A very British spaghetti Western: the good, the sly and the downright inept

I spent the first couple of hours after the BBC exit poll for the UK General Election was announced at 10:00 last night doubting its accuracy. I wasn’t alone: former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown publicly swore to eat his hat on live TV if it were proved right. Fortunately for him the exit poll did indeed prove wrong. Unfortunately, things turned out to be even worse than it suggested.

What? What? The Tories on 316 seats?
I couldn't believe the scale of the victory

The next hour or so I spent trying to adjust my mindset to a completely different outcome from anything I’d been expecting. For weeks – months even – we’d all been forecasting a hung parliament (no party with an overall majority) and weeks of negotiations to put a coalition together to govern the country. That’s what the polls were telling us, after all.

Incidentally, I don’t believe the polls were wrong. What seems to happen is that a small but crucial number of people tell pollsters that they plan to vote Labour. They may not even be lying. That may be their intention when they say it. But then they go into the polling station and vote Tory.

In my mind, these so-called “shy Tories” are people who feel they really ought to vote Labour, perhaps because they know it represents their interests. So that’s what they tell the polling organisations.

But the Labour leaders are not unlike the Tories: educated at similar schools and universities, less wealthy perhaps but still far wealthier than anyone on the median wage or less. In the loneliness of the polling booth they think about these two sets of people, both representatives of what they may perceive as a kind of master class. If they are to choose one such person, why not make it the one born and bred to be a master – in other words, a Tory?

The final batch of polls had the following standings for the main parties on the eve of the election:

• Lord Ashcroft: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• Ipsos MORI: Conservative 36%, Labour 35%
• Populus: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• ICM: Conservative 34%, Labour 35%

All tight. And all of them adding up to a total, for the two main parties, of 66-71%.

The actual result was Conservative 38%, Labour 31%. A total of 69%, but a substantial lead to the Tories. All it takes, however, to get there from what the polls were showing is a switch by about 3-4% of the electorate. That’s probably about the extent of the “shy Tories” out there, and they determined the outcome last night.

It’s against that background that I set my British Spaghetti Western, The Good, the Sly, the Inept.

First, the good. That has to be the Scottish National Party, the SNP, and its leader Nicola Sturgeon who had an excellent campaign – rewarded by a near clean sweep of Scotland. There was a time that we in the Labour Party would laugh at the Tories for having only one Scottish seat. Now the laugh’s against us: as well as the Tories, we too, as well as the Liberal Democrats, only have a single Scottish seat.

The other 56 have been won by the SNP. It has even managed to win the election of the youngest MP for 350 years, Mhairi Black, a twenty-year old student who has to fit in finishing her degree in the next few weeks, around taking up her newly-won position at Westminster. She unseated Labour’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Douglas Alexander, in Paisley and Renfrewshire South.

Next, the Sly. This is the only prediction I got remotely right. The Tories are like the Sandman: get too close and you’re likely to fall asleep. Back in 2010, when they didn’t have enough seats to form a government, they approached the Liberal Democrats who then had 57 seats, to join them in coalition. The Lib Dems said yes, much to the amazement of many of us who had regarded them as a party of the centre-left, much more naturally allied to Labour than to the Conservatives.

We predicted that the electorate would take a terrible vengeance on them, reducing their numbers to a level from which it would be impossible to recoer for a generation. Even so, again guided by polls, most of us felt that they might hang on to 20-30 seats. In fact, they now have just eight. Some of the party’s biggest hitters have gone, including David Laws, one of the main architects of the coalition. The leader Nick Clegg clung on, but he’s leader no more, having resigned this morning.

And finally, the Inept. My own party. Our arcane constitution allowed the Trade Unions to foist on us a leader, Ed Miliband, who is I’m sure immensely likeable, principled, honest, decent and lots of other great things. But a no leader. He appointed as his Finance spokesman Ed Balls, and together they crafted a message to the effect that they, like the Tories, would impose a policy of austerity, but they’d do it more nicely.

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP pointed out that this stance presented the British electorate with the choice between Tory austerity, and Labour austerity-lite. Not exactly inspiring.

Working to get out the vote around Luton, I had someone tell me that she had voted Labour, but against her instincts – she felt little confidence in the party. One even said that she might not vote at all, because Labour hadn’t cleansed itself of the Blairite tendency that took us into war in Iraq.

As Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon’s predecessor as leader of the SNP, last night told TV presenter Jeremy Paxman in a master class on how to handle aggressive questioning, if Ed Miliband had “fought the sort of campaign that Nicola Sturgeon fought in Scotland, then he’d be in a much better position this morning.” Indeed. Though he might also have had to learn to handle the media the way Salmond and Sturgeon do.

Well, that’s all in the past now. Ed Miliband has also stepped down. And Ed Balls was defeated for re-election in his parliamentary seat.

Crafted the economic policy that contributed to Labour defeat
And paid by being beaten himself

They always say businesses should hire slow and fire fast. Labour elected Miliband to the leadership rather quickly. It became clear soon after that he wasn’t going to inspire enough of the electors he needed to reach. But we fired him slow. It took four years for him to go, and the price for the generosity which let him have a go at becoming Prime Minister is going to be paid by a lot of other people, during five years of continued Tory rule.

Italian spaghetti Westerns leave you feeling entertained. This British one, on the other hand, leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth. I suppose it’s like the contrast in weather between the two countries.

Miliband rules out working with the SNP. Seriously?

