Labour – Page 8 – thinking liberal

British politics is in stalemate

The British elections last Thursday were probably the most significant electoral test this parliament, with the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, the London Mayor, and many English councils up for grabs. Everybody had the chance to vote for something. The outcome was underwhelming. Where does that leave the political scene?

The analogy is overblown, but I am reminded of the war that ravaged Europe 100 years ago. In 1916 huge efforts by the major combatants yielded little return on the ground. While the military men looked for breakthrough tactics, these yielded limited results, and in the end it was a matter of stamina and fundamentals.

The results pose uncomfortable questions for all the political parties that took part, major and minor. Most of the attention has focused on Labour. They suffered a further catastrophe in Scotland, falling behind the Conservatives to third place. In England they mainly held their ground, with an impressive victory in London’s Mayoral election. Supporters of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hail this as vindication – but that only shows how low their expectations have sunk. There is no hint here of how the party can regain power in Westminster. The myth of a hidden bank of left wing voters waiting to be energised by Mr Corbyn has been shown to be just that. But neither is there a disaster enough to fuel Mr Corbyn’s opponents; the Scots meltdown predates his tenure and so had already been written off. The best guess is that the far left will continue to hollow the party out from within, but that the party’s outward status remains largely unchanged. Come the next general election the question is whether the party will implode or simply repeat its dismal performance last time. On this year’s evidence it will be the latter.

For the Conservatives the position looks considerably better. They drifted only gently backwards in English councils; their performance in London was reversion to type, after unexpected success under their Mayor Boris Johnson; and they achieved a remarkable breakthrough in Scotland. But to keep governing beyond 2020 they will need to deliver a killer blow to Labour, while containing any Lib Dem comeback. Can they do that when they are riven by divisions over Europe, will replace their leader with one who has much less public respect, and while their government programme keeps being derailed by backbench discontent? Meanwhile their tactics in London, where they tried to toxify Labour’s Sadiq Khan by associating him with Mr Corbyn and Muslim extremists, failed, and may have damaged the party’s brand.

The SNP maintained their grip on Scottish politics but lost their overall majority. They have completed an astonishing pivot to the left, allowing the Tories a bit more breathing space, and leaving Scots to wonder what the point of Labour is. It is hard to see how anybody is going to deliver a knockout blow, but more Scots will surely start to tire of them. The only way seems to be down.

Ukip cemented their status as a major UK party, with breakthroughs in the Welsh Parliament and London Assembly, and consolidation of their role as Labour’s main opposition in parts of the north of England. But they are a party of oddballs, and it is hard to see how they can maintain their coherence. As a party of local government in England, they won only 15% of the seats of the supposedly down and out Lib Dems; this is a weak grassroots base.

The Greens moved forwards in Scotland, and held their own in London, where they are established as the third party by popular vote. But in English council seats for every gained they lost a seat somewhere else, to end up with even fewer seats than Ukip. Their switch to the left, while downplaying their environmentalism, looks to have been a strategic error, with the wind taken out of their sails by the revival of the Labour left.

And my own Lib Dems? There were quite a few successes; they gained more English council seats than any other party, and are approaching half the Conservative total. They comfortably retain their position as the third party of local government. There were striking constituency wins in Scotland and one in Wales. But all the Lib Dem successes boiled down to pockets of local strength, where they are deeply embedded into civic society. They have shown their ability to claw back ground from the Tories in particular, and even the SNP. But talk of a revival of fortunes belongs in the same category of optimism as the Labour left’s. The party was reduced to a single seat in both the Welsh parliament and London Assembly, and fell behind the Greens in Scotland. They struggle to reach 5% in proportionally elected contests, an irony for a party that is so in favour of this type of election. The party has not established clear political ground for itself and remains confused as to whether its coalition years were its finest hour or a terrible mistake. The party fights irrelevance in most of the land.

Plaid Cymru continued to move sideways. The politics of Wales remains quite different from that in Scotland, and the party seems quite unable to replicate the SNP’s success.

And nobody else made an impact. The Women’s Equality party was launched last year in a big media splash, and tried its luck in London, but got nowhere. The nativist Britain First is another new party, which has a big presence on social media, and it put in a performance that beat other competitors in its space (such as the British National Party), but still only managed a derisory result. For all the claimed discontent of the public with established politicians, there is not even a faint sign of an insurgency that could take off.

So British politics is in deadlock. The Conservatives have a narrow majority in the UK parliament but lack the discipline to govern decisively. There is no evidence as yet that they are going to break out of this. But neither is there any sign of a party or coalition of parties that can knock them off their perch.

There is a broad lesson here about British politics that is not given enough weight by most commentators. Political success requires a strong grassroots infrastructure and solid organisation, built up over many years, as well as being able to chime with some part of the zeitgeist. Labour and the Conservatives have achieved this more or less across Britain, now that the former are rebuilding themselves in Scotland. Fear of losing this vital political infrastructure stops either party from breaking apart, in spite of huge political divisions. The SNP has this in Scotland and is consolidating. That the Lib Dems are in the fight at all after failing so spectacularly to hit the zeitgeist is testament to their pockets of grassroots strength and penetration of institutions like the House of Lords; they have something to work with. Ukip and the Greens have attempted to build their own infrastructure but are finding it desperately hard going. Nobody else stands a chance. There will be no unconventional uprising like Italy’s Five Star movement. It is also very hard for a nativist insurgency, such as that of Donald Trump in the US, or the Front National in France, to get traction – though Ukip has tried.

And so we are locked in stalemate. The biggest threat to this dynamic is if one or other of the major parties breaks up under the strain. The second possibility is that the Tories get their act together sufficiently to deliver a knock-out punch to a Labour Party that does not look interested in government. As yet there is no sign of either.

The economy is for Labour what tuition fees is for the Lib Dems

If there is something that unites British Labour Party people, from rightist Blairites, to Brownites, through to the leftist Corbynistas, it is that the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 should not be held responsible for the financial crash of 2008/09, and the terrible state of government finances that followed. They are made indignant by Conservatives (and Liberal Democrats) who go on about how Labour is to blame for the financial mess the government left the country in in 2010, when the budget deficit had ballooned to over 10% of GDP. But the public finds the Tory line more convincing. And if Labour are to throw off this albatross, it will have to move on from its air of injured innocence.

