Month: November 2021

Focus on Fake

This morning I received this from a loyal subscriber, promoting a programme of seminars that which really does sound quite interesting (link in the text below):

Dear Matthew,
Firstly, thanks for being one of my key “liberal” places of good quality information. It is great to receive your emails that gently remind me to look at the new material.
As Chair of the Defence & Security Circle of the National Liberal Club, my all consuming volunteer thing, I am asking you a huge favour: we have been given at last minute a NATO project to deliver starting 1 December on fake news, disinformation and hostile players.
It is free, balanced and offers podcasts, videocasts and hybrid events.
I need to get the info out to asd many people who are liberal, moderate, policy thinking and concerned about values – to get in person attendees this Wednesday and to garner zoom online participants. It is a cracking program: 3 x 1 hour sessions you can dip into and events in EDinburgh and Manchester later on 6 and 13 December respectively.
Our website with the registration links is Focus on Fake (nlcdefence.org.uk)
I feel crap asking at this late stage – but I’m channeling my inner Aussie can do attitude.
If you feel at all able to do so – your network would be a suitable and most respected addition to politicians, media influencers, students from KCL and everyday people.
Happy to discuss or answer questions. I’m also charged with creating podcasts with bloggers and vloggers … might I entice you to give us 15 minutes in a chat?
Cheers
Noel

If Labour want to capitalise on Tory sleaze they need a political alliance

As many Conservatives feared, the government’s fiasco over the Owen Paterson affair is giving traction to accusations of “Tory sleaze”. You can argue whether Mr Paterson’s conduct actually merits this description, but a fair appreciation of the facts matters little in this kind of rough and tumble – a rough and tumble that Conservatives are only too happy to indulge in when it is to their advantage. And in any case there have been other examples of dubious behaviour. The Conservative opinion poll lead is evaporating. This must give Labour some badly needed hope. But capitalising on this issue will be tricky.

Labour does come at this with some advantages. They are much less sleazy than the Conservatives, having been out of national power for eleven years. Their MPs tend not to have well-paid consultancies. The government won’t let them award peerages to donors, removing the temptation to do so, and so on. Better still, their leader, Sir Keir Starmer, looks the model of personal integrity, even if he is a bit pompous with it. But for all that, Labour has been slow to see much poll benefit. The Conservative poll share is falling, but Labour’s does not seem to be rising, or not by much. The most conspicuous beneficiary in the most recent poll are the Greens. The Greens have very little prospect under the current electoral system, so in any general election their vote will get squeezed away. A lot of that squeeze is likely to go back to the Conservatives, such is the fear so many people have of voting Labour.

What is the problem? The party’s reputation can be tainted by two lines of attack. The first is that they will be no better in if they win power – “they’re all the same” – capitalising on the public’s general cynicism over politicians. Labour’s record when it was last in power wasn’t particularly clean by British standards. They needed big money donors, some of whom ended up with peerages, or, apparently, other favours; many of their MPs indulged in dubious expense claims. Former leader Tony Blair seemed a bit too relaxed about such things – though his successor Gordon Brown had a stronger reputation. The other line of attack is that the party is being taken over by the far left; their politicians are not beholden to big money, but they might have a tendency to think that the ends justify the means, and play fast and loose with the rules in other ways. And, of course, hard left parties are open to other lines of attack that might drive under decided voters away.

Labour has another problem. They are not articulating clear policies that would make British politics cleaner, beyond vague promises of tightening up the existing regime. They have suggested that MPs should not be allowed to take on paid consultancies. But they won’t suggest that second jobs will not be allowed – as at least one of their number is an emergency doctor, and they like to make the claims to sainthood that such a role allows – and doubtless there are other examples of “real world” jobs that enhance an MP’s job. Besides, all this is just tweaking at the edges, and would hardly make it harder for powerful business interests to get undue influence.