Picture the situation. A series of curiously convenient deaths have left you on the threshold of power in your nation. You have only to step forward to take it – and yet there’s an obstacle. You don’t share the beliefs of the majority of your compatriots. They wouldn’t accept you unless you change your views.

So what do you do? Do you accommodate their deeply held feelings or do you stand on principle? Do you give up the hope of power or do you compromise and win it?

Henry, King of Navarre, thought long and hard and decided compromise was the best option. “Paris,” he famously declared, “is worth a mass” and converted from Protestantism, to accommodate the wishes of his predominantly Catholic new subjects. So he became King Henry IV of France.

A good thing, too, for his subjects as much as for him. There haven’t been that many good kings, but he was one. Both sides gained from the bargain.

Good king Henry of France, for whom Paris was worth a Mass

Now fast forward rather more than four centuries. Britain stands on the edge of what looks likely to be the tightest general election since mass suffrage was introduced. The Conservative-dominated coalition with the Liberal Democrats is massively discredited. Its core concern has been for austerity economics as a way of to solve the nation’s economic woes: painful but, they would argue, necessary.

Well, we’ve had plenty of suffering, particularly amongst the most vulnerable sections of society: the poor have lost most of the safety net they might occasionally need and, even worse, the disabled, the ill, those most in need of help, have had state support withdrawn. The pain has been real. The gain, on the other hand, has been far less obvious: growth remains sickly to say the least and, while employment has risen, much of it has been in the most precarious form possible – the zero-hour contract, tying a worker to an employer who makes no guarantee of either work or pay.

Ed Miliband: trying to make up for lost ground
He may have to agree to things he finds distasteful

Sadly, though Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour-led Opposition has had an excellent campaign over the last few weeks, over the previous few years, he’s led the attack on the Coalition to limited effect. There have been occasional flashes: he opposed military intervention in Syria and, I suspect to his surprise, saw his stance adopted first in Britain and then, astonishingly, even in the United States. A great triumph, avoiding at least one lamentable and probably catastrophic intervention in the Middle East.

Generally, though, his leadership and the role of his most senior subordinate, Ed Balls, has been littered with gaffes and errors. The result has been clear and obvious: I’ve had people who, in the past, have voted for a variety of parties – people free of the tribal attachment that I feel to just one party – the so-called floating voters who’ve told me categorically that, however sick they are of the Conservatives, they could not bring themselves to vote Labour under Miliband.

The result is that Labour is level-pegging with the Tories in the last week of the campaign. And might even emerge with slightly fewer than Members of Parliament than they have – because it has massively lost Scotland. That nation, which previously sent huge number of Labourites to Parliament, has swung overwhelmingly in favour of the Scottish Nationalist Party. This is principally a reaction to inept English reactions to the defeat of the referendum on Scottish independence in September. It was the Conservatives who reacted least well, but Labour has paid the steepest price.

Miliband has therefore set his sights on winning over support from disaffected Conservatives – rather belatedly if, as I suggest, he had put off most floating voters earlier. In order to win Conservatives, he finds himself trying to ape Tory stances – being evasive on immigration, for instance, and instead of opposing the painful policies of austerity, suggesting a slightly toned-down version of them.

But the biggest concession he is making to the Conservatives is that he’s writing off any possibility of a deal with the SNP. The Tories constantly try to frighten voters with the prospect of a Labour government dependent on SNP votes, a UK government dependent on a party that wants to leave the UK, and Miliband has responded by toughening his rejection of proposals for collaboration from Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader.

First he ruled out a formal coalition, which he hadn’t been offered in the first place.

Now he’s saying that he wouldn’t come to any kind of a deal. He would rather not form a government at all than lead one on that basis. Which suggests he would answer Sturgeon’s recent question to him, “is it the case that you would rather see David Cameron go back into Downing Street than work with me?” in the affirmative.

Nicola Sturgeon. Hardly an ogre
It might be messy to work with her – but the alternative is far worse

Working with the SNP would indeed be messy, particularly after having ruled the prospect out so emphatically, in words that could come back to haunt him. But do we really want to see David Cameron returned instead?

Which brings me back to Henry IV. He said that Paris was worth a mass. Well, I hope Miliband realises that Downing Street is worth a mess. 

If he doesn’t, he would go down in history as the man who saddled Britain with an inexorably ruthless Conservative government, when he could have taken power himself at the price of a compromise. And turned into a good Prime Minister as Henry became a good king: Miliband could well be a fine Labour Prime Minister though a poor campaigner, rather like Clement Attlee, one of the Labour greats.

Turning his back on the opportunity might prove far messier still than taking it. For him personally. And, sadly, even more for the rest of us.

Nicola Sturgeon: another voice raised for a (moderately) radical approach to our problems

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, speaking in London today, called for an end to austerity policies and described their continuation as “morally unjustifiable and economically unsustainable.”

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP:
A radicalism so mild it's barely radical. But it's still refreshing to hear

Consensus is attractive when the alternative is conflict, but much less so when it just means conformity. Especially when what we’re conforming to is principally a matter of fashion.

It has been fashionable in the leading economies since the 1970s or 1980s, to proclaim belief in the working of free markets with minimal regulation. That view tended to come in tandem with faith in trickle-down economics: a free market will allow highly entrepreneurial individuals to make a great deal of money; when they spend it, the resultant wealth will trickle down to the rest of society.