There are two dimensions to this question. The first is a question of fact, or purports to be: how much responsibility did the Labour government actually have for what went wrong in the economy? The second is what is going on in people’s heads when they think of Labour and the economy, and how the party might address it.

On the first question, Labour have quite a few sympathisers outside the party. And certainly the direct line of attack made by Tories is not all it seems. The Tory narrative is that Labour went on a spending splurge in the boom years, which then proved completely unsustainable, leaving their successors choice but to implement austerity policies. Defenders of Labour’s record point out that there was no big government deficit before the crash. It was a relatively modest 2.5% or so in 2006 and 2007, and not regarded as irresponsible at the time. Nobody foresaw the financial turmoil, which originated in American sub-prime mortgage markets.

The Labour defence against this charge is mostly true. But not quite. Gordon Brown, as Chancellor (he became Prime Minister in 2008), claimed to operate government expenditure on a “golden rule” which meant no net borrowing over the economic cycle. But he had taken to moving the goalposts rather than applying the rule strictly. Had he followed his own rules as originally intended, there may not have been a deficit as the economy turned in 2007. But that only accounts for 2% of the problem. There was another 5% that came from somewhere else, allowing for a normal cyclical swing of 3%, and which cannot be blamed on Labour profligacy.

If you take a wider view, however, Labour’s defence becomes more difficult. British government finances were worse affected than other major industrial countries, from France to the USA, and much worse than some, like Canada. There are broadly two reasons for this. The first is that Britain had a bigger financial crisis, because it had a bigger banking sector, especially in international banking, and so was more affected by its collapse. The second is that tax revenues fell unusually sharply in Britain. Both aspects have government fingerprints on them.

Take banking. Labour lauded the rise of the international banks, and celebrated Britain’s “light-touch” regulation that helped bring this about. They gave RBS’s Fred Goodwin a knighthood for no other reason than that he had expanded his bank, recklessly as it turned out – there were none of the usual good charitable works to point to as supporting a general aura of public-spiritedness, as is customary in such matters. Meanwhile, Britain’s success as an international banking hub helped drive Sterling up and manufacturing exporters out of business. Mr Brown tried to wriggle out of responsibility by suggesting that he wasn’t responsible for banking regulation under Britain’s tripartite system of financial regulation (between the Treasury, the FSA and the Bank of England). This is pretty damning, because this system was of his own design, and it was clear that overall responsibility for making sure the system was working lay with the Treasury. It couldn’t be anywhere else.

Then on taxes, Mr Brown engineered a switch from taxes on income, and Income Tax in particular, to an array of other taxes, like stamp duty, that turned out to be about milking financial bubbles. At the time, his reduction of the basic rate of income tax to 20% was lauded as a triumph. This proved a colossal misjudgement, as it has proved politically impossible to raise income taxes, even in supposed more left-leaning Scotland.

On top of this, a broader claim can be made. The world financial crisis was not some storm that happened somewhere else with unfortunate consequences for Britain. Britain was the world’s leading international centre of finance; Britain’s bankers were at the heart of it, Two of Britain’s big banks, RBS and HBoS, collapsed, not helped a Britain’s own reckless mortgage lending, which also affected smaller banks, like Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. These banks had all adopted highly risky business models, whose main assumption was that global banking markets would be stable. Sitting on top of one of the most prestigious finance ministries in the world, and trumpeting his own reputation as a financial manager, Mr Brown and his acolytes can’t really escape the charge of incompetence for not appreciating these risks. And these risks were plan to some, including his Lib Dem shadow, Vince Cable, whose warnings were pooh-poohed.

Labourites are on stronger ground when they suggest that, once the crisis emerged, their government handled it well. It wasn’t pretty (amongst innocent victims of the government’s shoot-first approach were Icelandic banks and Britain’s own Lloyd’s bank), but largely stands up to scrutiny. Another argument is over whether the Tory/Lib Dem coalition that took power in 2010 was too tight with its austerity policies, compared to how Labour would have handled the same situation. Many independent commentators agree with at least the first part of that proposition, though I don’t.

So, I don’t think Labour were quite as innocent as they claim, even if much of the direct criticism is misplaced. But, in politics, such arguments actually count for little. A more important question is how the public perceives things. This is where Labour’s real problem lies. What the public sees is a classic hubris to nemesis story, which is one of the oldest storylines in humanity, and takes some rebutting. Labour’s problem is their boastfulness before the crisis. Labour appealed to voters because a Labour government meant “no more boom and bust”, unlike with the Tories. And then one of the biggest busts in history happened.

And there is trust issue here. Labour’s position is a bit like that of the Lib Dems over tuition fees. The Lib Dems vowed not to vote for an increase in student tuition fees before the election, and yet later that year they supported the trebling of fees. Many Lib Dems will give you a convincing intellectual explanation as to how this not nearly as bad as it sounds, and that anyway there was little they could do in coalition. But this cuts no ice with the public, because of the way the party presented their policies before the election.

Labour are onto an equally losing wicket if they try convincing the public that the economic crash of 2008/09 was not their responsibility. Ed Miliband, their leader at the last election, was quite right not to even try. Besides, the alternative argument that Labour were the hapless victim of world events hardly counters the public’s perception of the post-Brown leadership (Mr Miliband and his successor Jeremy Corbyn) of being nice but ineffectual. The usual advice for when you are in a whole is to stop digging. The idea that if the party had come out fighting, public perception would be swayed, is pure nonsense.

The only way forward is for Labour to acknowledge their responsibility, and put forward hard economic policies that show they are capable of taking tough decisions if in power. And that means they have to stop banging on about austerity and get tough with some of their own supporters. For now, though, there is no chance of that.

Core voters are always shafted. Politics is made in the centre. Bad news for Lib Dems

Democracy and idealism do not sit well together. Idealists have the motivation to form political parties and keep them going. But in order to win power the party must bring on board people and, policies, that the idealists disagree with, in order to win round those less committed to politics. And these floating voters come to matter more to the party’s managers than the the idealists. Because the idealists have nowhere else to go.

In Britain, the latest challenge to this process comes from Britain’s Labour Party; in America the Republicans seem to be doing something similar. This all seems to be part of the great cycle of politics. A party’s core supporters, those that are ideologically committed, get fed up with being taken for granted and rebel. They struggle to accept that a majority of voters disagree with them – following a natural human bias that most people think as we do. They may also be enticed by the idea that they can win by accident – through their opponents’ mistakes. Sometimes such ideological parties do win an election that way – it has just happened in Poland, for example. It rarely ends well.

