Politics UK – Page 15 – thinking liberal

The Coalition at 10: the wrong turning on public services

Ten years ago, when the Conservative and Liberal Democrats entered coalition, there was a certain energy about the way the new government wanted to approach public services. Gone would be the lumbering, heavy-handed nanny-state of “New” Labour. In would come something more focused, less costly and with a greater community involvement. The Economist enthused about the coalition’s apparent radicalism. In 2020, almost nobody remembers this energy. If the verdict is not entirely negative, the Coalition’s record on public services was more failure than success. It is as well we try to understand why that was.

The energy came from a meeting of minds between the Conservative modernisers led by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the “economic liberals” from the Lib Dems, led by his deputy, Nick Clegg (often referred to as “Yellow Bookers”). Neither faction had a secure grip on their own party, but there seemed to a meeting of minds across the coalition’s leaders. Alas neither leader had a strong grasp on how to manage public services, and most Conservative ministers had their own take on how things should be done. The left has made its principal line off attack on “austerity”, and blamed lack of funding for the coalition’s failures. But problems went much deeper than this.

At the start, though, it is clear that something needed to be done. After 13 years Labour’s public service policy was both bogged down and bloated. Labour’s strategy had been borne out of a tension between Tony Blair, who favoured business-friendly and market-oriented approaches, and Gordon Brown, who favoured top-down discipline and expanded budgets. Mr Brown won, mostly. The result was mountains of guidance coming down from on high, a highly complex system of numerical targets, and in the case of the NHS, a massively over-engineered commissioning system (“world-class commissioning”) supported by the biggest and most complex transfer-charging system in the world (“payment by results”). It was a job-creation scheme for management consultants, whose output was blather designed to incorporate as many as possible of the favoured buzz-words, and a slow atrophy of decision-making. Labour had achieved a lot in their 13 years, raising health spending and driving up standards in schools, but by 2010 the whole system was looking more than tired.

Unfortunately the Coalition found that sweeping out the nonsense was easier than replacing it with something better. The first thing to fall by the wayside was any idea of community engagement. Mr Cameron had promoted this through his idea of a “Big Society” which overlapped to a degree with the Lib Dem idea of community politics developed in local government. But Whitehall, both politicians and civil servants, jealously guard their power and nobody wanted to make concessions to interests not represented in Westminster’s lobbying industry. I had a sharp experience of this when local parents in Wandsworth tried to set up one of the government’s new “Free Schools”. This fitted the template of bottom up initiative promoted by Conservatives before the election, but the local, cross-party activists were quickly bundled out of the way, and the contract for the new school given to one of the well-connected academy-school groups. The Big Society was very quickly forgotten.

The next mistake was an obsession with structure over substance. The most costly mistake was a massive reorganisation of the NHS, which destroyed morale, but, to my knowledge, had very little benefit to show for itself. The minister in charge, Andrew Lansley, was given a free hand, and then sacked. Much of the new structure has shown itself to be useless or worse in the face of the pandemic, though that may have been as much to do with policies implemented after 2015 (such as cutting resources for public health), and hospitals have shown themselves to be in good shape organisationally. Another clear mistake was the energy put into the “acadamisation” of schools to take them out of local authority control. This proved to be a succession of costly errors. First managers of the new academies started overpaying themselves, then ministers found that academy chains were making the same mistakes that local authorities did. A huge amount of energy was wasted, and yet the country still suffers from the phenomenon of “coasting schools”. In both health and education the government would have been better off trying to make Labour’s structures work better.

A further mistake arose from a wrong-headed approach to outsourcing. There were two big problems. The first was a policy of divide-and-de-skill borrowed from the private sector. The idea was to divide services into separate functions, define their objectives, and then seek to meet these using as many untrained and inexperienced staff as possible. This may look fine on paper, but it is a complete misunderstanding of what public services are. Public services should be about solving problems, and especially the more complex ones, which will otherwise keep coming back at you. The private sector is not interested in solving people’s problems: it just wants people to keep coming back for more. Solvi8ng problems requires different services to be integrated, not carved up, and it requires highly skilled professionals to craft solutions around services users’ needs. The disaster that deskilling entailed is especially evident in social services and criminal justice.

There was one case where the government wanted to solve complex problems, using a people-centred approach implemented by skilled professionals. This was the troubled-families programme, which was to focus on 100 families that generated a totally disproportionate amount of impact on public services. Alas this fell foul of the second big problem: the idea of “payment by results” – the same words as Labour’s NHS transfer-charging system but with an entirely different use. The idea was to pay organisations more if they achieved measured results. Unfortunately, in the case of troubled-families, there was no good numerical basis of measuring success on the sort of timescale needed, so it simply led to the usual perverse incentives. Furthermore this type of remuneration ruled out smaller social enterprises that were unable to manage this type of financial risk, but which were more likely to embody the kind of public service ethos needed.

The coalition’s record was not all bad. The reform of university funding stood outside other reforms and was based on the recommendations of a commission appointed by the previous government, not to mention being led by two of the government’s more intelligent ministers – Vince Cable and David Willets. It secured additional resources for universities, allowing them to expand their intakes, including to more disadvantaged students. It compares favourably with the zero-fees approach used by the Scottish government, which forced universities to restrict access to the disadvantaged. Gradually people understand that the loan finance system works like a graduate tax, though the more recent imposition of high interest charges undermines this. That leaves plenty of problems with universities their financing, but it was a major step forwards.

Other bright spots on public services included improving school provision for disadvantaged pupils, through the pupil premium and better accountability, and a much stronger focus on mental health. But many big problems, like social care, were left unsolved.

After the coalition ended in 2015, the Conservatives doubled down on all the worst aspects of the coalition’s policies, with an almost vindictive cutting of public money. This came just as the longer-term problems stored up by earlier policies started to come back, with an increased crime rate, for example. In 2016 the new prime minister, Theresa May, tried to reverse this, but was quickly overwhelmed by the Brexit nightmare.

Labour’s top-down approach had got stuck, but the Coalition and the then the Conservatives on their own, looked for the answers in the wrong places. Readers of this blog will know what I think. Public services must become people-centred, allowing complex problems to be solved by crafting solutions across the boundaries of existing agencies. That cannot be achieved using a structure answerable to Westminster, or even at regional level (Scotland and Wales have just as many problems), but by devolution of power and accountability to a much more local level. This should be standard Lib Dem policy, though was not pushed in coalition; a few more Labour people talk about it nowadays, though it looks far from the way current Tories approach things. I would like to think it could be the basis of a Lib Dem-Labour-Green coalition, but I’m dreaming.

The Coalition’s failure shows just how hard our political system makes the effective management of public services.

Boris Johnson should be very worried by Keir Starmer

In the middle of a pandemic, Sir Keir Starmer’s start as leader of the British Labour Party has been inevitably muted. The news is dominated by the epidemic and the government’s response. There isn’t much time for any opposition party. But in these early days the portents look very good for Labour. Its members have made a very good choice.

Most of the attention has been drawn to Sir Keir’s performance at the weekly ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). In the first two weeks the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was ill and could not attend. But instead of handing over to his deputy, as previous leaders have done, Sir Kier took it on himself. This was an interesting side-stepping of the usual parliamentary protocol games. And then when Mr Johnson did become available, he easily overwhelmed the prime minister. His style was quiet but focused. “Forensic” was the description universally used, referencing Sir Keir’s former job as QC and Director of Public Prosecutions. It is a style to which a bluffer like Mr Johnson partially ill-matched.