Many of the measures that had been put in place to control, in particular, the financial sector were dropped during the time of Thatcher and Reagan. Unleashed, the banks took increasing risks in order to amass unprecedented fortunes, until they took a risk too many and came unstuck in 2008. At which point, people who had spent decades decrying state intervention, turned to the state – more precisely to all taxpayers, including the poorest – to rescue them from the disaster they’d brought down on themselves.

Unfortunately, holding out their hands to the state didn’t mean that these leaders of economic thinking were prepared to dump the ideology which, particularly in its trickle down aspect, had made them inconceivably rich over a generation.

The success of trickle-down was measured by their wealth; its failure by the impoverishment of everyone else. As Will Hutton argues in his insightful piece in today’s Guardian, “wages have fallen, in real terms, by the greatest degree in more than half a century, inequality of income and wealth have risen to desperately high levels that may soon metastasise into a serious economic and social cancer.”

Sadly, in Europe we’ve been driven since the 2008 crash by such carcinogenic thinking. The consensus claims that austerity is the only way out of this crisis: reduce government deficits and debt by slashing public spending, and we shall cure our problems. As Hutton points out, all this is achieving is to create a society in which “millions of workers struggle in a harsh demimonde of temporary jobs and zero-hour contracts.”

And yet these ideas, the new fashion, merely replaced economic thinking which could really explain our problems. The theories of John Maynard Keynes showed that it isn’t by reducing expenditure that a government gets out of economic difficulty, but by making investments. That provides employment which increases the tax take from workers, and it stimulates the economy to grow by increasing demand – which also increases the tax take. So paradoxically, the government may well get its deficit down more quickly by spending more, not less.

But we’ve been living the Reagan-Thatcher consensus. Keynes is out. Austerity and trickle-down are in. And, sadly, conformity to that credo has extended way beyond the traditional conservative parties. Many in the Labour Party, not least Tony Blair and his one-time voice piece Peter Mandelson, who famously – infamously – once declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

Well, I’d be relaxed about it too, if getting filthy rich didn’t always happen on the backs of a lot of poor people getting a great deal poorer.

To stand for a different set of ideas, for Keynesian ideas, is regarded by the proponents of austerity as a dangerous reversion to old-style, wildly left-wing socialism. Which is odd, since whatever Keynes was, he wasn’t a socialist. He wanted capitalism better managed, as does Hutton.

Calling for better management of our capitalist economy is dangerously radical? 

Seriously?

Keynes: hardly a left-wing firebrand
But we need his approach back, and that has to come from the Left

Fortunately the conformity to this dire consensus hasn’t been total. Every now and then a voice speaks out against these failed and failing views. And, recently, sometimes those voices have been heard.

I spoke yesterday about Alexis Tsipras in Greece. Succeed or fail, at least he’s trying a different approach in a country driven to despair by the previous policy of austerity.

Now Nicola Sturgeon has also spoken out. She, like many of us, feels there’s nothing tremendously inspiring about a Labour Party promising to do the same as the Tories, but a bit less, and a bit less fast.

And yet what she’s proposing isn’t that radical: an increase in spending of £180bn over five years of a parliament. That represents less than two years of running the English NHS, spread over five. Not exactly revolutionary: like Hutton, like Keynes, she just wants capitalism to behave more fairly.

But compared to everyone else calling for more cuts, isn’t it refreshing?

How sad that it has to come from a party whose main aim is the independence of Scotland. That the great party of the left in England, the Labour Party, didn’t beat her to it.

Ed Milliband, Ed Balls: come on, if Sturgeon can do it, surely you too can speak out for a real alternative to the failed policies of the Tories?

Time for the left to raise its game

Striking words, I felt, at the weekend from Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian:

Labour… [looks]… like a team facing an open goal and poised to miss. They need to raise their game – and fast.

Yes, I thought. We had Ed Miliband at the latest Labour Conference, insisting on proving the quality of his memory by delivering his key speech without notes, and then suffering a total memory failure and forgetting to talk about the economy (not the least significant of issues, one feels). And last week we had his Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer incapable of naming a single Labour donor, except for “Bill… Bill somebody…”

Ed Miliband: it's time to set the electorate alight

They seem to be taking aim at the government, but hitting their own foot.

Five years of shambolic government has hugely increased national debt while imposing austerity to reduce it. Austerity that has only left us with healthcare in crisis, education near bankruptcy and a police force unable to deal with crime. That sounds like an open goal. But Labour seem unable to get the ball into the net, with the opinion polls showing the two main parties level pegging.

What is it about this leadership that seems to leave it as though frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car? Why can’t it find a note that inspires the electors? The message that persuades the swing voters we so badly need, that it deserves the chance to form a government?

I keep watching Greece. I know that Alexis Tsipras may fall flat on his face and Syriza may find itself incapable of getting the nation’s creditors to ease their draconian debt conditions. But right now, at least he’s inspiring, he’s taking bold action, re-employing people thrown onto the jobless queue without hope of a job, raising the minimum wage to help alleviate the pain of utter, jaw-breaking poverty.

He’s telling the international financial community that he values their ability to make huge sums rather less than the ability of those who are suffering the worst hardship to feed and heat themselves.

Why can’t the British Labour Party strike that kind of note? Instead it seems exclusively concerned with convincing the business community that it can do just as well under Labour as under the Tories. And yet we all know that the business community will vote massively for the Conservatives whatever Labour leaders say?