I know more about the Labour phenomenon than the Republican one. Labour members elected the ideological Jeremy Corbyn after the party’s general election failure last year. These members remain as fervent as ever, and indeed new members have flocked in. This burst of enthusiasm has convinced them that they have started a new and better form of politics. As they see it, the compromises used to chase the centre ground, as uncommitted voters are usually referred to, have disillusioned people with politics. Now Labour will create a sharper narrative that will go down a storm with the electorate. They equate their own disillusionment with the compromises of their party with the widespread political apathy of the population at large.

But is this is an illusion. This week Britain’s polling organisations published a report into why they called the 2015 election wrongly. They overestimated Labour support and underestimated the Conservatives’. They found this was mainly because their samples were biased towards Labour. And that was because they were biased towards the politically committed, who were much easier to reach. This is a vulnerability of the quota sampling technique that the pollsters use. The less committed, or more apathetic, voters were much more likely to vote Tory.

This leaves more thoughtful Labourites with two headaches. The first is that current polls show the Labour vote holding up compared to the general election – so that electing Mr Corbyn at least hasn’t made things worse. But if the polling bias remains (and it seems to be, based on how the samples remember they voted in 2015), then in fact the Tory lead has grown. The second headache is that the army of the apathetic non-voters is more sympathetic to the Tories than many suppose.

Which leads to an inevitable conclusion. In order for Labour to win an election they need to convert people who voted Conservative last time, or who did not vote, but lean to the Conservatives. In other words, Labour must appeal to the centre ground.

Such thoughts cut no ice with Labour’s new members. When pushed they even suggest that winning is not that important. That leaves Labour in a terrible position, and the Conservatives thinking that they have the next election in the bag. Some hope that the European referendum will split the Tories. But the prospect of whacking Labour really hard if they hold together is the best possible incentive to hold the party together.

Labour’s prospects against the SNP in Scotland are no better; the SNP have cornered the middle ground in Scotland as masterfully as the Conservatives in England, while still retaining a substantial core vote. This conjuring trick will eventually come apart – but an ideological Labour Party will not be the instrument of the SNP’s demise.

Meanwhile, sitting on the sidelines are the Lib Dems. A number of people have suggested to me that Labour’s woes present the party with a golden opportunity. But the political dynamics or the core and centre are not working the party’s favour.

The party thought that the usual rules of politics would apply to them when they went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010. They shafted their core voters, but surely they had nowhere else to go? And meanwhile the party’s record in government would appeal to the centre ground. But a large part of what the Lib Dems thought was their core vote felt they did have an alternative: Labour. That weakened the party, and weakness is a big turn-off for centrist voters. The Conservative campaign exploited this ruthlessly, and the result was catastrophe, as the Lib Dem vote fell by two thirds, and their political clout even further.

So, somehow, the Lib Dems need to rebuild their core vote. The place to look is amongst Labour inclined voters who do not buy Labour’s new sense of direction. But the party also needs to win votes back centrist voters from the Conservatives if they are to win the all-important parliamentary seats. And that means the party must show distance from the Labour Party. So how does the party face the prospect of another coalition with the Conservatives? If they rule it out, they will lose the middle ground by giving tacit support to the ideological Labour Party. If they don’t, those Labour inclined “core” voters will think that the party has learned nothing from the coalition debacle, and leave the party alone.

This may not matter too much to the party at the next election, especially if it looks as if the Tories will win handsomely. There will be no danger of a coalition, so that awkward question can be ducked. The Lib Dems might be able to make a modest recovery based on local strength. But the strategic dilemma remains.

Probably the best thing for the party is to recognise that it is essentially of the left, and rule out any future coalition with the Conservatives. That will help the party rebuild its core. It then needs to apply thought to under what conditions it could work with Labour. But it will have to be a very different Labour Party from the one emerging under Mr Corbyn’s leadership.

Which would leave the middle ground in British politics to the Conservatives and the SNP. Which in turn means that political power will rest with them. A grim prospect indeed.

The Trade Union Bill – the unions are the authors of their own destruction

The House of Lords considered the Government’s Trade Union Bill yesterday. It briefly made the headlines because a report was released suggesting that the Labour Party would lose £6 million in annual funding as a result. Coverage was quickly buried by news of David Bowie’s death. At least we shouldn’t accuse the Conservatives of orchestrating that.

Because they didn’t need to. There has been little public interest in this legislation, which has been quietly making its way through the legislative process since last July. That is remarkable because it is politically tendentious, and could change the political balance profoundly. Instead of fighting this legislation tooth and nail, the Labour Party is focusing its energy on making up its mind about Britain’s nuclear deterrent. This is yet another example, if one was needed, of how Labour is now suffering from political insanity.

What does the Bill try to do? Those headlines were about changing how trade unions carry out political funding. At the moment the unions have political funds which its members can opt out of, but usually don’t. The government wants to change this to opting in, which it is thought that many fewer will do, given how few trade unionists actually vote Labour. The other main change is to make it harder for unions to take strike action by requiring a minimum turnout of 50% for a strike ballot, and the support of 40% of registered members in the public sector.

At first pass neither of these proposals looks unreasonable. The opt out rule on political funding creates a corporate influence by the unions on the Labour Party that undermines democracy. Labour gets the lion’s share of its funding this way, and the their influence on the party is growing – they gave decisive logistical and moral support to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign, for example. Unions play a vital role in our society in balancing the unhealthy inequality of power in employment relationships, not least in the public sector. But politically they are conservative. This is illustrated by their support for Britain’s nuclear deterrent. This not based on any arguments of high principle, but by the short term influence of any policy change on jobs. Just about any reform designed to make the economy or the public sector more efficient will be opposed by the union bosses for purely short-term reasons. The opt in principle would (probably) reduce the amount of money they deploy, as well as making union bosses more accountable for their political views. Politics should be about people, and not intermediated by corporate interests.

So what’s wrong? The reform is unbalanced. Trade unions are not the only malign corporate interest around – businesses also provide parties with funding, and especially the Conservatives. This is unhealthy too, though thankfully things are not as out of hand in Britain as they are in the United States. But it does help counter the malign political influence of the unions. This not just a question of allowing the Conservatives to oppose Labour. Labour itself was more politically balanced and electorally appealing when it took a higher proportion of corporate donations, under Tony Blair. Whacking union donations without some kind of equivalent reform of other corporate donations is simply a partisan attack on Labour that will probably do more harm than good. Labour certainly has a good case to make to the public on this.

