Conservatives – thinking liberal

Britain’s politicians are in denial – are the voters?

From the Office of Budget Responsibility: Economic and fiscal outlook November 2023

This week’s Autumn Statement by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, was a miserable affair, full of political chicanery with little to effort to tackle the country’s deepening problems. Worse yet, the opposition parties (Labour and the Lib Dems anyway), for all their huffing and puffing, are also unable to face up to these problems.

The Conservatives billed the set of measures as the biggest set of tax cuts since the 1980s. And yet the overall tax burden is rising as the freezing of tax allowances and thresholds will bring ever more people into tax or higher rates of tax, and increase the proportion of income people pay as tax. An even bigger problem is that the government has been using inflation to squeeze public spending, while services across the board – health, education, the police, the courts, and the list goes on – are clearly overstretched and in many cases breaking down – with collapsing buildings and rising waiting lists. The Chancellor offered not a penny to alleviate this crisis, while planning a further squeeze in the years ahead. Labour and the Lib Dems gleefully pointed out the first problem, but failed to address the second. They will stand by the announced tax cuts, while offering only gestures (taxing non-domiciled residents, or private schools, for example) to help fund public services. These tax-raising wheezes are nowhere near enough to match the scale of the crisis. Meanwhile all parties suggest that a bonanza of economic growth is coming to the rescue, without acknowledging the severe headwinds that will limit the country’s long-term growth prospects.

I am also highly sceptical of the one measure that seems to be getting widespread support – the full expensing of investment in machinery and systems against corporate profits. It is said that this will boost business investment, which is sorely lacking. It is in a fact the revival of a policy that failed in the 1980s, and was abolished by Nigel Lawson, the Tory tax-cutting Chancellor, who has been about the only holder of that post in memory that had a grasp of how the tax system as a whole worked and could be reformed. Back then it created a tax-avoidance industry and encouraged wasteful investment with fancy kit, rather than the thinking through of business processes which is the real key to improved productivity. That fiasco occurred at the beginning of my professional career as a Chartered Accountant, where I could see the nonsense it was creating up close. Alas the current crop of politicians and their advisers are too young to remember this. And it is of little use to new businesses, where the need is most acute, as these typically do not generate enough profit for this to be of use. What a silly waste!

Meanwhile the fiscal climate is getting a lot worse. Interest rates are rising at time that the size of the national debt is historically very high. If interest rates are higher than the overall rate of growth, and there is a budget deficit, then a debt spiral threatens, which, if it leads to an international loss of confidence in the public finances, could usher in a severe financial crisis. At the moment it is actually quite hard to understand how much of a problem this is. You should be comparing real interest rates to real growth rates – i.e. after inflation. But there are mixed signals on real interest rates. If you compare the nominal rate on government lending, it is if anything less than reported inflation – indicating a negative rate. But yields of index-lined bonds are positive and have risen sharply. Meanwhile the budget deficit is quite high – at 4% of GDP. It wasn’t so long a go when none of this seemed to matter. Interest rates were low, and the Bank of England’s Quantative Easing (QE) programme made large government debt look manageable. But conditions have changed. Inflation has made money much tighter – with interest rates rising, and QE going into reverse. I am starting to suspect a deeper change is afoot in the world’s capital markets. Earlier this century a number of countries ran large trade surpluses – notably China, Japan and Germany. This made trade and budget deficits more stable in countries like the UK and US, as the surplus countries had plenty of spare currency to provide funding. As the world’s trading environment is getting more difficult, this may changing – though it is not yet evident in public statistics. After over-reacting to fiscal risks in 2010, and moving into austerity too quickly, the opposite risk beckons. But the Autumn statement proposes tackling the budget deficit only slowly, leaving the very high level of net debt virtually unchanged. Politicians seem to assume that as inflation comes down things will simply go back to the easy financial environment that pertained before. This is complacent.

More from the OBR report – government plans make little impact on public debt

If that is complacency, the politician’s attitude to economic growth is outright denial, though some economists who should know better seem to be in the same place. It is assumed that the UK’s poor performance has an easily fixable cause. More investment perhaps, or encouraging more people into work, or perhaps lower taxes. Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, blithely talks about sorting out public services through economic growth – even applying the first-person to the process, as if growth was the gift one individual, and not the collective result of many millions of decisions. International comparisons seem to show that Britain’s productivity lags against peers. All that we need to do is fix this, the argument goes, and we will unlock growth. Well it may be that a burst of catch-up growth that is obtainable – but I suspect that these comparisons reflect an irreversible de-industrialisation, when a swathe of high-productivity industries left the country in the 1980s and 1990s and will not return. But stepping back, most or all of the developed world faces a number of headwinds that reduce growth potential, and in some case send it into reverse:

Demographics: more people are retiring as lower birth rates take their toll. Immigration can make up some of the difference, but is politically fraught, and stresses housing resources.
Trade: as globalisation runs into reverse, gains from trade are turned into losses. The UK is spared the American obsession with “near-shoring” or the reversal of the off-shoring of industries – but we have our own demons unleashed by Brexit.
Overdevelopment. The increasing consumption of goods, a critical driver of past growth, is simply a phase in economic evolution that has clearly ended. People move on to improve their quality of life in other ways. Meanwhile massive increases to the productivity of manufacturing industry mean that its impact on the total economy is much reduced. All this means that lower productivity parts of the economy, including many public services, loom larger. Productivity gains are harder to get, and where they happen the result is not so much increased production, but a transfer of resources to low-productivity sectors.
The energy transition. The country needs to make big investments to sources and distribution of energy, and its more efficient consumption. While the end result is desirable, in the meantime this will push down consumption. This, in fact, applies to pretty much all forms of investment. The country has become used to high consumption and low savings – reversing this won’t necessarily reduce growth as it usually measured, but to many people it will feel that way.
Housing. One way of achieving growth, or at least burst of catching up, is to allow people to move to places where the most productive jobs are. But these areas lack enough housing to accommodate this. Britain’s house builders have growth rich on the skilful management of land portfolios, rather than the actual building of houses, which many are actually very bad at. They have no incentive to increase the pace of building. And if the pace is increased, skill shortages quickly become evident. And I haven’t even mentioned slow and restrictive planning processes. Politicians at least show some awareness of this issue, but action never matches the promises.

The days of steady economic growth over the medium to long term are over, whether we like it or not. The best we can hope for is a short-term spurt. There is plenty of potential for human wellbeing to improve, but this will manifest itself in other ways.

The central problem is the funding of public services and maintenance of social safety-nets. A combination of two things are required here. The first is higher levels of taxation – and mainstream taxes which directly affect demand, and not gimmicks around capital and wealth (the latter may help make debt more manageable, but won’t suppress demand and prevent inflation). The second is a radical reform of public services so that demand for them is reduced – reducing the level of social problems, so that we require fewer police, courts, hospital beds, etc – and managing those problems so that they are solved early rather than passed from agency to agency. Alas we have very little idea how to bring such a change about – though we can see that some countries do this better than us (Japan, Switzerland, Denmark perhaps). A radical reform of government is clearly a part of this, with less centralised control – but it needs much more than this: decentralisation by itself could actually make things worse. With the possible exception of education (which has become more effective rather than cheaper) the reform efforts made by our governments in the last twenty years have taken us in the wrong direction – from Labour’s over-centralisation, to the de-skilling and outsourcing of the Conservative and coalition years. Unfortunately the choice between the two approaches of higher taxes or radical reform is not a binary one. Reform will require substantial investment, and that is likely to mean higher taxes in the short term at least.

If our politicians are in denial about all of this, how about the public? They surely understand that public services are in a dire state – and that fixing this will not come cheap. But they are too wrapped up in their own personal struggles to spend any energy on demands for change. Politicians are in denial for a reason: they don’t just a lack imagination and perception, but they also know a voter-loser when they see it. Still, Labour are clearly presenting a more realistic prospectus than the Conservatives, even if it is based on wishful thinking. Their poll lead at least seems to show some wider awareness by the public at large. And we must grasp at that straw.

