which means that it is going to be much more difficult for mainstream elites and policy makers to formulate a coherent and convincing response to the far right.

Talking tough about limits on immigration is one thing; talking about voters’ concerns over communities which are already established and which contribute to social and political life is another matter altogether. As Lauren McLaren notes in an earlier entry, in this election the mainstream parties are unlikely to thrust immigration to the forefront of their campaigns, but they are even less likely to talk about concerns over Muslims and Islam.

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, aside from coinciding with the increased salience of immigration the rise of the BNP has also taken place amidst a broader pool of anxiety and concern among voters over the role of Muslims and Islam in wider society.

At the time of Griffin’s breakthrough into the European Parliament last summer one poll by YouGov suggested that 44 per cent of voters agreed with the statement that ‘even in its milder forms Islam poses a danger to Western civilization’. The most recent British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey similarly suggests a reservoir of latent support for parties which specifically adopt hostile positions toward this minority group, indicating that only around one out of four voters have positive views toward Islam and five out of ten would be ‘bothered’ if a large Mosque sprung up in their local community.

As elsewhere on the continent, this anti-Muslim ‘frame’ is an important tool for the BNP because unlike its earlier emphasis on anti-Semitism arguments about the alleged ‘threat’ posed by Islam have support among sections of British media and the political establishment. In turn, the far right’s message is being delivered amidst a climate which is more favourable and might inadvertently legitimize this message in the eyes of voters.

Take, for example, the invitation to Geert Wilders last month to show his anti-Islam ‘Fitna’ film to members of the House of Lords, or coverage of Muslims in sections of the tabloid press. Few mainstream outlets endorsed anti-Semitism in the 1970s but today we don’t have to look too far to find support for Islamophobia – and BNP voters are much likely to read the Daily Mail, Daily Express or The Sun than other papers.

It is for all of these reasons that Griffin is working hard to claim ownership over the anti-Islam issue. Most voters remain unconvinced by Griffin and still hold extremely negative views toward the party. His Question Time debut was generally seen as a disaster, with only 4 per cent of voters afterward saying they would “definitely consider” voting BNP. But it is also for these reasons that it would be mistaken to overlook the changing message of the far right and ignore deeper currents within public opinion on which the party is preying.

Matthew Goodwin

More MOE

2010-04-15T02:36:00.000-07:00

"Move along, there’s nothing to see. Yet."

Yesterday I pointed out how the polls had been remarkably stable during the campaign, despite talk of their ‘volatility’, once you allowed for the margin of error inherent in sampling. Up till then, all but one poll during the campaign had put the Conservatives on 37 +/-3, Labour on 30 +/-3.

Since then we’ve had three more national polls. YouGov had 41/32/18. ComRes had 35/29/21. And Harris had 36/27/23. Fairly obviously, one of these – the YouGov poll – doesn’t fit into that earlier pattern, because it has the Conservatives on 41.

But it’s still hardly evidence of any great shift. It just means that over the last week every poll has had the Conservatives on 38+/-3 (rather than 37) and every poll has still had Labour on 30+/-3. Indeed, this is true of every poll since the campaign began.

Move along, there’s nothing to see. Yet.

Professor Philip Cowley

It's only words/and words are all I have

2010-04-15T02:22:00.000-07:00

"So what happens when we compare the Conservative and Labour manifestos?"

Manifestos not only inform us about the sorts of issues which parties consider important at the election, they also provide crucial insights into how the parties think about these issues.
You can get some sense of an answer to these questions can be gained from reading the manifestos carefully, a more systematic approach is to analyse the text of the manifestos in order to determine the types of words that they use to describe their positions – as explained here.

So what happens when we compare the Conservative and Labour manifestos? Some differences between the manifestos are immediately apparent. The most obvious difference is that Conservatives are more likely to use words that relate to chaos (such as ‘disorder’, ‘ruin’, ‘wild’, etc.) than Labour (112% more uses). The Conservatives are also more likely to use words relating to ‘restraint’ (‘control’, ‘discipline’, ‘halt’, etc.) than Labour (32% more uses). This may not be surprising given the Conservative’s ‘broken Britain’ claims. What may be more surprising is that Labour are more likely than the Conservatives to use words relating to ‘moral imperatives’ – such as ‘duty’, ‘law’, ‘principles’ (22% more uses).

Labour are also more likely to use words relating to ‘growth’ and ‘height’ (60% more uses). A plausible interpretation of this suggests that this is a result of Labour attempting to play up its record on producing economic growth. Strengthening the case for this interpretation is Labour’s greater usage of words relating to ‘time’ (‘past’, ‘decade’, ‘time’, etc.) (40% more uses). Contrasting with this is the Conservative focus upon words relating to rank orders (‘consistent’, ‘original’, ‘rank’, etc.) (25% more uses) – almost certainly relating to a pessimistic view of Britain in a comparative setting.

Finally, and importantly, the Conservatives are more likely to use words relating to ‘abstract thought’ (‘belief’, ‘choice’, ‘plan’, etc.) than Labour (25% more uses). This suggests a Conservative manifesto built more upon an ideologically driven vision of the future and a Labour manifesto built more upon past facts.

All of the above differences are statistically significant at the 95% level, and comparisons in word usage have been standardised for the different length of manifestos. Unstandardised, the Conservative manifesto is 28768 words in length. The Labour manifesto is 30517 words.

And before any Lib Dems complain, analysis of their manifesto will follow.

Jonathan Rose

Forget debates...THIS is how to engage people

2010-04-15T01:56:00.000-07:00

"Filipino voters expect to be ‘charmed and entertained’ by their candidates. Surely UK elections would be less tedious if we demanded the same? Gordon Brown, take note..."

In the Guardian recently Hadley Freeman wrote that UK elections are so boring that they might lead people to ‘self-lobotomise with a spoon’. Her comparison was with US - long and tempestuous, and UK - short and boring - elections.

The Philippines, which is due to hold presidential elections on 10 May 2010, just days after UK voters cast their ballots, gives us another, and perhaps more interesting, point of comparison.

The opening of the presidential race on 9 February 2010 was heralded by The Philippines Daily Enquirer as being like the beginning of a carnival.

And our Gordon might want to take note of the tactics of their Gordon: Richard (Dick) Gordon, a candidate for the Philippines presidential race.

Gordon, a former Senator, is not likely to win the race but he is having a lot of fun trying. Gordon and his running mate Bayani Fernando campaign as 'political transformers’ and have a transformers-branded truck as a campaign vehicle.

Gordon’s campaign was also boosted by his performance with the comedy duo Moymoy Palaboy in which they lip sync their way through the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

The video for this performance went viral and had received over 50,000 hits within just three days of being loaded up to Youtube.

Gordon, who has admitted that he has little money for advertising his presidential bid, must be delighted with the free publicity. Filipino voters expect to be ‘charmed and entertained’ by their candidates. Surely UK elections would be less tedious if we demanded the same? Gordon Brown, take note.

Dr Pauline Eadie

Polls in stability shocker

2010-04-14T05:15:00.000-07:00

"Most people involved in politics know about sampling error, but, as last night, they often forget its implications."