Today, to add insult to injury, we had Nigel Dodds of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, generally far closer to the Tories than to Labour, saying that contacts he’d had with some Labour backbenchers suggested they’d rather a coalition with his party than with the Scottish SNP. Even though the SNP is firmly anchored on the left. Dodds may be making this all up, of course, but in my bones I fear he isn’t.

Britain’s not in as dire a state as Greece. We don’t need to be as radical as Tsipras. But some radicalism, surely, we can dig out of somewhere? Something that distinguishes us from the Conservatives? Something our supporters can rally round?

I have to confess that I wasn’t being entirely honest in quoting Freedland. He wasn’t talking about Britain, but about Israel. Where another right-wing government has left an open goal for Labour to shoot at – and finds Labour unable to take the shot.

Now I live in Britain and I’m a member of the British Labour Party. So my main priority is to see the Cameron government go and Labour back in office. But I have to admit if there’s a nation in even greater need of ridding itself of a dire government, it has to be Israel – and it would do the entire world a huge favour by dumping Netanyahu.

But, hey, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get rid of our mini-Netanyahus over here too. That needs a Labour leadership that gets some fire in its belly and inspires the electorate. As Freedland puts it: that needs to raise its game – and fast.

Shameless, racist, effective

There are times when the sheer effrontery of the Cameron government makes it hard to avoid a certain sneaking admiration for its downright shamelessness.

The latest wheeze is to send vans carrying ads against illegal immigration cruising through areas of high ‘ethnic’ population numbers.

Don’t you love that use of the word ‘ethnic’, by the way? I mean, we’re all ethnic aren’t we? We belong to some ethnos or other. Even the Aryan whites who can trace a thousand years of their family’s presence in this country belong to an ethnic group, even if it’s only the tribe of the superciliously insular.

The vans carry the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest’, followed by information such as ‘106 arrested in your area last week.’ ‘Arrested’, take note, not ‘convicted’. Who knows how many were here legally.

‘Go home’.
Just the message to display around ‘ethnic’ areas

Lord Ousely is a former Chairman of the Commission on Racial Equality. He is, of course, ‘ethnic’, in the common but deformed sense of belonging to an ethnic minority. He told the BBC this afternoon that he would, from now on, be carrying a passport at all times so that he can prove, if stopped, that he has a right to be here and isn’t just hanging around the House of Lords in the hope of earning a pound carrying a peer’s bags.

Lord Ouseley.
‘ethnic’ so he's taken to carrying his passport everywhere

It’s the ‘go home’ part of the sign that’s most offensive. It’s the slogan the far right has been using for decades. Usually, they spray paint it on walls at night. The government’s innovation is to use it on vans paid for with taxpayer’s money. 

Not much taxpayer money, as it happens. The whole campaign is likely to cost around £10,000, for the pilot stage now being run in London. And what a payback. We’re all talking about it. Me, sure, but far more importantly all the leading media outlets too. It may prove totally ineffective as a way of reducing illegal immigrant numbers, but boy it’s a great way of gaining publicity for the government.

And what publicity! Facing a major threat from their right, in the form of the United Kingdom Independence Party, the Conservatives are clothing themselves in the language of extreme racist movements, while being able to claim: ‘racist? us? we’re just trying to control illegal behaviour. Surely you can’t be against that?’

They even turn it against the opposition, claiming the measure is a response to Labour’s ‘open door’ policy towards immigrants. The hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were turned away during the Labour years will have trouble believing there ever was such a policy. Even in my memory, Labour tried on the same trick of looking for easy gains from the right by targeting immigrants who, after all, don’t have a vote themselves but get up the noses of quite a few people who do.

Why, Gordon Brown used the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’, which used to be a preserve of the far right.

So the Conservative Party is winning support from its right, and secondarily giving itself another stick with which to beat Labour. What if the initiative proves a failure as an immigration control measure? Who cares? It will have served its true purpose by generating a propaganda coup for the Tories.

It’s hard not to imagine the hand of Lynton Crosby at work here. He’s the campaign manager of the Tory party and reputed to be a man of just this kind of diabolical cunning. And it’s brilliant, isn’t it? Totally unprincipled and utterly shameful, but so effective. And, what’s more, we’re all paying for it.

There is of course a response. One can stand firm on principle but still hit back with the same kind of ruthless efficiency.

How about a campaign proclaiming that immigration control is fine, but it ought to stop short of ethnic cleansing? Equating the present Tory leadership with the likes of Bosnian Serb warlords may seem unfair, but we’re up against people who’ve got their gloves off and don’t care how low they stoop to land their blows.

What has the Labour leadership’s response been, actually? Absolutely nothing. Afraid of frightening away the racist anti-immigrant fringe that might vote for them, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls refuse to denounce ugly electioneering on public funds.

Do they believe that a softly-softly approach will work for them against this lot?

Britain needs Labour to unleash attack dogs

Depending on how you measure it, the UK is about eighth or ninth in the world in income per person per year. So it’s quite an indictment that 500,000 people are now dependent on food banks. Over two and a half million people are unemployed, but a million more are on ‘zero-hour’ contracts: they have to be available for work but with no guarantee that they will have anything to do or receive any pay. Not unemployed, perhaps, but barely employed.

One in six children lives in poverty, a figure that is climbing rapidly after the decline that occurred under the last government. And some of the poorest people in the country, dependent on benefits, many disabled, are seeing the amount they receive cut because they have a spare room in their homes – but 96% of them have no alternative accommodation to which they could move.