Sunak remembers Tunbridge Wells

The Pantiles, Royal Tunbridge Wells – photo Paul Collins

Media commentary on British prime minister Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle largely misses the point – the exception being the FT’s Stephen Bush, whose newsletter came out after I started drafting this – and who is absolutely on point here. Most reflect on the ironies of the shock appointment ex-prime minister David Cameron to be Foreign Secretary, and the impact this may have on various groups of voters. Many cast it as the desperate act of a failing administration. I would rather see it as a rather brilliant move to the front foot.

First things first. The most important move yesterday was the removal of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. She was never qualified for the job and, predictably, proved a loose cannon. But she is a darling of the Tory populist wing, who gave her a rapturous reception at the party conference – and her appointment was widely regarded as necessary for Mr Sunak to secure his uncontested nomination to the top job. Last week her attention-seeking criticism of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and criticism of the police helped take the heat off Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s typically leaden response the Gaza crisis. This was an excellent opportunity for the Conservatives to cast doubt on Sir Keir’s ability to take on the job of prime minister. Instead the story was Ms Braverman’s extraordinary conduct – which included direct defiance of Mr Sunak in an article published in The Times. That undermined Mr Sunak’s authority. This exasperated respectable Tory-leaning voters in places like Tunbridge Wells, without doing much to rally disaffected voters in places like the West Midlands, site of a recent spectacular by election loss, which had been critical to the party’s success in 2019.

But by appointing Lord Cameron, as we must now call him, to the cabinet Mr Sunak relegated the Braverman story to the back pages. Instead of outrage by her supporters bringing attention to the fractured state of the Conservative Party, all anybody wanted to talk about was Lord Cameron and Mr Sunak stamping his mark on on the cabinet. Ms Braverman’s sacking was passed off with a shrug as a rather obvious move. She will try to regain the initiative – she is clearly politically ambitious – but it will be hard for her to recover. Her moment has passed. The Tory populists will seek out other standard bearers.

This will do much to reassure those voters of Tunbridge Wells, a short drive from where I live. Here a traditionally safe Tory seat is under attack from the energetic Lib Dem candidate, Mike Martin. These voters, to generalise, never rejected the Cameron brand of politics, as the West Midlands voters had. To them the problem with Ms Braverman wasn’t really her politics, it was the fact that she wasn’t a team player, and showed no particular signs of administrative competency. To people who are professionals themselves, as so many of these voters are, this is a cardinal sin. It is a point that the Brexit-supporting populists simply cannot understand. The professionals have warmed to Mr Sunak, who is well to the right of their normal politics, because he displays this professionalism – unlike his two immediate predecessors – Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. They abhorred former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with a passion, as he was the diametrical opposite of professional.

But, alas for Mr Sunak, Sir Keir is a consummate professional too. As is Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader – and indeed this group of voters rather liked the Lib Dem – Conservative coalition that Lord Cameron led, and probably like the idea of a Lib Dem-Labour one (anathema as that is to Sir Keir). Mr Sunak may have stopped a rout, but he will need to do more to secure a win.

To do that Mr Sunak will need to show that he is getting to grips with the crisis in public services, and the chaotic illegal immigration in small boats across the Channel. Pretty much all public services are in a sorry state, but the most important politically for now are the NHS, the courts and water and sewage (where problems are close to home in Tunbridge Wells). But to seize the initiative here Mr Sunak will need to unlock public spending, to invest in facilities and to restore lagging pay – otherwise he will not be seen as serious. This matters more than the tax cuts beloved of the Tory right. There is talk of cutting Inheritance Tax, as this is a wedge issue with Labour. Inheritance Tax does weigh heavily in the minds of the wealthier people of Tunbridge Wells, with its high property prices – but my guess is these voters would be unimpressed with such shameless politicking. The forthcoming Autumn Statement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be a critical test for this government.

But as Stephen Bush says, just as Mr Sunak was unable to capitalise on gestures to the populists because of his lack of follow-through, he will not capitalise on his gesture to voters of Tunbridge Wells for the same reason.

Starmer triumphant

Photo: Petr Kratochvil PubicDomainPictures.net

Recognition of Sir Keir Starmer’s achievement as Labour leader has been grudging. Even as Labour dominates the opinion polls with leads of over 10%, and local elections and by elections confirm it, the response has been “Yes, but…”. Any straw in the wind that might throw doubt on Labour’s dominance is leapt on and magnified. Labour’s victory in two by elections last week, in two ultra-safe Conservative seats, should end that, following as these do a spectacular victory over the SNP in Scotland in a another by election. The party can win almost anywhere it chooses to fight.

The three October by elections each throw a different light on the stranglehold Sir Keir now has on British politics. The first, in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, on the outskirts of Glasgow, shows that Labour is at last breaking the SNP stranglehold north of the border, which resulted in Labour winning just one seat in Scotland the 2019 general election. The constituency was marginal but the swing was huge. This follows the implosion of both the SNP and the Conservatives, which had been the second party in Scotland. This is important, as Labour failure here under both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn was a critical aspect of the failure of both of these leaders. This makes winning an overall majority in the country as a whole much easier, both directly and indirectly, as the prospect of the SNP holding the balance of power has been used to scare English voters into voting Conservative.

The second by election was in Tamworth, in the West Midlands. This seat shared characteristics with the “red wall” seats that used to be Labour, but which have been swinging to the Conservatives since 2010, and especially in 2019 – and which voted heavily for Brexit. In this case the Conservatives first won it in 2010 and improved their margin in each of the elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019 (even in 2017 when the national swing was against them). Labour’s success here is a sign that Labour is at last reversing this trend; even if it can’t back to 2010 in a general election, pre-2019 will bring in plenty of seats.

The third seat was Mid-Bedfordshire which is altogether more middle-class, and a classic, largely-rural safe Conservative seat that they have always held. What was particularly interesting this time was that the Liberal Democrats fancied their chances here, after their four spectacular by election victories this parliament, including two from third behind Labour, as in this seat. The argument was that many voters might contemplate voting Lib Dem but would never consider Labour. The Lib Dems put in a massive effort on the ground. But Labour’s success in the safe Tory seat of Selby suggested to them that they could win here, putting the Lib Dems in their place. And so it proved. Apart from the battle with the Tories, this was a trial of strength against the vaunted Lib Dem by election machine. Labour won.

Labour can’t win just by reinstating their red wall losses, even back to 2010, or recovering the seats lost in Scotland in 2015 – they lost in 2010 after all. But progress in Mid-Bedforshire and Selby show that they are making ground everywhere except, perhaps, in a few areas where the Lib Dems are already well-established, and London which they already dominate. By contrast their failure in Uxbridge, on the same day as Selby, and which the Conservatives and their supporting commentariat took to be a sign of hope, is an outlier. It is a London seat and London is the one area where the party had progressed since 2010.

All this brings to mind the build-up to the 1997 general election, and Mr Blair’s landslide victory for Labour, when Labour was similarly winning across a broad front. Then too, the Conservatives clutched at every available straw; they talked of creating “clear blue water” between themselves and Labour, much as they do now, without using those words. The Conservative prime minister was John Major, and his advisers kept saying that “the darkest hour is just before the dawn,” oblivious to actual cycle of light (the darkest hour is midnight). Meanwhile Labour shadowed Conservative fiscal plans in order to head off fears about extra taxes – and generally tempered its radicalism. I recently heard a claim that Labour promoted radical policies before 1997, and so should not fear doing so again. This is nonsense: any radicalism was confined to constitutional policies that were popular amongst key minorities, and few others cared much about. There were no promises on country-wide electoral reform or English devolution, and radical increases in spending on the NHS, for example, did not come until Labour’s next term.