How much does PMQs matter in the great scheme of things? The public barely notices. But it damages the morale of Conservative backbenchers, and the pressure on an immature government team could lead to it to make silly errors. The idea floated by the government that all MPs should return to Westminster, so that the boisterous atmosphere of PMQs might be restored, and so make things look a bit less bad, looks to be just such a silly error.

A second portent comes from Sir Keir’s cleaning out of the front bench team. His predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, valued loyalty over competence and the front bench was full of weak performers. Sir Keir’s team looks much stronger, though the parliamentary Labour Party is not as strong as it once was, so choice is constrained. But Mr Johnson is also a loyalty over competence operator, and his own front bench looks particularly weak. Which for a “no-details” style of leadership is a big problem. Sir Keir’s aim is to challenge the government’s competence by contrasting it with his own.

A third, and highly significant portent comes from Sir Keir’s refusal to challenge the government on the Brexit transition. Many are saying that the transition period should be extended, not least because of the virus, as there is not enough time to negotiate a trade deal by the end of the year. It’s a fair line of attack, but Sir Keir’s failure to take it up shows that he is the first Labour leader since Tony Blair to have a clear sense of political strategy.

As opposition leader, Mr Blair was very careful to pick his fights with John Major’s Conservative government only on a very limited range of issues. His aim was to take the fight to the Conservatives and win over their former supporters. To that end he projected similar policies but superiority in style and competence. The next Labour opposition leaders were Ed Miliband and Mr Corbyn. Neither were prepared to take the challenge to the Tories. Instead they hoped to win by rounding up a “progressive majority” from Lib Dem and Green voters, and from people who had previously not voted. Anybody who supported the Tories was suspect, and the party did not want to make the compromises needed to win them over. Instead they challenged the government on a very broad front, portraying them as something close to evil. This motivated the activists. They succeeded in winning over many Lib Dems and Greens, and even (especially in 2017) bringing out previous non voters. But these were neutralised by people put off by their perceived extremism, who moved over to the Tories.

By showing restraint in his attacks on the Conservatives, on Brexit, and indeed on the Coronavirus crisis, Sir Keir shows that he has grasped this. The priority is to win power, and this can only be done by persuading former Conservative voters to come over. And it is particularly important not to put off people who support Brexit.

Let’s look ahead to see how this strategy might play out. The most likely scenario is that Mr Johnson’s government will muddle through the crisis, and intervene enough to limit the damage to the economy. In this event Sir Keir’s message will be “the same, only different”. He will pursue the government on issues of competence rather than policy. Mr Johnson looks very vulnerable here, and with a little luck his government could go into free fall like Mr Major’s, and never recover.

A second possibility is that the Conservatives will lurch to the right. After a hard Brexit, the government tries to roll back the extension to government seen as the crisis has developed, in the hope of creative destruction from which a leaner, healthier economy emerges in time for the next election. There are undoubtedly some Conservatives who want to go down this route. But it would be highly unpopular in the country at large. If this develops, then Sir Keir will broaden his attack to favour stronger public services as well as competence.

A third possibility is that the stress of the Coronavirus crisis causes the government to completely unravel, leading to a Conservative rebellion which results in a National Unity government involving Labour. This is after all what happened in both the world wars in the last century, when the prime minister (Asquith then Chamberlain) was perceived to be out of his depth. There is no Lloyd George or Churchill in the wings, though, so this does look rather unlikely. If this happens it will provide Sir Keir an opportunity to demonstrate fitness for government, while doubtless the Conservatives would tear themselves apart.

Should Labour leftists feel betrayal? Certainly they will see their wilder causes sidelined or squashed. Sir Keir has signalled a tough line on antisemitism; this covers those who criticise Israel obsessively while taking an indulgent approach to countries like Russia and Venezuela. But they should stay calm. Once in power it will be quite easy to tilt policy in a socialist direction in the aftermath of this crisis. Getting power is the main thing, and then consolidating it. Mr Blair and Gordon Brown showed the way. It is not widely appreciated on the left just how far Mr Brown in particular advanced the boundaries of the state and the cause of practical socialism.

How should Lib Dems react? it is commonplace to hear the thought that the party flourishes if Labour leadership is moderate, after the party failed to make much impression when Mr Corbyn was in charge. This is clutching at straws. If Sir Kei8r’s leadership develops as I expect, the Lib Dems’ only chance is if Sir Keir is indulgent towards the party because he thinks it could be useful. He might if he thinks that it could keep the Conservatives out of 20 or more seats that Labour would struggle to win themselves. He would certainly much rather deal with the party in a hung parliament than the Scottish Nationalists. The Lib Dems might get some political space around immigration, since Sir Keir will not want to open up too big a gap the Tories there. Brexit will be a more troublesome issue for the Lib Dems. Otherwise there will be little open space.

What you will not see is Sir Keir taking up electoral reform. He might duck and weave, as Mr Blair did, or he might rule it out. He will not want to distract attention from his core message that the Tories are not fit to govern.

Of course, in the early days of a new leader it is very easy to project your expectations onto him or her. Perhaps that is what I am doing here. But this is my working hypothesis, and Mr Johnson should be very afraid.

How do the achievements of the Coalition look ten years on?

Ten years ago, in May 2010, a new government was formed from a coalition of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. It lasted the full five year term, but it is usually regarded as a political failure, especially for its junior partner, who have been marginalised ever since. If coalitions don’t work for all parties than they are unlikely to be repeated. I don’t want to go over that well-trodden ground, though, but to ask whether the coalition served the country well. Its leaders thought that however unpopular they were at the time, they would be vindicated by history. How is that working out?

I had envisaged doing that in a single post, but on reflection I could not do the topic justice. I will attempt it in three. In this post I will look at the Coalition’s handling of the economy, and in particular the controversy around austerity. In the second I will look at the attempt to reform public services. And finally I will look at its record on the country’s governance, where the most important event was the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014.

The Coalition’s record on the economy usually gets a bad press, except from confirmed Conservative supporters. The government inherited the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, and in particular a budget deficit of an eye-watering 11% (though we may soon learn to regard this as being a bit tame). All parties in the 2010 election promised to eliminate this deficit to bring the national finances back to order. The trajectory offered by the Conservatives was the steepest, and this was the target adopted by the coalition. It involved some tax rises (especially raising VAT), but most of the strain was taken through expenditure cuts. The scale of such cuts was spectacular. Only the NHS and education were spared, and, with demand on the NHS rising through an ageing population, even the NHS budget amounted to a real-terms cut. The cuts were less spectacular in execution than planned, and the government’s targets for the deficit were missed repeatedly. The actual outturn was strikingly similar to that promised by both Labour and the Lib Dems in the election.

These cuts provoked a massive depth of anger from the left. “Austerity” has been turned into a totem of hate, alongside the nebulous idea of “neoliberalism”. For all this anger, or perhaps because of it, it is hard to take this seriously. Rational debate has become impossible. All cuts are always evil, in this way of looking at life. There is no such thing as wasted public spending (though some might debate spending on weaponry, trade union allies quickly close that thought down). In the country at large this is a minority view though. One of the critical truths grasped by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair before their victory of 1997 was that until Labour showed that it could embrace austerity if necessary, not enough people would ever believe that the party was fit for government. That is probably still true.