There is something similar going on strike ballots. It is not unreasonable to ask for a substantial mandate for such action, rather than let a minority of activists decide things. If the union case for strike action is a strong one, they will get the support, as has been shown repeatedly. The problem is that the government refuses to modernise the way strike ballots are carried out. This has to be by post, which is not only expensive, but it gets swamped by junk mail, leading to low response rates. Most organisations that cary out mass ballots now do so electronically, or at least supplement the post with online. There are risks, of course, but they are manageable. Allowing unions to do this would be a completely reasonable quid-pro-quo; refusing to consider it is an attack on workers’ rights.

If I were a trade unionist, this shocking state of affairs would give me pause for thought. Because the unions themselves have helped bring this situation about. Firstly, their conservative influence on the Labour Party has helped make them less electable. In 2010 they were decisive in making sure that Ed Miliband got selected as leader. And their hysterical opposition to austerity prevented Labour from developing a coherent and electorally convincing economic policy. Secondly their tribal attack on the Liberal Democrats for having the temerity to form coalition with the Conservatives helped weaken a vital bulwark against Tory hegemony. If Labour voters had rallied to the Lib Dems in the South West, things might have turned out differently.

And the end result is that Labour, as it turns out, is more interested in other things than union rights. Meanwhile the unions have no other friends across the political spectrum. The SNP have shown more interest in the fate of English foxes than union rights. How hard should Lib Dems fight their corner when the unions done so little for them?

Of course no real trade union leader will come anywhere close to such reflections. They still think that the Tories are the spawn of Satan who must be excluded at all costs, and that austerity, understood to include any initiative to make the public sector efficient, is based on lies – and that the public will be convinced of both these things if only they were proclaimed loudly enough.

For liberals the attitude is clear – it is to welcome the government’s reforms, but to fight for others to curb the malign influence of big (and not so big) businesses on political funding, and to allow trade union democracy to be modernised. It is hard to shed tears for such political dinosaurs as Britain’s current union leaders.

What will 2016 bring? Remain will win and the Tories will stay together

New year predictions are not something this blogger has indulged in before – but it seems to be a universal obligation for the first blog of the year. There is little to be said for it at face value: predictions are either banal continuations of current trends, or depend too heavily on events that are unpredictable. Still, they may reveal something interesting about the way the blogger sees the world- so here goes.

The most important event of 2016 in British politics (and that will be my main focus) will be a referendum on UK membership of the European Union. This is not certain for 2016, but nevertheless looks more than likely. I predict a comfortable majority (in the region 60-40) for the Remain campaign – I am not joining the crowd who suggest that it will be very close, or that Leave will win.

Unlike fellow Lib Dem blogger David Boyle, I don’t think the referendum campaign will be a repeat of Scotland’s independence campaign. Not because I think that the status quo supporters will be any more inspiring or less negative. There are routine calls for Remain supporters not to repeat the “mistake” of Scotland’s No campaign, which failed to make a positive case for the Union. This rather overlooks the fact that No won in Scotland, in spite of a brilliant Yes campaign. There were signs of ineptitude on the No side – but that more applies to the minor tactics, which were dictated by a Scottish Labour Party whose lack of political skill was shown to all in this year’s General Election, when they were reduced to a single seat. I expect the Remain campaign will manage things better.

But the main reason why the EU referendum will not be like the Scottish one, is that their is no equivalent of the SNP-organised Yes campaign. They managed to motivate their supporters through a very positive, inclusive message, which appealed to young people. There are people in the Leave EU campaign that think that life outside the EU is a fantastic and positive opportunity for Britain, but they look very unlike the Scots Nationalists. For a start many of these are businessmen who think that leaving the EU means deregulation, so that they can screw their employees, customers and the environment even harder. They are fundamentally unconvincing when they suggest that this will make more than few people better off – there is no economic card equivalent to Scotland’s oil.

But a deeper problem for the Leave side is that most of their supporters are of the stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off type. To them the EU represents the intrusion of the modern, globalising world, and leaving it will enable the country to put up stronger barriers to the world. Especially when it comes to the free movement of people. This is a striking contrast to the Scotland Yes campaign. The Leave campaign are (mostly) convinced that immigration is their trump card – and many Remain supporters agree, and are duly worried. Most people outside London are convinced that immigration is too high and one of the main problems that Britain faces. But I don’t think this will be as easy a card to play for Leave. First I doubt whether the public quite has the courage of its convictions on the issue – on the same principle that most voters talk about how much they distrust established politicians, but then keep electing them anyway. Second, the referendum will not change Britain’s political class, and the public doubts its will to deliver lower immigration, even outside the EU. Perhaps these two points two sides of the same coin.

So Remain will win. What will that do to British politics? The conventional wisdom, which I have supported, is that this will tear the Conservative Party apart. But I have changed my mind on this. Europe has been a defining issue for many Tory activists, and they will be upset that the referendum was lost. But we must remember two things about the Tories. First: their party is not “democratic”, by which I mean that its members don’t control things through electoral processes, as they do in the Lib Dems and Labour (sort of, in both cases). The controlling elite has huge power over party direction and can weather the odd storm. Second, the party has the prospect of political power before it. They are in power, and the opposition is weak; too many people, with too much money, will not want to throw away the opportunity to hang on to that power. The example of Ukip, now a chaotic, busted flush, is not encouraging to rebels. The main threat to the Tories comes from who they choose to succeed David Cameron as leader. But this is quite tightly controlled by the parliamentary party, who have an instinct for survival. No equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn is in the wings.

What other predictions? Jeremy Corbyn will remain leader of Labour, and consolidate his power. Labour’s Sadiq Khan will win London’s Mayoral election. Labour “moderates” will bide their time; setting up a rival party is unrealistic on so many levels. And the Lib Dems? They will achieve some local successes, which will be enough to convince insiders that they are making a comeback, but nobody else. The SNP dominance of Scotland will continue in the Scottish parliamentary elections, but I will be surprised if the Conservatives manage to overtake Labour.

And the economy? I think that trouble will strike before 2020; the economy looks too much like its old self in the days of Blair and Brown. How will it come about? Britain is vulnerable to events elsewhere in the global economy. Perhaps foreigners will start pulling out of the London property market, causing developers to get into trouble, and then whoever is lending them money. This could spark off a long term decline on Britain’s property values, quite opposite to the conventional wisdom that prices are driven by excessive demand, rather than excessive finance. And yes, that process could start in 2016.