But there are differences between now and 1996, and they are interesting. Then Mr Blair was putting most of his energy into winning over liberals. He had an unwritten pact with the Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, but it was a scary time to be a Lib Dem – what was the point when Labour seemed so interested in liberal ideas – promoting education, Scottish devolution, freedom of information – and even some signs of flexibility on electoral reform? Sir Keir is not interested in any of this – except with the adoption of a green agenda, though he is hedging even on that. The Tories have alienated liberals so thoroughly that he doesn’t have to try to win them over. Instead, he is focusing on Brexit-supporting working class and lower middle-class voters, which Mr Blair did not completely neglect (his law-and-order policies were designed to appeal to them), but treated secondary. Sir Keir dead-bats the endless culture war provocations that the Tories throw at him and drives home his message on chaotic state of public services, important to this group. Sir Keir’s uncharismatic style seems calculated to reassure, compared to Mr Blair’s slippery charisma.

Of course, Labour’s strength largely reflects the Conservatives’ weakness. And yet there is little they can do to correct that. Their attempts to imitate the US Republicans with nativist and culturally conservative causes, and rowing back on green policies, seem to have little traction with their key audience, while alienating middle-class liberals, who have been a key part of their electoral coalition. Perhaps their best hope is to stoke up fears of tax rises under a Labour government. But the dire state of public services has probably reconciled most people to higher taxes, and the Conservatives have shredded their reputation for competent management. Even those who think the prime minister Rishi Sunak is competent, will not think the same of most of his colleagues, and will have noted how often the party ditches its leaders.

Big swings can happen in a short space of time. A notable case was in 2017 when Theresa May lost a commanding lead over Labour in weeks. But that was a snap election when neither side was prepared, and Mrs May compounded it by trying to capitalise on her lead by putting risky policies in the party manifesto. Most people expect the Conservatives to close the gap a little, leaving Labour with a small majority or just short. But a complete Tory meltdown is also on the cards, such is the party’s weak credibility and penchant for self-destruction.

There are legitimate questions over Sir Keir’s policies. His talk of making public services work better through reform, and not by radically increasing funding, is just not credible. Furthermore, the public finances are looking weak. High inflation means a tight monetary policy. The country still depends on funding from foreigners, and yet the funding environment is getting much more difficult. Promising to fill this gap by growing the economy lacks credibility too, given the headwinds of demography, the retreat on open trade, and the rise of low-productivity services.

But whatever the doubts, Sir Keir Starmer is offering a much more convincing alternative government to the Conservatives, and there seems to be nothing the latter can do about it.

The Tories don’t need more humanity: they need competence

Last weekend The Observer reported that a senior Conservative had suggested that the Tories were in danger of being the “nasty party” again. They needed to show more humanity, he said. This followed some provocative language on the subject of asylum seekers from the Home Secretary and the party’s deputy chairman. The nasty party epithet resonates because it was attributed to the party during the long period of its doldrums while Tony Blair was prime minister, and and the party suffered three crushing defeats to Labour in general elections. It took a conscious rebranding effort by David Cameron to break free of the tainted Tory brand.

The Tory brand is undoubtedly deeply tainted once more. Their poll ratings are dire. Even in traditional heartlands, like where I live in rural Sussex, the party is being rejected in local elections by spectacular margins. Nice middle class people treat the party with disdain. The party’s main electoral strategy, though, is not to woo these voters but lower middle class and older working class voters who were part of the anti-establishment coalition that supported Brexit, and flocked to the party in 2019 in the “Get Brexit Done” election. It now seems that appealing to these voters is one of the driving principles of government policy, casting aside all considerations of national or wider interest. These voters are thought to like the “nasty party” image.

The problem of small boat crossings across the Channel illustrates the government predicament well. It is this flow of illegal immigrants that provoked those nasty comments. The government promotes a series of “tough” but token policies – such as trying to transport migrants to Rwanda, and housing them on a barge that looks distinctly like a prison ship. Ministers then attack “leftie lawyers” for slowing down (or even stymieing) these ideas, in the hope that mud will stick to Labour, led by lawyer Sir Keir Starmer. Certainly the flow of migrants across the Channel irritates Brexit-supporting voters, who are no sticklers for the rule of law.

But the flow of boats goes on. There is apparently a slight dip in numbers in 2023 compared to 2022, but this may just reflect weather conditions. The people traffickers are getting better organised, and are easily able to outwit government efforts to impede them. For some rather puzzling reason government ministers have been claiming that their policies are designed to “break the business model” of the traffickers. Perhaps they think this form of words sounds clever. But their policies are not directed at this goal at all. The business model depends on the absence of legal routes of migration, or even alternative illegal means – this forces migrants into the traffickers’ arms, allowing them to extract high prices and therefore invest significant money and effort in beating the government efforts efforts to make their lives difficult. Of course the government does not feel it can offer alternative routes, because that means letting more in legally, and their whole aim is to reduce flows overall.

And the longer the flows persist, the more the government has to confront difficult questions. The first of these is why all this is blowing up now, after Brexit, when Brexit was meant to enable Britain to “control its borders”. The business of managing borders is clearly a lot harder than most Brexit advocates had said. Then there is the the rather pathetic scale of the Rwanda and barge policies compared to the volume of incoming people: hundreds compared to tens of thousands. Worst of all is the effect of painfully slow processing of asylum claims, which has left tens of thousands in limbo, many having to be put up at state expense. What the government has not quite admitted was that this backlog arises from deliberate incompetence, as the former Home Secretary Priti Patel seems to have though that processing claims more slowly would reduce the incentives for people to come over and make claims. That hasn’t worked: instead state agencies and their political masters are made to look chronically ineffective.

Polls now show that few people think that the government will fail to stem the flow of boats. In the short term it might work for the Conservatives to deflect the anger towards the liberal “elites”, personified by leftie lawyers. But we probably have more than a year to wait before the next election. It is hardly worth suggesting that the opposition would do no better, when it doesn’t look as if things could get much worse.

If it is to turn the tide of opinion, the Conservatives needs to demonstrate competence above all else. Those nice middle class voters will forgive a lot of nastiness for that. Angry Brexiteers are not so dissimilar. And as for international standing, foreigners have their nasty side too – it is competence that inspires their respect. The problem for the party is that it has turned incompetence into something of a feature since they chose Boris Johnson as their leader. Both he and his successor, Liz Truss, openly selected cabinet ministers on the basis of loyalty rather than ability. Political posturing mattered above all.

Since then there have been an endless succession of ministers evidently not up to the job. Mr Sunak seemed to break from that idea. His stock (and the government’s) was never higher than when he reached a deal with the European Union over Northern Ireland – allowing competence to trump political posturing. But then again, his appointment of the inexperienced but ideological Suella Braverman as Home Secretary always pointed in a different way. Now political messaging is once again the priority, as the government stumbles from one mishap to another.

This recalls the government of John Major in the 1990s, with the party exhausted and fractious after the Thatcher years. It is true that this government managed to pull off an election win against the odds in 1992 – but at that point the government was being given the benefit of the doubt on its economic strategy, while doubts over Labour leader Neil Kinnock persisted. By 1997 the government’s haplessness was exposed to all, while his Labour opponent, Tony Blair, was the very picture of slick competence. Sir Keir can’t aspire to Mr Blair’s heights, but he looks competent enough. Mr Sunak’s supporters may keep clutching at straws (as did Mr Major’s “the darkest hour is just before the dawn”, they said, inaccurately) but it is heading for humiliation all the same.

