Is Britain about to go bust?

The debate about Britain’s economic policy rumbles on, with a speech by the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls last week.  In previous posts I have dismissed the claim made by some that the government’s cuts are unnecessary, and most commentators, including Mr Balls, seem to accept this, even if they don’t say so explicitly. But there is a furious debate about how quickly the cuts should be implemented: 5 years as the government plans, or 8 years as Labour suggests, apparently including Mr Balls, though in the past he has been suggested longer.  An impressive array of economists seem to support the Labour argument.

The basis of the critics’ argument rests on conventional macroeconomics, and runs that cutting too fast creates needless unemployment and risks a spiral of lower demand which will make things worse.  This argument is open to challenge on its own terms (see The Economist’s Buttonwood column here, or Bagehot here), but the government’s defenders don’t generally try; instead they trump it with an argument about unsustainable levels of government debt.  I want to look at the macroeconomic argument in a future post.  Today I will consider whether unsustainable debt really is such a risk.

If government debt gets too high, it can derail the whole economy.  A default, when governments renege on the terms of their debt, can be absolutely catastrophic.  The problem is that if governments can’t raise the money then all the functions of government are threatened.  For countries like Greece who are part of the Euro, this means that they literally can’t pay the bills – salary payments are stopped and so on.  This is such a frightening prospect that there are strong incentives for other members of the zone to organise a rescue.  Countries like the UK do have another option: they can debauch their currency by paying bills with newly created money.  That’s how hyperinflation starts; the most recent example is Zimbabwe, and its implications are hardly less disastrous than default.

So what are the risks for Britain?  The good news is that before the crisis struck overall debt was modest by international standards at a shade over 50% of GDP.  Even better, the maturity profile of this debt, i.e. how soon it has to be rolled over, was long term – longer than any other major economy.  The bad news is the massive size of the current deficit – 11% in 2009, and the fact that 8% is “structural” or won’t bounce back with the economic cycle.  That means that total debt is increasing rapidly; by the end of 2010 it was already 75% of GDP. This gives two main problems.

The first problem is that debt risks spiralling out of control.  Few think that the current economy is capable of more than modest growth, austerity or not, which means that extra wealth is not being generated fast enough to get us out of trouble.  And debt comes with an interest bill.  There are some classic economic models of this, and on these the warning lights are flashing red furiously.  At some point lenders (characterised as the “bond markets”, but potentially including you and me) refuse to lend, or at least start to put the rate of interest up, making things worse.

The second problem is more subtle.  If total national debt levels off at a high level, this will drag down the whole economy for a long while to come, as we spend too much resource servicing the debt.  One study suggested that serious problems start to happen when debt reaches 90% of GDP – less than two years away at the current trajectory.  Taking longer to eliminate the deficit means that overall debt will level off at a higher amount, unless the aggressive option really does lead to meltdown.

There are three further overlapping problems for the UK.  Debt markets are very open; there is a degree of dependence on overseas support; and the pound is a floating currency.  Government debt problems are much easier to handle if there is ready access to lenders who are effectively forced to lend to you; this has helped such high debt countries as Japan and Italy.  Superficially the UK seems to look this way: pension funds are massive, and traditionally hold lots of government debt (gilts) for actuarial reasons.  But such funds are aggressively and independently managed, helping to make our financial services industry internationally competitive.   That means they switch away from buying gilts as soon as they think it is not such a good deal.  Dependence on overseas investors appears to be relatively modest, as buyers of gilts are overwhelmingly domestic (or so I believe).  But the country still runs a significant current account deficit (unlike Japan, and even Italy), meaning that the economy as a whole does need foreign lenders.  The floating pound is often presented as a get out of jail free card – but the benefits of being able to devalue are two edged.  Foreign investors will be wary of sterling if they think it will devalue; domestic investors will likewise increase their overseas exposures in the same event, reducing their ability to buy gilts (unless these are  issued in foreign currency, but let’s not go there).

But, the government’s critics maintain, there’s no sign of trouble, and never has been.  The government has had no trouble selling gilts, at very low interest rates.  The trouble with this argument is that markets can turn in an instant, and you won’t know until too late.  An investment decision depends on a judgement looking far into the future, and this can move very quickly.  Government ministers seem to have got a genuine fright in May 2010 with the Greek crisis.  By and large the closer a commentator actually is to the debt markets, the less sanguine they are about the whole thing.  There are just too many risk factors.