What about elsewhere in the world? Perhaps 2016 will produce an unexpected drama in the US elections, but I expect the winner to be a Democrat. Hillary Clinton looks a shoo-in, but could she be derailed by something in her back history?

And Syria? The civil war looks like a stalemate until Saudi Arabia and Iran decide that they need a rapprochement. Continued low oil prices could force that. A coup within Islamic State to produce a new regime that seeks alliances with other actors should not be ruled out. – and less sponsorship of outside terrorism. But terrorism will go on.

Of course the last three paragraphs have enough escape clauses to not count as serious predictions. But that will have to do for now!

The left is failing. It must confront reality

Pity the French Socialists. Last weekend they managed to stall the Front National at regional elections – but only by supporting the centre-right Republicans. The collapse of the left and centre-left in France offers lessons to the British left – in the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green parties. But they are not listening.

Now remember that only three years ago the French Socialists were triumphant. François Hollande won the presidency, and parliamentary elections confirmed the party’s ascendancy, along with left wing allies, including the French Greens. France was in an anti-capitalist mood; this was no victory of the centre ground. The Socialists promised tax hikes on the very rich, and the reversal of many of the centre-right’s reforms on public services. It is probably as close as we will see in Europe to a triumph of the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – right down to a leader that did not follow the conventions of personal charisma.

But the Socialists lost their way almost immediately. They put through a few token left wing changes, but have been following the political centre ever since. The left wing programme proved unworkable. The electorate could not see the point of the party. Working class voters defected to the Front National, offering another mix of un-keepable promises, alongside its defining xenophobia. That France’s fractious centre-right was able to recover and provide the main challenge to the FN completed the humiliation of the left.

The problem for the left is that it is happier protesting and airing their “values” rather than governing. And a lot of its protest turns out to be very conservative. Many on the left seem to see their mission, not as improving the lot of the disadvantaged, but as protecting (“defending”) this or that public institution from attempts to reform them. Alongside this they protest at “injustice”. But there is no clear and consistent picture of how to make things better. There is an idea that you can raise taxes harmlessly by aiming at the wealthy, and then using the money to pump up public services and benefits without asking whether they are doing the job they are meant to be doing. And as for foreign affairs, it seem to be largely making a noise about various victim groups, and then doing practically nothing about it.

One example of political failure is dealing with racism. Look at this article from Kehinde Andrews in the Guardian. He is commenting on the 50th anniversary of the Race Relations Act. He points out how some forms of racism have been driven back in the 50 years, but then points at the racial minorities still suffer discrimination, and are disadvantaged on a wide variety of measures. The failure is clear, but what to do? All Mr Andrews can say is this: “Britain must acknowledge the uncomfortable history and reality of racial discrimination and be prepared to consider solutions that transform the conditions faced by oppressed groups”. Note that he has moved to language of victimhood and oppression. And the complete absence of thinking about how on earth to solve this intractable problem. To be fair, Mr Andrews is not a politician. But I hear all too often the language of victimhood and difference amongst leftist politicians who address ethnic minority issues. Everything is always somebody else’s fault.

As Tony Blair put it in a recent article in the Spectator:

Right now we’re in danger of not asking the right questions never mind failing to get the right answers. All of it is about applying values with an open mind; not boasting of our values as a way of avoiding the hard thinking the changing world insists upon

This leaves the left with two big problems. First is trying to present themselves as a convincing party of government. This is what Labour failed to do in this year’s General Election. But the French Socialists showed that you can still win, if your opponents are even more distrusted than you are. Then comes the second problem: what do you do when the left achieves power. Does it “stay true to its principles” and push through a populist left-wing programme, attacking independent businesses, and cosseting public sector workers, including an expanded nationalised industry. Recent examples of this approach are Argentina under the Kirchners, Brazil under Dilma Rousseff, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. In the end the government cannot escape economic reality, and the economy turns sour. Interestingly this approach seems to be much more difficult in Europe than in South America. No doubt European institutions are stronger – making wilful suicide much harder. France cannot print its own currency, for example. The other choice is simply to U-turn, as the French did, and implement policies that most people cannot distinguish from those of the centre-right. This leads to an existential crisis for the governing party.

In Britain we can see that with the second party of the left, the Liberal Democrats. They entered coalition with the centre-right, the Conservatives, in 2010. Activists and members fled; the party felt as if it was imploding. It was vilified from across the political spectrum for selling out. Mostly this was because they dared to face up to the compromises of government – although it was also tangled with the toxicity of working with the Conservatives.

Rather than confront the realities of government, the left indulges itself with the language of protest, usually constructed in abstract terms (“austerity”, etc.) that means little to people they are supposed to be helping. And that leads to two problems. The first is losing working class voters to the populist right. British leftists have had some luck here. Ukip is the only credible party fishing in these waters, and they are not adept. But the popularity of movements like Britain First shows that there is a ready group of white working class (and not a few middle class) voters who are ready to take this direction. The second threat is the centre-right. If this group has an organising philosophy, it is economic liberalism, using a conventional wisdom that has built up since the 1980s. It is well past its sell-by date, and yet it is more credible than the non-offering of the left.

To reverse this, I think the left will need to do three things:

Develop a new policy framework that addresses the challenges of the current world. That is the main focus of this blog, so readers should have some idea of what I mean. It needs to focus on sustainability, local networks and public services coordinated around the needs of users, not providers.
Develop a better language with which to frame its ideas to those currently disillusioned with politics. I suspect this is better done through local, community politics than clever brand building by Westminster operatives.
Develop alliances across the parties of the left, and move away from destructive tribalism. This will need to be underpinned by political reforms that make such collaboration easier (proportional representation, for example). There are some good ideas bubbling up across all the parties, alongside the nonsense.

There is, alas, almost no sign of progress on any of these three lines. But I will not give up hope.

Success in Oldham deepens denial among Labour left

Last week BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Aloud ran a piece on research showing how people assume that most other people think like them. This is, apparently, particularly strong at the political extremes. We don’t need academics to tell us this, of course – it explains many of history’s major political misjudgements. Prime candidates at the moment are supporters of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who are in deep denial about how difficult it will be for their party to win elections. In this, if nothing else, they resemble the supporters of Donald Trump in the US.