A state of affairs so shameful should spell disaster for the government presiding over it. It’s true that those suffering most are also the groups least likely to vote, but there is a huge layer of people not quite as vulnerable but who are finding their living standards squeezed, the ‘squeezed middle’ as the Labour leadership calls it. There are even others who are financially more secure but ashamed at what is being done, in their name, to the most vulnerable.

So it’s galling that the Labour opposition, after over a year with an opinion poll lead of around 11% – by no means outstanding for an opposition half way through a parliament but a reasonable platform – has failed to build on it and instead sunk back to around a 6% lead. Given the tendency of the electorate to swing back towards the incumbents as an election approaches, that’s perilously close to defeat levels.

What’s going wrong?

It isn’t that the Labour leadership, of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, are preaching some kind of wild radicalism that would put off middle-ground voters. On the contrary, they’re even committing to respecting the budget cuts being made by the present government, and only to spending more for the purposes of investment.

Their message overall is that the vast majority of people are paying over the odds for economic policies which don’t guarantee economic health, but will massively benefit the wealthiest. It’s a perfectly sensible position and one that should be generating increasing support.

Ed Miliband
Probably a nice guy, possibly a great Prime Minister
But he needs to be less of the former to become the latter

No, what seems to be the problem is that they’re simply not displaying the kind of strength voters appreciate. Ed Miliband gave a disastrous interview in April in which he came across as unbriefed about his own policies on VAT, and since then has had trouble taking the initiative on economic matters. Then it emerged that the Unite union, one of Labour’s most important, and above all most generous, contributors might have been trying to influence the selection of a parliamentary candidate in Falkirk by devious means. Miliband decided to take on the union, which might seem resolute, except that it’s rather a matter of sawing off the branch on which you’re sitting.

What’s more, it led to Miliband having to part company with his campaign manager, the feisty and effective Tom Watson.

Meanwhile, the Tories have wasted no time signing up and unleashing their attack dogs.

First they appointed Lynton Crosby as their campaign manager. He won an enviable reputation as a highly effective political operator in his native Austrialia. There has been a major scandal about his possible conflict of interests (he is also a consultant to tobacco companies and the government has gone notably soft on them recently), but somehow the Party is weathering the storm. Meanwhile, one can see his hand behind some recent hard-hitting campaigns, for instance to use the Falkirk miseries to present Labour as divided and in hock to the unions.

Now they’ve also recruited Jim Messina from the States, who’s responsible for what has come to be thought of as the most homophobic campaign advert in US history.

Crosby and Messina aren’t going to be pulling their punches.

And what has Labour’s response been? Over a month after Tom Watson’s departure, the Party hasn’t yet appointed a new campaign manager. It’s as if the two Eds think that being sensible, moderate and reasonable is enough to win elections.

They need to think again. This is no time for Mr Nice Guy. Those qualities may make for a great government, but they don’t help you get into a position to form one. They need to expose the present administration as what it is: without either competence or compassion. They need to show again and again, on issue after issue, how they fail and how they damage everything we hold dear. That’s what a Crosby or a Messina would be doing if Labour had them. It’s what the Eds need to learn to do.

What the country needs is another Labour government like the one Clement Attlee led in 1945. One of the great reforming governments of the twentieth century. That’s the kind of government that can tackle the rising child poverty, the assault on the disabled, the relegation of millions into unemployment or precarious employment.

But that will only be possible if Labour’s leaders can find the relentless drive and focus that marked a Tony Blair or, in the sixties and 70s, a Harold Wilson.

Leaders with the vision and the principle of an Attlee, but the election-winning capabilities of a Blair or a Wilson? An elusive combination. Can the Eds rise to the challenge.

Maybe. But sadly the jury’s still firmly out.

Try opportunism: at least it works

Opportunism always seems terribly distasteful. Unfortunately, it’s highly effective.

In Britain today we have a government that assured us, when campaigning for office, that the only way to emerge from the financial crisis was to reduce the national debt, whatever the price, to allow for growth to take off. Three years later, the only growth has been in the debt itself, though the price has been high: 300,000 more children plunged into poverty, healthcare costs climbing while resources and quality fall, education in disarray.

In those circumstances, you’d expect the opposition to be making serious gains. Instead, after having moved ahead by as much 11-13 points in the polls, itself not a comfortable cushion two years before an election, the Labour has drifted down to as low as 5-6 points recently. It looks now as though the fall has stopped and the lead is back up at around 8 eights, but that’s still low.

Against a government without either competence or compassion.

What the government has is a good sense of PR and a lot of friends in the media. That’s made it possible to pull off a remarkable propaganda stunt: they’ve persuaded too many voters that the financial crisis is the doing of the Labour Party. This is a view they hold despite the fact that Labour wasn’t in office in the US, in which most of the toxic banking took place, let alone in Ireland, Spain or Greece which were among its most badly-hit victims.

Even so the Labour leadership of the ‘Eds’, Miliband and Balls, should really be landing a few more blows on a government with so weak a track record. Which makes it disappointing to see how often the Eds seem to be on the back foot, defending their own position rather than attacking the government’s.

There are those who talk of keeping Labour’s powder dry until nearer the next election. But there’s not a lot point in having lots of dry powder if you don’t start firing it until the battle’s lost.