But the criticism of the Coalition’s austerity policies goes much wider than the angry left. Most neutral economists join in. In fact I don’t think I know of a respectable academic economist who has been prepared to defend it. The argument here is that as the country was in recession, there was massive spare capacity, and the country needed fiscal stimulus to put this capacity back into use, and reduce long-term damage. Instead government cuts prolonged the recession and stunted the subsequent recovery. Few defenders of austerity bother to respond to this criticism. Instead they suggest that national debt was out of control and it was vital to bring it down to calm financial markets so that the government could finance itself. This thought was clearly on the minds of coalition ministers in 2010. It was the time of the Greek debt crisis, and nerves were jangled. The Treasury undoubtedly played the risks up – fiscal conservatism is in their DNA. The academics respond that as the UK had its own currency, the government could always pay its debts; anyway interest rates on government debt did not suggest market panic.

This is an interesting line of debate. The complication in the case of the UK is that it has a large and persistent current account deficit, and so is dependent on foreign finance, unlike Japan, another major economy with a floating currency and big debts. There is strength on both sides of the argument here. Ten years on the academics look closer to the mark than the Treasury types. But there is some strong hindsight there.

I am much more interested in taking on the academics’ core case against austerity though, which is that there was a lot of spare capacity in the economy in 2010. This view arises from an idea that economies have a natural rate of growth, arising from steady productivity growth, in turn arising from improved technology and more sophisticated management methods. In the 2000s they thought this rate for developed economies was about 2% a year. If GDP fell below the level suggested by this “trend rate” than that suggested spare capacity. This meant not only that the gap was bigger than it first appeared in 2010, but that with the slow rate of growth once the economy started to recover, that gap was never closed.

That line of reasoning suggests that all was well with the British economy in 2008 when it was hit by the financial crash. But that was far from true. A closer inspection of the country’s productivity growth in the years before the crisis shows that it was entirely based on two sectors: finance and business services. The crash proved that in the case of finance this growth was a work of fiction – a product of stoking up risk and optimistic accounting. It was scarcely better in business services, which was riding the bubble. There are plenty of good reasons for thinking that the idea of a natural rate of growth is out of date – this is a favourite topic in this blog. The truth is that growth in the UK since 2000 was driven by the expansion of a financial bubble, the import of cheap products and services from Asia, and massive immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, all fuelled by fiscal and monetary policy that was surely too loose. By 2010 the financial bubble had burst, cheap Asian imports had run their course, and although immigration was continuing, it had slowed and the general view was that it was causing excessive social strains. It was not a question of quickly trying to recreate the pre-crash economy, but the much slower job of building a more sustainable replacement. Fiscal stimulus would simply have led to a flood of imports, not new and better jobs.

In fact “rebalancing” was widely spoken of as a necessary thing at the time, though most people fondly thought of this as a return of old-fashioned manufacturing. Looked at it a bit more closely, and much of the academic criticism of the coalition actually reflects this. They bemoan not the cuts to services and benefits that so angered the left, but the lack of public investment. There is some justice to this, but investing public money wisely is much harder than it looks. Usually the money ends up wasted in vanity projects. Some of the suggested ideas, such as the expansion of Heathrow airport don’t look so good in hindsight. Others: better interconnecting rail links between northern cities, look a better idea, and the coalition could have done much better there. A failure to support green energy projects was a constant complaint by some Lib Dem ministers.

As it happened, the economy did rebalance, and quite quickly. Unemployment was never as serious as the GDP figures suggested it should be, and the employment statistics became very healthy. The problem was that this rebalancing was towards a new and rather ugly economic model, with insecure gig workers at its base. Inequality did not get worse in the Coalition years, but it didn’t improve by much either. The generation gap, with younger people in insecure jobs and rented homes, their elders with nice pensions and property wealth, has got worse. The coalition did little for regional inequalities either. And yet none of these problems was easy to solve, and the government’s main priority was to dig its way out of the financial crisis.

Overall my verdict on the Coalition economic record is good, but not that good. Damning with faint praise, perhaps. But the country was in the grip of wider economic forces: catch up by China reducing the flow of cheap goods; the spread of the gig economy; the saturation of the “stuff” economy. The glib criticism of macroeconomists does not do justice to these forces.

Lib Dems will always argue that the worst aspects of austerity on public services came in the following Conservative majority government, which doubled down on the cuts. There is some justice to this, but we can’t let the party off that easily. The Coalition’s record on public services is about more than austerity, as I will discuss next time.

Universal Basic Income – why it doesn’t deserve the hype

To judge from my Facebook news feed and Twitter updates, the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is gaining traction on the political left and centre-left. The extraordinary measures being undertaken by governments to prop up economies hit by Coronavirus and associated lockdowns somehow make it look less outlandish. In Britain the idea is getting closer and closer to being official policy for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats; it is already there for the Greens. I have always been a sceptic, and I still am.

The attraction is easy to see, and the crisis has highlighted its virtues. It is one answer to the massive information gap that lies between governments and the citizens they serve. This makes it impossible to target aid accurately to those in need. Government schemes like the furlough scheme leave many gaps, are subject to administration delays or injustices, and doubtless pay lots of money to those who don’t really need it, including fraudsters. On the other hand, attempts to target better involve humiliating procedures to verify need, which are often administered by officials that seem to take pleasure in the exercise of petty power for its own sake – and who are not empowered with discretion to use common sense nor accountable for the human results of their work.

This information gap has two main causes. The first is privacy, whereby we deliberately limit the information we make available to the authorities, or anybody else. The is one of the core aspects of what we understand by freedom, and all psychological benefits that come with empowerment and autonomy. But there is also the sheer scale and complexity of the information problem. Even in countries unworried by the idea of privacy, like China, face colossal problems trying to understand individual people’s needs, and often resort to arbitrary rules.

UBI is income that everybody is entitled to, on the minimum possible qualifications (such as nationality; there would likely be some form of age-based entitlement too). This would eliminate the need to provide targeted help in most cases, its advocates argue. In particular it would not depend on whether the citizen is working, and could replace unemployment benefit, or, in the UK, Universal Credit. There is no need for the state to gather data on income and work status in order to check entitlement.

Some support for this idea has recently come from Finland, where a randomised trial was carried out between UBI and unemployment pay. It was found that UBI did not reduce the incentive to look for work, while significantly improving the wellbeing of those receiving it. One worry about UBI, especially if it is substantial enough to replace entitlements to benefits, is that a significant number of people would give up the search for work, because they would not need it. But advocates point out that the incentive to work is improved because people keep all the extra earnings (subject to taxes), rather than having benefits withdrawn. The Finnish study provides some interesting evidence here.

But if the incentives argument falls away, there remains the question of how the state manages to pay for it. There is a dilemma here. The higher the rate of UBI, the more it can replace other benefits, and so deliver the advantages advocates want to see. In the UK Universal Credit is an obvious target, and so is the basic state pension. And yet as soon as it reaches this sort of level, the state outlays required to cover it become massive. Of course there are savings. Since the state pension is already a more or less universal entitlement, there may not be much extra outlay. Tax free allowances on pay could be withdrawn. But the gap remains massive.

