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.
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..
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.
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.
Labour shortages mean that the pay of refuse workers is advancing
It turns out that the leaders of Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties agree on quite a lot. The latter, Sir Keir Starmer, gave a quite a weighty speech to the Confederation of British Industry this week – which did much to help his gravitas as prime-minister-in-waiting. What has drawn most attention is his opposition to excessive immigration (not clearly defined, of course) and commitment to making Britain a high-wage, high-productivity economy. This was one of the main planks of Tory policy in at least the last two general elections, and still is – in contrast to integration with the European Union’s labour and product markets. Many in the CBI want a more flexible approach to immigration (to say nothing of more integration with the EU) – but they weren’t getting it from either leader.
The politics are obvious. Immigration is a touchstone issue in Britain, as it is in much of the world. The public thinks that the ruling elite were too relaxed about immigration and this was one of the main factors behind the populist backlash of the last decade, and the Brexit referendum result in particular. Labour are less trusted by the public on the issue, and so need to show a visibly firm line, or they won’t win back the voters that have deserted them since their last election victory in 2005. And the idea that choking off cheap labour from abroad will raise living standards is superficially plausible. In fact it was one of the more plausible claims made by the supporters of Brexit. And having done Brexit, I can understand how mainstream politicians feel the need to try and make the idea work.
But how does political necessity fare against reality? Most people seem to have very little idea of how the high-wage economy is actually supposed to work. It’s a bit like the “Australian-style points system” to manage immigration, which most people think is a jolly good idea, without having much clue about what it actually is, and how it compares to alternatives. The main target audience for economic policy ideas seems to be property-owning retired folk in the English North and Midlands (and in the English South and Wales, to be fair), who have little direct stake in a modern, functioning economy – which is all somebody else’s problem. Meanwhile they insist that there is “no room” for more immigrants – and fear that it erodes English national culture. There is therefore no particular need to explain the actual impacts of policy.
The overall economic theory is clear. If we can raise economic productivity, there is more money per head to go round to support higher wages. By choking off the supply of cheap labour from abroad, employers will be forced to use the available resources, i.e. local workers, more productively. There are two basic problems with this line of argument. The first is that higher income per head on average does not guarantee higher income for everybody. An imbalance of power in the labour market leads to high pay for the powerful at the expense of the powerless. The hope is that cutting immigration strengthens the bargaining power of less powerful. Academics argue about whether it is true – but it is not hard to find anecdotal evidence of just this. A shortage of lorry drivers following Brexit has recently driven up their pay – and with it incomes workers in related fields, like refuse collection. Still, we shouldn’t forget, as Tories sometimes do, that better wages depend on the bargaining power of workers.The second problem is that productivity is only part of the equation – the proportion of working people, or working hours per head of the total population, is critical too. In fact in a modern developed economy it is probably more important – and it has been falling due to demographic pressures, the propensity of older workers to retire on their savings, and (perhaps) lack of access to health care for longer term and mental conditions. Immigration raises the ratio of working people in the short and medium term – which is why so many people think it is a good idea.
Still, let’s put these problems aside, and try to imagine what a high-wage society looks like. It is in fact not too hard to find such societies. They are usually located in spots in the developed world with a low population density. These are often tourist hotspots and it is mainly as a tourist that I have visited them: in Australia, New Zealand, Western Canada, Norway and Switzerland. The first thing you notice is that there aren’t many workers. If you are on safari in Africa, you will get a tour guide and driver as a minimum. In Canada and Australia the same individual does both roles. Go into a shop and there are few people to serve you. And there aren’t many shops. At hotels you carry your own bags. You get something of the Tesco automated checkout phenomenon. Self-service amounts to higher productivity for Tesco, but all they are doing is making you do more work for yourself. An experienced cashier is much quicker. In a high-wage economy you may find yourself eating at home instead of at restaurants – or inviting friends for drinks at home rather than trying to find a bar. The cost of services involving human contact is relatively higher.
So where are the workers? Not so many in the tourist spots, though there will be people delivering high-end products or services at quite a cost. They are mostly somewhere else, delivering highly productive goods or services. In Australia and Canada there is mining; in Norway there is oil; in Switzerland there is sophisticated manufacturing (chemicals and such) and banking. These are linked to exports, so that high-wage countries tend to be high-exporting ones, usually running trade surpluses.
Here’s the key. Some gains to wages for the less well off can be made by reducing profits and cutting top-level pay. But not enough and not sustainably. A large proportion of workers need to be employed in highly productive fields. If businesses simply raised prices to pay for higher wages, we end up where we started by putting so many things out of the reach of less well-off workers. But high productivity industries in the modern era are very productive indeed. They don’t employ many workers and usually need exports to to be sustainable.