What is needed is something much more eye-catching. An obvious policy is the abolition of the House of Lords, perhaps with its replacement by an elected second chamber. The Lords are already over-large and over-used for patronage; the government is in the process of making things much worse by creating even more peers, of which large party donors will undoubtedly feature heavily; that could give the idea public traction. A second idea is to reform the electoral system for the House of Commons. Nothing is more annoying than Conservative claims that it is up to constituents to judge the behaviour of their MPs, when most voters quite rationally think that party label is more important – and most MPs hold safe seats anyway. Behaviour has to be pretty extreme for an MP to lose his seat, and usually the opposition has to be pretty canny too. Actually electoral reform would not necessarily deliver a better system; proportional systems can produce their own safe seats (though not the Single Transferable Vote, which requires multiple-member constituencies). But it’s a real change that would make established politicians uncomfortable – and it can prove a focus for a public wish to make a real change to politics. The is exactly what happened in New Zealand in 1993.

But Labour has a credibility problem when proposing such policies, which go to the root of why people distrust it. When the party has had the opportunity, they have done little to progress either Lords reform or electoral reform. The New Labour government from 1997 to 2010 made some important reforms to both, but none that changed the system radically, to tackle patronage appointments or safe seats, for example. When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010 to 2015 proposed much more significant reforms (in some cases not far from Labour’s 2010 manifesto), Labour undermined them because they did not want the governing parties (and especially the Lib Dems) to get any of the kudos; party advantage came first. Besides, the Leninists on the party’s left probably quite like the opportunities conferred by the current system to create an elective dictatorship. Big constitutional changes are tricky to push through, so the public would be right to question Labour’s determination to make changes when things got a bit rough.

What would give Labour a much better chance of showing that it really wants to change things is to form a cross-party alliance. This would need to include the Liberal Democrats, who have their own credibility issues after the coalition, but who are locally strong in places, and the Greens, who have the momentum. Bringing Scottish and Welsh nationalists into the picture would add even more credibility, but would be much harder. This would have the added benefit of making things easier after the election if neither the Conservatives nor Labour won a majority – which looks more probable than Labour winning a majority on its own.

Alas Sir Keir shows no sign at all that he has either the courage or the imagination to take such a path. The result of that is that the business of British politics will carry on much as normal for many years to come.

The curious case of Owen Paterson

Last week was acutely embarrassing for the British Conservative government, led by Boris Johnson. After an excoriating report by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, the House of Commons was due to censure former Tory cabinet minister Owen Paterson for repeated paid lobbying. Mr Paterson was popular on Conservative benches, and was vociferously maintaining his innocence – so Mr Johnson thought he’d help him out and rewrite the standards system, which he heartily despises, in one fell swoop. Thanks to a three-line whip, and the decisive voting support of a number of MPs who had fallen foul of the system, he narrowly won the vote last Wednesday. This caused such a stink that he promptly reversed course the following day, and now Mr Paterson has resigned as MP. All those Tory MPs who loyally voted for the wrecking motion endured the stink for nothing. I find the whole affair a bit puzzling.

The first curiosity was why Mr Patterson resisted the Standards Committee’s report so vociferously. At the start of the week the BBC interviewed him, and he vehemently maintained his innocence. He claimed that the whole standards process was unfair, saying that 17 witnesses that he had put forward were not heard, and that he had no way of making a proper defence, and not even a right of appeal. He even claimed that the way he was being persecuted over the two years of the investigation led to his wife’s tragic suicide. This was pretty strong stuff, though I had heard this kind of thing before from senior Tories. I will never forget Jonathan Aitken and his claim of “the sword of truth”, before being found guilty. His alternative course would have been contrition, admitting what he had done was wrong, and throwing himself on the mercy of his fellow MPs. Given his popularity, and his personal tragedy, this might well have worked – he could have got away with no suspension or a short one, that would not have had the possibility of triggering a by-election. He may well have believed what he was saying – but, as Matthew Syed points out in The Sunday Times, the human capacity for self-deception is massive, especially when it is in our interests. He would not have got himself in so deep if he had thought what he was doing was dodgy, but he does not appear to have been well-advised.

The next puzzle is why the first initial media response to Mr Paterson’s claims were so muted. On the BBC there was only a formulaic rebuttal, saying that the standards process was independent; none of the specific issues that he raised was responded to; it wasn’t even very clear what he was being accused of; his interviewer certainly didn’t press him. It was not until the debate itself that it emerged just how flimsy Mr Paterson’s defence of was, both in his explanation of his behaviour, and his criticism of a parliamentary process that has been in place for decades. He behaviour was clearly and repeatedly in breach of standards; his 17 witnesses had submitted written statements; the process allowed Mr Paterson to make what amounted to an appeal; and so on. Given the Tory onslaught on the supposed bias of the BBC, I’m not surprised that they wouldn’t take it on, though it says much for the sad state of that institution. But nobody else did either, until that debate. My New Statesmen daily email wittered away about other things. There were no articles in my online Financial Times, nor in the email newsletters from The Times or the Guardian. Where they cowed by the threat of legal action until the parliamentary debate laid things bare? Did they not understand the importance of the story? Where they leaving a trap for the Conservatives to fall into? I’m too far away from the action to have much idea. Once the case against Mr Paterson was properly explained in the debate, though, the papers turned on him.