Some on the left wave all this away, based on the insights offered by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which basically suggests that budget deficits can be funded by borrowing or printing money, and so traditional ideas of balancing budgets are old hat. Now I’m not as rude about MMT as most conventional economists seem to be, but it does seem to have encouraged the sort of magical thinking I last remember being widespread at the time of the tech boom in the late 1990s (“losses are the new profits”). The problem is that UBI would potentially unleash a wave of extra consumer demand across the economy, which could lead it to overheat and break down, through inflation or a debt crisis (because of the need to borrow foreign currency to buy imports sucked in by the excess demands). That is unless demand could be dampened down in some way, i.e. taxes raised. This is not a question of just taxing wealth, and top pay either. This may be a good idea anyway, but it is not likely to have a big enough impact on demand to head off trouble. Some combination of increases in basic income tax, national insurance and VAT will be needed too. This needs to be discussed more openly by the idea’s advocates.

But my reservation goes deeper. To me UBI seems to be trying to shortcut the sort of interventions that our society needs. It is an attempt to give people money in the hope that their problems will go away. That may work for a lot of people, but we will still be left with a vast residue of people with more complex needs, which a basic UBI does not begin to solve. I prefer solutions based on a highly devolved interventions by empowered professionals, able to tailor solutions across the whole range of public services from health, to housing, to law enforcement. The way to bridge the information gap is through people intelligently examining individual needs and crafting complex solutions. This will entail a judicious mixture of conditional and unconditional benefits. Our public services have been going in the opposite direction for two decades or more, as successive governments have sought to take the humanity out of public services and replace it with targets that turn out to be meaningless. By focusing so much on UBI, we are distracting attention away from the real crisis in public services.

The craze over UBI illustrates one of the biggest failings in a our politics. The search for simple, if radical, ideas instead of trying to understand the humanity of our society, and going about the messy and painful business of adjusting to this reality.

The political consequences of Covid-19 depend on what the government does afterwards

There has been an understandable rallying round by the public during the Covid-19 crisis. Here in Britain, as in most places, the governing party has seen its popularity rise (the main exception is the USA). Will this last?

As with so much else in this crisis the answer seems to depend on which party you supported in the first place. Conservatives think they will keep the opposition parties on the back foot for the long term. The obvious precedent is the Falklands War in 1982. In spite of the initial calamity, which could be blamed on a careless government, people rallied to the flag. Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives had been doing very badly in public opinion polls beforehand, but they won a landslide in the next two elections.

Opposition supporters, on the other hand, think there will be a reckoning as the dust starts to settle, and the government’s handling will be judged as inept. We are starting to see signs of a concerted assault on the government this weekend. The Sunday Times is running a story claiming that the government failed to follow scientific advice at the start and lost five weeks in its initial response. Kier Starmer, the new Labour leader, has joined in, after being reticent beforehand. Will the charges stick?

I certainly think the government made a false start. Contrary to what is repeatedly being said, though, this was not because they were ignoring scientific advice. That advice was muddled and contradictory; there were plenty of senior science types who backed the government up, though others were urging an earlier lockdown. There was a disastrous dalliance with the idea that the country should allow the virus to spread and build herd immunity; this was following one of the many strands of scientific advice. What was lacking was political nous. Politicians, not scientists, should be the experts on what the public will accept, and how best to communicate what the government wants it to do. The reason why so many governments went fast and hard for a lockdown in other countries was mainly political. It was a very simple message to communicate and it made them look decisive. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, showed poor judgement and has nobody else to blame.

But once the government grasped that the critical issue was not to overload hospitals, they started to do much better. The NHS built up capacity in intensive care with impressive speed, and, unlike in Italy, they have not been overloaded. The whole chain from reporting symptoms to admission to the ICU has been thought through and works (unless you live in a care home, unfortunately). Two issues nag, apart from neglect of care home residents: the slow rate of testing and the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE). Both partly go back to the government’s slow start, as other countries got ahead of the UK in stressed global markets. There has also been organisational ineptitude, especially in the case of testing. Public Health England, in charge of the testing (not actually part of the formal NHS) seems to have been using methods copied from Soviet Russia. They have been slow to take up available capacity, and getting the tests to the people that need them has been not been given much thought. Most people are expected to drive themselves to facilities set up in car parks, and even this is badly managed – I was caught in a 20 minute traffic jam outside the facility set up in Chessington World of Adventures, which I just wanted to drive past, and which would ordinarily handle much higher volumes with no disruption at all.

Still, the public probably don’t think anybody else would have done better – it doesn’t bear thinking about what would have happened if Labour had won the election last December and Jeremy Corbyn had been prime minister. I suspect the attacks on the government will resonate with the usual suspects and change few minds.

Much more important is what happens as the crisis subsides. There are some tricky decisions ahead about how and when to release people from the lockdown, but I don’t think the government is going to get this badly wrong. For all the criticism, it is managing the issue quite sensibly. The real risks are when life starts to return to normal, and the government works out what to do next.

Top of the agenda is our old friend Brexit. The government insists that it will not ask for an extension to the transition period, which ends on 31 December. It evokes too many bad memories of how Theresa May’s government lost control; there is also a powerful myth in the government’s inner elite that delaying deadlines weakens the government’s negotiating position. This is risky; the country is likely to plunge head first into a hard Brexit that could be very disruptive. On one view it would be throwing salt onto the woulds left by the pandemic; on another the pandemic will have dome so much damage already that few people will notice. We’ll have to see.

Next comes the economy. This deserves a separate post. The signs are that damage to the pre-crisis economy will be severe and there will be no quick bounce back. Also government finances will be in tatters. The challenge will be to make sure that panic about the latter does not prevent action about the former. With ultra-low interest rates, government finances are not nearly as scary as they will look. The early signs are that the Treasury has learnt from its mistakes after the Great Financial Crisis, and ministers are not ideologically averse to throwing government cash around. That should prevent catastrophe; the public will forgive a degree of recession.

But the big issue will be catching the zeitgeist of how to change things after the crisis. In my last post I said that people will want to get back to where we were before. But there will still be some shock and reevaluation; the public will expect more than a shrug. What to do about the working-class heroes of the crisis, the nurses, hospital workers and care home workers, will be central. There is a public perception that these groups are undervalued by society. But what to do? Paying them more will be very expensive on public finances and almost certainly need more taxes to balance it. If the government picks up and runs with this idea they could prove unstoppable at the next election. It would mean trashing 40 years of Conservative ideology. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Alas other issues thrown up by the crisis, such as the precarious nature of so many jobs, and the poor housing conditions of so many of the less well-off, will be rapidly forgotten by most people, and the government will take little or no action. A more interesting question is whether people will feel more sensitive to environmental issues, forcing the government to take these more seriously. Previous crises would suggest not, but this is a different crisis in a different time.

Politically all crises represent both threat and opportunity. There is plenty of both this time. It will be a real test of political mettle. We haven’t seen anything yet.

Strategy and tactics in British politics

In any longer term competitive activity it is useful to distinguish between strategy and tactics. This as true of politics as it is of anything else. It is surprising how few British political activists grasp the difference.

The current usage of the two words derives from the development of military theory in the 19th Century. Strategy focuses on long-term aims and how to achieve them. Tactics focuses on the here and now. Strategy guides your choice of which battles to fight; tactics help you win those battles. In politics strategy is mainly about identifying the coalition of voters you need to win and retain power. You then develop tactics to secure that coalition.