So what to think?  The Labour plan is probably viable, if backed by a real determination to follow it through (and Alistair Darling, the outgoing Labour chancellor would have been an excellent figurehead, unlike Mr Balls).  But it undoubtedly takes more risks with catastrophe.  Whether it is worth doing so does come back to your view on the macroeconomic risks.  If you think that the austerity programme really will lead to meltdown, then this has real power.  But neither is the government argument implausible.  It’s about the risks you are prepared to run.

The wonderful world of Scilly

I have recently returned from a holiday in the Isles of Scilly (note for pedants: “Scilly” for short, not “the Scillies”).  I have been going there every two years or so for over 20 years, and it’s still one of my favourite places.

Some of the attractions are obvious.  White, sandy beaches (though the water is still cold); beautiful rocks (pictured in the title to this blog); a kind climate, notably better than the mainland; the ever-fascinating and ever-present sea.  But it is also a wonderful, miniature world apart.  Everything is smaller: roads, cars, shops , castles.  Each island has its own post office, even though in many cases the number of inhabitants is less than a single London street (well not quite true; the post office on Bryher, the smallest island has closd down – but a new one is being built to replace it!).  It’s very English too; relations with the mainland may be a bit strained sometimes, but you hear nothing of Cornish nationalism.

This year our visit coincided with a daytrip by the Queen – and we did catch a glimpse of her.  It was real shock to see so many policemen, though, including ones armed with machine guns.  The islands are nearly crimeless.  One of our guests accidentally dropped his wallet on the morning of his departure.  A passing chambermaid from one of the local hotels, picked it up, took it to the receptionist, who managed to locate us before we even knew it was gone.

We’ll be going back.

Service break

I am on holiday for a couple of weeks, and won’t be attempting to post while away.  I’ll be back later.  Last week has been busy, so I’ve not posted much – but I’ve got lots of ideas…

Why are NHS managers so unpopular?

Health Service Journal (HSJ) was on its high horse last week.  Its front cover says “The Big Lie exposed: the truth about NHS management”.  The proximate cause is a report by the King’s Fund called The Future of Leadership and Management in the NHS.  This report suggests that the NHS doesn’t have too many managers, and that, if anything the service is under-managed.  The HSJ is directed at NHS managers, and it is easy to see why they are so fed up.  But the HSJ coverage has a blind spot.  It doesn’t ask how the NHS got itself into this situation, and why NHS managers have become politically toxic.  It’s no use waving around King’s Fund reports; if NHS managers don’t understand of this, they will struggle to reverse it.

But let’s clear the decks first.  The idea that the NHS has too many managers as opposed to those “front line” staff is silly, and the political target to reduce their number is at best unhelpful and at worst positively damaging.  In order to deploy those front-line resources most effectively, they need to be properly managed.  Huge strides have been made by the NHS through more and better management over the last couple of decades.  Furthermore, my impression of the quality of NHS management is that it is easily up to the same quality as the private sector.  That, of course, is not as much comfort as it might be, given that crass management is pretty rampant in the private sector.  So a lot of the political comments made about NHS management are unjust, unfair and often just plain untrue.

So what’s gone wrong?  Well a clue comes in the frequent use of the word “bureaucrat” by politicians.  This is a word thick with negative connotations, of insensitivity to people’s real needs and of the arbitrary exercise of power.  Many of the public’s interactions with NHS management have left just this sort of impression.

The NHS is a hierarchical organisation, with pretty much all accountability through a single man at the top, the Secretary of State.  To most people this is no accountability at all.  One man can’t possibly grasp the intricacies of any particular local situation.  So local NHS officials have huge amounts of effectively arbitrary power.  And they rub our noses in it.

When the local NHS where I live executed a 180 degree turn and decided to close a local hospital rather than develop it, they rode roughshod over local feeling.  A local official just told us the area was too posh to have a hospital.  After a kerfuffle involving the local Labour (at the time) MP, more facilities were promised nearby in an appropriately less posh place – but of course these were soon cut, even before last year’s election.

The problem for most NHS managers is, I think, that they don’t remotely get what the problem here is.  Tough decisions have to be made.  If we followed local opinion all the time the NHS would go bust in days; if we kept consulting nothing would get done.  We have clear mission and we execute it.  NHS managers seem to bristle at the idea of genuine local accountability.  HSJ itself opposed the Lib Dem proposal of directly elected health boards.  Chaos.  Postcode lotteries.  Working for people that don’t understand.  And so on.  NHS managers are all too happy with their hierarchies, allowing them to pass the blame upwards the whole time.