There were four opinion polls last night, all showing different sized-Conservative leads, ranging from 3 to 10 points. Cue confusion, and lots of talk about the polls being ‘all over the place’.

In fact, it’s dead easy to explain, and the polls are actually behaving remarkably stably.

Each opinion poll has a sampling error, an acceptance that sampling 1000 or so people is not going to produce an absolute accurate measure of the views of 40 or so million.

That sampling error is usually reported along with the poll – at least by the more responsible news outlets – and it is (usually) +/- three percentage points.

And every poll last night showed the Conservatives on 37, plus or minus 3. (Actually, every poll last night showed them on 37, plus or minus 2). And every poll last night showed Labour on 30, plus or minus 3.

In fact, with one exception right at the beginning of the campaign, every poll during the campaign has shown the same: the Conservatives on 37, plus or minus 3, and Labour on 30, plus or minus 3.

The veteran pollster Bob Worcester has one key maxim: focus on the share, not the lead, and he’s spot on.
Most people involved in politics know about sampling error (anyone still puzzled, there’s a good simple summary here), but, as last night, they often forget its implications.

Professor Philip Cowley

“I feel like I win when I lose”

2010-04-14T02:09:00.000-07:00

"No-one (in their right mind) would want to find themselves governing in the scorched earth years that lie ahead of us. Not so much a poisoned chalice as a barrel’s worth of the stuff."

A familiar part of any electoral spring is the appearance of our old and counter-intuitive friend – “it’s a good election to lose”.

In varying forms, it has already made an appearance in The Guardian, The Independent and the London Review of Books courtesy of Messrs. Legrain, Lawson and Lanchester, respectively.
For Legrain and Lawson, the gist of the story is that it’s 1992 all over again. What appeared at the time, to some, to be Major’s surprising win was just the prelude to the rise of Blair and the New Labour decade.

There’s a curious parallel in Australia’s electoral experience. After a decade in power, Paul Keating won a surprise victory for the incumbent Labor Party in 1993 – the one he said was for ‘the true believers’ - but his exhausted administration just about limped its way through to 1996, a thumping electoral defeat and ten years’ long march through the political outback.

For Lanchester, the story is rather simpler. No-one (in their right mind) would want to find themselves governing in the scorched earth years that lie ahead of us. Not so much a poisoned chalice as a barrel’s worth of the stuff.

In general, the belief that ‘it’s good to lose’ rests on a conviction that a tired old government is best put out of its misery and the incumbent party given the chance to undertake ‘a period of renewal’ in opposition.

Suitably refreshed and revised, and with a new leadership, the party will be well placed to seize back the reins of office and stride confidently into the future. But then that’s what some Tories thought in 1997 and certainly what many in the Labour Party imagined in 1979.

But ten years (or thirteen or, indeed, eighteen) is a very long time in politics. I was at university with young men who thrilled to the bright, fresh morning of Thatcherism but found themselves entering the House of Commons just as the long shadows of night were descending on the Conservative Party.

By the time that Cameron is in Number Ten (should he get there), it will be too late for them. Most politicians just can’t afford to wait. That’s why it’s always hard to find a politician who (really) thinks it’s good to lose – at least before the event.

It may be better to govern in good times than in bad times but it’s always better to govern than to oppose.

Once you’ve made all the accommodations and compromises and signed up for all the half-truths, what is there left but to win? And what ambitious thirty-nine-year-old imagines that a glittering prize will still be waiting for him or her as they crest their fifties?

But for those of us who have a little less at stake, the question remains: can there be a good election to lose and could this be one of them?

To retrace our steps just a little further, it depends upon whether you think this is 1979 or 1974 (always remembering that while Marx might have gotten some things wrong, his claim that history only ever repeats itself as farce was bang on the money).

The 1970s was also a decade of economic crisis (albeit one that is crudely mis-recollected). For all that Labour may have been a bit unlucky to lose in 1979 (more bad timing), Thatcher certainly had a plan (of sorts). Between 1974 and 1979, Labour went on trying more or less what had worked (or not really worked) before.

Do Cameron and Osborne have a plan for something very different from what has gone before? If so, it is cunningly concealed. Could Labour be back in 2015 with a radically rethought political economy? Maybe. Perhaps in 2010, there’s not really going to be a winner at all.

Professor Christopher Pierson

Sun worshippers let us lead you

2010-04-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

The front cover of Labour’s election manifesto - launched this morning – features a bright sunshine. Given that Labour are in the ‘future business’, it’s a strange choice – because it was a common image before 1945, but not since.
Before 1945 party political imagery would often feature the sun, promising a brighter future. Before the First World War and during in the inter war period, Gerald Spencer Pryse was at the forefront of poster design for the Labour Party. In his work the people could be seen stepping out of the dark and into a brighter future. Most notably in “Forward the Day is Breaking”

and also “To-morrow when Labour Rules”

Although not by Pryse but even more striking use of the sun-visual metaphor is ”Greet the Dawn, Give Labour it’s chance” (with the apostrophe in the wrong place), which was used by the party in the elections of the 1920s, and which Labour’s modern image most obviously resembles.

But it is not just Labour which historically has used the sun within its propaganda. The Conservatives “Sun-ray treatment” utilised strikingly similar imagery in 1929.

This has not been unnoticed by one prolific blogger, although it should be noted that he got the date wrong.

Christopher Burgess

Out with the new, in with the old

2010-04-12T05:47:00.000-07:00

"...to focus on their internet strategies whilst ignoring their direct mail operations, is like reporting on a football game by describing the corner kicks in loving detail but ignoring the goals."

Marcus Aurelius said that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. I’m not sure what that says about me, given that one of my ambitions is to go on Stars in Their Eyes as Diana Ross.

My second ambition, however, is to have a law named after me - like Godwin’s law, or Parkinson’s law, and so based on the media coverage of the election so far, here’s a first go at Cowley’s Law. It’s this: there is an inverse relationship between the importance of any election campaign technique and the amount of media coverage devoted to it.

The immediate spur for this eponymous claim was the defenestration of Stuart Maclennan, the former Labour candidate for Moray, found last week to have been using his twitter account to post some near-to-the-knuckle (and in a couple of cases, way beyond the knuckle) comments. Yes, Maclennan was brought down by things he wrote on twitter, but it was merely the vehicle by which he broadcast opinions which made his candidature unsustainable. There will no doubt be similar moments over the next few weeks. But there are always have been. Remember Howard Flight, the Conservative vice-chair sacked and then barred from standing again as a candidate in 2005 because of things he’d said about spending cuts? There was nothing web 2.0 about that – his comments were made at an old fashioned meeting – but his fate was the same as Maclennan’s.

No Luddite me, and so this isn’t an attempt to ignore or downplay the importance of the internet or new social media. On which I would recommend an excellent blogpost by Mark Pack (originally given as a lecture to our postgraduate students at the University of Nottingham), or James Crabtree’s fascinating article in Wired, detailing the way the Conservatives are using the internet, and especially the way that they are buying up google adwords, allowing them to target their online message. Both these pieces show that its effect of the internet on politics is much more nuanced than people often think. All the parties rightly take the web and new social media much more seriously than they used to. Crabtree quotes one Conservative staffer saying that in the past the person in charge of the website was also the person you went to ‘if your Outlook broke’. No longer.