In British politics it is the Conservatives that grasp the usefulness of the distinction best. After 2005, its leader put into action a new strategy, which was to woo liberal-minded middle class voters to join the party’s existing base of conservative suburban and rural middle classes. This allowed it to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, and then to win an outright majority by crushing that party in 2015, completely outmanoeuvring Labour. But to hold this shaky coalition together he had to promise a referendum on EU membership, which he lost, causing the collapse of his strategy. He sensibly bowed out. After Brexit the Conservatives, led by Theresa May, developed a new strategy. This was to bolster the rural and suburban core vote with Brexit-supporting lower middle-class and working class voters in the North, Midlands and Wales. The metropolitan middle classes would then be bullied into voting Tory by fear of Labour. This strategy seemed to be working in 2017, but Mrs May’s lousy tactical handling of the election in 2017 ended in failure. This election was a very good demonstration of the difference between strategy and tactics. Sound strategy was let down by bad tactics. When Boris Johnson took over from Mrs May last year, he retained her political strategy, but added much sharper tactical management to it. Aided by Labour’s strategic ineptitude, he was rewarded with a landslide last December.

Labour’s Tony Blair grasped the need for strategy very well. His strategy for Labour was to appeal to middle class voters while retaining its working class base. When he left the leadership in 2007, this strategy was getting stale, but his successor, Gordon Brown, had no clear alternative. Labour leaked metropolitan middle class votes both to the Tories and Lib Dems and lost. Since then Labour has shown little grasp of strategy and has preferred to focus on tactics instead. Ed Miliband’s strategy, inasmuch as there was one, seems to have been based on the idea of a “progressive majority”. The collapse of the Lib Dem vote, he reasoned, would be enough secure a winning coalition without the need to chase more conservative voters, as Mr Blair had. But the Lib Dem collapse favoured the Tories, not Labour, while in Scotland Labour was helpless facing the rise of the SNP. Under Jeremy Corbyn the party’s strategy was based more on hope than evidence; he assumed most voters were fed up with Tory austerity and angry about the way the rich seemed to be getting away with so much. There was also a hope that the party could bring in people who hadn’t voted before, especially younger voters. Alas for them they interpreted the relatively good result in 2017 as evidence of sound strategy. Labour instead strategised on what they would do if they won power – an area where Mr Blair was weak, as indeed have been most Conservative leaders. Political strategy and government strategy are different things.

Just how bad things are in Labour was illustrated by a remark of leadership candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey. In her defence of Mr Corbyn’s record she said that the loss of the 2019 election was due to poor strategy. That’s a bit like saying that the result was down to weak leadership, and not the leader. Actually it is clear she actually meant “tactics” rather than “strategy”. Party activists, even senior officials, muddle the two up. It doesn’t help that most advisers on political tactics call themselves “strategists”.

The Lib Dems are no better than Labour on this. Nick Clegg, its leader in the 2010 election did seem to have some sort of strategy, which was to appeal to liberal-minded voters, and use coalition government to establish the party’s credentials as a serious political force, and so expand its voter base. This strategy collapsed on contact with reality after 2010, though poor tactical handling of the early coalition government didn’t help. By the 2015 election, the Lib Dems were reduced to fighting 30 seats as if they were by elections, so empty was their strategic appeal. Since then the party has remained consumed by tactical rather than strategic thinking, in particular with its focus on Brexit. But as the third party in a winner-takes-all electoral system, the party starts from a point of strategic weakness, so perhaps this is understandable.

A wider point needs to be made. The way I write about it suggests that political strategy is a matter of clever choices by senior party leaders, allowing them to lead a willing “army” to victory, rather as military strategy is a lot of the time. But political strategy involves compromises and pain. It is about identifying disparate coalitions of voters – but what you promise one part of the coalition will displease other parts. Mr Blair’s strategy so annoyed core metropolitan Labour support that he remains regarded as a traitor within the party. Mr Cameron’s coalition required the EU referendum to satisfy its core supporters, which came at a huge political cost. Tension within the new Tory coalition is obvious, especially over such matters as immigration policy.

The problem for Labour is that it has been, and probably still is, unable to face up to the compromises required to secure a winning coalition. Nothing very clear is coming from the leadership candidates. Lisa Nandy is best at articulating the problems, but is less clear on the painful choices Labour will need to make. Ms Long-Bailey still seems to hope that all Labour needs is sharper tactics. Kier Starmer says as little as he can about what he would actually do.

And the Lib Dems? What they do in large measure depends on the choices that the new Labour leadership does or does not make. Such is the lot of a third party.

So farewell then EU

On Friday Britain leaves the European Union. This will not be marked in any very big or public way, any more than the country’s entry into the European Economic Community was in 1973. That reflects the country’s ambiguity towards the institution, but I for one will will be sad.

I was not old enough to vote in the 1976 referendum on staying in, held on the day of my Physics A Level practical, but I was a passionate supporter of the idea then. Most of my generation was (with less passion in most cases…), though many changed their mind since. Back in the 1970s we younger Britons were tired our country: its strikes, its badly-run public services, which included utilities such as gas and telephones. Unemployment and inflation were high, and the country had suffered a steady decline in its prestige since the glory days of the War, not just relative to the USA, but to France, Germany and even Italy. Modernisation meant tasteless sliced bread, soul-destroying motorway flyovers, and tower blocks that were already falling down. The country needed a good shaking, and most of our European neighbours seemed to be doing a better job. We rejected the prejudices of our parents’ generation and its complaints about greasy food and garlic.

Our hopes were mainly fulfilled. In many ways the country mended itself from the 1980s onwards. National prestige was largely restored; first inflation then unemployment came down; public services became better managed. Strikes vanished. Modernisation was the internet and the mobile phone: things that were of demonstrable value. How much of this was down to being a member of the EEC/EU can’t be said, of course. And the picture wasn’t all good. Many industries, such as steel and coal, continued their precipitous decline. Middle level jobs, in offices and factories, were hollowed out. These were replaced by both better jobs (managerial and computing) and worse (call-centre operators).

So why did so many of my generation turn against “Europe”? At this point it is very easy to repeat standard tropes. We have a picture of white working-class people in “left-behind” towns in the north and on the coast being the drivers of Brexit. But the pro-Brexit feeling went much further and wider than this. It went right across the class spectrum, and swept in swathes of respectable middle-class suburbia, and lots of working class people who were far from being “left-behind”. It was a complex business, but mainly seems to be a reaction against the metropolitanism that had come to dominate the political class. Metropolitans shrugged at the agents of change, such as the influx of immigrants and an increasing body of restrictive regulations with which the country had to conform, or, indeed, the lack of them, for example border controls. Many people felt that something important had been lost, and that the politicians didn’t care.

I did not share these misgivings: I am a metropolitan. I am only tangentially part of the political class and certainly no part of a ruling elite, but I am much closer to them than most. I understand what the political class is trying to do and have largely supported it. I like change. Leaving the EU I do not feel any sense of regaining anything meaningful, but I do feel that I have had rights taken away from me.

Still, stepping back it is hard not to think that the political class deserved the kicking that was administered to it by the Brexit episode. Politics became dominated by professional politicians who never experienced much life outside politics and its hangers on in PR, lobbying, think tanks, journalism, the charity sector and so on.They had little empathy with many voters, and simply assumed they would come round to the various changes imposed on them in time, as they were good for them. The MPs expenses scandal, which overwhelmed the later years of the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 was revealing. MPs were drawn from young, upwardly mobile professionals (or yuppies as they used to be called) and were envious of their contemporaries who were making fortunes in finance, consultancy and other better-paid fields. So they indulged in a little bit of creative catching up. They paid almost no thought as to how this might look to the people they represented.