Anti-Tory pacts – lessons from Wealden

Analysis: Matthew Green thinkingliberal.co.uk

Such is the paradox of the information age. Massive amounts of information from across the globe is at our fingertips, and we can now use AI tools to retrieve it with startling efficiency. But news reporting, especially local news reporting, has collapsed – so many, many interesting things are liable to escape our attention because they will never get into to the accessible database. There has been a wealth of reporting on last week’s local election results in England. But many interesting, and important, local stories remain unremarked. Such is the case in my local area, with the district council elections of Wealden in East Sussex – and arbitrary bureaucratic agglomeration of villages and small towns, whose main centres are Uckfield, Hailsham and Crowborough, each of roughly equal size.

The first point to make about this is that I wasn’t involved in these elections, in spite of being a party member. I haven’t talked to any of the actors since long before the campaign started. My reporting is based simply on the results published by the council. I hope to find out more later – but I’m not minded to harass exhausted newly-elected councillors who have important decisions to make about running the council. I’m a blogger, not a journalist.

It was the first British public election since 1979 in which I did not vote for the Liberal Democrats, or one its predecessor parties. That was because they did not field a candidate in my ward. There were only three candidates: a Conservative, a Green and an independent who did not put up much of a visible campaign. I voted for the Green candidate, Christina Coleman, who won with 64% of the vote against the Conservative incumbent councillor, Roy Galley, who had won in 2019 with 59% of the vote, against just a Green candidate. Ms Coleman increased the Green vote from 523 to 1,107, while Mr Galley’s vote sunk to 545 from 749. As I searched through the results, I found that this outcome was not untypical. The Conservatives contested wards opposed by typically only one other party. And they lost badly, sinking from 34 councillors (out of 45) to just 9, behind both the Lib Dems (13) and Greens (11). This was a shocking result in a part of the Blue Wall that is so blue that most people don’t regard it as politically competitive. This bespeaks serious trouble for the Conservatives. It is hard to exaggerate the degree of disgust with the party amongst most of my neighbours, whom I would describe mostly liberal conservatives. One Conservative inclined neighbour is even more unforgiving of the Liz Truss episode than I am.

But that is unremarkable. It has been picked up by the main media commentary. What is remarkable was the degree of cooperation amongst the Conservatives’ opponents, and how well this worked. To put a bit of substance behind this story I have analysed the detailed results in the table above. This is all my own work and it’s possible the odd error has crept in. First, some basics to help understand the figures. There are 41 wards, four of which elected two councillors, and the rest just one. One was uncontested – the Conservatives were elected unopposed. The Conservatives contested all the wards except one (where an independent stood, and lost, against a Green). In the analysis I have tried to exclude candidates without serious backing or a campaign. I judged these to be independents who did not manage to gain 100 votes, and minor parties (though in one ward there was a Reform UK candidate, and in a another a pair of Ukippers, all of whom received over 100 votes); I have left in all of the Labour candidates, although one failed to reach 100.

The Lib Dems put up 23 candidates, doubtless so that they could claim that they could theoretically win a majority on their own. But they were opposed by the Greens in only three cases, and Labour in one, with “serious” independents in four. Eleven of the Lib Dem candidates faced no other serious opponent than the Conservatives; they were all elected – but only two others were. The Greens put up only 14 candidates – nine of these faced only one serious opponent (well, 10 if you exclude a weakly supported Labour candidate) – all (ten) of these were elected, along with one other. Three Labour candidates out of 11 were given a clear run against Conservative candidates; none were elected. Two Labour candidates were elected in three-cornered battles with Conservatives and independents (including a split result in a two member ward) – their first councillors in the district. The independents are by their nature not a coherent party, so the analysis means less – but their 18 serious candidates were involved in only four straight fights – three against the Conservatives (which they all won) and the lost fight with a Green. There were 13 three or four cornered contests: the Conservatives won six of their councillors here. These six, the two straight fights with Labour and the one uncontested ward were all the councillors they won. They won no contest in a straight fight with Lib Dems, Green or Independents. In two case of the more complex contests, the Conservatives prevailed with under 40% of the vote. In only three cases Greens and Lib Dems ran candidates against each other – the Conservatives won in two of them (with under half the vote), with the Greens winning the third comfortably with the worst Lib Dem performance of the day.

So far as I know there were no formal pacts – if there had been, the picture would have been a bit tidier. But cooperation is evident, and, as a device for winning against Conservatives, it proved highly effective – but less effective where Labour were putting up the candidate. How far can we extend the conclusions to a general election? Local and national elections are different – but the main problem for the Tories in Wealden was their unpopularity at national level. Their Wealden administration is not particularly unpopular, though no especially popular either. This suggests to me that an electoral pact between the Greens and the Lib Dems could turn some seats in the Blue Wall unless the government can seriously scare voters about the prospect of a Labour-led government. Wealden borough closely corresponds to a parliamentary seat, also called Wealden, which is very safely for the Conservatives (the Lib Dems edging ahead of Labour into a distant second) – but this all changes when new parliamentary boundaries come in. Such a pact would follow one made in 2019, but could be much more effective if voters are less scared of Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader than Jeremy Corbyn.

But it would be very hard to bring Labour into such a pact. Many former Conservative voters will vote for the Lib Dems or Greens (somewhat ironically since the Greens are closer to Corbyn’s Labour than Starmer’s), but draw the line at voting Labour. So there is much less in such a deal for Labour than the other parties, and it would be a major distraction from Labour’s main campaigning focus. Also Sir Keir is setting his face against electoral reform (which would be another distraction for him), which reduces the attraction of Labour to Lib Dems and Greens.

In the right circumstances electoral pacts work. Given the severe distortions imposed by the current electoral system I would have no qualms about my party entering into such a pact.

Dominic Raab and Diane Abbott shine light into some dark spaces

Politicians have to navigate two worlds: that of politically correct official policy and the respectable disagreements with it, and the world of their committed supporters where more extreme views are common currency. This happens in all parties. Liberal politicians have to restrain and suppress views on such topics as Brexit and immigration, for example. This does not stop politically incorrect views being widely disseminated in mainstream media, of course, but politicians must be very wary of publicly supporting any such views. Two episodes which broke over the weekend illustrate this.

The first was that of Dominic Raab, who resigned as deputy prime minister and Justice Secretary, after a report into accusations of inappropriate behaviour – bullying – in the management of civil servants, which upheld some of them. Mr Raab came out swinging: he suggested that the threshold set for bullying was set too low, and would make the task of ministers implementing their promises to electors impossible. He also suggested that some civil servants were undermining the government because they disagreed with its policies. These complaints were taken up by parts of the press, notably The Telegraph. It was soon being suggested that the complaints were orchestrated in order to remove a politically contentious but hard-working minister – and that others would receive the same treatment.

The prime minister has remained silent on the issue; opposition parties have piled in to condemn Mr Raab, with the Liberal Democrats even suggesting that he resign as an MP. On the face of it, Mr Raab’s arguments are hard to sustain. Most of the specific complaints made by civil servants (six out of eight) were not upheld – but there were two examples that the report’s author, employment lawyer Adam Tolley, viewed as too extreme. It would be easier to accept Mr Raab’s assertion if all the complaints had been upheld. The bar Mr Raab seems to want is high indeed – physical intimidation. Others point out that Mr Raab’s record of achievement in office is weak, compared to others with similar politics. I have spent many years in a professional management environment and have no sympathy with what Mr Raab is suggesting. There are good and bad ways of getting the people you work with to do what you want; Mr Raab clearly opted for the bad far too often. I am pretty obsessive about fonts and formatting (apparently one of the issues that Mr Raab complained about) – but as a manager I just had to let go, as the topic didn’t matter all that much in the end.