And so we can start to see the characteristics of a high-wage economy. Workers must have strong market bargaining power, generally by being in short supply. There must be a strong, highly productive core to the economy, generating a substantial export trade (overall trade doesn’t need to be in surplus in theory – though in practice this often seems to be the case). And most people will have to put up with doing more things for themselves, as the price of services is high – and especially in rural areas. Taxes are also likely to be quite high to to support public services such as health and education – as a strong state underpinning of these, and an effective social safety net, is all part of the ethos – and supports the strong bargaining position of workers generally.
In Britain the problem is obvious. Labour shortages are improving the bargaining position of workers. We are moving towards a self-service economy as these labour shortages sweep through the hospitality industry amongst others. But what of the highly productive core? Here we are faced with a fleet of ships that have sailed. Fossil fuels are depleted and anyway a problem in the zero-carbon future. The country’s manufacturing has been hollowed out – the trade deficit is of very long standing. Financial services provided a lot of punch in the earlier years of the 21st century, but are going through rough patch in the 2020s. Brexit is widely blamed, but in truth the problems are wider. A lot of the strength of the mid-noughties turned out to be fictional – and it was very centred on London. The country needs to look to the future, and not try to recreate old glories. Here the parties do differ a bit. There doesn’t seem to be a coherent Conservative strategy at all. Their basic idea is to create fruitful conditions for investment and sit back and wait. Liz Truss, Mr Sunak’s predecessor, did lend some coherence to this approach. She wanted to create a low-tax, low-regulation haven for footloose international businesses. This idea quickly collapsed, leaving Mr Sunak plying platitudes about innovation. His government looks increasingly paralysed by internal divisions and unable to implement any decisive strategy.
Labour’s big idea is the green economy (something promoted by the Lib Dems and Greens too). This entails a massive investment programme designed to transform the country’s infrastructure as well as develop export industries. This is a good idea, but a lot of the work involved (home insulation for example) is not high-productivity. And there is intense competition for the rest – batteries and wind turbines for example. Still, it doesn’t do to underestimate British inventiveness, and public-private partnerships in this area surely provide part of the answer. Also renewable energy does offer high productivity, without the need for exports. There are other ideas. I have often talked about health care and related services, where Britain has a promising base – and where the NHS offers world-class data for developing new treatments – as the covid episode showed.
But there is a gorilla in the room that the politicians don’t want to talk about. This isn’t Brexit (though they don’t want to talk about that either). This has created problems for developing export industries – but other EU members are further down the path of developing exports and British industries struggled to compete with them in the single market. Britain’s trading problems got worse within the EU, after all, even if there were compensations. The gorilla is public sector pay – especially if we include the issue of social care. High wages mean high levels of pay in the public sector. Not all public sector jobs are badly paid, but the pressure of a tight labour market is putting public services sector under pressure. Staffing shortages are rife in many parts of it. Meanwhile part of the government’s anti-inflation strategy is to hold back public sector real pay levels – which is making matters worse. The answer is either to shrink the public sector or to raise taxes. Of course the politicians hope that an explosion of high-productivity private sector jobs (with associated tax revenue) will come to their rescue. But it won’t happen in time, if it ever does.
This is a tough place to be in, so it’s no surprise that our politicians are slow to confront the truth of it. I have to admit that it is forcing me to rethink some of my assumptions. But I do think that the vision of a high-wage economy is worth pursuing. The main alternative being offered by those interested in social equity is a universal basic income paid by the state. I am deeply uncomfortable with that idea for a number of reasons. Given that, here are two things to be thinking about.
The first doesn’t involve any great rethinking on my part, but remains politically toxic. We need higher taxes. This is not just on various soft-spots and loop-holes in the wealthier parts of the economy – schemes that are predestined to disappoint. Higher taxes need to affect most people. This is because public spending will have to rise to accommodate higher public sector pay – and we need to manage down the level of demand in the rest of the economy to help stabilise it, to say nothing of limiting the need to borrow money on world markets. Of course public sector productivity can be improved (though I prefer the word “effectiveness” to “productivity” – as a lot of the solution is lowering demand by forestalling problems), reducing the need for spending. But our political class, our civil servants, and the commentators and think tankers that critique them, have almost no idea how to achieve this. They are stuck in an over-centralised, departmental mindset. What is needed is locally led, locally accountable, cross-functional, and client-centred services – an idea that is so alien to British political culture that most people can’t even imagine it. So we can’t count on that idea and must settle for replacing the dysfunctional with the merely mediocre, with no cost-saving.
The second idea is even more contentious, and I haven’t properly thought it through yet. It is that inflation is an essential part of the process of readjustment, and we have to tolerate it to a degree – provided that the source of that inflation is a rise in pay for the less well-off. As somebody who grew up in the 1970s, I hate inflation. I think it undermines trust between the state and the governed. I have never subscribed to the view of liberal economists that it can be a tool of economic management. But there have to be exceptions. One example was Ireland in the 2000s, as that country worked through its economic transformation as it integrated with the EU economy, which did involve a spurt in productivity. Wages rocketed, driving inflation up. Ireland was in the Euro, so there was no ability for the currency to appreciate to ameliorate the effect. This was the only way for the country to reach the sunlit uplands – which didn’t stop the European Central Bank from criticising it – something my economics lecturer at UCL said was absurd.