So what happens now? Politicians start the long, slow business of reconnecting with the voters. The Conservatives are further ahead with this than the other parties. Their parliamentary party look and sound very different from the old-style sharp political professionals. It may take Labour a bit longer. They were in process of replacing one sort of disconnected political professional (the smooth Blairites) with another (hard-left activists) when the election struck. The scale of their defeat has left them all over the place, but the only way back for them is get back out onto the doorsteps and reconnect; they will learn that eventually. Similar comments can be made about the Lib Dems, who tend to think of themselves as establishment rebels, but have been all to eager to seek establishment respectability. Its former leader, Jo Swinson, exemplified the metropolitan political class as well as anybody.

Just how this will work itself out is anybody’s guess. For all their faults, the metropolitans were mainly right (I would say that wouldn’t I…); they just made almost no attempt to engage with and communicate with people who were unsympathetic. The country will not necessarily stay on an inward-looking anti-progressive path.

And what of Brexit? Clearly it’s going to get messy, as the country still has not settled on a clear vision of what it wants to be. It would be nice to think that the country will come to a resolution of these issues in time – but the blame game is likely to keep going. Brexiteers will heap opprobrium on the EU and our European neighbours as things turn sour; Remainers will indulge in “told-you-so”, blaming everything on Brexit, fairly or otherwise.

But boredom will win out in the end. I would like it, of course, if the country could find some way to rejoin the EU in due course, but not until public support reaches the two-thirds level; we have had enough of one small majority imposing its will on the rest.Meanwhile the EU itself will change and the journey back may become harder. I am unlikely to regain my lost freedoms and lost pride in my country in my lifetime. And that makes me sad.

Why is the left losing the argument in the country at large?

Nothing illustrates Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s failings more than his assertion that, at the last general election, his party “won the argument”. The party’s vote went down by 2.6 million. Any sense in which the party won an argument is so abstract as to be worse than useless. But not enough people on the left realise just how much trouble they are in.

While some on the left show shocking complacency, others exhibit a level of despair similar to that in 1992, after the Conservatives won their fourth successive victory (and proper victories, unlike 2010 and 2017) when voters fled from Labour and the Lib Dems at the last minute. If the Tories could win then, in such an unpromising election for them, it seemed to presage them winning forever. The journalist Will Hutton caught the mood with a political bestseller The State We’re In. In it he suggested that the Tories had so deeply penetrated civil society that they were unbeatable. He also decried Tory (and American) economic policies, while praising those of Germany and Japan. Only a few years later Labour won their biggest ever election victory and the Tories were knocked so far away from power that people dared to think they would never regain it. Meanwhile Germany and Japan plunged into an economic crisis from which, seemingly, only Anglo-Saxon economic policies could lift them. It is surprising that Mr Hutton dared to show his face in public again, but newspaper comment by him still pops up quite regularly.

The Labour and Lib Dem revival was evident in the elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005. This led to complacency on the centre-left, and the idea of a “progressive majority” that was floated back in 1992. It was observed that if you added the Labour and Lib Dem votes (and perhaps the Greens too) there was a clear majority of the popular vote: 55-60%. This was advanced as a reason to embrace proportional representation, which would confine the Tories to a prison. But as politics poisoned after the MPs expenses scandals, and the financial crash, the weakness in this line of argument became plain. Ukip rose as a fourth, emphatically non-progressive force. The Tories revived in the 2010 election, and Labour and the Lib Dems were unable to form a parliamentary majority, though they had 52% of the vote between them. The Lib Dems entered coalition with the Conservatives instead.

The Lib Dem vote promptly collapsed, but the idea of a progressive majority persisted. Labour reckoned they could win on their own simply by picking up disillusioned Lib Dem voters, without trying to convert any Tories. This suited the Labour left, and its increasingly vocal socialist element, which had been marginalised in Labour’s government years, and which was energised by opposition to the coalition’s austerity policies. But, alas, this simply drove more Lib Dem supporters into the arms of the Conservatives, who formed an outright majority in 2015 (with a combined Labour and Lib Dem vote of just 38%), mainly by picking up Lib Dem seats. By now the “progressive majority” was shown to be a clear fiction: adding Ukip and Conservative vote share took you to more than 50%. Proportional representation would not have saved the “progressives”. And that is more or less where things have stuck since. In 2019 Labour and the Lib Dems mustered just 44% between them, down from 47% in 2017. That leaves the left with an uncomfortable truth: they will not win majority support unless they win over substantial numbers of Conservative voters: that they “win the argument”, in other words. And they haven’t done that since the great financial crisis of 2007/08, unless you count that narrow majority of votes in 2010.

Much has been written about this, but most of the thinking has been done by people on the right of politics. Their analysis focuses on values, and the way many voters crave a sense of belonging, undermined by a rootless liberal elite, or left-wingers impassioned by foreign causes. This is fine as far as it goes, but thinkers on the left have a long tradition (starting with Marx and Engels) of looking at economic interests, which they assume lie behind people’s values. This has often been taken too far, but right now there is not enough of it. The narrative of the left is that it is on the side of the “many”, often quantified as 95% or even 99% of the population, against an economy “rigged” by “the few”. This clearly isn’t working.

There are two things to observe about the strength of the right. First is that it is based on older people, as it wins over increasing numbers of the baby-boomer generation. The second, heavily overlapping, point is that they appeal to people who own property, or who have an inheritable interest in property. They are especially making progress in “left-behind” areas where property values are sinking, creating a sense of grievance.

For the most part Conservatives have been very sensitive to the needs of these groups. I remember seeing an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing that austerity policies after 2010 largely bypassed older voters, whose lot improved overall. Old age pensions were improved and tax allowances raised. Interestingly these policies were driven forward enthusiastically by the Conservatives’ coalition partners, the Lib Dems, for whom the “triple lock” on state pensions was a cornerstone policy. A Lib Dem minister, Steve Webb, skilfully piloted pension reform that postponed pensions for many with minimal political damage. It is no accident that the left’s biggest moment of opportunity since 2010, the 2017 election which saw a surge in Labour support, came when the Conservatives dropped the ball on looking after older voters, with their proposals on social care. There was no chance of them repeating that mistake.

Property ownership, meanwhile, is becoming the critical economic dividing line in British society. Ownership is steadily sinking as housing becomes less affordable, but it still remains high, at over 60%. This does not fit the narrative of “the many” versus “the few”. By and large, property owners and older voters are not so exercised about austerity policies, and are less concerned about changing working practices, such as zero hours contracts. They are distrustful of the radicalism that the left trumpets so loudly. This may not be wholly rational. If austerity has caused economic growth to sag, then this affects the property market. But the left is more comfortable stoking up a sense of outrage amongst people who rent their homes, or have a dependency on the types of benefits that have been cut, than they are in making more nuanced claims for the benefit of Britain’s top three quintiles of income.

Won’t time shift these factors in the left’s favour? The older voters are dying, while more younger ones enter the electorate. We often heard that argument in the context of the Brexit referendum. But people’s political perspective changes as they age, and the left seems to be losing its grip on voters in the middle of the age range. The proportion of older voters is likely to go up, demographers tell us. Things are more promising from that perspective on property ownership, which has been falling steadily. But the change is slow and the Conservatives are acutely sensitive to this, doing what they can to make sure new homes are built, and that people can get themselves onto the property ladder.