Still, Mr Raab is getting a sympathetic hearing in many places, and not just The Telegraph. But this is not politically mainstream. One survey suggests that most people claim to have experienced bullying by their superiors at work. I have worried that bullying behaviour by managers is so commonly portrayed in television and film dramas that people think it is how management is done – but this is doubtless trumped by direct personal experience, where people meet good management technique as well as bad. The FT’s Stephen Bush suggests that political careers tend not to provide such exposure to good management practice, though, and perhaps that is why politicians so often fall into Mr Raab’s trap. It is easier to see how the idea of the civil service undermining government policy has currency, though. The idea of a civil service “blob” is popular amongst conservatives; doubtless socialists who have made it as far as government office feel similarly. Passive-aggressive behaviours are common in all organisations, though, and the more radical your ideas are, the more of it you will get – as I know full well from direct experience. It is something competent managers develop techniques to manage, and less competent ones get paranoid about. But such conspiracy theories are the currency of activists and not the political mainstream.

Diane Abbott’s case is perhaps a bit more interesting. Ms Abbott is a long-standing Labour MP, elected in 1987, as the first black woman elected to parliament. While she can be a bit eccentric, she is clearly an intelligent person, and one who has suffered mountains of misogynistic and racial abuse. Her problems arose from a letter to The Observer newspaper, in response to this article by Tomiwa Owolade. It is worth getting the context of this episode right. Mr Owolade led off with this anecdote:

I was a sixth-form student and talking to a girl who told me with utter confidence that “white people can’t be victims of racism”. Racism is about power and privilege. White people have power and privilege. Black people and Asians don’t. This means that only the latter group can be victims of racism; racism is the exercise of power and privilege against people of colour.
Tomiwa Owolade, The Observer 15 April 2023

He describes how at first he accepted this point of view, but that he came to reject it: life is much more complicated than that (‘not black and white” as the title to the article has it). In evidence he discussed a recent survey of people’s experiences of racist abuse. This found that both Jews and Irish Travellers, people often defined by black people as “white”, were more likely to experience such abuse than black or Asian people. The survey even found that white Irish people suffered more racial abuse than black Africans or Asians. He also pondered the fact that in the survey most black and Asian people did not claim to have experienced racial abuse at all. Of course a survey such as this is not conclusive evidence by itself, and actual experience of abuse is only one explanation of the way people answer such questions: but it is clear that Jewish people, and especially Irish Travellers, experience a lot of abuse.

This was, apparently, too much for Ms Abbott, who clearly agreed with the girl in Mr Owolade’s anecdote, and defines Jews, Travellers and Irish as white. She has since withdrawn the letter (and apologised for its content which she described as an early draft sent by accident), and I haven’t found a version of the full text to link to. These are the sentences that have been most widely quoted:

It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.

I hope I don’t need to point out that highly selective nature of Ms Abbott’s historical examples (Jews and Gypsies sent to death camps in Europe; British ruling classes shrugging off mass starvation during the Irish famine, and so on): her words clearly reflect common talking points amongst certain groups of political activists – and I do understand why black people in particular are reluctant to accept terms of reference set by a white-dominated establishment. But in the wider political context such ideas are incendiary – and much more politically incorrect that Mr Raab’s views on what constitutes bullying. The Labour Party is just emerging from a very damaging row about antisemitism – which the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn was accused of not doing enough to combat. Mr Corbyn’s line was different to this one though – he suggested that antisemitism was just another form of racism, and didn’t merit special treatment. But Ms Abbott’s letter suggests that antisemitism is on a par with prejudice against redheads. She was immediately suspended pending investigation. It is hard to understand how such an experienced politician allowed such a letter to go out under their name – and very hard to see how she can come back from it.

Alas a sensible debate on racism and antisemitism is impossible to have in the current political climate. Pretty much any view is going to create offence somewhere – and spark accusations of some form of racism or denial. Nuance is crushed as every scrap of evidence is mobilised to support one or other fixed view. It is clearly is a complicated issue, but no respectable politician can afford to challenge the conventional wisdom. I rarely discuss it on my blog, since the risk of my remarks being misinterpreted and misused is so high.

Still some writers, such as Mr Owolade (who writes for the New Statesman) do try to explore the nuance. Perhaps one day we can move on. At least with workplace bullying and the role of the civil service we can have a bit more of an open debate.

The moral high ground is not good politics

An earlier example of low political advertising from the 2016 referendum campaign (c) Vote Leave

Labour’s national campaign HQ must be beside themselves with glee. They put out an online advert claiming that the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, wants sex offenders to roam free rather than spend time in prison. This dominated the news agenda over the whole four-day bank holiday weekend, with the party leader, Sir Keir Starmer doubling down with an article in the Daily Mail on Monday. Many (probably most) of their party’s loyal supporters were unimpressed with this descent into gutter politics. The Guardian‘s Marina Hyde was vicious in her criticism. But that only served to stir the pot some more. This has all the hallmarks of an orchestrated campaign, and in its own terms it was an outstanding success.

I’m not repeating the ad here, as it has benefited enough from extra exposure by critics and neutrals. Instead I give an earlier example of this type of campaign advertising – this time from Vote Leave in the 2016 referendum campaign. Turkey was, and still is, a candidate country to join the European Union, so Vote Leave could claim some tangential factual accuracy. But there was no actual prospect of its application succeeding, and Britain could have vetoed its accession anyway (though, to be fair, the British government wasn’t inclined to, unlike the government of France and several others). But the ad played to fears of a new wave of immigrants under the EU’s freedom of movement rules – and olive-skinned Muslims at that. The Labour ad’s facts are just as tangential, and it is even more fundamentally untrue. But the Vote Leave ad was regarded as a big success, for all the furore (in fact partly because of it), and so the political professionals seek to emulate it. These professionals have Sir Keir’s ear and they are doubtless very pleased with themselves.

The aim of the ad isn’t to persuade people that Mr Sunak actually thinks that child sex offenders shouldn’t go to prison, or even to persuade people that Labour would be much different. It is to neutralise Conservative attempts to paint Labour as soft on crime. It draws attention to the government’s generally dismal record on public services, which certainly includes the police and the courts, to point out that Tory claims on law and order don’t add up to much. If readers cynically shrug and say “They’re all the same”, then the ad will have done its work. Complaints by liberal types only go to show that the Labour leadership is made of different stuff. Indeed to be complained about by Guardian readers is a badge of honour that the leadership of both main parties seek as free and welcome publicity. This is utterly depressing for people on the left of politics.

Some are suggesting that this tack by Labour might backfire, though. The New Statesman reports one Labour adviser as saying “…it won’t work because we won’t win from the gutter – our biggest problem is not failing to attack Rishi, it’s lacking a positive alternative vision – and because dredging up past records won’t end well for Keir. The Tories will go to town with his DPP record.” But that is to misunderstand the strategy. Labour is defending a very healthy poll lead; all it needs to do is prevent the Tories from changing people’s minds, and either staying at home or voting for Labour as the lesser evil. The party will doubtless throw in abundant positive stuff about green growth and so on later in the campaign. But for now they are more worried about Tory negative campaigning and feel that the best way of neutralising this is in negative campaigns of their own. The Tories are going to go to town on Sir Keir’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions anyway.

Another worry for some is that Labour ranks are divided about these tactics, right up to shadow cabinet level. Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary, is being briefed against, and is keeping her head down. Instead Labour fielded Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, for media interviews as she evidently wants Ms Cooper’s job. I’m not sure this matters too much if Sir Keir is clearly in charge. Ms Cooper will go quietly out of loyalty – a pity because she probably has more of the sort of administrative competence that Labour will need badly once in power.

And, of course, Labour have no convincing solution to Britain’s law and order crisis without promising more public spending, which they won’t do for fear of Tory attacks on tax rises. Ms Thornberry collapsed spectacularly when pressed on this by her BBC interviewer on the World at One radio programme on Monday; “We’re optimists,” was the best she could do. No marks to the BBC for tamely following Labour’s manipulation of the news agenda, but full marks for its challenging Ms Thornberry robustly. But Labour seem to have got away with it.