Britain’s position is different from Ireland’s. We haven’t had that productivity spurt. There is nothing to drive an appreciation of the currency. But we want wages amongst the less well-off to rise. Price rises are part of the adjustment – with inflation acting as a tax on the wealthy, as part of a redistribution process. Meanwhile we need to drive capital investment – most renewable energy is very capital intensive, for example – as are most of the ideas for developing higher productivity. That means keeping interest rates low. Which won’t happen if interest rates are jacked up to combat inflation. And, as suggested already, to the extent that inflation needs to be managed, higher taxes are a better way to do it.
This is quite a progression in my personal thinking (and thank you to regular commenter Peter Martin for helping me along the way – though doubtless we still disagree). But trying to get to the fairer, more sustainable society we seek is going to require many of us to change our thinking – and put up with some things we don’t like.
When Theresa May went to the country in the general election of 2017, she promoted herself under the slogan of “strong and stable”. Polls showed the Conservatives heading for a massive landslide. Polling day came a few weeks later, and the party lost its majority. British politics has not settled down since. The “strong and stable” label for the Tories has never looked less appropriate, though that won’t stop the party from trying to use a version of it again. Reliable predictions are impossible, but it’s still worth trying to get some idea about how things could develop from here.
When Boris Johnson won his landslide for the Conservatives in December 2019, it was commonplace to suggest that it would be impossible for Labour to come back to winning a majority in one go. I always thought that was nonsense – an example of the human cognitive bias towards the status quo. It was suggested that a turnaround on such a scale would be unprecedented. So what? Less than three years later under Liz Truss, Conservative polling plumbed to such depths as to suggest not only a Labour majority, but a landslide. Now she’s gone, and the dust has far from settled.
Slowly the poll ratings are coming back to the Tories, but the Labour lead remains massive. The new Conservative leader, Rishi Sunak, is regarded much more favourably than his predecessor by the public, especially on the critical area of economic competence. It is possible to sketch out a scenario whereby he manages to claw his party back to winning a majority at the next election. Economic competence is at the centre of such a scenario.
Now it is important to understand how the public perceives economic competence. It has little to do with actual competence. The critical signs for the public are keeping a tight reign on public spending, and also for the economy not to be subject to dramatic adverse changes. Economic growth does not count for as much as many people seem to think. The bedrock of Tory support is retired. They have paid off their mortgages, have substantial value in their houses, and receive reasonably secure pension income, some of it from the state. They don’t like higher taxes because their income is relatively fixed. But unemployment, higher interest rates, and so on hurt them little. They shrugged at warnings that Brexit would damage the economy, and still do, even as many of the warnings are being realised. They are for economic growth in theory, but against just about any policy that will bring it about. There aren’t enough such people to produce a winning majority, but without them, or a substantial majority of them, the Tories cannot win. Labour under Tony Blair wooed enough of them over to put the Conservatives out of power for more than a decade.
On top of this bedrock the Tories need to win over another swathe of voters with conservative instincts. These are more aspirational; they have jobs (usually in the private sector) and own their homes, or feel that home ownership is within reach. This group is going to be put under pressure by higher interest rates. Mr Sunak may escape blame for the current rise in rates, justifiably or not, thanks to the political ineptitude of his predecessor. But it’s important that the rates don’t keep going up. That means running a conservative fiscal policy. Both he, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, seem to understand this. If inflation turns a corner, thanks to easing world conditions for energy and food, the pressure on interest rates will ease and it will look as if the government has managed a crisis well. The Tories would be in a position to raise doubts about Labour or a “coalition of chaos”, and, combined with the redrawing of parliamentary boundaries, there lies a narrow path back.
The threat to Labour of such a scenario is real enough. The public retains a serious bias against the party on economic management. This was made worse during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader. This wasn’t so much from what he and the party actually said – his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, proved to be an able communicator – than from a general attitude by the party that used the word “austerity” as a term of abuse. The party made no attempt to pick fights with interest groups on the grounds that “we can’t afford that”. Things are much better under Sir Keir Starmer, though he has not picked able communicators as shadow chancellors – the best that can be said of the current incumbent, Rachel Reeves, is that she is more effective than her predecessor, Anneliese Dodds. Their strategy seems to be, as it was under Mr Blair and Gordon Brown, “the same, only different”: trying to pick only carefully chosen and relatively minor differences, like windfall taxes, but copying Tory policy otherwise. When Tory policy goes crazy, as it did under Ms Truss, this leaves them looking muddled. They were much happier under Boris Johnson, who tried to dodge hard choices altogether, meaning theatre was less pressure on Labour to confront choices it would rather not. Labour will face an awkward strategic challenge under the Sunak-Hunt regime. The “same, only different” strategy is still viable, but it will pose some awkward choices on its attitudes to public spending.