But the local NHS is taking political decisions all the time.  For example, reducing health inequalities, a key local NHS objective, is loaded with political judgements.  A key political objective is to maintain middle class consent for the service; without middle class users the NHS would collapse (and we already have the example of NHS dentistry to show that).  So treating them like muck because they are on the wrong side of the equality equation should be a no-no.  Politicians can see that easily; bureaucrats can’t – it’s just not their problem.

And once you are perceived as an insensitive bureaucrat, the rest follows pretty quickly.  An organisation as large as the NHS will always throw up examples of crass management, which will be gleefully reported by patients and clinical staff alike.  And if managers are overstretched, they are bound to drop some balls too.  Episodes such as the Mid-Staffs fiasco add grist to the mill (and incidentally I did not sense much outrage from other NHS managers in the HSJ coverage of that sorry affair).  Throw in the management consultant blather dropped on the NHS (World Class Commissioning and such), and you have a massive stock of ammunition.

So NHS managers need a lot more political sensitivity, and should welcome more genuine political accountability instead of resisting it.  The NHS reforms are meant to help this, though whether do, of course, is another matter.

The military covenant – let’s be careful

Am I the only person here in Britain to feel just a little uncomfortable over the so-called “Military Covenant”, given prominence by the Prime Minister over the last couple of days.  This basically holds that servicemen should be given extra respect by the rest of us because they put their lives on the line on our behalf.  This is meant to have practical consequences for medical treatment, housing and schooling for their children.  There is talk of enshrining this in law.

I don’t have an issue with these practical points.  The demands of service personnel (especially tours of duty in remote spots) place huge pressures on family life in particular, which means that it is very easy for service families to fall foul of arrangements designed for the rest of us.  It sounds as if these could do with improving.  Service families, servicemen who are injured (mentally or physically), and those making the difficult transition to civilian life, all deserve extra attention from our public services.  Mind you, I would like our public services to do a better job for everybody.

But respect?  This can’t be unqualified.  Soldiers do put their lives on the line on the public’s behalf.  But it isn’t like firemen going into burning buildings to rescue people.  We equip these people with lethal force and (in practice) some fairly free rights to use it.  In the big perspective, this power is often abused.  Sometimes soldiers (or airmen or sailors for that matter) are just careless with innocent lives.  But many worse atrocities occur, for no better reason than the individuals want to exert power.  A lot of soldiers are, well, not very nice people; that goes with the job, but we need to be careful.  Most of the worst atrocities around the world are committed by people in armed services.  It’s very easy for them to abuse their power.

The record of modern British forces is not at all bad.  But things do go wrong; we have abuses of prisoners in Iraq, for example.  And there was Bloody Sunday, of course.  But the standing of British servicemen (and women) has never been higher in my memory; perhaps there’s a bit of guilt there since we don’t really understand what we are meant to be doing in Afghanistan.  If they have maintained high standards of conduct, then they have earned their status as heroes.  But the line between hero and villain is very easy to stray across.  We must hold our servicemen to that standard.  Treat them as heroes if they uphold it, but not otherwise.

It is all too easy for people to excuse bad behaviour by their military.  Just look at how long it took for the British establishment to accept that Bloody Sunday was bad.  It’s all very difficult in the stress of combat, we say, and other countries are worse.  But all soldiers know that discipline is critical to their role.  It is imperative to our civilisation that we hold our service personnel to high standards of conduct.

Who is to blame for the UK’s economic mess?

As time passes it is clear that the UK’s economic crisis is amongst the worst of the major developed economies, though Japan may beat it on some measures.  It’s not in the league of some smaller economies, like Ireland or Greece, although a comparison with Portugal may be more nuanced.  Some people (notably Labour politicians) struggle to accept just how bad things are; others don’t get much beyond railing deficits and the National Debt.  It’s worth pausing to consider what went wrong, and to try and attribute responsibility.

What happened?  Until 2007, the UK had an astonishingly consistent record of economic growth.  This started with the departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism under John Major in 1992, and continued until early 2008.  Economists had taken an average annual growth rate of 2.5% for granted.  Unemployment fell, and most people felt better off, though the very wealthy did much better than the rest.  Public expenditure rocketed, with massive investment in the NHS in particular.  A recent study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows that poverty was reduced, largely because of increased benefits and tax credits.