Taking the moral high ground is not a successful political strategy. Nothing attracts sneering political and media criticism more. The Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg tried it in the 2010 general election; it generated a brief spurt of popularity, but ultimately turned him into the most hated person in British politics. Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir’s predecessor as Labour leader also tried it. This brought him some success in the 2017 general election, against Theresa May, a slightly more scrupulous Conservative leader. But against the entirely unscrupulous Boris Johnson Mr Cornbyn fared hardly better than Mr Clegg. Sir Keir seems to have flirted with the high ground (as Ms Hyde pointed out in her Guardian article), but has wisely decided against it.

It is possible to overdo the negative. The Conservatives are widely thought to have done this with their attacks on Tony Blair in 1997, though these were particularly inept. But this seems hard to do. Britain’s electoral system makes this worse: it encourages a focus on small groups of swing voters, where persuading the other side’s supporters to stay at home is part of the game. Loyal supporters provide campaigners and foot soldiers, but are ignored otherwise. Labour’s grassroots are repeatedly being trodden underfoot by their leadership, and may be unwilling to put much effort into the political ground campaign. Doubtless Labour’s strategists feel they are dispensable – and that enough of them will seek the tribal reward for beating the Tories (and Lib Dems) to do what is needed.

Are we condemned to this sort of politics forever? The public may hate high-minded politicians even more than the regular low-life, but they don’t like politicians generally. If Labour flounders in government, this could generate a backlash against politics generally. If this could be channelled into political reform (with the country’s flirtation with populism evidently exhausted by the Brexit saga), and electoral reform in particular, this might lead somewhere. This did happen in New Zealand in the 1990s. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Tax and immigration will be the key issues between Labour and the Conservatives

After Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and the post-2017 version of Theresa May, most Britons have been yearning for a time when their main party leaders were ordinary competent politicians. But now Sir Keir Starmer has taken over the Labour Party and Rishi Sunak the Tories, that day has come. Both men had less political experience than their leadership positions normally warrant, and accordingly had uncertain starts, but now both are now hitting their stride. It promises to be a fascinating, if unedifying, contest, at least for those who follow politics as a spectator sport without worrying too much for the consequences for the country.

Sir Keir matured first. Indeed earlier this year he decided that he had to hammer Mr Sunak’s apparent weakness as hard as he could. I was uncomfortable with this: it didn’t matter to Sir Keir whether the attacks were well grounded or not – he ruthlessly went for the man rather than the policy. It seems unpatriotic to keep undermining your country’s prime minister just for the hell of it. But that’s politics – Mr Sunak would not hesitate to do the same if the roles were reversed.

Mr Sunak has survived this, and it is Sir Kier who has lost momentum as a result. The turning point came with his renegotiation of the Northern Ireland Protocol that had been spoiling relations with the European Union. This was a thoroughly competent piece of statecraft that moved things along. Few doubted that this deal was the best that Britain could get – and opponents seemed to be the sort that did not really want resolution at all. Better still, Mr Sunak was successful in selling this to his own party. Only 22 MPs voted against it in parliament – with many formerly troublesome Eurosceptics lining up behind Mr Sunak. That both Mr Johnson and Ms Truss were amongst those 22 underlined just how little threat his predecessors now pose. The deal has not convinced the Democratic Unionist Party to rejoin the Stormont government – but most observers thought that nothing was going to pass that test that would not cause even bigger problems in the province. In UK terms the DUP is very isolated.

That’s a good start. Mr Sunak had earlier set out five priority areas for his administration: inflation, NHS waiting lists, growth, national debt and “small boats” – the influx of illegal migrants across the Channel. It was widely assumed that his specific pledges on these issues were designed to be easy to pass – but with the economy poised on an awkward knife-edge, this should not be assumed. He needs to do two things if he is to a reasonable chance of winning the next general election, widely assumed to be in the autumn of 2024. The first is to win back the Brexit-voting, conservative working class and lower middle class voters that flocked to the party in 2019 – many of these are telling pollsters that they will abstain or vote for a protest party such as Reform UK. To these he needs to show that he is true to the Brexit vision, and especially on immigration; these voters, who tend to be older and retired, may be not so sensitive to the economy, but they are sensitive to the NHS and crime. The second thing is to win back or win over Labour- and Liberal Democrats-inclined floating voters with a less conservative political outlook, who generally voted Remain, but who were put off by Labour under Mr Corbyn. For these voters a display of competence is critical.

Sir Keir Starmer starts ahead, with substantial poll leads, following the Johnson and Truss fiascos. He may also have had a stroke of luck in Scotland. Scottish seats used to be critical to Labour’s success, but the party was wiped out there by the SNP in 2015, and then they struggled against resurgent Conservatives. But now the SNP seems to be imploding after Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as leader. To watchers from south of the border this episode has all the hallmarks of a bloodletting and collapse after a long period of imposed stability – all Britain’s main parties experience this from time to time. Things are always a bit different in Scotland. Pro-independence voters don’t have many convincing alternatives – Alba and the Greens each have issues of their own. But the case for independence will have taken a temporary knock, and Labour is prevailing over the Conservatives in the anti-independence camp, with a stronger appeal to independence-waverers. A resurgence by Labour there would be doubly good news for Sir Keir. It makes winning an overall majority in the UK much easier for him, and it reduces the risk of the SNP holding the balance of power in a hung parliament – which would be a nightmare outcome, and a prospect that might scare the voters too. But for all this lead, Sir Keir knows that a lot can go wrong, and that the electoral system is in many ways tilted against him.

A lot of how the battle will play out is obvious. Labour will attack the government for incompetence on just about any issue that comes up, regardless of how justified the complaint may be. The Conservatives try to divert the blame onto world events and cast doubts on Labour as being soft lefties. Most of this be just noise to voters and unlikely to change minds. Beyond this I think there are two issues where voters’ are more open, and which could cause a shift in balance between the parties: tax and immigration.

Tax-and-spend arguments are as close as we’ll get to a debate over economic strategy. We will not get any kind of sensible discussion of economics, of course – even though there is an interesting debate to be had between the parties. Labour’s approach tends to focus on macro-economic policy. The priorities for them are ensuring that aggregate demand is sufficient to ensure low unemployment and decent bargaining conditions for workers, and getting decent headline figures for investment. The Tories rather focus on microeconomics – the idea that prosperity must be based on the efficiency of businesses and public agencies and how hard we work – where the question of incentives and competition loom large. Instead of that, the Conservatives will accuse Labour of wanting to dramatically increase public spending, leading to higher taxes and a less productive economy. They remember fondly John Major’s success with the “Tax Bombshell” campaign in the last week or so of the 1992 general election, when fortunes suddenly turned in their favour. The problem for Labour is that almost all public services are crying out for more spending, and it is very hard not to criticise the government without suggesting a substantial increase. Which leads to the question how you pay for it. This question is dealt with as if a nation’s budget operated like a household one, which is far from how it actually works. But it is too hard to try to explain that extra public spending might simply lead to better use of the economy’s resources and higher wages, and not necessarily to higher taxes. This argument is in any case a lot shakier when inflation is taking hold, as it is now.

The obvious answer is for Labour to try and sell the idea of higher taxes in order to have more effective public services at a time when the ratio of working people is falling. The tax burden may be at a historical high as a proportion of national income, but it is still moderate by European standards. There is even polling evidence that this has majority support. But Labour still carry the scars from 1992 (and indeed 2019) when the Conservatives successfully scared many floating voters with the prospect of higher taxes. Instead they want to follow Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s strategy of 1997 of promising to hold back taxes and spending – and then increase both after the second term, when people are more used to the idea of a Labour government. Meanwhile they will try to dream up a number of painless taxes on other people to pay for selected areas of higher spending – non-doms, oil companies and so on. Against this the Conservatives will try to promise that better public services can come without higher taxes; since many voters are under financial stress, they will not relish the prospect of higher taxs. The arguments of both parties are unconvincing, and it is hard to see which way the public mood will swing.