Mr Sunak is left with two major headaches, though. The first is on public services. The government will be forced to constrain resources in order to manage the budget deficit. The timing is awful. Services across the board – health, education, the police, courts, to name only the most obvious – are all under stress, and they are about to be put under further pressure by workers demanding that pay keeps pace with inflation. The job market remains quite tight, so retaining staff is going to be hard. And these public services, mostly, matter to people. The obvious cuts have already been made, and saving money through more competent management is something this government seems to be unable to pull off – years of incompetent leadership are a large part of how they got into this mess. Politicians have lived too long on the notion that message and narrative matter more than operational effectiveness. The government could face constant distraction from one public service crisis to the next, giving the overall impression that they have been in power too long and their time is up. They won’t be able to rely on trying to divert the focus to Labour.
The second problem for Mr Sunak is related: his party lacks competence and discipline. Crisis in public services could be compounded by parliamentary rebellions and questions over his leadership. His need to maintain a broad church of views within the cabinet does not help. Trouble with the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, illustrates this. She goes down a storm with party activists, and helps keep the culture wars burning – but tub-thumping will help little in trying to run a complex and important brief, which has already suffered from years of poor leadership. She had already been sacked by Ms Truss for what amounted to gross disloyalty (thinly disguised as breach of ministerial procedure). She is more a politician than an administrator. But on the backbenches she could be a thorn in her leader’s side.
To people like me, it is hard not to think that these are symptoms of a political system that may have worked once, but which has long since ceased to do so. Politicians achieve high office by playing the gallery to a small coterie of deranged activists and donors, and where administrative competence and negotiating skills count for little. So it is disappointing that Labour are offering no serious political reform. Activists support the introduction of proportional representation, but Sir Kir has no intention of letting that get into his manifesto. He is worried that marginal conservative voters will react against it. That may be a sound judgement. Perhaps if a coalition is forced on him by the Liberal Democrats, he will entertain some degree of reform. There may be something in Tony Blair’s strategy of being cautious before winning power for the first time, and more radical on the next occasion. But for now it is hard to know whether the Labour party is on the right strategic course, and has enough competent people at the top. To me it looks vulnerable.
But there are good odds on Sir Keir being the next prime minister – and that looks justified.
It looks certain that Liz Truss will become British prime minister this week, and British politics will take a dramatic turn. It is surely an act of political suicide by her Conservative Party.
We are, of course, urged not to underestimate Ms Truss – as so many of us have in the past. And yet, Matthew Parris in The Times tells us that this is a mistaken sentiment – just as it was for Boris Johnson and for Donald Trump – also politicians who won the top job against huge scepticism of their fitness for the job. She really is as shallow and dangerous as she looks.
I agree. During her bid to persuade first Tory MPs and then ordinary Tory members to vote her into the job, she has backed herself into a difficult corner. Her fiscal policies are inflationary; her economic ideas delusional, and she has shown little aptitude for the negotiation and compromise that are essential to any successful political leadership. She is also a stiff and awkward communicator. She enters the job in the middle of an economic crisis – it is hard to see that she has much chance of a honeymoon period longer than a month.
It gets worse for the Conservatives. They have built their political appeal on the basis of being a safe pair of hands with the economy. Whether this claim has been justified is another matter: while the austerity policies with which the party was associated from 2010 until 2019 struck most voters as being careful and sensible, most economists regarded them as being inappropriate at best. Now that reputation for economic competence is under water. Recent polling shows a Labour lead on handling of the economy, as its does in overall voting intentions. This is very dangerous territory for the Conservatives – and Ms Truss is going to do nothing to improve it. The sort of tax-cutting fantasies that are popular on the American right do not play so well with floating voters here. And it is hard to see that inflation is going to improve much under her stewardship – not without a recession, which she is claiming that she can avoid.
Still, many observers think the Conservatives can pull things back. Ms Truss will hit the ground running, as she has had plenty of time to prepare. A new cabinet will be put in place quickly – and the current government lethargy will be replaced by energy and optimistic talk. There is bound to be a honeymoon bounce. Ms Truss might even go straight into a new general election. This would be perfectly justifiable, to give her a fresh mandate, rather than the flawed manifesto of 2019. The Conservatives have been planning for this possibility for some time, as new, and more advantageous constituency boundaries come into effect. They will likely be better prepared than they opponents. But the polling looks dire – and she and all her hangers-on will be dismayed at the idea of throwing away their coup so soon. Opposition is a dismal place to be for those used to government. Still there is a certain recklessness about Ms Truss, and I wouldn’t rule it out.