And then bang!  GDP shrank by 6% in a year, stayed flat for the year after that, before struggling to a bit under 2% growth in the year after that (taking the year to the 1st quarter from the ONS).  Forecasts are for consistently anaemic growth. This is striking.  When economies hit a recession due to a temporary shock, they bounce back quite sharply, as temporarily unused capacity comes back on stream; this is what has happened in Germany this time.  Not for us; a good 7% of the economy has vanished never to return.  What makes this particularly bad is that this 7% produced an awful lot of taxes, while public expenditure carried on regardless (with benefits increasing due to the extra unemployment and hardship).  This has left the country with a “structural deficit” of about 8%.  This is the excess of public expenditure over taxes after you strip out temporary factors; the actual deficit was much larger (it reached 11% and has now dropped to 10% per annum).  Now I’m not sure how we ended up with an 8% structural deficit after losing just 7% of GDP, of which presumably no more than half would will have been taxed.  The government was already running a bit of a deficit when disaster struck; I think that capital taxes must account for the difference, now that the property boom has disappeared.

What this comes down to is that a lot of the pre-crisis growth was not for real, and government finances were built on unsustainable foundations.  What was happening?  This phantom growth seems to have been related to a boom in personal borrowing to finance property purchases and good old fashioned consumption.  Symptoms included an over-sized finance industry (in earnings if not jobs) and unsustainable levels of consumption.

Who was to blame?  The three commonly cited answers are everybody-and-nobody/events-beyond-our-control, bankers, or the Labour Government.  Some Labour politicians still seem to subscribe to the first idea.  It was an international storm (I never want to hear the phrase “perfect storm” again) and we were caught in it; nobody was seriously criticising government policy before the crisis.  As the economy has failed to bounce back, this has become unsustainable; why are we having so much difficulty when other countries caught by the crisis are having an easier time?  Of course some try to say this is because of Coalition policies over the last year.  But almost all of the many critics of the Coalition policies accept that we were in a terrible mess in the first place.

So the critics shift to another target: Britain’s bankers.  These are an easy target, paying themselves handsomely while their organisations required government bailouts.  There is also a widespread conception that the bailouts cost a lot of money, and that this is one of the reasons that government debt is a problem.  Actually the government has largely got away with it, for which Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling deserve some credit (contrast the terrible hash that the Irish government has made).  A lot of government money was put at risk, yes, but the banks were charged for it, and the money lent will largely be repaid, and the guarantees not called on.  Where the bankers were culpable was in rampant lending, supporting excessive consumption and a property bubble.  But the lending was nothing like as reckless as in the US (or Ireland for that matter).  If the government had awakened to the idea that consumer lending needed restraint, something could have been done.  Let me be clear; the banks were reckless; we need to regulate them much better – but they were not the fundamental cause of the crisis.  We had a narrow escape.

Could the government have seen the vulnerability of the British economy?  There were not many prominent critics at the time, though Vince Cable was clear enough, for exactly the right reasons.  But it was a matter of undergraduate economics to see that economic policy was on an unsustainable path.  Literally.  As a second year economics undergraduate at UCL in early 2007 my macroeconomics lecturer, Professor Wendy Carlin, used the UK economy as a case study to illustrate her model for an open economy.  It was also used as an exam question.  Was the UK’s strong economic performance due to increasing economic efficiency or excess aggregate demand, she asked.  It was clearly the latter: the giveaways being the appreciating real exchange rate, and a large current account deficit (the economy as a whole consuming more than it was spending).

What should the government have done?  The first thing should have been to raise interest rates and tighten monetary policy much earlier.  Unfortunately this was genuinely difficult, because this was the Bank of England’s main target was inflation, and not the general standing of the monetary system. And the inflation rate seemed benign (thanks in large part to the overvalued pound).  The second thing would have been to regulate the banks harder, to restrain lending.  This was the FSA’s job, although the degree of independence of this agency is less strong.  Finally the government could have tightened fiscal policy to reduce the level of demand in the economy, through expenditure cuts or tax increases.  Nominally the government’s policy was to run a zero structural deficit, but it chose to fiddle with the statistics on the economic cycle so as to argue that it did not have to do anything.  The government was not egregiously profligate, as Coalition politicians like to suggest, but it was pushing the wrong way.

What comes over, above all, is a failure of leadership, especially from Gordon Brown, as a formidably powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer.  The tripartite arrangement for managing the financial system (between Treasury, Bank of England, and FSA) did not help, but it is very clear that if in doubt it was the Treasury’s job to lead.  They didn’t.  They could have leant on the FSA and Bank of England, as well as tightening fiscal policy directly.  But Mr Brown either refused to recognise the gravity of the situation, or his political courage failed him.  Given his constant level of denial about the seriousness of the crisis, I suspect it was mainly the former.  He could not face admitting that so much of economic achievement was unsustainable.  It is invidious to blame one man, when the hands of many were involved.  But Gordon Brown had the authority; there was enough evidence for him to act on; and he made things worse not better.  A career in the Treasury that had started so brilliantly ended catastrophically.