Of course, being in denial is something that, as a Liberal Democrat supporter, I know something about. Throughout the Coalition years we were told that our party faced oblivion at the next election. We refused to accept this, but alas we were wrong. Denial is always easier to see in others. The main problem on the Labour left is that they assume that most Britons share their view that the Conservatives are out only to line the pockets of the rich, and that “austerity” is evil. Now I’ve written before that this outlook will doom the Labour Party to failure, and that one of the first tests of the Corbyn leadership would be the Oldham by election. Well that election was last week, and it was a triumph for Labour. They increased their percentage share of the vote, though with less votes overall. A challenge from Ukip failed to materialise: they increased their vote (by 3%), but by much less than the Conservative vote fell (over 9%). Is this vindication for the Corbynistas?

Up to a point it is. It shows that all the chatter that Labour’s lurch to the left has affected the party’s electoral standing is just that. There is little decent data on this result, analysing who did and didn’t support each party, so we can’t say for certain what happened. But as Alistair Meeks points out in politicalbetting,com, the result is completely consistent with previous by elections in the area. Nothing much has changed. There is much for Labour supporters to take heart from here.

The first point is that Ukip look like a busted flush. The party was supposed to be picking up disillusioned white working class votes, and presenting a major threat to Labour in the north of England. They nearly won one of those previous nearby by elections. If Mr Corbyn did not play well on Oldham’s doorsteps, as the chatter suggested, Ukip’s Nigel Farage played no better. He used to be a media star, and regarded as “authentic”, but he seems to have lost his credibility. The Ukip result in the May General Election was disappointing, as they were mugged by the ruthless Tory election machine. Mr Farage’s shenanigans over whether he was resigning as leader may have had the same sort of effect on his public standing as Nick Clegg’s U-turn on university tuition fees. The party needs to dump him, but probably won’t. The transition from a Tory breakaway in the shires to being a party of working class protest is too much for it.

The second cheering point for Labour is that their challengers to the left are thoroughly neutralised. The Greens achieved barely 1% of the vote. The Lib Dems put in a major effort and still lost their deposit, and tried, unconvincingly, to draw comfort from the fact that their vote did not actually fall from a mere 3.7%. In this environment at least, these parties are treated as a complete irrelevance. In living memory the Lib Dems were capable of pulling off a stunning wins almost anywhere. There are some signs in local by elections of a Lib Dem bounce back, but it is highly localised and bypassed Oldham.

All this bodes well for Labour’s prospects in May 2016, the next big local polling date, when there are also elections to the Scots and Welsh parliaments, and London’s Mayor. Labour’s candidate for London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has every chance of wresting the position back from the Conservatives. In Scotland, though, prospects look dire for Labour as the SNP machine looks dominant. It is even possible that the party will drop to third place behind the Conservatives. But London’s political class seems to have written Scotland off.

So why am I suggesting that Labour activists are in denial? Because May’s result in the General Election was terrible for them and there is not the faintest sign of it getting better – only that it is not getting worse. Their prospects in Scotland are not the sort of irrelevance that Londoners seem to assume. Scotland is one of the most important battlegrounds in British politics; it has been for at least five years. If Labour can’t engineer a recovery there, they will be locked out of politics in Westminster. Interestingly, the success of the SNP was a key piece of evidence for the Corbynista thesis – that the public was really angry about austerity, and Labour’s big mistake was not to be angry enough. But Scots voters turned on Labour because they thought they were incompetent, and did not stick up for Scotland. Mr Corbyn’s election does not improve their standing on either count, to put it generously.

Labour may be standing up well enough in the north of England, in spite of a cheeky challenge by the Conservatives to win back support there, but there is no sign that Labour can win back those politically sceptical middle-England voters that they progressively lost after Tony Blair stepped down as party leader. To do that Labour activists must break free of the notion that most people share their political outlook, deep down. Meanwhile a dangerous rift between the parliamentary party and the leadership reinforce a general air of incompetence, the most fatal thing in politics.

I have heard a number of people suggest that the real winners of Oldham are the Conservatives. It is hard to disagree.

The Autumn Statement shows the conflict of short and long term Tory priorities

George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered his Autumn Statement yesterday. This is a very British piece of political theatre, delivered by somebody with a very theatrically British job title, that adds up to “Finance Minister”. In the statement Mr Osborne announced financial plans for the next five years of the Conservative government. It is a set-piece event designed to score political points and attract good publicity. The dust has not had time to settle, but some important issues are clear.

The main headlines were these: the government dropped the central part of its plans to reduce tax credits to top up the incomes of people working on low pay. It also withdrew plans to cut police budgets. Various other goodies were doled out; schools had their budget protected in real rather than nominal terms; there was more money for the NHS, and various investment projects. This was all part of a familiar game of managing expectations, which Mr Osborne now handles with competence. The reversal on police cuts was particularly well managed. The short-term politics has worked very well for the government, helped by the Labour opposition spokesman John McDonnell’s misjudged stunt using Chairman Mao’s Red Book.

But let’s step back a bit. The first point to make is that this exercise is one of completely false precision. The justification for a greatly reduced level of cuts to departmental spending (according to the FT’s Martin Wolf, from £41.9bn in pre-election March, to £15.6bn in post-election July to £7bn now) was a £27bn reduction in 2020’s projected borrowing. This £27bn figure is widely reported in the media, but it is nearly meaningless. It is based on economic forecasts which have almost no chance of being fulfilled – though at least they are produced independently by the Office for Budget Responsibility. That £27bn can appear out of nowhere in four months simply reflects this imprecision; it can disappear just as quickly. Personally I feel that the projection of a steady 2% plus of GDP growth, which underlies this forecast, is most unlikely to be fulfilled; it is an artefact of a deeply flawed process of economic modelling that still has a grip on conventional economics, because nobody has found a substitute.

So this needs to be taken in a broader strategic context. The government has two stated economic aims for the medium term. The first is that the state should run a surplus in the middle of the business cycle; the second is that overall government spending should be cut to about 37% of national income- low by postwar standards. Both are entirely arbitrary. There is a good case for a government deficit to fund investment, especially if the private sector is reluctant to invest its profits, which has been the story of the 21st Century so far. There is no convincing evidence that I know of to suggest that a lower level of government expenditure is more economically efficient.