My problem is more the balance of the focus between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ in how the election’s reported. For example, until this weekend’s story about Labour’s supposed targeting of cancer patients – a story denied by the party – I’d not seen a single article about the way the parties were utilising direct mail. Who are they targeting? How are they doing it? What messages are they prioritising? Ditto leaflets. Yet polling evidence from the British Election Study – from February, so before the parties really stepped up their campaigning, but the most recent we’ve got – showed that these old fashioned techniques totally outstripped the new. Those contacted by mail and leaflets outnumbered all of those contacted by other campaigning techniques combined. Of those contacted by the Conservatives, for example, 89% had had something through their letter box, compared to 18% by email. And would-be Labour supporters were just as likely to be contacted by one of the oldest forms of campaigning going, a knock on the door, than by email (12%), and more likely to have been phoned (14%) than emailed.

And a survey released today showed how just a tiny minority of voters expected to get information online. Only 9% of voters questioned in a poll by Opinion Matters for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) said they expected to get information from political websites and 5% from emails sent by politicians. Compare that to 63% said they would find out about the election from the TV, 47% from newspapers and 27% from radio. It’s interesting that this story does not seem to have been picked up yet in the media: do stories about how the internet isn’t that important just not have legs?

None of this is to decry reporting on the way parties are interacting with the internet, but to focus on their internet strategies whilst ignoring their direct mail operations, is like reporting on a football game by describing the corner kicks in loving detail but ignoring the goals. We’d do well to remember another law, the one named after Willie Sutton. He was the bank robber who when asked why he robbed banks, reputedly replied ‘because that's where the money is’. If only journalists covering this election would do the same. Go where the parties are devoting their money and efforts, and report that.

Professor Philip Cowley

Queen sacks PM: You Heard it Here First

2010-04-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

"...not everyone is aware that there is a precedent for the Crown to sack a sitting Prime Minister..."

Whenever the prospect of a hung parliament comes to mind (and given the many column inches and acres of cyberspace that must be filled in the run-up to an election, it always does), the question of the Queen’s constitutional role is never far behind. If there is no outright winner, must she summon the leader of the single largest party? Or (if it is not one and the same person) must she allow the sitting Prime Minister the opportunity to seek to form a government (of all the persuadable talents)?

But not everyone is aware that there is a precedent for the Crown to sack a sitting Prime Minister, despite his being duly elected and able to command a majority in the lower house, and to install the leader of the opposition in his place. The luckless victim of this manoeuvre was the venerable Gough Whitlam (then Prime Minister of Australia and Leader of the Australian Labor Party) and the lucky beneficiary, Malcolm Fraser, leader of Australia’s Liberals (i.e. Conservatives) and one of a small but distinguished band of politicians to have lost his trousers in mysterious circumstances.

The story is one of labyrinthine complexity, bad timing and enough duplicity to make even Machiavelli blush. Following a death and a resignation in the upper house (the Senate), Whitlam’s government no longer had control and the opposition was refusing to vote supply. Whitlam had already lost his Treasurer, Jim Cairns, who was accused of trying to negotiate an off-the-books loan of petro-dollars from the Middle East and of having an affair with his outrageously glamorous private secretary, Julie Morosi. The Queen’s representative in Australia then (as now) was the Governor-General; at that time, Sir John Kerr. On 11th November, 1975, at the beginning of a meeting requested by Prime Minster Whitlam and held at the Governor-General’s residence (a few minutes drive from the parliament building in Canberra), Kerr dismissed Whitlam. Fraser was waiting in an adjoining room. He was immediately commissioned as Prime Minster, returned to parliament, had supply voted through the Senate (before the Labor Party knew what had happened), secured the dissolution of parliament and the calling of fresh elections which his party duly won. On the steps of Parliament House, Whitlam delivered (entirely off the cuff) the most famous speech in Australia’s political history: ‘Well may we say “God save the Queen”, because nothing will save the Governor-General'. Kerr was indeed left a broken man. He resigned in 1977 and died in 1991.

Could it happen here? Probably not. Although Fraser’s tactics were unconventional, the Senate had a sort of popular mandate that the House of Lords could never claim. Did it change anything? Well, it certainly brought to a close what was by some way the most exciting period in Australia’s political history. It made Gough a folk hero (for some at least) and Fraser a pariah (for the same folk). Many thought it would hasten the coming of the Republic; but that is still awaited. Above all, it gave Labor the will to play as hard and dirty as its opponents. Under Hawke and Keating, Labor was to turn Fraser out of office (in 1983) and to go on to win five consecutive general elections. There’s a lesson Labour would like to have learned.

Professor Chris Pierson

And so the first week ends...

2010-04-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

This week’s blogs have included what polls aren’t telling you (and why the don’t knows may be crucial). Or when the first time Labour asked its supporters to design a poster (the answer is the distinctly pre-internet 1908). Why the newspapers aren’t powerful in the way everyone thinks (although they might be powerful in other ways). Or why corruption isn’t as electorally damaging as everyone thinks (although it’s harmful in other ways).

Following Sir Michael Caine’s appearance at the Conservatives launch of their youth volunteering scheme (‘Tories, Sir, thousands of ‘em...), we carried a piece on the chequered history of youth engagement. Plus the most rebellious Parliament of the post-war era draws to a close and why the Demos pamphlet calling for votes at 16 was sloppy and disingenuous.

We also carried perhaps the naffest poll of the election so far – snog, marry, avoid: the prime ministerial verdict – but only to draw attention to something much more serious.

This week, coming up amongst other stuff: independent MPs, the prime ministerial debates, party election broadcasts, and much much more. Who said elections are boring?

Professor Philip Cowley

The most rebellious parliament ends

2010-04-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

"...the 2005-2010 Parliament easily goes down as the most rebellious in the post-war period..."

The 2005 Parliament which was prorogued this week – formal dissolution comes next week – will probably be remembered as the expenses parliament. But it holds one other distinction: as the most rebellious parliament of the post-war period.

The session that just ended, that of 2009-10, saw a total of 48 Labour rebellions, out of 135 divisions, a rate of 36%. In itself, this is the third highest final session since 1945, beaten only by the 39% achieved in 2004-05 session and the 36% (but marginally higher once you examine the decimals places) of the 1978-9 session.

But when you add those 48 revolts to the 300+ that had occurred in the preceding four sessions, it means that the 2005-2010 Parliament easily goes down as the most rebellious in the post-war period, whether measured in absolute or relative terms. In absolute terms, there were 365 Labour revolts between 2005 and 2010, more than in any other parliament since 1945, and easily more than what had been the record (the 309 between February 1974 and 1979). In relative terms – a more meaningful comparison, given that the parliament was shorter – there were Labour rebellions in some 28% of divisions. Again this easily tops the 21% achieved in the second Blair Parliament, 2001-2005 (and recorded here, in loving detail), which was itself a post-war record. There were also, just for the record, more Labour rebellions in this parliament than in 1997-2001 and 2001-2005 combined.