My next topic on the economy: is the Coalition economic policy making matters worse or better?

 

 

Upside down economic thinking

Couldn’t resist commenting on this story in yesterday’s FT.  This behind the paywall, but this summary from City AM is a good start:

PACE OF UK GROWTH UNDER THREAT
Britain’s economy is unlikely to grow as fast as before the financial crisis because its most productive sectors have been hardest hit, jeopardising government plans to cut the deficit. A Financial Times analysis of the sectorial performance of the economy before and after the crash highlights how much banks and insurance companies boosted economic growth between 2000 and 2008.

What it says is that the finance industry contributed a lot to measured GDP up to the crisis, but not to jobs.  In that sense the finance industry is said the be “productive”.  But these industries bore the brunt of the crash. The article also says that this is one of the main reasons why unemployment did not rise as much as the fall in GDP suggested.   Because finance is unlikely to recover fast, since the burden of accumulated (private sector) debt still has to be worked off, then we can’t expect to repeat the pre-crash growth rates.  Bad news.

This is the kind of thinking that takes hold when you accept GDP as the ultimate arbiter of progress.  Let’s look at in another way.  A lot of the growth prior to the crash was down to financial services which created few jobs and which was based on expanding indebtedness, not supplying services that people actually wanted or needed.  It was illusory, in other words.  Highly productive is hardly the right description.

In one sense the article is right.  The finance industry contributed a lot of taxes, whose disappearance is one of the causes of our massive structural deficit.  We can’t hope for illusory growth to rescue our tattered public finances, so it could be a long grind.

This type of upside down thinking is one of the reasons why we need to supplement GDP with other measures that aren’t so affected by such illusory “production”.  Cue the forthcoming Lib Dem policy paper on Quality of Life to be published later this year (which yours truly is helping to write…).

NHS reform – the politics is a smokescreen

Ever since the NHS was formed over 60 years ago, politicians have struggled to manage it.  Assorted ministers and policy wonks have dreamed up elegant reform plans, while the NHS’s insiders have undermined them in a bid to carry on much as before.  The NHS does change, but never quite along the path that the politicians have in mind.  That is as true now as ever.  The difference is that NHS management is promoting reform rather than resisting it; but they are going about it in their own way.  The fire and fury of the current political debate is mostly irrelevant.

I have already posted some thoughts on the NHS.  I considered the question of the timing of the reforms, alongside the £20bn cost-saving challenge posed by NHS Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson (referred to alternatively as “the Nicholson challenge” or “the QIPP*programme”).  My conclusion was that the main organisational damage has already been done, so we do not have much choice but to follow through.  I left aside the question of whether the reforms are wrong-headed.  I would like to consider this, before coming to an equally pragmatic conclusion.

What is being proposed?  A continuation of the big idea of the last 20 years or so: to create a purchaser/provider split, and to use this to introduce market mechanisms, under the banner of improving choice, to help ensure that the NHS is effective and efficient.  The problem that these reforms are supposed to solve is that the NHS is too dominated by hospitals, and the doctors who run them, who do not have enough incentive to change to meet new needs or to become more efficient.

In this latest incarnation, the purchaser element (now usually referred to as commissioners) of this set-up will be a combination of consortia of general practitioners (GPs), and an arms-length NHS Commissioning Board operating at national level (i.e. for England – the reforms don’t cover the other parts of the UK).  The intermediate commissioners under the current system, regional Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) and district Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), are to be phased out.  On the provider side (i.e. the hospitals and other facilities), the idea is that all NHS facilities should be run by more or less independent Foundation Trusts, but that the commissioners will be allowed to secure services from “any qualified provider”, which will not be restricted to these trusts.

These reforms are a natural, if rather accelerated, continuation of the previous government’s NHS reforms.  Commissioning by GPs was already being piloted, and the idea of moving all hospitals to Foundation Trusts was the previous government’s idea too.  What is newer, and perhaps more radical, is the proposed regime of accountability that is being imposed on this.  Previously the NHS was run by the Secretary of State for Health, with very little restraint or accountability.  Now a complex framework of powers and accountabilities is being imposed, giving both parliament and local authorities a greater role.

The government argues that this is just evolutionary change.  But there has been vehement opposition from people who think that the new regime will end the NHS as we know it.  One problem is the commendable desire by the government to establish much of the framework in parliamentary law, rather than simply letting the minister rearrange things by fiat.  People now have the opportunity to project all their worst fears into the legislation on the basis that it does not specifically ban them.  In fact we are still being asked to trust ministers to do the right thing, only with more accountability.