So what should the left do? It can hardly ditch its core support among younger voters and those renting homes in order to win over Conservatives and Brexit Party supporters. Some of the policies needed to address the needs poorer and more disadvantaged voters will hurt property owners (e.g. more social housing undermining property prices) and older people (e.g. higher taxes on investments). In my previous post on Labour I suggested three things; radicalism (less of it), pluralism (more) and competence (also more).

The one party that has made some headway in attracting former Conservative voters is the Lib Dems. It has done this by being only marginally on the left (many Lib Dems, myself included, hesitate to call ourselves of the left at all). But it still signs up to many signature left wing priorities: better public services and stronger action on the environment in particular. The party is still vilified by many on the far left, who call them “Yellow Tories”. In the last election Labour sent its activists into seats like Carshalton, Wimbledon and Finchley because they preferred the Conservatives to win these than let the Lib Dems gain traction. But unless the Lib Dems are allowed to gather up Conservative votes, even as they gather Labour ones too, the left as a whole will not succeed.

There is another way forward, as suggested by the coalition of 2010. That is for parts of the left to team up with Conservatives in order to make headway on critical priorities. This has happened in Germany with its grand coalition, and now a Green-Christian Democrat alliance being mooted. The Greens and the conservatives have formed a coalition in Austria. The Lib Dems experience in the 2010 coalition was unhappy, in that its support collapsed, though it can point to achievements. The German SPD’s experience is hardly better. The Lib Dems will not be tempted to go down that route again. But if Labour continues on the road mapped out by Mr Corbyn, that may be the only option for the left to have a serious influence on government.

Radicalism, pluralism and competence: 3 things Labour needs to rethink

The left loves its abstract nouns. So, as Labour ponders what it needs to do to come back from its disastrous showing in last month’s general election, I have three more abstract nouns for its members to contemplate: radicalism, pluralism and competence.

Abstract nouns may be how many political activists like me think about things, but they can be dangerous. They are not good for communicating ideas to the public at large, and they are often used to paper over tricky choices. It is important when thinking through these ideas that we move onto more concrete territory about what actually needs to be done. We don’t want to just invent some more abstract phrases which over-promise and under-deliver: “progressive patriotism” anybody?

So let’s start with radicalism. Leftist politicians talk far too much about it as if it was self-evidently a good thing. We are interested in politics because we want to change things; we have a low opinion of most current public institutions; we see unfairness and injustice everywhere. So it seems natural to advocate radical change. But radicalism has a dark side: it means change and change means insecurity. It also invites scepticism. Many people are fed up with politicians promising to change everything, and then either not delivering, or delivering things that make things worse. And these attitudes prevail amongst the voters that Labour lost to the Conservatives (or so I believe). Telling them that you are going to shake everything up with transformative change for a fairer society cuts little ice. Labour politicians need to tone it down, and present a more reassuring face to the public.

A lot of this is purely about presentation. Brexit is a radical policy after all, but retains a strong appeal amongst conservative voters. That is because it is being presented as a step backwards, to undo the unwanted radicalism that has been inflicted over the last generation. It was a critical step in the Leave campaign in 2016 to include the word “back” in their slogan “Take back control”. A lot of Labour’s radical policies can be re-presented in this way. Nationalisation of the railways, and perhaps other utilities, can be seen as going back to a time before these services were messed up. Whether people will be convinced that a return to secondary picketing and collective wage bargaining as a positive is open to question, but they are certainly steps backwards. The abolition of student fees is easier, even though the scale of the fiscal cost is much greater than in the gold old days. Indeed it is a valid line of criticism of Labour’s policy platform that it owes more to nostalgia than genuinely radical thinking.

But a bit of slick re-presentation will fool nobody. Labour needs to reverse some of its radical promises as well as its rhetoric. This is a competency issue too (I’m coming to that). Some signature policies, like free broadband, are obvious choices. But to convince the public that they really have changed, Labour needs to roll back something that will create a bit of a stink within its own ranks: if it ain’t hurting, it ain’t working. Dropping free student tuition would do that job, but would probably hurt too much. A substantial roll-back of nationalisation plans might be better though it would have less impact. Funnily enough the first election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, in 2017, was much better than its 2019 one on this front, though incomplete (no attention was paid as to how its abolition of tuition fees would work in practice, for example).

Pluralism means accepting that a variety of political viewpoints should be tolerated and allowed to be expressed within the political process. Most Labour people say that the party should be a “broad church” accommodating a wide range of views. Fewer accept that other political parties have any useful role to play on the left or “progressive” side of politics. (I put “progressive” in quotation marks in deference to the English language: many “progressives” are not progressive at all; not all progressives are “progressive”). And many seem to think that Conservatives and others on the political right have no moral legitimacy, and that people only support them because they have some evil purpose in mind, or have been duped by some or other conspiracy of misinformation. While pluralism within the party, within “progressive” politics and within politics at large might seem to be three separate issues, it is critical to understand that they are linked. If you think Tories are evil, and that Labour’s essential purpose is to oppose them, then it is a short step to thinking that other non-Tory parties are a distraction or worse. And it is a short step from this to viewing politics as a battle between good and evil, in which you should be on your guard against evil influences in your own party, and vigorously oppose them.

At best Labour has an image problem. Where the Conservatives successfully promoted their slogan of “Get Brexit Done”, the nearest Labour came to an equivalent signature phrase was “Why don’t you f**k off and join the Tories”, applied by their activists to anybody who dared oppose their views from other parties such as the Lib Dems (“Yellow Tories”) and within their own party. Far too many people followed that advice. The most visible sign of trouble is the party’s problems with antisemitism. A party that conducted its internal discussions in a more civilised way would not have allowed the sort of abuse that some Jewish members faced to get anything like as far, or to see some of the abusers get off so lightly. This intolerance is damaging the party’s image with the public, and it gives other parties, especially the Lib Dems, a reason for existing.

The funny thing is that Mr Corbyn is the model of politeness in person, and a keen advocate of a “kinder, gentler” politics in general. This shows how difficult it will be for Labour to change its culture. One way in which a new leader might show how things have changed is to work with rival “progressive” parties more readily. I think this needs to go as far as entering into limited electoral pacts. Others suggest that the way forward is to promote electoral reform and proportional representation. As a good liberal I should support this, but I am not sure that this is actually in Labour’s interests. It would be an attack on traditional British ways that might well upset the conservative voters it needs to attract. And anyway I am not sure Labour should give up on the idea of being a broad, pluralistic and democratic movement along the lines of the US Democrats. There is a paradox here: in order to show that there is no need for rival parties on the left it needs to embrace those parties rather than reject them. An electoral pact of some sort would be a powerful signal of that; and pushing such an idea through with a controversial conference motion would show that the new leader means business, rather than mouthing sweet nothings about a “pluralist Labour family”, as leadership candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey has put it.

Which brings me to competence: even Ms Long-Bailey admits that Labour has a credibility problem. The problem is not just to embody competence, but to project it to the public at large. To do this the party needs to overcome some archetypes that many in the public have of liberals and leftists. One is the woolly liberal, who spends too much time listening to nonsense and avoiding hard choices. Another is the permanent whinger, who will never be satisfied, and never take responsibility. People come across these archetypes in their daily lives, and know that they make terrible leaders, even if they often like them or agree with them. Mr Corbyn seemed to alternate between both of these archetypes. He couldn’t make up his mind about Brexit. He protested about everything. And Labour’s election manifesto embodied the problem. The policies may have been individually popular but they were collectively incredible. Life is about choices, and Labour were promising everything now, with a team with little experience of government.