The main reason that people seem to think that the Conservatives might win the next election is a lack of belief in Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader. He is uncharismatic and cautious. It is hard to say what he stands for, and his polling is weak. But is this a Westminster bubble thing? Activists on the left like their leaders to be charismatic and radical – and so do the journalists and others who follow them. It is easy to see their disappointment. But FT columnist Janan Ganesh warns that this bias against the uncharismatic, also applicable to US President Joe Biden, leads us to underestimate them. Floating voters like their leaders to be reassuring and middle of the road – and, I would add, especially if those leaders are from the left. Radicalism is not a positive attribute. The Conservatives are walking into a trap.
The main equation for Labour is whether they will win the next election by themselves, or alongside the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dem leader, Sir Ed Davey, is no more charismatic than Sir Keir, though he is more experienced. He has made a lot of the political running in the last few weeks on the energy crisis – a subject he knows well as a former Energy Secretary. Like Sir Keir, he is relentlessly un-ideoligical. He is not trying to move the debate to the areas that his activists want to talk about – such as Brexit – but focuses on the areas that are close to floating voters top concerns. The other issue that the Lib Dems have been able to run with is the water companies’ disposal of raw sewage into rivers and the seaside. The Lib Dems are doing well in many Tory heartland seats where Labour is weak. The public ground is being subtly prepared for a coalition – or cooperation at least – between the two parties – in a way that it wasn’t before the Lib Dem coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, which saw Lib Dem support collapse.
It is reported that the Conservatives are preparing a campaign based on defeating the “Coalition of Chaos”, compared with strong and stable one-party government. This follows the successful deployment of this line of attack in 2015, which nearly wiped out the Lib Dems – though it failed in 2017, to the extent that the Tories are likely to avoid the slogan “Strong and Stable”, the basis of the 2017 flop. This line might gain traction if it looks as if a Labour-Lib Dem alliance will not gain enough seats to prevent the Scottish Nationalist Party from holding the balance of power. The SNP will not want to let in a Conservative government, but they will demand another referendum on independence. Labour and the Lib Dems are going to need to think through their strategy on that front with care, and not just hope that the issue won’t come up. But will the prospect of another Scottish referendum scare English floating voters? Probably not enough.
Sir Keir’s strategy was a risky one. He has done nothing to motivate his own activists – and gone out his way to insult the socialist left, the source of Labour’s most energetic supporters. He is unable to project the flair of Tony Blair, who previously made a floating-voter strategy work for Labour. But the Conservatives are playing into his hands.
This week’s Bagehot column in The Economist suggests that Labour’s policy of freezing energy prices is bad policy (actually “silly”) but good politics. It says that Labour has been too tied to “wonkery” – the design of policies that are clever enough to solve problems without the need to confront awkward choices. Their new policy is a welcome break form the current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer. But I don’t think the policy is quite so silly – even if Labour’s suggestions about how the costs will be managed mainly are.
The challenge is huge. British energy prices, especially for gas, have shot up this year. But that is just a foretaste. Further steep rises are in the pipeline: the graphic above, showing annualised costs, culled from the New Statesman (featuring widely quoted projections from Cornwall Insight – who seem to be the only people making them) shows the problem. The median annual household income is estimated to be £31,400 after tax – so costs are rising from 4% to maybe nearly 14% of income for the median household, and it could be double this for the bottom quartile. Other costs are rising too, and, for most people, pay is not keeping up (many senior executives and our local refuse collectors excluded). The media has little difficulty in finding cases of extreme hardship – of people choosing between energy and food for example – and, apparently, not even being able to heat that food up. In one case publicised by BBC News, somebody was selling their furniture to pay their bills. And that is before the forecast price rises have gone through, and before winter brings in the need for heating. Overwhelmingly the public feel that the government should step in to relieve hardship – although how many Conservative Party members share this feeling, while they choose their next leader, is not clear. So far, so clear.
This is where The Economist‘s wonkery comes in. The view amongst Britain’s policy wonks is that help needs to be concentrated on those that need it most. Trying to cap the price for everybody, a policy widely favoured in other European countries, is regarded as a bad idea. For two reasons: first it wastes public funds on people that don’t need it, and second it blunts the market signal that people should reduce energy consumption, and so ease the imbalance between supply and demand that is causing the problem in the first place. This thinking has guided government policy to date. British energy prices have been allowed to shoot ahead of those in the rest of Europe – while the government is trying to target the bulk of its help to the neediest. But this bumps into a major problem. How can the government tell who to help, and who can get along without it? They have two main ways of trying to do this. The first is to help those already entitled to other help, such as Universal Credit – and the second is to ask people to apply for help, and then to assess whether they actually need it.