The most rebellious Labour MP was Jeremy Corbyn (with a total of 216 votes against the party whip). He was also the most rebellious between 1997-2001 and 2001-2005. He was closely followed by John McDonnell (192), Alan Simpson (144) and Kelvin Hopkins (131). More surprising are some of the names at the bottom of the list. The 2009-10 session saw Megg Munn, James Purnell, Eric Joyce and Tom Watson defy their whips, all for the first time. Who would have expected those names? Taken as a whole, 174 Labour MPs rebelled in the Parliament, 142 of them under Gordon Brown’s leadership. Between them, they cast a total of 3318 votes against their whips.

We’ve recorded all of them – plus the thousands in the 1997 and 2001 parliament – as part of a long-running research project, which is now coming to an end. The first ever rebellion of the New Labour era came in November 1997, when Jamie Cann was the only MP to defy the whips, over the Second Reading of the European Parliamentary Elections Bill. A total of 13 years and 719 rebellions later, the last one we monitored came over the Digital Economy Bill, just a day before Parliament prorogued.

Professor Philip Cowley

And now for something serious...

2010-04-09T04:54:00.000-07:00

"... just voting might start a process that leads to the parties taking them more seriously..."

We have been told that this is going to be a Mumsnet election, the parenting website whose users are principally affluent, ‘aspirational’ women in their thirties and forties concerned with ‘quality of life’ issues. They are the latest version of the classic ‘swing voter’ who lives in the kind of marginal constituency that now supposedly decide general elections - the Worcester Women for our own times, the British cousin of the American Soccer Mom. Since 1997 many other names have been coined for what is basically the same group of women. In 2005 Labour focused on the School Gate Mum. Last year the Conservatives said they would woo Holby City Woman. More recently Douglas Alexander referred to Take a Break Woman as critical to Labour’s fortunes in 2010.

At the risk of sounding post-modern, all these groups are obviously made up; they only matter because the parties (and journalists) think they matter. Those who study elections are sceptical that any one group holds the key to a general election: when support shifts from one party to the other it is pretty much the same across social groups. The real significance of these groups of phantom women lies in what they say about how the parties think about the electorate, about who is important (and who is not important) to them - and why.

Alexander’s invocation of Take a Break Woman is in this regard really interesting, if only because he got it so wrong. Those who read Take a Break are not the affluent, early middle aged women whose votes he is trying to chase. The kinds of women who read that august weekly have, in fact, long been disregarded – and continue to be ignored - by Britain’s political class.

Let me declare an interest. I was commissioned (by a drinks company whose name will soon become obvious) to write a report on the politics of women in their twenties and early thirties in the social groups C1/2 and D, many of whom work in part-time jobs, all of whom are on below average incomes and a significant number of whom have to juggle their work with caring for pre-school or young school age children. When asked in a survey that accompanied the writing of the report what were the biggest issues affecting their everyday lives, the top answer – at 58% - was ‘money worries’. We gave these women a name, and because it had to alliterate we called them the ‘Lambrini Ladies’. The report is out now.

These women are a ‘lost political generation’. They are amongst the most disengaged from formal politics, and the most likely not to vote – even before the campaign began many had already decided that it was not for them. This has always been the case – young women on lower incomes have long seen politics as something that men do, and have failed to connect their everyday lives with Westminster where middle aged, middle class men (and a few women) get together and shout at one another. They are, we suggest disengaged at least partly because the parties have failed to engage with them.

Our report points to a problem shared by all the main parties. But it also gestures to - as they say in cheesy management manuals –an opportunity. Our findings very much accord with a recent Observer poll of Netmums users. Now, those who go on the Netmums site – not to be confused with the more middle class Mumsnet (do keep up) – are very much in the same mould as those we talk about. The Observer poll revealed that while Labour had lost ground with such younger, lower income women the Conservatives had failed to make a strongly convincing alternative case. Their votes are up for grabs. But no-one is talking about them, even in a campaign that looks like it will lead to a hung Parliament.

Why? One answer is that they live in the wrong constituencies – too many are in safe Labour seats – although how ‘safe’ some of those are now might be questioned. In any case, we estimate that there are about four million Lambrini Ladies, and they are everywhere, even in the marginals where just a few votes can determine who becomes an MP. Of course their very disengagement plays against them – the parties only talk to those who they think will vote, like affluent middle-aged women. But if the parties started to address the kinds of issues that these women consider important, then they might make a difference. For what the Lambrini Ladies want are concrete, specific policies that plausibly promise to make their lives a little bit easier. What they do not want is politics as soap opera – they might watch East Enders but that does not mean they want the leaders’ wives gushing on about how their husbands are wonderful fathers who make the coffee in the morning. Pictures of David Cameron holding a baby will not wash – these women know what a baby looks like. In the accompanying survey they were asked if they were proposing to vote because politics was like a soap opera – only 6 % said so. The rest had more serious reasons, although many of them were negative, it seems that – if nothing else - it is dislike of Labour (25%), the Conservatives (18%) and even the Liberal Democrats (9%) will get many Lambrini Ladies into the polling booth.

In a few weeks what can be done? That is very much up to the parties. It is also up to the women themselves. One reason why we are told that this is going to be a Mumsnet election is because the kind of women who use the site demand to be heard. Young women on lower incomes who find making ends meet a daily problem do not tend to be that kind of woman. They do not have the cultural resources which many of those once referred to as Worcester Women simply take for granted. There are lots of deeply embedded issues that need to be overcome here, but just voting might start a process that leads to the parties taking them more seriously.

Professor Steven Fielding

Snog, marry, avoid

2010-04-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

It’s one of the key questions of the election so far. So we’re happy to clarify the position of women aged 25-34 in social groups C1/2 and D - the ‘Lambrini Ladies’ – in regard to the vital political question of Snog, Marry or Avoid?

Gordon Brown

Avoid 85%

Snog 9%

Marry 4%

Don’t know who he is: 3%

David Cameron

Avoid 68%

Snog 15%

Marry 16%

Don’t know who he is: 2%

Nick Clegg

Avoid 66%

Snog 16%

Marry 7%

Don’t know who he is: 11%

So: Nick Clegg is the most snoggable. David Cameron is the one to marry. And the Prime Minister is the one to avoid.

The absolute figures for Nick Clegg are somewhat lower, given that just over 10 percent of respondents didn’t know who he was. Mind you, there was also some 3% who didn’t know who the Prime Minister was either...

There is a more serious side to this – honest, there is – and it’ll follow shortly.

The survey was carried out by Opinion Matters, 24/3/10-6/4/10, who spoke to 1416 women in C1, C2 and D social groups; the data reported here come from the 430 in the 25-34 age group.

Professor Philip Cowley

Targeting youth engagement - again

2010-04-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

"From this perspective, the Conservatives' new proposals suddenly seem significantly less radical..."