This is the backdrop to the latest scandal to hit Labour. The largest Trade Union, Unite, which as you’d expect is proving a major force for disunity, has been caught trying to stuff its own members into the Labour Party in Falkirk in Scotland. Those new members would have a vote in the selection of a candidate to fight the forthcoming by-election in the constituency, and Unite no doubt expects them to choose its favoured candidate.

Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union.
A stick for the Tories to beat Labour? Or – the opposite?

It hardly made the show more savoury to discover that some of these new Labour members didn’t even know that they’d applied.

Manna from heaven for the Tories, who have leaped on the opportunity to brand Miliband as the puppet of the unions, a mere front man while real decisions are taken in unpublicised meetings of union barons behind closed doors. It doesn’t help that Miliband’s election to the leadership of the Labour Party, ahead of his brother, owed a lot to the votes of Unite delegates.

Now you might expect a counter-attack on the secret decisions that really affect our daily lives, such as those taken in the boardrooms of banks or major industries. But the Eds are no more inclined to tackle those guys than the present government is, or indeed the previous governments led by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

So it was fascinating to read this morning’s news that Miliband is referring the shenanigans in Falkirk to the police, for investigation of possible criminality. That’s a striking move. It looks like he’s throwing down the gauntlet to Unite, biting a hand he wants to prove doesn’t feed him.

Now suddenly the talk is of his breaking the link between the Unions and Labour. That would be a historic move, since it was the Unions that set Labour up in the first place. They’re also the Party’s major source of funds. Now, while I’m not always happy about the way the Unions use the influence this buys them, I’m pretty sure that things would be a lot worse if Labour found new sources of finance from nameless billionaires, just like the Tory Party. Certainly, I can’t see how they’d long stay different from the Tories.

But I don’t really see the link being broken: there’s too much at stake. What’s more likely is some kind of showdown followed by a compromise in which the Union voice is reduced further in favour of ordinary members. That might allow Miliband to emerge looking rather stronger and more decisive than he does today.

In other words, he might finally start to look like a fighter, but not by taking on his opponents, whom he seems to have trouble confronting, but some dubious elements among his own supporters.

Which strikes me as pretty opportunist. But it worked superbly for Tony Blair: rather than concentrating his fire on the Tories, in the run up to his first election victory, he focused on repealing Clause 4 of the Labour constitution that committed the Party to nationalisation of major industries. By taking on forces within his own party, he won himself a reputation as a strong man and someone the political centre could trust. Three landslide victories testify to the success of the tactic.

Is Miliband doing the same thing? It feels a bit like it. Which is ugly but, regrettably, I find myself holding my nose and hoping he succeeds. After all, Unite’s underhand behaviours isn’t smart or helpful, and if slapping down its leader Len McCluskey is what it takes to make Labour look like a party of government again, it may be a price worth paying just to get rid of the present dismal shower.

If that sounds like opportunism, it is. And if that seems distasteful, well, as I said at the beginning, that’s what opportunism is like.

It’s almost enough to make one cynical about politics.

I'd be preparing for champagne in 2015, were it not for 1992

It was a strange old evening, 9 April 1992. 

Friends had gathered in our house, clutching bottles of champagne, one of them a magnum, though to be honest more in hope than expectation. It looked as though after thirteen years of Conservative rule, the first eleven under Margaret Thatcher, we might at last see Labour returned. Perhaps.

The fall of Thatcher, out of the blue nearly eighteen months earlier, had seemed to open the door a chink, giving us a glimpse of the myriad possibilities beyond. Of a gentler, fairer country, in which support for the underprivileged would not necessarily be viewed as a weakness.

The bellwether in the 1992 general election was Basildon. It would be the first of the marginal constituencies to declare a result. If the Conservatives held on to it, John Major’s Tories would be back in Downing Street; if not, Neil Kinnock might well form a Labour government.

It didn’t take long. Basildon made its announcement: David Amess had held it for the Tories, and the government clung on to office for another five years. Our friends trooped disconsolate into the night, the champagne uncorked.

The story even had a curious sequel. A year or so later we opened the magnum, and the wine was flat, the only time I’ve seen that with champagne. Perhaps I should have complained, but I didn’t: that the sparkle had gone from the wine seemed entirely appropriate to that joyless evening back in April 1992.

Now we have another dismal Tory government. It calls itself a coalition, because it includes some Liberal Democrats. The aim was that the Conservatives would get to pursue a ruthless policy of austerity to fix the country’s finances, while the Lib Dems would get constitutional reform – proportional representation and an elected House of Lords.

In the event, the Tories got their austerity and the economy has taken a severe turn for the worse, with debt climbing and an unprecedented triple-dip recession in the offing; meanwhile, both proportional representation and House of Lords reform were defeated.

Charmers all: Danny Alexander (Lib Dem), George Osborne (Con) and
David Cameron (Con) enjoy the moment they cut benefits still further

So this feels terribly like the run up to 1992 again. It’s a lousy government failing on everyone’s criteria, even its own. A little over half way to the next election, the desire for change is in the air. Labour is riding high in the polls and achieving good results in by-elections. It could be back in 2015.

On the other hand, 30 months before the 1992 election, in October 1990, Labour was averaging leads of around 10% in the opinion polls. Today, Labour’s lead is around 10%. Are we just looking at a mid-term lead that could be lost as quickly as it was gained?