Both solutions are badly flawed. A problem on this scale is going to hit many people not entitled to benefits, which have become notably stingier over time. I have seen this problem in a different context: the supply of free school meals to struggling families. Many families need the help but are just above the threshold for entitlement. The problem with asking people to come forward is that many will refuse to as a matter of pride, while others who don’t need the help will try their luck, and need to be weeded out in some way, or else the system will subject to allegations of widespread abuse. This last has been the case with help for businesses in the pandemic. This problem is what I have called the Information Gap. The state does not know enough about individuals or businesses to tailor its policies to specific need. It either creates universal entitlements, helping those who are not in need, or resorts to a number of very blunt instruments, which often create political backwash.
The Information Gap is not just some technical problem that can be left to policy wonks to solve. It is one of the central problems of the modern state, and everybody in politics, wonk or not, should be aware of it. There are three general philosophical approaches to dealing with the Gap. One is to use the best efforts of the state to gather information and close the gap, compelling disclosure as required. This is the approach we associate with the Chinese Communist Party; it is highly paternalistic, and seamlessly moves into the state intruding into our private lives in unexpected ways. And the state never gets enough information to solve the problem properly. Its opposite is the libertarian approach. This suggests that the state should not involve itself in helping individuals at all. It should establish a system of security and property rights, and not much else. This thinking is popular n the political right, though not amongst populists. The third approach is solve the problem through a combination of universal entitlements and high taxes. This has recently been popularised through the advocacy of Universal Basic Income. Of course nobody, or almost nobody, advocates taking any of these three approaches to the extreme. Practical statecraft involves balancing all three approaches. Politically, though, we need to develop a sense of in which direction is the site needs to tilt at the current time.
Alas politicians rarely succeed by being honest about the difficult choices involved. Tory leadership contender Rishi Sunak seems to be suggesting that we take the more paternalist approach – but without being clear as to how the information gap is to be closed. His past behaviour in the pandemic suggests that we will accept a high degree of failure and try to shrug it off. His rival, Liz Truss, is suggesting a more libertarian approach – but without being honest about the widespread hardship and business failure that is likely to result. And now Labour is suggesting the use of universal entitlements – but without being honest that this will lead to higher taxes. All three are displaying a dependence on magical thinking. Labour’s “costing” of its new policy is laughable – but the economic illiteracy it is showing is the rule amongst serious politicians, not an aberration.
Personally I think Britain needs to move further along the universal entitlements and high tax route – an approach derided by Ms Truss, but one which the better-run European states favour. That does lead to further problems. Public services will require more discipline to improve their effectiveness, which I believe will have to come alongside decentralisation – with political accountability moving in parallel. That will require deep reforms that people may support in theory, but will resist in practice. Without reform, services will simply gobble up resources without becoming more effective. A further problem, shown in other European countries, is that tensions over immigration have to be managed. If entitlements are high, the public resents people it sees as freeloaders – and there is political mileage in stoking up that resentment, whether fair or not.
So that’s two cheers for Labour – and indeed the Lib Dems whose policies Labour seem to be copying. Alas I don’t see any sign that either party is going to be honest about taxes. But the public, surely, will start to see the need for hard choices. The careers of the two British politicians most egregious in suggesting that no hard choices are required – Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn – have both ended ignominiously.
Hardly for the first time in my life, I have got something wrong. In my recent post on the Conservative leadership contest I suggested that Rishi Sunak would prevail over Liz Truss. This was based on the thought that Conservative members were more sensible than they are usually portrayed to be, and that they would react against the apparent recklessness of Ms Truss – t and favour Mr Sunak’s better presentation skills. I have badly underestimated Ms Truss, as I now think she is unstoppable, but I’m hardly the first person to do so.
Monday night’s TV debate showed why. Mr Sunak badly needed to portray Ms Truss’s economic plans as reckless (an opinion which I share), and especially that they could send inflation and interest rates up. He got his point across pretty successfully. In the process we found him talking over his opponent repeatedly with the confident male assurance that far too many of us have seen senior men do with female colleagues. Would he have done that with a male opponent? You bet he would – he was desperate to convey his message. So it probably wasn’t sexism – it was the opposite, not making concessions to Ms Truss’s sex. But it was a very bad look, and looks matter. Ms Truss held her line firmly; the waves broke over a rock. She had ripostes prepared, and she used them. Mr Sunak’s plans were contractionary (er… that goes with taming inflation); it was all Project Fear (a clever reference to the Remain campaign’s warnings of the economic consequences of Brexit – which have largely been proved right, but which Mr Sunak could not point out); it was all Treasury conservatism and “bean-counting” (true enough – but not actually relevant in this context). She surely did enough to cast doubt in Conservative members’ minds about Mr Sunak’s plans. Meanwhile Mr Sunak’s behaviour neutralised his actually rather impressive confidence and command.