But all this makes more sense if you think about the politics rather than the economics. And here the Statement was balancing long and short term aims. The long term aim is to crush an ecosystem of political bureaucrats in central and local government, and a range of agencies, consultancies and NGOs that hover around them. This is the principal power base of the Labour Party, and flourished mightily under the patronage of Mr Osborne’s predecessor but one, Gordon Brown. What is set to replace it is series of soulless, hollowed out agencies that are as easy to deal with as modern big businesses like phone companies (BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, etc) that are unable to manage complexity, so try to deny that it exists. The government’s new Universal Credit system is shaping up to be just such a nightmare. I see both sides of the argument here. I hate the old Labour bureaucracy and its hangers on with a passion, and I am not sorry to see it being dismantled (though a lot of excellent professional services are going too). But its hollowed out replacement lacks credibility, and at will be a partial solution at best.

The difficulties with this Conservative dystopia are apparent in the short-term politics. Welfare, security, health, education and social care are proving politically highly resistant, and hence the retreats evident in Mr Osborne’s statement. The Conservative fight to crush the opposition Labour and Lib Dems is going very well. But this is in large part due to Labour’s ineptitude. What if it woke up and led a serious fightback?.

The Conservatives’ drive to cut government budgets leaves them politically exposed. They stand a real chance of shutting Labour out of power for generations, but only if they secure the votes the working class and and the less secure middle classes. The changes to tax credits would have made these voters very angry. Mr Osborne’s U-turn is unsurprising – but leaves the question of how he managed to get into the mess in the first place. Meanwhile added demands of an ageing population on health and social care services is a challenge that will not go away. The extra funds found for these are unlikely to be equal to the challenge. And the problem of an economy polarising between low and high wages, while housing costs are escalating, is placing huge stress on welfare.

The hollowing out of the state at both national and local levels will continue apace. But a weaker than expected economy, and mounting pressure on health and social care services are likely to break Mr Osborne’s plans eventually. Whether the political opposition, outside Scotland, will be in any shape to exploit this situation remains open to doubt, however.

Jeremy Corbyn has been holed below the waterline

The metaphor of a ship holed below the waterline is an engaging one. Above the surface nothing much seems wrong – perhaps a minor list. But down below the water is pouring in; barring extreme good fortune the ship is doomed. I remember using it in 2007, when the world’s interbank markets froze over; the ensuing collapse of the banking system did not happen until over a year later, when Lehman Brothers failed, though a surprising number of people did not see it coming. I think the metaphor is just as appropriate for Labour’s new leader: Jeremy Corbyn.

Many wrote Mr Corbyn off from the start, as a far-leftist, backed by trade unions promoting fantasy economics. These were my instincts, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. He sparked real enthusiasm amongst hundreds of thousands of activists. He came over as an engaging, anti-politician – a nice chap. With the public so tired of the usual type of politician, might he not spark enthusiasm amongst the wider public? Hearing him occasionally on the radio, he seemed to be talking a lot of sense. He had real momentum. You could put a positive spin on most of what he said.

Of course there were doubts. His Shadow Chancellor John McDonell’s inept handling of the government’s fiscal plans did not bode well. There is something chaotic about the party under his leadership, with no coherence across the Shadow Cabinet. But that sort of thing happened to Mrs Thatcher in her early days too – and look what happened to her. And I did not take much notice of those putting it about that next year’s elections, in Scotland, Wales, London and local councils, would be a critical test. Mr Corbyn was enjoying his new job, and his backers were determined to consolidate their hold on the party. I thought he could weather one set of bad results at least. Politicians are expert at finding somebody else to blame; no doubt the left would simply blame die-hards from the old order.

And then came the Paris attacks. The public regards these things as a critical test of political leadership. There is a lot of fear out there. Could something like that happen here? Can we not holiday in safety in European capital cities? We want leaders who can express our outrage, provide reassurance, and take charge of stopping the bad guys. The FT’s Janan Ganesh suggests that the public’s insecurity might make them seek older, more experienced politicians, especially ex-soldiers – in place of the callow think-tankers, PR types or charity workers that currently dominate the political ranks.

What they do not want are the intellectual prevarications we have had from Mr Corbyn in the last few days. He suggested that the killing of British terrorist Jihadi John by drone attack was not as good as bringing him to justice in a court. He failed to dissociate himself from Stop the War Coalition, which he used to chair, when it suggested the the French were reaping what they had sowed. He professed his nervousness about a police shoot-to-kill policy, when the public carried mental pictures of gunmen in suicide vests firing indescriminately. He seemed to rule out attacks on Islamic State in Syria (or Iraq come to that) by the British military.

The point isn’t that these views are without validity. Extra-judicial killing makes many feel queasy – and making martyrs, with all the risk of killing innocents alongside them, is no substitute for the grinding humiliation inflicted by judicial process and punishment. Our politicians have often suggested that the country’s interventions in the Middle East are designed to make our streets safer; that is open to challenge, to put it mildly. Trigger-happy police kill innocent civilians – as Londoners well know from 2005. It isn’t clear how bombing IS target in Syria will help.

But now was the wrong time to raise these concerns. They smack not just of qualified outrage, but of indecisive leadership that will be no match for the hard men (and women) that want to kill us. Unless Britain becomes an unexpectedly more secure and optimistic place, the vast majority of the British public will take fright at the idea that Mr Corbyn could be Prime Minister. The best that could be said of him is that he is too nice for the job. It was bad enough in May when Ed Miliband didn’t look Prime Ministerial enough; this is infinitely worse. In the full heat of a General Election campaign, Labour would be lucky to hold onto seats it had previously considered safe. What happened in Scotland could be repeated across England and Wales. The Conservatives, Ukip, or even the Liberal Democrats could clean up.

And yet SS Labour sails serenely on. Labour MPs know they are in trouble, but apart from an outburst at an MPs’ meeting on Monday they don’t feel they can do much about it- Mr Corbyn’s support amongst grassroots activists is too strong. Those activists are in denial, dismissing these difficulties as a bit of a wobble. They can’t possibly admit they have been so wrong only a month or two ago.

But the party is in serious trouble. I think there will be three key arenas in which this drama will play out: Scotland, London and the old industrial heartlands of England.