Two lines of criticism that I can see have some kind of traction.  First is that the framework will open up the health market to competition law (and specifically European law) in the same way as for gas and electricity.  This means that the NHS trusts and the private sector would have to compete on a level playing field – and this might literally drive some NHS trusts out of business.  A lot of what NHS hospitals do is a natural monopoly (accident and emergency work, complex surgery, etc) , like the railways.  The fixed costs are so high that the market cannot sustain competition in most localities.  However, so the argument goes, these fixed costs also support activities where private sector competitors could undercut the NHS; if these are competed away then many hospitals would cease to be viable, and so the service on core activities would deteriorate.

Frankly I’m not stressed by this.  If a train wreck is on the way, it will be in very slow motion, giving time to take corrective action if need be.  More to the point, NHS professionals are masters at keeping the private sector at bay (except for NHS doctors doing private work on the side…), and they will only be seriously vulnerable in places were the service offered is ludicrously bad.  And as for European competition law, judging by its impact (not) on the French and German energy markets, there shouldn’t be anything that the politicians can’t handle.

The second criticism is more cogent.  It is that the rules for setting up GP commissioning consortia are a bit vague.  They could be set up in such a way that makes them very difficult to hold to account, or to act in partnership with other agencies.  For example, they may not be geographically coherent, cross local authority boundaries, and so on.  This does need some more thought – though again the worry is the direction reforms could take, rather than what is actually likely.

Personally, I don’t place a huge amount of faith in the purchaser/provider split and the marvels of choice anyway in this context.  There are two big problems: that the buyers (you and me) don’t know enough about what they are buying, and have to rely on intermediaries, whose incentives distort the picture.  The second is that so many providers are natural monopolies.  After decades of reform, the NHS does not remotely resemble a market economy.  It reminds me of a large company trying to introduce market-style rules for internal transactions; these systems never achieve as much as their proposers hope, since everything is trumped by politics in the end.  There have been two big achievements of the NHS reform process.  First is that hospitals are gradually being forced to be more efficient and accountable; this has mainly been achieved by good old-fashioned management, of which the “Nicholson Challenge” is but the latest example.  The second is that commissioning processes have forced NHS managers to address the question of what society actually needs, and then try to reorganise the service to meet these needs.  This last development is the more recent, and the the reorganisation of PCTs has interrupted it – but the new arrangements will probably be more effective in the long run.

The big prize to be won from the current reforms is hardly spoken of at all.  It is that GPs will start to come under the same sort scrutiny as hospitals have.  The consortia themselves will do some of this; the NHS Commissioning Board, which must authorise the consortia, will also be on the case.  The PCTs were supposed to be doing this, but were mostly pretty ineffectual.  The important point is that we should be in no hurry to authorise the consortia, to allow this scrutiny process to have real bite.  This seems to be exactly what Sir David Nicholson (who will chair the NHS Commissioning Board) has in mind.

Meanwhile the over-large number of PCTs has been reorganised into a more manageable number of “clusters”; these and the SHAs will no doubt live on as embodiments of the Commissioning Board.  The NHS will become much more centralised in the short term.  With some very sharp minds at the centre, including Sir David, this doesn’t have to end badly.  But the politcal arguments are mostly a smokescreen.

*QIPP stands for Quality, Innovation, Productivity, Prevention

AV referendum – the return of the old politics

So the Nos won the UK AV referendum comprehensively, with 68% of the vote, on a higher turnout than expected.  Their campaign only seemed to gather momentum as time went by.  This is a bitter blow to me, as I actually liked AV – while having reservations about proportional representation (PR).  Now it will be considered politically toxic, probably forever.  It doesn’t help that most people that voted No did not understand what they were voting against.  In fact very few voters seem to have understood the system or its implications.  It is highly frustrating that so many nonsense arguments were tolerated, and even encouraged by the media (turning back on hundreds of years of history; would cost £250m; gives some people but not others more than one vote; and so on).  What went wrong?

There were clearly tactical errors by the Yes campaign.  They failed to find compelling reasons to change.  Their two favourites, making MPs work harder and ending safe seats, were very weak as AV would not make a huge difference.  They took a tactical decision not to explain the system to voters, on the basis that it would turn them off.  So they left that to the Nos, until finally they found a good way of communicating it (the Dan Snow broadcast with pub vs coffee shop).  That broadcast proved that you can communicate new ideas if you apply enough thought and creativity to the task.  There seemed to be too much time spent online, and not enough trying to get through to proper floating voters.  It is more difficult to say whether the later idea to portray a Yes vote as an anti-Tory one was right; it certainly swayed some.