And then there is the puzzle of why Mr Johnson ordered a three-line whip on the rather bizarre wrecking motion, which basically suspended Mr Paterson’s case until the rules were rewritten by a committee with an inbuilt Conservative majority. This brought the whole thing back onto him and his government. Perhaps the initiailly muted press reaction lulled him into a false sense of security. But if sentiment in his party was strongly for Mr Paterson, and against the standards system, he surely did not need a three-line whip? And if it wasn’t, he was obviously taking a big risk. Mr Johnson certainly wants to dismantle the standards system, which he himself has run foul of, and which may well cause him trouble in future (the rather curious episode of the financing of the refurbishment of his flat is a case in point). Perhaps he was not aware of just how overwhelming the case against Mr Paterson was. It had ben a busy week and he has a distaste for detail. He also seems to have been badly advised by either or both of his Chief Whip and the Leader of the House.

It remains to be seen how much damage the affair will actually do. I suspect that the opposition’s aerated claims of corruption will not cut much ice in themselves, though attacks from fellow Conservatives, such as Sir John Major, might. It is still likely to be another dent in the government’s reputation, which will make support harder to rally in future. Perhaps more serious is that the prime minister will have lost credibility with his MPs; he will find them less willing to go into the lobbies to support any future dodgy business. There is no immediate threat to his leadership, though.

Still, this whole curious business shows that there is a level below which the government is not allowed to sink, much as it might want to. That is something.

New Labour was not about making hard choices

I have now finished watching Blair & Brown – the New Labour Revolution, a 5-part series from the BBC on the Labour government of 1997 to 2010. For politicos like me it was compulsive viewing, for all its flaws. Does it say anything to us about politics now?

One criticism of the series is that it was too long. Five episodes of one hour each is indeed a lot of time, but I was hooked, as were many of the reviewers. We learnt quite a few new things, and the tension between its two principal characters gives the subject a fascinating dynamic. In fact the main problem seemed to be on how much it left out. There was no coherent commentary from the left of the party, for example, and the causes of the Global Financial Crisis were not examined. This left two critical parts of the New Labour narrative (or myth in the word’s broader sense simplified story) unchallenged – that “Old Labour” was unelectable, and that the GFC was something that happened from out of the blue from the USA that the government neither contributed to, nor could do much about. Both warrant challenge, even if emotionally I am bought into the first of those myths, while strongly disagreeing with the second. But neither is a simple question to unpick, and the argument on the GFC is probably asking too much for most political journalists to be able to handle, alas. Instead they took a whole episode to dig into the Iraq War – an editorial decision that it is hard to gainsay. The first episode covered the period before they won power, and there was episode for each of the three terms – so there was a logical structure to the whole series. Quite a bit of time was spent on pregnant pauses within the interviews (which included both main protagonists amongst many other important figures), but the overall pace was not slow.

I am struck by how deeply flawed the partnership was. The two leaders worked as a team before the 1997 election, but after that Gordon Brown jealously guarded the Treasury as his fiefdom and kept Tony Blair at arms length. I have no doubt that it was Mr Brown who was primarily at fault here. One of the most remarkable moments came when it dawned on Mr Blair that the government had to dramatically raise its spending on the NHS, to bring it into line with the average of health spending in Europe. This was a brilliant insight (which I have explained recently on one of my blogs) that very few people in the governing elite seem to understand – instead seeing the NHS as a spending black hole that needs to be contained somehow. But the only way Mr Blair could persuade Mr Brown to follow this line was by announcing it in a television interview. Mr Brown could not see the wood for the trees. It turned out to be one of New Labour’s best, and most popular, policies.