This is a race between the tortoise and the hare, that we have so often seen played out in politics. The patient plotter quietly and relentlessly pursuing their ambitions, while their flashier opponents fall apart one by one. John Major; Gordon Brown; Theresa May – (you can go back further – Jim Callaghan; Ted Heath; Clement Attlee). Like all of these, Ms Truss has endured massive amounts of sneering criticism on her journey upwards. Apart from Attlee, though, none of them were particularly successful once they achieved the summit of their ambitions.
I have in fact met Ms Truss. It was before she was an MP, when she was attending a Lib Dem conference in the later 2000s on behalf of Reform, a think thank devoted to new ideas for public services. We exchanged pleasantries, but I don’t remember much beyond that. Reform’s ideas were (and still are) definitely centre-right – and more to the right in those days of New Labour. They favoured the conversion of state schools to academies, for example – something of a red herring in policy terms. As I remember they had better ideas elsewhere – they had a god line of constructive criticism. This part of Ms Truss’s career tells us two things. First is that she is fluent in the world of think tanks and policy debate. She is repeatedly portrayed as being a bit dim: this is far from true – but it is harder to shake the accusation of shallowness. The second thing this tells is us is that she is a professional politician, and knows no other trade. She was in her late 20s at this stage – was elected to parliament in 2010 and quickly became a junior minister (in 2012), reaching the cabinet in 2014. To be fair, she did train as a management accountant (i.e. a qualified bean-counter, like me, though working in business rather than in the profession) – but she did not take up any serious professional or management role. Her whole life seems to have been political – with politically active parents, and active with the Liberal Democrats at university, before taking up with the Conservatives. She paints this as a political journey, rather than opportunism – and I’m happy to take her word on this. I’m told she was never a left-wing Lib Dem, and the Conservative Party is in the long run a happier place for economic liberals – though deeply out of fashion in the 1990s. But a political career was clearly always on her mind.
Where does this leave us? We have no reason to doubt her conviction to a particular political philosophy (unlike Boris Johnson, for example) – that of being an economic liberal. But her attachment to particular policies never seems to be very strong. She knows all about how to win power, but her ideas about how to exercise it have less “bottom”. This isn’t all bad – disaster can happen when a particular politician has an idée fixe, which they pursue obsessively regardless of evidence. A particular disaster was Andrew Lansley, the first Health Secretary in the coalition government of 2010, who implemented an over-engineered reform of the NHS when it was already suffering reform fatigue. Ms Truss might have the flexibility to change course when things go wrong. The danger is that her yardstick of success is less about actual achievement than the political mood. She is not a conviction politician like Margaret Thatcher. If she was, she would have been completely thrown by Brexit, which she energetically opposed, and now supports with equal energy.
Getting the top job, if she succeeds, is going to be a big shock for her. You can’t get away with sleight of hand. If the economy goes seriously wrong, for example, she can’t simple vanish and blame somebody else. She may be comfortable with rapid changes of course, but she would then find it harder to persuade people to trust her. She is a poor public speaker, verging on disastrous. This was one reason that many people, including me, never took her chances of rising to the top seriously. She simply did not look the part.
As my readers will know, I think her ideas for tax cuts will be disastrous. They will hinder the fight against inflation, which will lead to increasing interest rates. They are a gamble that you can fight inflation without damaging economic growth. Given the obstacles the country is experiencing international trade and labour markets, not least by Brexit, this looks unrealistic. She may well be forced into austerity policies, including public service cuts just as an election looms.
So if I was a Conservative member I would choose Mr Sunak. But Ms Truss has been running this race for much longer than him. And it shows.
I’ve been away on holiday for the last week, near Bakewell in the beautiful Peak District of Derbyshire. So I haven’t commented on the race to succeed Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party – which under the UK’s unwritten constitution means the automatic assumption of the office of Prime Minister. I did watch (most of) the two televised debates. You will have to take my word for it that I was predicting that the final two would be Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss even as Penny Maudaunt was the 58% betting favourite to win the whole thing.
As I write, Ms Maudaunt may yet make it to the final two, to be decided by party members, and even Mr Sunak’s place there is not guaranteed. But let’s assume that things turn out as I predicted. Which one is likely to win overall? This is hard to predict. YouGov have made a valiant attempt as polling Conservative members, but to get their sample they are fishing in a large lake for a rare fish. Their polling suggests that Ms Truss has a comfortable lead. This fits with most commentators’ prejudices of the Tory membership, as most think they will prefer Ms Truss’s more ideological pitch – or may even be worried by Mr Sunak’s ethnicity. Actually I’m not so sure, and I expect Mr Sunak to prevail in the end.