These three abstract nouns work together. A competent Labour shadow government is one where people are chosen on ability, not on loyalty to the leader or ideological soundness. A competent manifesto is one that balances its radicalism with leaving some ideas for later.

Labour’s next big decision is to elect its new leader. How do the candidates shape up on this agenda? It’s hard to tell because candidates tend to say what it takes to get elected, and so it is hard to know what they would actually do. It is also not clear who those candidates will be as the number will get thinned down by the obstacle course of the nomination process. I will comment when the field has been whittled down.

Why Dominic Cummings is doomed to fail to reform state inefficiency

I was rather shocked by a story on the radio news last weekend. It was announced that the NHS was about to spend £40m to sort out the login to its IT systems, as staff are wasting lots of time with separate logins to a dozen or more systems. My first reaction was: “Why on earth has it taken them this long to get round to fixing this, if it costs just £40m?”. It was followed by a more depressing thought: they will spend their £40m and still fail to achieve it. And then: “What on earth possessed them to press-release such an embarassing story?”.

It is no wonder that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, has such a low opinion of civil servants and public sector management. The quality of management is appalling. It always has been. One of my earliest memories was just how awful the nationalised gas, electricity and telephone industries were in the 1960s and 1970s. It was worse than even I knew, as the government had lost control of their finances, so that these industries simultaneously drained the public purse and were starved of investment. And the vast scale of wasted resource on nuclear energy development only emerged long after it happened, with nobody accountable as usual. I do remember Harold Wilson (the PM of the time) having to cancel an absurdly ambitious development of a new bomber for the RAF. Things have only got better since then because the state has shrunk. One of many current fiascos is the Universal Credit system: a fatal combination of a visionary minister with a weak grip on reality (Ian Duncan Smith), and civil service project management skills.

It is not all bad. The London primary schools where I have served as governor are as well-managed as any organisation that I have seen, though some of the regulations they have to navigate, and the “guidance” from national and local civil servants can be mind-numbing. There are other pockets. These might give us some clues as why such poor management happens – it is nothing to do with being part of the state as such – and indeed many large monopoly private businesses can be just as bad. Partly it is about accountability and incentives, and partly about complexity. Alas it is impossible to get these right in many areas. Health services are mostly too big and complex (our NHS isn’t particularly inefficient in global comparisons, though I imagine few others have the nonsense over IT logins); the secrecy required for national security institutions is the enemy of accountability; and so on.

Mr Cummings wants to address this by a massive shakeup of the civil service, as advertised by his blog, which I don’t read, as it sounds too much like an ego-trip, but this article in the Economist gives more detail. The general idea is to change the culture, to allow in more mavericks as well as engineers and scientists, ensure proper accountability for failure, and to prize competence and the ability to get stuff done, as opposed to just being “a safe pair of hands” (i.e. staying out of trouble before handing the job to somebody else). As somebody who has had a career in management, and experienced the public sector at first hand through my two decades as school governor, I really get this. The serial incompetence of the public sector really annoys me. But with all my experience in management I can see at least three sorts of problem with Mr Cummings’s approach.

Firstly management isn’t just about getting stuff done. There are two types of skill required to be an effective manager. 90% of the attention goes on the first type of skill: task-orientation. Success is generally achieved by picking a small number of priorities and concentrating on them. This seems to be Mr Cummings’s obsession, and he is in line with most people who pontificate about effective management. But there is a second type of skill: risk-management. This is about looking for trouble and heading it off. What most people don’t seem to appreciate is that it requires opposite skills to task-orientation. Task orientation requires focus; risk-management requires the opposite – the ability to step back, gather data from all directions and think about the things that are not priorities. You also require strong judgement as to which potential risks to take seriously and which just to keep a wary eye on – but without that broad horizon it doesn’t work. Some of the worst management disasters (including in the British public sector, notably in the NHS) have occurred from areas outside management’s top three priorities. In theory the incorporation of good risk-management skills is perfectly compatible with Mr Cummings’s idea of maverick managers constantly challenging each other. In practice this is unlikely. In his recent blog he has said “I’ll bin you within weeks if you don’t fit”; this does not sound like the sort of culture that welcomes effective risk management.

Secondly there is a clear implication that decision-making is centralised. If you don’t trust public servants in generality, then you are unlikely to delegate much of importance to them. Mr Cummings is as likely to have as low an opinion of government ministers as civil servants. This would certainly be justified in most cases: good management skills are not a requirement for political advancement, and most politicians have had little aptitude for running things. That’s a recipe for everything coming back to Downing Street. And given that the name of the game in Downing Street will be prioritisation, that means that most of the stuff that is referred to it won’t get looked at properly, because it won’t be in No 10’s top three. This will result in either gridlock or things being waved through when they should be challenged.

And the third type of problem is lack of consultation. One of the most tiresome things for people who want to get stuff done is listening to a wide variety of interested parties who might be affected by what you are trying to do. Managers of Mr Cummings’s sort like to short-circuit such time-wasting and have a good chuckle when people complain. Consultation is hard work, and most of the concerns people raise are about making sure their lives don’t get changed too much, sod the bigger picture. But not only is it good for risk management, but it is also good politics. People get less angry if they have been consulted about things, and it is useful to know who the big trouble-makers are likely to be, and whether there are easy ways to head off some of the trouble.

In my recent post on Boris Johnson’s government I suggested that his and Mr Cummings’s approach would lead to cronyism. This is what happened to the academy programme driven forward by Mr Cummings at the Department of Education. Doubtless Mr Cummings views this as a success because he pushed it through further and faster than anybody thought possible. But it achieved little in advancing the quality of education. It was not in fact over-centralised – but the rather extreme model of delegation he adopted meant that the unscrupulous made hay. And his impatience for consultation meant that academies were run by a small number of politically well-connected organisations, and not the sort “bottom-up” local groups that the policy was supposed to empower. And it created a huge stink, which meant that he and his minister were moved on earlier than people though they would be. Now this failure may be because of the lack of competence of education department civil servants (I have certainly seen that claimed by an initial enthusiast disillusioned by the results) – but that was a factor that had to be managed rather than bulldozed through. In the end Mr Cummings and his boss Michael Gove were responsible for a classic public sector failure themselves.

So what should the government do about poor public sector management? Most approaches have drawbacks, which is why the problem is so persistent. Delegated management and accountability – part of the formula with schools – can work very well, but won’t for large, complex monopolies. Holding managers to measurable targets, the big idea of former Labour reformer Gordon Brown, often has perverse results and leads to poor risk management. Outsourcing, favoured by many Tories, has often disappointed: because the process itself needs to be well-managed and not treated as an exercise in buck-passing, and because it often means carving up processes in ways that make the whole harder to manage. Labour claim to have new ideas to improve accountability to service users; these should not be dismissed, but scepticism is warranted. I think regional and district devolution of political responsibility is an important part of the solution, but it could take a long time before this shows results. Politicians are likely to misuse their new-found powers at first, and the centre is also likely to implement it in such a half-hearted way that the benefits will be hard to obtain.

In some ways I wish Mr Cummings luck – especially with the country’s appalling defence procurement processes. But his ideas are both strategically and tactically misconceived and he may well end up making things worse rather than better.