Labour must win back Scotland from the SNP in order to regain power in Westminster. Mr Corbyn’s supporters claimed that he was the right man to do this, interpreting the SNP’s rise as a backlash against austerity, rather than against rampant incompetence. But the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon’s handling of the Paris outrages has been assured, even promising an open mind on bombing Syria, in spite of her party’s conference resolution against it. Labour do not look like a serious government in waiting in Scotland, and they are sure to be routed in next May’s elections to the Scottish parliament. That will a a hard failure for the left to gloss over.

London holds its Mayoral and Assembly elections next May too. The interest here is that London is the biggest stronghold of Mr Corbyn’s activists. If there is to be a pro-Corbyn surge, it will start here. But Zack Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate for Mayor is well-funded, and has hired top-rate campaign advisers, fresh from the Tory General Election victory. He wants to win and will pull no punches – even if other Tories would happily give Labour a run here to keep Mr Corbyn in place. If Labour do badly it will be devastating for their future prospects – though Mr Goldsmith has weaknesses of his own, and it wouldn’t do write off Labour’s Sadiq Khan just yet. He certainly gets my second preference over Mr Goldsmith.

But perhaps the most interesting battleground will be in England’s northern and central heartlands: Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and so on. Many of these cities are virtually Labour one-party states. But interestingly a number of local leaders are taking a pragmatic and enterprising line to power. They support local devolution and are prepared to work with the government on that basis. And yet Labour’s working class voters will be amongst the most distrustful of Mr Corbyn’s metropolitan ways – and outraged at his recent prevarications on security. An early test of their feelings will come in a by election in Oldham in December. Ukip, anxious to overcome their disappointments in May, scent blood. Even the Lib Dems, with their Lancastrian leader, Tim Farron, are putting in an effort. This will be an interesting election to watch. If Labour fare badly in these heartlands, an anti-Corbyn coup is surely only a matter of time.

And what will happen when the good ship Corbyn finally keels over and sinks? That’s another matter, but Labour’s problems would hardly end then.

The real meaning of the controversy over the House of Lords

This week Britain’s House of Lords voted to delay the reduction of tax credits for Britain’s poorest working families. Parliamentarians from the ruling Conservative Party are apoplectic at what they say is constitutional outrage – an unelected chamber challenging an elected one. There is an important constitutional issue here, but as usual the Conservatives are pointing to the trees so that we miss the wood. The key issue is not whether the upper chamber is elected; it is how the executive power of the British government should be held accountable, and prevented from excess.

Britain does not have a written constitution. There is no charter of sacred principles which sets out the rights and responsibilities of each part of government and of its citizens. What we have is the result of a very messy process of evolution. It is the result of a struggle between those who want unlimited executive power, and those who want to limit it. We can date this struggle back to King John in 1215 at least. Some may push this back to the time of King Alfred the Great in the late 800s.

Initially the kings claimed their authority from the Divine. They competed for power with their nobles and with the Church. Things have moved on. The power of the Church was crushed by Henry VIII, and the hold of the Divine withered. The House of Lords retains, nominally, the last vestiges of the rights of the nobles. Instead both the divine and the nobility have been replaced by an idea of the Will of the People. But that is just as slippery an idea as that of the Divine.

To most politicians in both Britain’s main ruling parties, the Conservatives and Labour, the Will of the People is represented by a majority in the House of Commons, elected every five years using single member constituencies under the First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system. In their eyes theses elections confer rights on the House of Commons akin to the old doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, or the Chinese one of the Mandate of Heaven. This doctrine is often referred to as the Sovereignty of Parliament. The usual practice is that the Commons is controlled my a majority of members from one party, who approve an executive and are expected to support it all of the time. Checks on the executive are regarded as both inefficient and undemocratic. Checks by the judiciary are tolerated (less so if they are at the European level), since most accept that the rule of law is essential to an orderly democratic state. But even that has its limits; the executive chafes at laws that confer rights on ordinary citizens, especially human rights and rights to information. Other checks on power are not accepted. The House of Lords is more there for decoration than anything: a useful political tool to reward politicians for good behaviour, or political donors. There may also be value in the minor revisions to legislation that it proposes from time to time. Hence the anger at this week’s challenge.

And yet many observers feel that this leaves an inadequate check on the executive. There is an argument that unlimited executive power is dangerous rather than efficient, and should be subject to checks and balances. The most famous example of this, of course, is the constitution of the United States of America. The political system there often seems stuck in gridlock, and yet we can hardly call that country a failure, or less democratic than ours. There are three classic ways in which executive power might be limited. A written constitution allowing government actions to be challenged in the courts; a federal constitution that distributes powers between federal and state levels; or an “upper” chamber of the legislature to form a check on the main, popularly elected one. Britain has elements of all three, but they are all weak. The Conservatives want to keep it that way, and weaken the second chamber further.

Is this a bad thing? Conservatives would argue that a strong executive offers decisive government, that is able to develop the economy and protect its citizens better. In particular it is better placed to push through hard but necessary reforms. These reforms may not have been explicit at the time of the government was elected (one of the key arguments against the tax credit proposals), but there is also a sense that the next election casts a verdict on the past government, as well as electing the new one – so there is accountability in the end. Labour politicians are sympathetic to that line of argument, since they want the minimum limits on power when it is their turn.

Liberals oppose this on the basis that it is undemocratic, too beholden to vested interests, and centralises too much power at the national level. These are familiar arguments that I will not try to develop today.

Liberals do have a problem when it comes to the House of Lords though. It is manifestly undemocratic, but simply replacing it with an elected upper chamber with similar powers looks a bit of a nonsense. How would the new upper chamber’s mandate differ from that of the Commons? it could set itself up an an alternative “Will of the People” and simply create deadlock. Wouldn’t it be better to have a single chamber and make that work more effectively? Many liberals might accept that argument in theory, but fear in practice that abolition would not be linked to reforms of the Commons, for example to be elected on a proportional voting system. That fear is well-founded, but it leaves them arguing for something that looks inadequate.

A better way out is surely to come at the problem form a new angle: that of federalism. The new upper chamber might represent the interests of elected governments below the top level. There are many ways that this can be approached, and it would serve a wider purpose. The would help secure a better distribution of power within the country by strengthening local and regional levels of government (I dislike calling this idea “devolution” because it suggests a top-down process). It may also present a more robust solution for Scots’ demands for more self-rule than the unbalanced solutions now on offer. And it is the urgency of the Scotland problem that might give the idea political traction, alongside the widespread recognition that government in England is over-centralised.

That will require some form of constitutional convention to resolve. That is what liberals should be calling for -a not an elected upper chamber by itself.