These two candidates were always the strongest in the field of seven candidates left after Jeremy Hunt was eliminated. They have both held one of the great offices of state (indeed Ms Truss is still Foreign Secretary), and they are both well grounded in the sorts of choices governments have to make. The other candidates have come up with interesting debating points but show little evidence of actual grasp. Meanwhile both Mr Sunak and Ms Truss have come closest to putting forward coherent policy positions – and they clash. Mr Sunak has taken the continuity position, of keeping taxes and spending much as they are, and defending the various measures put forward to relieve hardship as the cost of living crisis takes hold. This makes sense as he was Chancellor of the Exchequer until very recently. This has been heavily criticised by Ms Truss. She says that the tax rises (National Insurance is going up, alongside Corporation Tax rates) will cause recession. Instead tax should be cut in the short term, to generate economic growth. Inflation should be curbed by the Bank of England – whom she suggested were in large part responsible for inflation in the first place.
Three questions are posed by this challenge. First, will tax cuts generate growth? Second, can Britain afford more public debt? And third, is the fight against inflation best left to the central bank? The first question is in fact quite complex one – and politicians of left and right often try to hide in the complexity to justify populist policies of lower taxes or higher spending.
There are a number of ways that tax cuts can stimulate growth. The most direct is by allowing people to spend more (assuming that it isn’t accompanied by public spending cuts) – which helps take up economic slack. Donald Trump’s tax cuts worked like this, at least to some extent. But there is very little sign of slack in the UK economy. Indeed this is one of the causes of the inflation crisis. Tax cuts will either fuel inflation or suck in imports (and the country is running a current account deficit). A second mechanism for tax to affect growth is by drawing in more capital – fixed or human – by improving incentives. The case for this is strongest for Corporation Tax – as this is something multinational companies factor into their choice of where in the world to invest – but there is little evidence that it is a big factor in the UK. But Corporation Tax is a very efficient tax, and low interest rates are keeping costs of investment generally low. There is in any case a big time lag between any tax cut and any change to investment behaviour – it will have little effect on whether the country avoids recession this year or next. The question of incentives for income taxes is much less clear – it is a classic essay question for first-year economics students. Lower taxes make work more rewarding increasing the incentive to do more, but also the could reduce the need to work to fund your chosen standard of living. If tax rates are very high (for example, the top rate of 83% current when I was calculating payroll deductions in 1976) the chances are that the former predominates – but the case is much harder to make at current levels. Tax cuts won’t help growth, especially in the short to medium term.
Can Britain afford to borrow more, meaning that it is easier to cut taxes without cutting spending too? The Conservatives promised not to do this in their 2019 manifesto. But Ms Truss suggests that we can get round this by classifying a chunk of debt as “Covid debt” to be paid off over a longer time frame. Mr Sunak says this is nonsense. Running a budget deficit in a country that controls its own currency isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it does not work like a household budget. If there is slack in the rest of the economy it is almost a national duty. And there is the argument that if the markets can’t stomach it, you can simply create the shortfall as money. But this can be inflationary, and there comes a point when the providers of finance insist on lending in other currencies. Britain has not been in anything like this danger zone since the early 1980s, when deficits from nationalised industries caused havoc to government finances. Inflation has made the picture more complicated, and debt levels are historically high (in part thanks to the covid crisis). But Ms Truss is probably right on this one – if you can deal with the arguments on inflation.
And here Ms Truss says the Bank of England can take more of the strain in turning the tide. Indeed she has suggested that the bank is partly to blame for the inflation crisis in the first place. In one of the debates she suggested that the Bank’s mandate should be modelled on that of the Bank of Japan. It is hard to credit this. The only way that the bank can fight inflation is to raise interest rates. This restrains growth – indeed the policy makes no distinction between restraining growth and restraining inflation – it tackles one through the other. From somebody who is suggesting that the problem is a lack of growth this is an extraordinary line to take. Further, the inflation problem has largely been brought about by problems on the supply side of the economy (oil/gas problems, Brexit, covid and a spate of early retirements in the workforce). It is hard to see how higher interest rates would have helped. It is simply a shallow attempt at blame shifting.
But none of the leadership contenders have wanted to confront the economic reality of Britain’s position. Britain’s workforce relative to its total population is shrinking due to demographic changes. Those same changes are placing public services under greater pressure, especially in health and social care. There are no soft spots on public spending – squeezing local authorities and benefits merely puts other services, especially the NHS and police, under yet more pressure. We have cut too much on defence. There is no productivity bonanza that will make public spending more affordable – or to be more precise, improvements in productivity are affecting a shrinking share of the economy, and cannot be expected to provide a get-out-of-jail-free card. All that points to higher taxes, or taking the country down the route of high inflation and currency and debt crises. By suggesting that he will only look at tax cuts once inflation has been dealt with, at least Mr Sunak has one foot on the ground. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king.
Funnily enough I have more sympathy with the Tory position than most on the left. Public spending (and taxes) should be subject to continual challenge. It is lazy to shrug our shoulders and suggest that nothing can be done. it is better for people to make their own choices n expenditure. There is a huge challenge in making public services more effective and accountable. But fantasy economics does not help.