As it happens, I remain hopeful. There were two great differences back then. The smaller parties represented far less. Labour and the Conservatives between them accounted for 85-90% of the total; today they’re in the mid-seventies. A 10% lead today is more significant than in 1990.

The other great difference is that in October 1990, Thatcher still had a few weeks to run as Prime Minister. After eleven years, most people had had enough of her. There’d been riots over her so-called poll tax and there was a general feeling that even her erstwhile supporters had just about had too much of a good thing. In November, she was unceremoniously ditched by the men whose careers she’d nurtured in the Conservative Party and government.

Lo and behold, the polls turned round. The Labour lead was slashed. Certain polls even showed the Conservatives in front. In the runup to the election, Labour was sitting on leads of 5% or less. By contrast, as it approached the 1997 election, which it won, Labour had leads of up to 20%.

Dumping Cameron after only two and a half years in office would feel much more like an act of desperation than the kind of renewal Thatcher's removal represented. But – who knows? The Tories are good at pulling rabbits out of hats. A 10% lead is good, but it isn’t impregnable.

To make things safe still needs a lot of work. Above all, Labour needs to realise that its lead is mostly down to the Conservatives. Their abject failure to hit their own targets, has cost them dear. The reaction against the government has taken Labour up into the low forties in the polls. But to be sure of victory, it needs to press on, up towards 50%, with leads in the high teens, as in 1997.

The Tories have done about as much as they can for Labour. It can’t just rely on the government continuing to shoot itself in the foot, however good it’s proved at doing that so far. Now Labour has to come up with something positive itself, convincing voters it’s ready for government. 

That has yet to happen, so I haven’t ordered the champagne, far less put it on ice. Even so – those opinion polls, those by-election results – they at least make me feel I can choose the bottles I want to purchase, plan the celebration I hope to hold. Whether I can move from plan to action depends on the two Eds, Miliband and Balls, at the head of the Labour Party today. Let’s hope two Eds are better than one and they can give us a 1997 rather than a 1992.

That’s an outcome to which I'd be happy to raise a glass. 

What we need today: the wisdom of Solomon

It’s enthralling to see the increasingly frequent and bad-tempered spats between George Osborne, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his opposite number and would-be successor Ed Balls, Finance spokesman for the Opposition Labour Party. 

Ed Balls isn’t much liked, and it’s not just down to his name. His opponents find him insufferable. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and ‘fools’ in his book seems to embrace anyone who disagrees with him. In the long run, that suggests the non-fools probably come down to just one person.

He also has the unbearable defect of having been proved right. He said the present government’s policies would take Britain back into recession without doing much to reduce government debt. Since that’s exactly what’s happened, it’s not surprising Osborne is becoming increasingly shrill in his denunciations of Balls. It’s horrible to have someone saying ‘I told you so’ even if he doesn’t say it out loud. Particularly if it’s true. 

But Osborne has even bigger problems

This is a government that prides itself on its Christian credentials. So let’s open our Bibles and take a look at the opening chapters of the First Book of Kings. 

This is the story of Solomon, that paragon of wisdom down the ages. And what marked his reign? Why, a massive programme of public works. The temple, first of all. Seven years in the building. The palace too, which took almost twice as long, but, hey, he was funding the project, he needed something special.

King Solomon at the opening of the temple.
Iconic King and paragon of wealth, wisdom and Keynesian economics

It didn’t stop there either. There were other major construction jobs in Jerusalem and also in other cities, such as Hazor, Megiddo and Hezer, as 1 Kings 9 makes clear. And 1 Kings 8 tells us that for the opening of the temple, Solomon sacrificed 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep. In what was a small population by modern standards, the impact on demand and prices in the agricultural sector must have been substantial.

In other words, Solomon was a Keynesian three millennia before Keynes.

But this investment programme, and all the benefits it brought to the Israelite economy, had to be financed somehow. He had to turn to the banks.

In Solomon’s time that meant the Phoenicians, wily traders who'd enriched themselves by Mediterranean commerce. Like his father David, Solomon cultivated good relations with Hiram King of Tyre. Hiram provided the wood, the stone, the gold for all that splendid construction work. Israel must have been an attractive investment, particularly as Assyria to the North and Egypt to the South were having a bad time politically which negatively impacted their credit rating. Hiram saw a literally God-sent opportunity in Solomon and extended easy terms.

Not easy enough, though. Solomon hit difficulties. Hiram foreclosed and Solomon had to hand over some extensive real estate in Israel, evaluated by him as 20 ‘cities’ though, judging by Hiram’s reaction, they were probably little more than villages (I Kings 13). In the end, Solomon had to come up with 120 talents of gold as well.

In passing, it’s interesting that at the time ‘talent’ was a term in the financial sector. We don't see much of it these days.

But the real measure of Solomon’s failure was the price paid for it by his son, Rehoboam. When he came to the throne, the people appealed to him to reduce a burden of taxation they saw as intolerable. Against the advice of his leading counsellors, he replied (1 Kings 12) ‘And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke; my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.’

A remorseless, unbending mindset. Like austerity heaped on austerity. Making the poor pay for the profligacy of the rich. It worked no better then than it’s working today. The rebellion that followed left Rehoboam with only a rump of his father’s kingdom to rule and ended his flamboyant ambitions.

What he’d needed was a moderate programme of reflationary investment in infrastructure coupled with careful control of public expenditure, reducing its level over a period of years without choking off the potential for growth. That’s the prescription favoured by Ed Balls.