If the Conservatives’ plans for a National Youth Service and support for marginalised young people reveal anything it’s that politics has no memory. In this case not even a short-term memory. If it did then the Conservative party would recognise that intensive investment for youth engagement initiatives and preventing the social exclusion of young people are already parts of government strategy, under the combined package of the New Deal for Young People (NDYP), the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Aiming high: a ten-year strategy for positive activities and the Cabinet Office’s Youth Taskforce Action Plan. Each of these programmes, due to outlive the election, make explicit their aims to make young people aware of their social responsibilities, prevent marginalising young people from policy-making, stimulate youth employment through welfare-to-work, and ensure that young people are drawn towards active participation in political decision-making. From this perspective, the Conservative’s new proposals suddenly seem significantly less radical.
More worryingly Cameron’s statement and the good response it received could also indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of youth work. As commentators such as Bernard Davies have argued voluntary youth organisations are driven by the aim to give young people real influence in decision-making, regardless of whether this will lead to visible social improvement. The purpose is to put young people in control within a setting where they can have real influence over what an organisation does, not to impress upon them the importance of political and civic engagement. It is the diversity of activities and potential to adapt to the needs and requirements of young people that give youth work its power, not its ability to bring together communities or imbue young people with a sense of social responsibility. The Conservatives' plans for a standardised format of volunteering and engagement overlooks this and promotes an organisational ideology which youth work does not fit into.

From a more cynical perspective, the electoral nod to the problem of youth apathy and marginalisation could be just that, a nod to a perennial problem which requires recognition but may never be resolved. Despite the amount of investment that youth support and engagement programmes have received – the NDYP for example is the largest of the New Deal programmes for social improvement – young people still remain socially marginalised and disengaged from formal politics. Cameron’s pledge to introduce further programmes to involve young people, while seemingly positive, could also be interpreted as tokenism and unlikely to reach young people whose interests do not conform with the Conservatives' model of voluntarism. Cameron’s National Youth Service, while only for short periods of time, operates along a particular model of community engagement. Such as singular approaches belies the diversity of the voluntary sector and the fact that the activities youth organisations engage in are responsive to what young people want to do. This situation is not necessarily something that will come as a surprise to members of the current youth service. Elections are a time when parties seek to promote themselves as capable of producing tangible goals and youth work does not necessarily do this. Although 250,000 young people have moved from Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) to NDYP welfare-to-work schemes since the programme was introduced in 1998, it is still unclear whether the implementation of these schemes has had any real effect on youth unemployment considering that of the 470,400 18-24 year olds currently claiming JSA, 50,000 made their first claim in the last year. In terms of reaching targets, programmes such as NDYP have failed but that does not mean they have not supported thousands of young people who would have otherwise been ignored or excluded from the labour market.

Ultimately the question is one of purpose. The purpose of initiatives such as the NDYP and the youth service as a whole is to tip the balance of power in the favour of young people, regardless of whether doing this will bring about the type of change policy assumes. Praise-worthy as this may be, it does not fit with the results-focused image the Conservative party seeks to project. Despite the support this morning’s announcement received from supposed advocates of youth engagement, the implementation of a National Youth Service has the potential to undermine youth organisations that do not conform to this model and impose a system which young people have no influence over.

Deirdre Duffy

What election polls do not tell us

2010-04-08T00:51:00.000-07:00

"...in spite of the useful information that election polls offer, they are lacking in two important respects..."

We can expect a large number of election polls to be published in the next four weeks. Not all polling agencies arrive at their numbers in exactly the same way, and they need to be read with care. And in spite of the useful information that election polls offer, they are lacking in two important respects, both of which relate to the difference between ‘hard’ choices and ‘soft’ ones.

First, consider people who respond to opinion pollsters by saying that they do not (yet) know. These respondents are generally deleted from the calculation of the parties’ projected vote shares, which implies that, were they to make up their minds, they would not disproportionally go to any one party. But consider the group of people who hesitate between the Conservatives and UKIP, and who correctly state that they do not yet know for sure which party to support. When they make up their minds, they will not support Labour, or the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens. Therefore, omitting these ‘don’t know’ responses from the results will (in this case) underestimate the actual level of support for Conservatives and UKIP.

Similarly, when asked about the choice for a party that they intend to make, respondents may name a party and are counted towards that party’s projected share of the vote. Some of these answers come from people who have firmly made up their mind, but for others this hides the fact that they are not yet certain about their choice. The polls that are currently conducted in the UK do not take into account the certainty with which respondents’ give their answers. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of a close race. We are in the dark about the proportions of voters who may still change their stated preference because they like another party almost as much as the one that they said they would vote for.

In a survey conducted by the British Election Study team in February 2010 (file feb10spb.dta), and which contains more detailed information than most election polls, we find that of those who unequivocally state that they will vote Conservative at the next general election, 4.5% actually hesitates between Conservative and Labour, and 7.6% hesitates between Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Of those who claim that they will support Labour 2.1% might still change to Conservative, and 13.8% to the Liberal Democrats. Of the projected Lib Dem support 8.9% might still go Conservative and 26.9% Labour. In all these situations, it will not take much for these voters to still change their vote intention because they are actually quite strongly attracted to two different parties at the same time.

When looking at the “don’t know’s”, we find that 12.7% is actually strongly attracted to the Conservatives, 27% to Labour, and 22.4% to the Liberal Democrats. When prodding the “don’t know’s” to indicate which party they lean to, we find that those leaning to Labour have a much stronger preference for that party than leaning Conservatives have for theirs. In other words, if, as is usually the case during election campaigns, the number of yet undecided voters declines as polling day draws nearer, Labour in particular and the Liberal Democrats to a smaller extent stand to gain more from this than the Conservatives.

The methodology employed here is analogous to that reported in Martin Kroh, Wouter van der Brug and Cees van der Eijk ‘Prospects for electoral change’, in Wouter van der Brug and Cees van der Eijk, European Elections and Domestic Politics – Lessons from the Past and Scenarios for the Future (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, pp. 209-225).

If we want to gauge the possible dynamics in party support over this election campaign, we have to take into account the differences in the certainty with which respondents state their intended choices. In the current situation, doing so reveals an even closer race than most of the polls suggest.

Professor Cees van der Eijk

Avoid, Avoid, Avoid

2010-04-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

New research into the political views of a group of women in the 24-35 age group on lower incomes - or the 'Lambrini Ladies' as we call them - has discovered many interesting and serious things (about which more later).

However one of the more amusing findings is that when asked if they would snog, marry or avoid the leaders of our three main political parties 89% wanted to avoid Gordon Brown, 66% would flee
David Cameron and 63% would give Nick Clegg a very wide berth.

As I will reveal later the Lambrini Ladies have more significant reasons for being disengaged from politics but if any of the leaders think they can exploit their sex appeal they had better think again.

Professor Steven Fielding

How powerful are the newspapers?

2010-04-07T05:54:00.000-07:00

According to popular wisdom, newspapers are important political actors. Newspapers certainly like to think so. And the public seem to believe it. Claiming 'it's The Sun wot won it' (as in 1992) just would not make sense in any other context. When newspapers declare their positions going into an election, it makes news.
But we know that newspapers are much less powerful than many people believe. Journalists are simply not trusted. Just 13% of people say that they would be pleased should their child become a tabloid journalist. If we do not trust people, how likely are we to slavishly follow their opinion? More importantly, newspapers are not a hypodermic needle injecting opinions directly into passive readers. For the most part, readers are critical and engaged.