It would be tempting to characterise the partnership as Mr Blair being strong on vision, and Mr Brown being good on the detail. But Mr Blair was wrong about a lot of vision things too. He was wrong to push for joining the European currency (though at the time I was on Mr Blair’s side) – another disagreement resolved through the news media; he was wrong about joining the Americans in the Iraq war; he was wrong about trying to bring a private sector ethos into the public services, such as the NHS and schools. On all of these Mr Brown’s judgement seems to have been better, though he was and remains very unengaged on Iraq. But Mr Brown became complacent, especially with his hands-off approach to the financial sector. He put in place a tripartite system for managing national finance, between his Treasury, the Bank of England, and the Financial Services Authority (FSA). All well and good, but it was clearly his job to ensure that the system as a whole was working. He did not seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation until the collapse of Lehman in late 2008, by which time he was Prime Minister. His response then was magnificent – but more insight in 2007, when the risks were becoming obvious, would have helped. Instead he cut the rate of Income Tax, which left the country very vulnerable when the bubble burst. He was so blinkered by his success in “no more boom and bust” that he would not see the risks building up in the system.

Though it ended badly, New Labour has to be seen as a success overall, with three successive Labour general election victories, two of them landslides. Can it tell us anything about the future? The obvious parallel takes us back to Labour, which once again is back in the doldrums. The New Labour strategy was to win by courting the political middle ground and holding back on the party’s more left wing instincts; their most important insight was that the middle ground was a rather conservative place, and not the liberalism associated with centrist political parties, though it needed that too. The party needed a firm message on law and order, and a conservative stance on taxes and spending – as well as keeping union power at bay. This meant accepting that a lot of the legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s government had to stay. That itself was not enough, because John Major’s Conservatives were firmly anchored in that middle ground, and had used that strength to pull off a victory against the odds in 1992. Mr Blair and Mr Brown also had to exude confidence and competence. This was not too hard, as the Tories were beset by divisions, and their economic prestige suffered a fatal blow with the ERM fiasco in 1992, shortly after the election.

Can Labour follow the same strategy? Its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, clearly thought so after he took over in 2020, with the government floundering with its response to the covid-19 pandemic, and seemingly led by right-wing ideologues. Mr Starmer always appeared on television with the word “leadership” on his backdrop. But the Conservative leader, Boris Johnson, has a clear eye on that middle ground, which remains generally conservative. But he also understands that the middle ground has moved on – largely thanks to New Labour. Now it means a strong commitment to state-funded public services, such as the NHS. Unlike Mr Major (now Sir John), though, he has an iron grip on his party. He has recovered from his wobbles on the pandemic, and the public (or the floating voters anyway) appear to have forgiven him. Mr Johnson’s rhetoric on climate change and the environment also marks out his fight for the middle ground. He is not presenting anything like the target that Messrs Blair and Brown were able to destroy prior to 1997.

But the problem for Mr Johnson, and anybody hoping to win on the middle ground, is that it is a have-your-cake-and- eat-it sort of place. It wants well-funded public services but no more taxes; it wants action on climate change but no addition to heating or motoring costs, and so on. This is creating growing tensions within the Conservative Party. It does not create much of a direct opportunity for Labour – who are no more able to solve the contradictions of this middle ground than the Tories. But division amongst the Tories could allow Sir Keir to appear as a more competent alternative.

But a successful challenge is unlikely to look anything like New Labour. Perhaps Labour can try its own “cake” strategy by allying itself with the Lib Dems and the Greens, each of which can cement its appeal to different segments of the anti-Conservative market while leaving there contradictions unresolved. That alliance would need to be based on the promise of electoral reform. It would be a risky strategy, and it is too early to start playing the cards now. New Labour did create an informal alliance with the Lib Dems in the 1990s, as part of its strategy of leaving nothing to chance. But the Lib Dems are weaker now, while trust between the parties is low. Mr Blair was happy to hint at electoral reform then but in the end was “unpersuaded”. Something stronger would be needed now.

Britain, along with most of the rest of the world, is confronting some difficult choices. This is much more the case than in 1990s, when the opportunities for economic growth were much better. After an initial period of austerity, New Labour did not have to navigate such treacherous waters and was able to present voters with a “both/and” proposition. Alas hard choices do not make good politics – the revolution now would be to make taking those choices electorally appealing. The New Labour experience offers us no clue on how to pull off such a feat.