And isn’t it obvious that the book of Kings is saying the same? Solomon did well to stimulate the economy but shouldn’t have let things get out of hand. When they turned sour, the disastrous reaction was to slam on the brakes far too brutally. That’s what Rehoboam did and what Osborne’s doing.

George Osborne, even the Bible’s against you. Having a go at Ed Balls might sound like a smart move, but what if he has God in his corner? Are you sure it's wise?

The government: no easy ride for the bone idle

It’s seemed to me for a long time that to be successful in government you have to be a skilful politician, to get elected in the first place, and a good statesman to make something of office once you get there.

Nicolas Sarkozy showed great political skill seeing off his rivals for the presidential nomination in 2007, and then thrashing his opponent (though admittedly she was pretty weak). Once in power, though, he proved so sadly mediocre a statesman that even his superior political talents couldn’t secure him a return to the Elysée.

Back on this side of the Channel, our previous Prime Minister, Gordon Brown was a fine statesman. Assisted by an able Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, he returned the country to growth in early 2010 after the 2008-2009 recession. Today, that looks little short of miraculous. But his indecisiveness and short temper made him a lousy politician (most notably when he indulged in some choice comments about a voter without realising that he was wearing a live mike). Result: he quickly turned a lead in the polls into a deficit he couldn’t overturn before the last election.

But the people who really take the prize are the present lot, above all the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his Chancellor, George Osborne. They seem inept at both politics and statesmanship.

They failed to win a majority against the hapless Brown, partly because they initially started off telling the electorate just how much the programme of austerity they were planning was going to hurt. So, while I took delight in the damage it was doing to their poll standing, I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of rueful admiration for their honesty. On the other hand, they may have chosen this line because they were expecting everyone to blame Labour – you know, ‘look at the terrible things Labour’s legacy is going to make us have to do to you.’ 

In fact, and unsurprisingly, quite a few voters simply wondered why they’d vote for a party that had nothing better on offer.

When they realised that they were losing votes, Cameron and Osborne switched tack and started talking of the sunlit uplands that awaited us all when they cleared the deficit and reduced the national debt. They stressed the happy ending rather than the painful road they were going to take us down to get there. 

In a sense, that was actually more honest than the previous position, because it revealed them to be just as mendacious as any other politicians.

It wasn’t enough to win them outright victory, but it gave them the opportunity to get their backsides onto cabinet seats in the present tawdry coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The latter, by the way, have consigned themselves to oblivion for a generation for having made this government possible.

In power, Cameron and Osborne have revealed just how lamentable they are as statesmen. The country’s back in recession. Debts have barely dropped. And as unemployment climbs to record levels, the worst of the cuts are still to come.

Meanwhile, their competence as politicians continues unchanged. For instance, when the Unite union threatened a strike by fuel tanker drivers, they saw a great stick with which to beat the opposition: Unite is a major contributor to Labour. So Ministers whipped up a panic about shortages and even urged people to stockpile fuel at home. There were queues at petrol stations around the country, and a woman was badly burned after the petrol she had had the presence of mind to store in her kitchen exploded.

Together with a budget that increased taxes on the poorest and reduced them on the top 1% of incomes, this kind of behaviour led to their turning a narrow lead at the end of last year into a record-breaking lead for Labour in recent weeks (some of that’s soft though: the leaders of the Opposition have a lot of consolidation work to do, but they must be grateful for the help the government’s giving them). 

Cameron and Osborne.
Yep, the picture does them complete justice

What’s fascinating though is the way one of those Opposition leaders is beginning to get right under the government’s skin. Not so much Ed Miliband, the leader, though he’s beginning to land some telling blows, as the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls. As the Guardian pointed out at the weekend, he’s been right on a couple of notable points, above all in his assertion that the government’s policies would lead us back into recession without sorting the debt problem. So – balls by name, but when it comes to talking balls, he leaves that to the government, and limits himself to exposing it.

Nothing is so painful for a politician as to face an opponent who told him so. And it’s a test of good politicians that they can rise above that pain. But, as I’ve said, Cameron isn’t a good politician. Faced with Ed Balls’ provocative asides, he’s cracked a few times in recent times, most notably last week when he was heard to call him a ‘muttering idiot’.

Interesting that he takes Balls’ barbs so badly. I can only put it down to the phenomenon Dorothy Parker pointed to when she said ‘I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true’. Whoever said that the truth can never hurt was showing the kind of propensity for talking balls that marks our present government. A lie can be shrugged off, but a true criticism strikes deep and hard.

So poor old Cameron. He’s beginning to lose it. The sure sign of the beginning of the end. 


Couldn’t happen to a more deserving chap, really.

But why is he so bad at all this? After all, he has a background in PR. Why is he so incompetent at communications?

Without wanting to do any pop psychology, I can’t help feeling the answer’s easy. He’s never had to strive for anything. Everything’s dropped into his lap. Eton, then Oxford. At Oxford, he was in the Bullingdon club whose members liked to get drunk in restaurants and then trash them, knowing that ‘Daddy’ would be round to pay for the damage. Why, he even got his chance to enter Parliament because the previous holder of his seat, Shaun Woodward, defected to Labour and had to give it up.

There have been increasing rumours that Cameron simply doesn’t work too hard. A lot of holidays, frequent evidence of attending meetings poorly briefed.

Could it simply be that he’s at last having to work for something and he just doesn’t know how?