The real power of newspapers comes in their ability to ‘frame’ news. This is the process by which a newspaper selects a story for publication, interprets it, and reports it. By highlighting negative issues, and importantly keeping the negative news focus upon a particular party, issues can be subtly shaped.

A paper in the Journal of Politics showed how newspapers can have a noticeable impact upon perceptions merely through the process of 'framing' news. These 'frames' are the ways in which newspapers cover electoral issues, whether the reporting is positive or negative towards a candidate or party. The impact of exposure to 'framed' news which systematically favours one candidate is about one-fourth as large as the impact of party identification. Given the importance of party identification, this is not trivial. Moreover, there is evidence that more extreme 'frames', such as those employed by Fox News in the USA, can be important not only in increasing vote share (where Fox News caused an increase in total Republican vote of about 0.5%), but also by encouraging greater turnout among non-voters who are more easily swayed by 'framed' news (resulting in a 3 to 8% shift in vote intentions to the Republicans among viewers). This implies that the non-political readers of 'framed' news will be more prominently affected. This lends credence to claims that tabloids – for whom political coverage is not the primary focus – could have an important impact.

As the election approaches, these 'frames' will increasingly come into play. They can be fairly obvious – such as The Sun's claim that 'MILITANT unions have given more than HALF of all donations to Labour since the last General Election' or the Mirror’s belief that the election is a choice between fairness or greed. Or they can be a bit more subtle but still important – the Guardian's focus upon Chris Grayling's comments about homosexuals is an example; a story which will clearly have a negative impact upon potential Conservative support among Guardian readers.

Newspaper's declarations, such as the recent News of the World declaration for the Conservatives, are not important in their own right. But a change in news frames will make those readers who might have voted Conservative more likely to do so. Those readers who have always voted Labour will almost certainly remain unmoved.

Jonathan Rose

Think tank in sloppy logic shocker

2010-04-06T02:38:00.000-07:00

"...doing something that almost 80% think is daft is a curious way to reinvigorate the political process."

The age of majority has been the subject of two major independent reports in recent years. The first, by the Electoral Commission came out in 2004. It recommended against lowering the voting age to 16. The second, by the government’s Youth Citizenship Commission, came out in 2009. It too did not recommend votes at 16.

I need to declare an interest here, as Vice-Chair of the YCC. I cannot speak for all of my fellow commissioners – some of whom were in favour of votes at 16, some against – but one of the most frustrating things about the debate was how disingenuous many of the arguments were, especially those put forward by those who favoured lowering the voting age. You’d hear repeatedly about how people could get married at 16 – but without mention of the fact that (in England and Wales) it requires parental consent to do so. Or you’d hear about how people could pay tax – cue the cry: no taxation without representation! – without mention of the fact that taxation isn’t age-related: indirect tax (about which ‘no taxation without representation’ was first uttered) is entirely age-neutral, and even income tax begins at the point at which sufficient income exists, not at any specific age. Sometimes these errors and elisions were just the simplifications that inevitably creep into political campaigns, but at times the number of such weaknesses did raise the suspicion that they were in fact covering up a pretty weak case.

The thinktank Demos have just published a report arguing for votes at 16, and sadly it’s full of exactly the same kind of flaws. One paragraph is a particularly stunning example:

Being able to join the armed forces at 16 is just one example of an age-differentiated right that lends support to an argument for lowering the voting age to 16. The ‘Votes at 16’ coalition states that some 4560 16 and 17 year olds were serving in the armed forces as of April 2007. Of the first 100 British soldiers to be killed in the ongoing war in Iraq, at least six were too young to have ever cast a vote in a general election.

Leaving aside the fact that the Demos authors appear to have just accepted the evidence of the Votes at 16 coalition without verifying it (not something I would recommend), there are two huge sleights of hand going on here.

The first is in the word ‘serving’. Because whilst it is possible to serve in the armed forces below the age of 18, frontline service is supposed to be avoided until 18. So despite the line in the report’s conclusion about denying the vote to those who are fighting and dying for their country, there should be no such cases. Also note – only mentioned later in the Demos pamphlet – that joining the armed forces below the age of 18 is only possible with parental consent, because society does not see 16-17 year olds as able to make that decision alone.

Ah, but you say, what about the ‘at least’ six casualties, ‘too young to have ever cast a vote in a general election’. And here’s the second, and by far the worst, sleight of hand. All of those listed, terribly young though they were, were 18 or 19. All, in other words, were old enough to vote. Hence the curious construction of that sentence: it is not ‘too young to vote’, but ‘too young to have ever cast a vote in a general election’. Note here the belittling of all other elections such as local or European elections – presumably Demos thinks these aren’t real elections? – because that would not fit the authors’ arguments. And then try to follow the logic to its conclusion: to insist that all members of the armed forces cannot serve in front line roles – with all the attendant risks – until they have had the chance to participate in a Westminster election would require lowering the voting age to 13. Only then could we be certain that no one aged 18, or 19, or 20, could die serving in the armed forces without having had the chance to vote in a Westminster election. Perhaps this is what they think? If so, they should say so. Else, there is the danger that this appears as a pretty despicable bit of shroud waving, using the deaths of young soldiers to advance an otherwise weak argument.

The same sloppy logic unfortunately applies to much of the rest of the report. There is, for example, a section of the comparable rights and responsibilities of young people, which does not note that many of them have been rising in recent years – with 16 year olds today denied things that would have been available to them a decade ago. These are all inconvenient facts, but they are ones worth noting in any balanced weighing up of the evidence, which Demos claims to be doing.

The bit that the report does get right, however, is that this not a popular move amongst the wider public, no matter how much ground it is gaining amongst elements of the Westminster village. Whilst it rightly notes that public acceptability is not the only guide to reform, doing something that almost 80% think is daft is a curious way to reinvigorate the political process.

Professor Philip Cowley

Counting the cost of corruption

2010-04-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

"The formal electoral process has become a game, behind which the realities of politics are played out in a manner which bears little resemblance to democratic accountability..."

Corruption scandals cost politicians votes, so goes the conventional wisdom. Try telling that to Silvio Berlusconi, a man almost synonymous with scandal, but who emerged as the big winner from last week’s regional elections in Italy. What does that tell us about the electoral impact of corruption? One reading might be that it shows voters don’t really care about accusations of corruption amongst their political leaders. The reputation of the political class is now so low across most European democracies that citizens more or less expect them to be involved in corrupt activities. And over time corruption scandals, like most scandals, lose their capacity to shock: what once generated outrage now elicits indifference. So, although voters may have been disgusted by the recent parliamentary expenses scandals in the UK, they are less likely to have been wholly surprised: for many, it will have represented confirmation of what they already suspected about the behaviour of their representatives.