Neither party is convincing on immigration either. There is panic over the number of people trying to cross the Channel in small boats, and then claiming asylum. Actually this is a real enough problem: overall numbers may be modest by the standards of international refugee flows, but it is placing public resources under pressure, and and it is a bit of a slam-dunk for organised crime. Immigration is not a top issue for voters according to opinion polls in the way it has been in the past. But both parties know that with the chaotic situation in the Channel, it can be pushed up the agenda easily enough. Housing the refugees (and others) while their claims are processed is creating stresses right across the country. Mr Sunak knows that he needs to do two things. To motivate conservative working class voters (and a lot of conservative middle class ones come to that), he needs to promote a tough line that will be hard for Labour to follow. The second thing is that he needs to make a substantial dent in the numbers making the crossing – to demonstrate competence, and woo back more liberal floating voters, as well as convincing those conservative voter that he isn’t just grandstanding. The first of these things is going well enough. The Home Secretary makes a good hate figure for liberal types, who make all the noise that Mr Sunak needs to demonstrate his toughness. But few understand how he is going to achieve much in the way of actual results, though. The much vaunted scheme to deport migrants to Rwanda does not look remotely adequate to deal with the sort of flows that we are seeing, even after the government has bulldozed the legal objections.

The Tories can sense Labour weakness here. Sir Keir has one sensible idea – to make legal routes for refugees more accessible, and the processing quicker, and so reduce demand and the numbers having to be put up in temporary accommodation. This means increasing legal flows of refugees, which will annoy many – but it does tackle the disorderly aspect of the current situation, which is what is most dangerous. But it is a stretch to think that this will stop the flow of channel boats by itself. The incentives for people traffickers remain strong. The only thing that might work there is rapid return of the migrants to France or elsewhere in Europe. But why would the Europeans agree to that? Only a substantial change to legal routes for refugees might possibly unlock that. that would be too brave.

It is hard to discern public attitudes to immigration post Brexit. There are two competing visions. The first is the Japanese one: that any immigration disturbs the cultural identity of the country and undermines social cohesion – as well as placing stress on housing and public services. So numbers of immigrants should be kept low, and definitely reduced. Or there is the Canadian/Australian vision, which accepts the desirability of substantial flows of immigrants, including refugees (at least in the case of the Canadians) – but wants the flow to be orderly – and abhors the idea of queue-jumping by unregulated arrivals. The small boats are abhorrent to both – but there any agreement ends. Both visions seem to have substantial support, and it is hard to see which way the zeitgeist will go. Labour seem to be more clearly pitching for the Australian/Canadian position, which is popular amongst the immigrant communities themselves – while the Conservatives are trying to play both visions at once. And as with tax, it is hard to see which side will end up on top.

There is a third issue which has the potential to sway voters: the environment. This covers not just the mission to reduce carbon emissions, but also threats to the countryside through habitat loss and pollution (and especially sewage overflows). The government is under attack for competence, as well as its heart not really being in it. But Mr Sunak has left it out of his five key targets – so presumably his party’s polling shows that this is not a critical issue. Labour are making a lot of the idea of green growth – but this may be more to motivate their core supporters than to win points over the opposition.

It will be an interesting contest. My guess is that sir Keir will prevail decisively. Whenever I try to write “Sunak” my computer changes it to “sunk”; I think he is, such is the low regard his party is held in by the voters..

Weak leadership gets the BBC into trouble

Nadine Dorries – who gave an astonishing interview on World at One

The BBC is one of my main sources of news, but it often annoys me. Recently I wrote that the choice for mainstream media is either partisan and useless (like Fox News) or impartial and dumbed-down – like the BBC. But now it seems that pressure from Conservative politicians is making the institution erratic, and editorial management weak.

The narrative amongst British conservatives has for some time that the BBC is part of a liberal elite, which also includes the civil service, that constantly undermines conservative policies, which represent the will of most people. This narrative became politically dominant after the Brexit referendum, and seemingly unassailable with the landslide victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in December 2019. Pressure on the BBC mounted, as the government sought to influence senior appointments and news coverage. The outcome has not been more rightwing bias, though, so much as weak editorial leadership.

This was illustrated recently by the news that the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, was in the process of recruiting the senior civil servant Sue Gray to be his chief of staff. This was a pretty unremarkable episode of itself. Unlike most British politicians, Sir Keir is not a lifelong career politician – he had a substantial career as a lawyer in government service – a “securicrat” I have seen it called. It is easy to spot an affinity with another career securicrat like Ms Gray, though she is not a lawyer – they had known each other professionally for some time, apparently. The move shows that he is serious about the business of becoming prime minister. It also shows that senior civil servants, among others, think that he has a serious chance of doing just that. Senior civil servants have taken up this role before, for both Labour’s Tony Blair (Jonathan Powell) and the Conservative David Cameron (Jeremy Heywood, though he had a more overt relationship with the Conservatives). Nevertheless many Conservatives were incandescent at the news. This is doubtless because it is an intimation of their own political mortality – after such a dramatic fall from their seeming invincibility after the 2019 election. They suggested that it threatened the impartiality of the civil service – though their usual complaint is that the civil service isn’t biased enough. Their argument isn’t really sustainable, but it is at least arguable. That cannot be said for the line attempted by some supporters of Mr Johnson, who suggested that the report on parties at 10 Downing Street during lockdown prepared by Ms Gray was part of a malign conspiracy that caused Mr Johnson’s resignation. This is so wrong-headed, on so many levels, that it hardly needs refuting. Suffice it to point out that Ms Gary’s report was much delayed and pulled its punches, allowing the former prime minister to escape until his next series of blunders.

So there was a political kerfuffle, and clearly the BBC had to report it. But I was astonished when immediately following the news on Radio 4’s World at One, the BBC aired a long and unchallenging interview with Nadine Dorries, a former minister under Mr Johnson, in which she aired the conspiracy theory, and several clear untruths about the affair. Even the BBC admitted that the interview “in hindsight” should have been a bit more challenging – though the whole thing was so mad and implausible, challenge was hardly required. It was a display of astonishingly bad editorial judgement, which can only be explained by the sort of hidden political machinations that so often lie behind the BBC’s news agenda (which, to be fair, don’t just benefit one party or faction). What was even more astonishing was that in the flagship Ten O’Clock News on BBC television that evening the whole story barely rated half a throwaway sentence from one the political correspondents. If it was top story at 1pm, surely it counted for something at 10pm?

Alas this sort of muddle is becoming typical. But the BBC then became engulfed in a much more serious episode. The government last week launched a policy on what it calls “small boats”, headlined “Stop The Boats”, which, among other things, is designed to cancel asylum claims from refugees crossing the English Channel in dinghies. This policy deserves a post all of its own – though I’m a bit more sympathetic to the government than most other liberals. This generated the political controversy it was designed to. During the general shouting BBC sports presenter Gary Lineker tweeted his outrage at the policy, and compared the language used to justify it to 1930s Germany. There is a debate to be had, if anybody is interested, as to how far this claim is justified. The Holocaust came in the 1940s: Mr Lineker was talking about the propaganda that preceded it, building up the conditions that allowed it to happen. Still, the government has never encouraged violence against refugees. Actually, as the FT’s Stephen Bush points out, the government’s approach can be more fairly compared to 1930s Britain, who ignored the plight of refugees from Nazi Germany, on the grounds that it was somebody else’s problem (as did almost every other country in the world). The usual suspects complained that this was an outrageous act for a BBC personality, and undermined the institution’s impartiality. They’d had Mr Lineker’s card marked for some time as a member of the sinister liberal elite.