Why was the No campaign so effective?  The use of the Tory machine clearly helped.  The campaign was very well funded, so they were able to put much more, and much better produced literature.  They weren’t even trying to win the argument, simply repeating a whole series of misleading sound-bites endlessly.  But particularly striking was their use of of mainstream politicians.  David Cameron and the Conservatives put on a strong, united front.  And enough Labour politicians supported them to rally many traditional Labour supporters.  By comparison, the Yes campaign had only the much weaker Lib Dem machine behind it, and tried to use non-politicians much more.

So the voters were not engaging with the arguments and trying to make sense of them, but taking a lead from people they trusted.  Conservative supporters rallied to a very impressive extent behind the official Tory line (80-90% according to one poll).  The newspapers may also have helped.  If all these respectable people were reinforcing even the more spurious No arguments, people thought there must be something to them.

So people actually have quite a lot of respect for good old-fashioned politicians when it comes to political arguments.  A year ago we thought that disillusion with politicians was ushering in a new politics.  The surge for the Lib Dems after the election debates.  The coalition with political enemies coming together in the national interest.  But this new politics seems to have been a mirage.  People are happier in the more familiar, tribal territory.  They will follow the old politicians, who don’t seem to care what they say in support of causes they think are in their interest.  The expenses scandal is completely forgotten now.

There also seems to be a deep conservatism amongst British voters.  They are sceptics of almost any change, though they are quick enough to get used to changes when they happen.  This is quite comical at times.  I remember huge resistance to the London Eye being erected; now nobody would want it taken down.  David Cameron’s and Boris Johnson’s appeal to “hundreds of years of history” to support FPTP is comical in the same vein, given how recent our democratic institutions actually are.  The idea of a “progressive majority”, popular with some on the left, is a nonsense.

A further lesson is that we should be highly suspicious of referendums to decide constitutional changes.  If people just follow the politicians, then shouldn’t just let the politicians decide?  Independence for Scotland – yes to a referendum; electoral systems, European Union treaty changes – no.

So the old politics is back.  What does that mean for progressives?  And what does it mean for the Liberal Democrats?  Topics for another day.

Yes or no to AV?

Truly my last blog on the arguments for and against AV for Thursday’s UK referendum on AV.  It’s been quite a campaign, but the arguments made by either side are weak or worse.  This may get a little better in this last week.  In its broadcast tonight the Yes campaign is at long last explaining what the system is and why it is a good idea, and even toning down some of its exaggerated claims.  The Yes campaign had left too much of the explaining to its opponents, while spending too much time twittering to to the converted.  By contrast the No broadcast seems much more about rallying the converted, especially Labour supporters; it rehashes the usual arguments in quick soundbites, using a variety of politicians and vox pops.  Up to this week the No campaign has been much more vigorous, albeit scurrilous.

First, for the benefit of those that haven’t decided, and want to get beyond the soundbites, let’s have a quick round up of the usual, weaker, arguments before identifying the stronger ones.  First the Yes:

  • It will make all MPs work harder.  The idea is because most MPs will need second preference votes to win, as well as a good haul of first preferences, then they will be more sensitive to people’s needs.  Well maybe.  But they are already trying quite hard for the first preference votes of minor parties.
  • Tackles “jobs for life”, duck houses, etc.  Well it should reduce the number of safe seats – but there will still be plenty left.  So some change, but not that much.
  • All MPs will need 50% of support.  A stronger argument, but of course this is 50% before abstentions.  Some voters will not offer second or third preferences so they will drop out, meaning that the winner gets a bit less than 50% of the voters who turned up.  The Economist newspaper seems to think this is a big problem, but if voters are indifferent between candidates then surely that’s fair enough.
  • It’s change.  True, but is it for the better?  Change would certainly rock the older politicos – but this is weak stuff.
  • It will keep the Tories out of power forever.  Not an argument to persuade Conservative supporters.  Frankly, I’m not at all convinced.  The Lib Dem vote could implode, the Tories scoop up second preferences from UKIP; if Labour fluffs it that could easily deliver the Tories an outright victory.  And if David Cameron succeeds in “de-toxifying” the Tory brand, it’s all to play for.