However, even if citizens do become gradually inured to corruption within the political class, there is another reason why we should remain very concerned about its impact. In the post-communist era, electoral politics in the developed democracies has shifted from ‘selling ideologies’ to ‘selling leaders’. For although voters may increasingly expect their politicians to be corrupt, the political game itself demands a rhetoric of denial. The focus of election campaigns is increasingly on the honesty and trustworthiness of leaders, presented in contrast to the alleged dishonesty of their opponents, rather than on what they actually stand for.

This is doubly damaging for democracy. It reduces electoral competition to little more than a political beauty competition, where voters are being sold a confected ‘package’. Witness the recent focus on the wives of the main party leaders as extensions of their appeal. We are invited to get to ‘know’ our political leaders, as if they were characters in a national level soap opera, leading some commentators to talk of the ‘trivialisation’ of politics. An even more insidious problem is that this undermines comprehension of the real complexities of the political process and the capacity of politicians to effect change. There is an inevitable ratcheting up of increasingly implausible claims about what can be achieved, with political leaders trading promises that are almost bound to fail. That can only add to a sense of cynicism towards the political process as voters are increasingly turned off. In some countries, notably in the former communist world, such trends have opened the way to the emergence of ‘state capture’, whereby firms and other private bodies shape the laws, policies and regulations to their own advantage. The formal electoral process has become a game, behind which the realities of politics are played out in a manner which bears little resemblance to democratic accountability.

For all the recent hoo-ha around the claims by former ministers like Stephen Byers and others, it is highly unlikely that they are really in a position to ‘sell’ policy change to the highest bidder. But, even if their attempts to trumpet their self-importance were little more than bluster, the line between lobbying and improper influence can easily become blurred. So far, in addition to well-established and mainly effective parliamentary procedures, a strong and largely independent media has helped ensure that the UK retains sufficient scrutiny of the political process for it to be difficult to ‘buy’ policy. But there is no room for complacency.

Professor Paul M Heywood

Fire up the Hansom cab

2010-04-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

"It seems odd for parties to look back into the relatively distant past, considering that they are in the business of providing better futures..."

In all the fuss about the new Labour poster featuring David Cameron as Gene Hunt one thing has been missed: this is not the first time that the party has turned to its supporters for poster designs. For that, you can go back to the distinctly pre-internet 1908, when the National Executive Committee decided to put an ad in Fabian News soliciting ideas. It’s not clear what ideas this produced, but Labour’s 1910 campaign went on to feature the iconic designs by the Royal Academician Gerald Spencer Pryse, ‘Workless’, ‘Landless’, and ‘Forward! The Day Is Breaking!’ The Conservative party agents journal of 1910 similarly asked if agents had any ideas for posters, and to send them in.

And note: it’s also not the first time Labour attempts to play on history have backfired. In 1979 Labour produced this:

The poster was meant to remind people of Heath’s three-day week, but coming just after the Winter of Discontent it was a marketing disaster.

It seems odd for parties to look back into the relatively distant past, considering that they are in the business of providing better futures. History, if nothing else, is open to interpretation as the Tory rebuttal has shown. To anyone under the age of 30 the 1980s were a time of childhood. To fans of Ashes to Ashes, Gene Hunt anyway is a hard nosed go-getter. Perhaps parties should concentrate more on the future, rather that arguments about a past that a significant number of the population can’t remember. However given what’s in store, whoever wins the election, perhaps it’s not so surprising that the future will not feature much in the current campaign.

Christopher Burgess

Things to read if the telly's rubbish this Easter weekend

2010-04-02T02:30:00.000-07:00

With a Westminster election expected to be called just days away, here’s some things to read if the thought of a rerun of Diagnosis Murder doesn’t appeal.

You can read why academics forecast a hung parliament (and why that’s not just because they’re all ignorant lefties). Why the parties won’t talk about immigration, why the environment won’t be a big electoral issue, and why recent political scandals won’t necessarily be as big a factor as you might think (voters everywhere think politicians are at it). Why you shouldn’t expect MPs voting to affect their electoral fortunes, why focussing on the same high profile Conservative candidates is very misleading, and as Ken Clarke told us, why all those new MPs could put back the cause of parliamentary reform anyway (because they’ll do what the whips tell them – as we argued here).

We’ve also carried a piece on the Prime Minister’s visit to the University to unveil his party’s election promises, and on a debate of local candidates. Plus, how the internet is changing politics (and not in the ways everyone thinks), David Owen’s views on hung parliaments, the role of posters in campaigning, what the election means for the far right, the Conservatives and ‘property owning democracy’, and why a ‘new’ play about politics sounds pretty much like almost every other play about politics.

What more do you want?

Professor Philip Cowley

Not talking about immigration...

2010-04-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

"Faced with parties that will be raising it, the major parties must decide whether to ignore or engage with them, and, if the latter, on what terms..."

One of Labour’s five election pledges – unveiled when the Prime Minister visited Nottingham University last weekend – was to ‘strengthen fairness in communities through controlled immigration’. And yet, despite persistently high levels of opposition to further immigration and evidence that it had a significant impact on voting in the 2005 election, immigration is unlikely to be one of the main issues on which the election is fought. Why?

First, because although people are overwhelmingly opposed to immigration, and opposition actually increased during the last decade, in recent years, it has become of less importance to voters as the economy has risen up the agenda. And whilst you might think that an economic downturn could coincide with increased concerns about immigration, for most people the predominant worry regarding immigration is less about economics and more about culture and security. Thus, trying to rally opposition to immigration to win enough votes to matter requires adopting more cultural/identity-based or security-related arguments, which none of the main parties seems likely to do.

Second, neither of the two largest parties wants to make immigration a key campaign issue. Labour has presided over the largest post-war rise in immigration ever witnessed – encouraging large-scale migration to help improve Britain’s economic performance and to run social services. It is unlikely to want to draw attention to this. And whilst evidence indicates that Conservatives—on balance—probably benefited from introducing the issue into the 2005 campaign it did not help them win that election; and as Smell the Coffee (a seminal document amongst Conservative modernisers) argued it dominated what people heard about the party and alienated liberal-minded voters amongst the upper and middle classes.

Matt Goodwin is ultimately doubtful about the prospects for the BNP in the election but argues that UKIP might perform better because it lacks the extremist baggage (or to be more specific, the racist baggage) of the BNP. Yet although support for these parties has risen in recent years, this support has come in elections which are ‘second order’—that is, elections which people tend to view as less important than national-level general elections. Although rising support for small parties like these via local and European Parliament elections cannot be completely discounted—this is, in fact, how the Front National began to mobilise large-scale support in France — the more interesting question is whether parties like the BNP and UKIP will force the more established parties to engage with the issue.

Faced with parties that will be raising it, the major parties must decide whether to ignore or engage with them, and, if the latter, on what terms. In countries like Sweden, the main parties have taken a consensus-building approach to this issue, developing cross-party agreements to address a growing concern about immigration, and the result has been that it has become almost an electoral non-issue. Hence Gordon Brown’s call yesterday for a united front’ amongst the major parties to address the immigration issue. Ignoring the issue entirely, though, is likely to backfire by pushing at least some voters to the BNP and other small parties, and perhaps worse, contributing to large-scale public resentment at a political class that is unwilling to address one of the issues that has been of major concern to the British public in the past decade.