The BBC Director General responded by withdrawing Mr Lineker from his presentation of Match of the Day the following weekend. He had breached BBC guidelines – or as it guidance? Normally BBC guidelines allow freelance sports presenters to express political opinions – anything else would be an outrageous infringement. But they had been modified to impose extra standards on big stars. This undoubtedly applied to Mr Lineker, the BBC’s best-paid presenter (best-paid anything, I think). In fact I suspect this policy was adopted with Mr Lineker in mind after an earlier round of complaints. This turned a minor media skirmish into a major news story – as Mr Lineker’s colleagues pulled out of the BBC’s weekend sports coverage. They couldn’t even give us the main football scores on the evening TV news. It wasn’t hard for critics of the BBC to point out inconsistencies in the way the BBC applied its guidance (the political presenter Andrew Neil was an oft-quoted example). More to the point, the episode had clearly touched a raw nerve amongst BBC journalists, doubtless including many who disagreed with Mr Lineker’s expressed view.

I haven’t seen any public polling on the issue. Many people have been cheering Mr Lineker on. Many more feel that a sports presenter should be allowed to express political views. Conservatives often make pleas for freedom of speech for “politically incorrect” views – and it’s hard even for them to understand why this should be an exception. Opposition parties have piled in criticising the BBC management – though they mostly draw a connection with a row over the apparently politically connected appointment of BBC Chairman, an entirely separate episode. The top priority for Conservatives seems to be to re-energise their more conservative supporters, who are in a funk; they seem less bothered by trying to win back more liberal former supporters. If that is so they shouldn’t be too worried by the political fall-out. Still, liberal supporters aren’t just a tiny elite, and if can’t be good for the government to keep crossing the street to slap them in the face.

But for the BBC, the episode shows what happens if you keep giving in to political pressure. You don’t just get fairly harmless nonsenses like the Nadine Dorries interview: you ultimately lose credibility.

Is Liz Truss right about the “economic establishment”?

UK Treasury: Picture by Carlos Delgado, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19020165

Last weekend former British prime minister Liz Truss reentered the public sphere with an essay in the Sunday Telegraph, and an interview with The Spectator, publications that are both relatively sympathetic to her cause. This has occasioned much derision in the wider media. While I share much of this derisive view of her, I’m not going to join the chorus – it’s been said too well by others. Ms Truss has simply reminded most people why they dislike her so much. I want talk about the issues she raises, both in terms of economic policy, and how it can be implemented in Britain’s institutional environment.

Ms Truss’s starting point is what is widely seen as the UK’s dismal economic performance since the great financial crisis of 2008-09. Economic growth has been dismal, and if Britain has been able to maintain the pre-crisis trend of growth, then, according to Tim Harford in the Financial Times, it would be a staggering 40% better off. She attributes this to policy mistakes – a view that seems to be widely shared, even if not many agree on what those mistakes were. Personally, I differ from this – I think that the lack of growth is a reflection of adverse economic conditions, which started before the crisis – principally demographics and a changed world trade environment, made worse by Britain’s lack of a strong manufacturing industry. Liz Truss’s solution is to go back to policies popularised by the US president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and often attributed to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher too, though in fact she was much more cautious. These are mainly a matter of tax cuts, especially for businesses and the well-off, and deregulation. What she particularly favours is to proceed with tax cuts without regard to short-term effects on the public budget deficit, in the belief that an expanding economy will make things good in the longer run. She was always reluctant to talk about cutting public spending, and in the case of defence, advocated a substantial increase.

Her views on tax are largely magical thinking. Tax cuts might directly stimulate growth by increasing demand, but not as efficiently as many other policies, such as more generous state benefits, and not at a time when inflation is running riot. Lower corporate taxes might attract inward investment – but they are not widely thought to be a major factor, especially when the country’s politics seem so unstable. To her credit, though, apart from tax cuts, she advocated supply-side reforms that stand a much better change of promoting growth. These included easing immigration rules and making it easier for parents of small children to reenter the labour market. These weren’t popular in her own party, though. In her speech to the Conservative Party conference she decried an anti-growth coalition – which it struck many observers as being mostly her own party. However, her supply-side ideas had nothing like the heft to make more than a small difference to the country’s growth rate. Tax cuts (or forgoing tax increases) were her only big idea.

She has a second huge blind spot: inflation. She does not appear to understand that this usually arises from excess economic demand – and therefore that taming it requires deliberately crimping economic growth. She persistently seemed to think that inflation was somebody else’s problem – in particular the Bank of England’s. I find it astonishing that somebody whose degree course included economics (PPE at Oxford) can have thought this way. Everything interacts with everything else, and if you are the head of government, you are ultimately responsible for all the tools of macroeconomic management. What individuals do with their personal time may not be government’s problem; what public institutions do most assuredly is, even if they are run at arms length.

But amid all this foolishness and and failure to understand how things actually work, she did touch on something that is true. She railed against the “economic establishment” (the Sunday Telegraph unhelpfully added “left-wing” to this in their headline, but she neither said that nor meant it). She was particularly vehement about Treasury orthodoxy, which she saw at first hand in two years as a Treasury minister. The power of this orthodoxy undermines, usually fatally, any attempt to implement policy that contradicts it. That included her fiscal policies. They didn’t have her back when things got rough, and they forced an about-turn on most of them. What is a bit less clear is how Ms Truss fits the people controlling the world’s financial markets into this orthodoxy. She and her supporters are trying to blame the derivative based policies used by many pension funds for creating an unstable situation, about which nobody warned her or her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwateng. The Bank of England, also part of the orthodoxy, should have handled this better, they suggest. Rather interestingly, when she describes these polices as allowing the funds to invest more in businesses rather than bonds, they sound like just the sort of pro-growth idea she should be supporting. Of course the real problem here was the imperious arrogance with which she and Mr Kwateng treated financial markets. And as for the Bank of England, it was widely known that it was struggling to manage markets because inflation had caused a reversal of its loose-money policies, especially Quantitative Easing, upon which markets had come to depend..

I have some radical economic ideas of my own, though quite unlike Ms Truss’s. These are that Britain is far too centralised, and that responsibility for the many trade-offs required in financial and wider policy need to be radically decentralised. It’s not surprising that people oppose housing or industrial investments in their local area, when they will not be accountable for the benefits. The tough decisions are made in Whitehall, leaving with nothing else to do but complain. But this is part of the Treasury orthodoxy too – they don’t want a chaotic decentralisation, with corrupt nobodies taking decisions without the Treasury having ultimate sign-off. When the government wanted to distribute funding for its “Levelling Up” agenda, it didn’t distribute funds for disposal by the city regions and councils, it made these institutions put in bids for the imperious mandarins to pick from. To be fair, government leaders seem a bit embarrassed about this, and say there will be changes in future. But how did they allow this in the first place? And what credibility do their promises to do things differently next time have? The Treasury will undermine any effort they make to reform things. It is now reported that the Treasury is refusing to authorise any capital projects proposed by the Department for Levelling Up. The Treasury isn’t all in the wrong here: the levelling up funding was originally envisioned by former prime minister Boris Johnson as a politically directed slush fund to help win marginal constituencies. The power of the orthodoxy is that it is often right.

So the “economic establishment” would undermine my ideas for reform just as surely as they did Ms Truss’s. It’s a real thing. Any serious attempt at political reform therefore has to take on the orthodoxy and beat it. It can be done. Mrs Thatcher did it, and, to some extent, so did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for Labour in the early 2000s, especially with their radical expansion of health funding (and it required both of the double-act to do it). It took these leaders years and all their political skill. The remarkable thing about Liz Truss is that she thought she could break the Treasury in an afternoon, based on a mandate she had won from 100,000 or Conservative Party members.

And that is the point. We need political leaders who understand the orthodoxies and how to challenge them – people with political skills high and low. The current government possess few, if any, people of that description. Do Labour? I really don’t know. I haven’t been that impressed with Sir Keir Starmer, their leader, or Rachel Reeves, his Shadow Chancellor. But I could be wrong – they are becoming more effective. One opposition politician I am sure has the necessary heft and skill is the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, having honed those skills as energy minister in the coalition government of 2010-2015. Perhaps he will get another chance.