It says much about the Yes campaign that they haven’t said much more than this until this week.  The Nos, on the other hand have given us a massive battery of arguments:

  • It will cost £250m which is best spent on other things.  There has been a lot of heat generated by this claim, based on the costs of running the referendum (too late) and buying counting machinery (unnecessary).  Still, there will need to be an information campaign to explain the system, and it will take longer to count the votes, which will mean a bit more overtime.  Cheaper not to vote at all, of course.  What price democracy?
  • More countries use FPTP than AV.  My Tory leaflet says 2.4 billion to 29.5 million.  So?  I don’t know who they have counted into their 2.4 billion, but a large part of it is India, where there are literacy issues (and which doesn’t deliver stable government either).  The US has got round many of the weaknesses of FPTP through primary elections (which really are more expensive!) .  Many states also use run-off elections which work a bit like AV, and AV itself is not unknown.  And for President, if they used FPTP then Al Gore would have beaten George Bush in 2000 – but in fact they use an electoral college system.  New Zealand abolished FPTP for proportional representation.  That leaves Canada amongst developed countries; that country’ electoral experiences are not an advertisement for the system.  Today the Conservatives won a general election because the left-wing NDP took votes away from the centre parties.  What’s more many other nations, including France and Italy, have a single member run-off system that works a bit like AV.
  • The Australians don’t like AV.  My Conservative leaflet claims that 60% of Australians want to go back to FPTP.  That isn’t what the poll in question actually asked.  What many Aussies don’t like is that they are forced to preference ALL candidates, even if they are indifferent.  We aren’t proposing that in the UK.  In fact the principle of preferential voting (as they call it) is not controversial there.
  • AV gives weight to extreme parties, like the BNP.  Extremists will find more difficult to win under AV.  But they find it hard enough under FPTP (though George Galloway did sneak in in 2005).   But their second preferences will count.  Just as they would if there was no candidate of their party at all.  This is true, but it’s called democracy.
  • Soppy centrists will get elected.  This is the exact opposite of the extremist argument.  It isn’t made by the mainstream No campaign, but it is the argument of choice of the magazine Spiked, and Matthew D’Ancona.  The idea is that the trawl for second preference votes will put a premium on being unobjectionable.  But you still need first preference votes to be in contention, since you will almost always need to be in the top two on first preferences to stand a chance (and this is the Australian experience).  Soppy centrists are likely to get knocked out.  Besides appealing to the centre is how marginal seats are won under FPTP too.
  • There will be permanent hung parliaments and coalitions.  This is a valid argument against proportional representation, but not AV.  The argument runs that the Lib Dems will get more seats, denying a majority to Labour or Conservatives.  You have to believe in a Lib Dem recovery to think that; they will have a real problem to get enough first preference votes to be in contention in enough seats.  Even if you accept this, the balance between the top two parties is likely to favour the winner (because they get more second preference votes as well as first preference votes), and this will offset the effect.  One academic has suggested that the only election since the war that would have given a hung parliament under AV was last year’s, which, um…
  • We want PR.  AV is not remotely proportional; that’s why a lot of people like it.  But FPTP isn’t either.  PR isn’t on the menu.  The danger is that a No vote will put people off electoral reform of any kind for a long time.
  • We’ve been using FPTP for 300 years and we should stand by our traditions.  Well I’m exaggerating, but only slightly, based on Mr Cameron’s utterings.  One person one vote has only been around in the UK since 1950 when the university seats were abolished.  It’s not all that long ago when we abolished rotten boroughs.  We forget how much our constitution changes and adapts.

Enough.  What are the arguments that count?  For yes:

  1. It reduces the chances of rogue candidates splitting the vote and letting the enemy in.  This will make it easier for MPs to take an independent line against party managers.  Perverse results where people vote for the left and let a right wing candidate in (which seems to have happened in Canada today) are prevented.
  2. It’s more transparent.  Today a lot of voters vote for their second preference because they don’t think their first has a chance of winning.  The importance of first preference votes under AV will not stop this entirely, but it will be a big help.  And the winning candidate will know where his or her second preference votes came from.  Today they like to claim that all their votes are positive first preference ones – time to expose this.
  3. It’s a majoritarian system, like FPTP.  Coalitions only happen when the public really can’t make up its mind.  Of course many people prefer coalitions…but see above.  We aren’t turning the political world upside down, just making it a bit better.

And for the Nos:

  1. There is clearer bond with the voter, who needs to make a binary decision, which then gets counted in a highly dramatic process.  There is a little magic in the old ways.
  2. If No wins then the Conservatives will have to give the Lib Dems a consolation prize, perhaps in Lords reform.  If Yes wins then the opposite applies.

And that’s enough!