Dr Lauren McLaren

Politics academics all ignorant lefties

2010-04-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

"I’m sceptical about much election forecasting...but I confidently acquit my colleagues of the charge of being groupthinking lefties."

Politicalbetting.com had some fun this week with the results of a poll of politics academics, carried out back in 2006, which showed the vast majority both wanted and expected a Labour victory after the general election. A full 54% of politics academics wanted a Labour victory, compared to just 15% who wanted a Conservative win. Ditto their predictions for what the Commons would look like after the election: 53% expected a Labour victory, just 18% thought a Conservative victory was likely. And an overwhelming 80% thought Gordon Brown was the best chancellor of the post-war era. Given both this overwhelming Labour bias, and what currently look like very inaccurate predictions, why should we believe the academic election forecasts reported here a few days ago?

The problem is that we’re not comparing like with like. Politics, as a discipline, is extremely broad, a point we make repeatedly to students wanting to study it at university. At Nottingham, for example, our third year students can take modules from a list of about 30, covering everything from intervention in Africa to war and massacre, from the politics of science fiction to Middle Eastern politics, and from political utopianism to Russian security policy, as well as modules looking at parliamentary politics or the politics of public opinion.

The much-ridiculed survey was of members of the Political Studies Association, a group which represents that broad church. The result is that when the PSA does surveys of its members on things like this it often gets silly results, which is why I wish they wouldn’t, and have argued before – in an article that didn’t win me any friends – that they make us all look pretty stupid.

But the recent political forecasts didn’t come from all politics academics; they came from a very specialised group of election experts. Plenty of these aren’t in the PSA anyway (many of those presenting papers at the Manchester conference are not even UK academics). So, in short, those who did the forecasting are not all PSA members, and not all PSA members are election experts. I wouldn’t necessarily trust this lot’s views on political philosophy (nor they mine), but I do trust their knowledge when it comes to elections.

As for political bias, well, there’s no doubt that academics are on the whole left-of-centre. I was once told that academics used to be much more representative of the rest of the population, until the public sector/private sector voting cleavage became so prominent in the 1980s, although I’ve seen no evidence of that. For what it’s worth, I suspect – although again with no evidence – that the elections experts are not as left-of-centre as academia in general. But more importantly, where’s the evidence that any bias, if it exists, has impacted on the various voting forecasts? Anyone who studies the papers presented at the recent conference – or any similar work – will see that these are pretty hard headed models, into which the data go, and out of which the results flow. It’s really not clear where the bias is supposed to be.

As the original post pointed out, I’m sceptical about much election forecasting (as is my colleague Cees van der Eijk, who wrote an excellent short article for the British Journal of Politics and International Relations setting out his doubts), but I confidently acquit my colleagues of the charge of being groupthinking lefties.

They might well still be wrong, but if they are, we will be able to judge their models against the result, and say why. And it won’t be because of any bias.

Professor Philip Cowley

Stiffing the politicians?

2010-03-31T01:17:00.000-07:00

"...if we no longer trust politicians why should we trust a playwright’s view of politics? "

On 14 April 2010 a new play, Stiffed!, will start a four-week run at the Tabard Theatre in London. Stiffed! has been written by two journalists ‘who have experienced first hand the workings of politics’ and promises to be ‘a riotous satire on the inner workings of parliament, the press and politicians’ which will poke fun at both Cameron’s Conservatives and New Labour. Stiffed! will open in the midst of the general election campaign in which voter mistrust of politicians is at all time high, and presumably the Tabard hopes to tap into that mood.
The play is described as ‘new’. But all the advance publicity suggests it will however revisit territory already made familiar by first Guy Jenkin (A Very Open Prison, Crossing the Floor) and then Alistair Beaton (A Very Social Secretary and The Trial of Tony Blair) and Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It) since the middle 1990s.

These political satires all start from the same basic proposition: all politicians are bastards. Politicians are presented as weak and if not necessarily corrupt at least as afflicted by serious moral flaws, and consumed by the desire to promote themselves rather than represent the interests of the people. Some of these satires are motivated by serious anger – Beaton for example writes as someone disappointed by New Labour, especially Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq.

It is arguable that taken together these satires contribute to the populist distaste for politics. Some might think that last year’s expenses scandal vindicates that distaste: if we mistrust politicians as a class it is not because we have seen a few plays and television shows but because they do not deserve our trust. But given the increasing stress amongst academics on how political ideas are constructed – by the media in general - the possible role played by such fictions in shaping how we see politics is something that requires further exploration.

A significant step in that direction was taken last December when Nottingham University's Centre for British Politics held a conference to look into how politics has been represented in fiction. It benefited from the participation of Alistair Beaton, Tony Saint – who wrote the recent BBC4 comedy On Expenses – and other writers such as Maurice Gran and Lawrence Marks who gave the world Alan B’Stard. Interviews, transcripts and paper summaries generated by the conference have now been put on the Centre website and some of the academic papers will also be published in a special edition of Parliamentary Affairs in 2011. At the very least, the conference provoked the question: if we no longer trust politicians why should we trust a playwright’s view of politics?

Prof Steven Fielding

Mystic Meg says: hung parliament

2010-03-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

‘Prediction is very difficult’, said the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, ‘especially about the future’. But a recent academic conference at the University of Manchester tried to do exactly that with the forthcoming election. The conference was featured on the ever-excellent politicalbetting.com website, and what followed was a shower of abuse from readers of the site, many of whom didn’t like what they were reading. Much of this was ad hominem, much downright abusive, and much of the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) has since been removed from the site. One of the allegations was that the academics were engaged in an exercise in ‘groupthink’.

I’m personally quite sceptical about a lot of election forecasting. With the exception of David Sanders’ work on the economy and voting – which famously got the 1992 election right, when the polls and most commentators got it wrong -- I’m not convinced that it adds much value, beyond what you could get anyway from glancing at the opinion polls, and applying a uniform swing. Too often a massive amount of work goes into developing models that deliver little more than a series of SOTBOs (that is, Statements Of The Blindingly Obvious). And for much of the conference, I felt like a character in a Bateman cartoon: the man who was sceptical about election forecasting.

However, the one charge of which my colleagues are absolutely free is that of group think. The different papers presented at the conference came from a variety of different institutions, all working separately, using completely different methods and approaches, and drawing on different data. Some used measures of party support, others measures of prime ministerial/leaders approval. One paper forecasted using local council by-elections, another looked at the public’s expectations of the election. They then weighted and filtered these data in different ways.

And yet here’s the thing: despite working independently, almost every single paper forecast a hung parliament, one in which no party had an overall majority. They differed over which party would hold most seats (most papers predicted the Conservatives), but they almost all predicted than no party would have an overall majority. That’s not group think. That’s the sort of consensus that should make even those of us who are sceptical sit up and take notice. Of course, they could all be wrong, and we’ll know that in a month and a bit, but if so, they will be independently wrong.

And here’s another thing. As politicalbetting.com recognised a few days later, the betting markets – which are also sometimes used as a form of prediction, for those who believe in the wisdom of crowds – are now heading in the same direction.

Professor Philip Cowley