David Cameron: good at the art, however poor he is on the science

Politics is an art form and no science: it's all about presentation and hardly at all about substance.

David Cameron: good reason for self-satisfaction

Take the British government’s economic competence. According to the most recent findings, confidence in it has risen from 28% of the electorate to 40%. This seems to be based on just one piece of good news: growth last quarter was 0.6%, the level the last government achieved within a few quarters of the crash, and which it has taken this government three years to reproduce.

What else have they achieved?

• At the last election, the Conservatives fulminated that the previous, Labour, government had saddled the country with an unsustainable level of debt. So they’ve increased it (taking it from just under 80% of gross domestic product to 90%), but there’s no more talk of unsustainability.
• They also set out to slash the government’s deficit, and they have, by as much as a quarter though a lot less than they promised. To fail to meet their target, they’ve created conditions in which:
• As well as the mass unemployment level of two and a half million, about a million further people are on ‘zero-hour contracts’, ostensibly employed but with no guarantee of work or pay
• The disabled are under major attack, with benefit levels being reduced by a variety of subtle mechanisms and by deeming huge numbers as fit for work when they certainly aren’t: around 30 such people die each week

Average pay has been reduced further and faster than all but three other countries in the entire European Union

George Osborne, as Chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for this performance, staked his reputation at the last election on preserving the UK’s triple-A credit rating. He’s lost it. Entirely predictably, he has failed to resign.

In only one area has the government notched up a significant achievement: it has increased the number of people on seven-figure salaries (we have more such people in banking, for instance, than the rest of the EU together) and he has provided them with a tax reduction.

So it’s clever that, with such a track record, the government still enjoys such a glowing reputation. Clever, though not entirely unsurprising. With so many targets to hit, the Labour opposition has indulged in ‘deafeningly silence’, as a critic within the party, Graham Stringer, recently pointed out. So the Conservatives, and the government, have not been called to account for their performance.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives themselves have lost no time. They’ve had vans cruising round immigrant areas with ‘go home’ signs, in what is an obvious play for the racist vote. Brilliantly – and in their campaign manager, Lynton Crosby, they have a brilliant mind at work – they are now apologising to the immigrant communities and promising to consult them first, in future.

Why is this so clever? Because it gives them the opportunity to call off the campaign now that it has achieved its aim of attracting far right support from the party snapping at the Conservatives’ heels, the United Kingdom Independence Party, while at the same time offering an olive branch to immigrants amongst whom a recent poll showed the Tories have minimal support.

What was the Labour leadership’s response? Instead of denouncing the whole shameful charade, they decided to make a bid for the same votes. They had Chris Bryant, party spokesman on immigration, make a speech about the dangers immigration represents for British workers – in other words, they also played the racist card.

To compound this dereliction on principle, they then cocked up in the practice too. Bryant’s speech was leaked at the weekend, so that it became known that he was to denounce two major firms for using immigrant staff to undermine British labour. The companies hit back and Labour discovered that it had built its brief badly and got its information wrong. Instead of making a persuasive play for votes from the far right, Bryant therefore spent most of his time backtracking from what he’d been planning to say, defending why he’d intended to say it, and generally looking incompetent.

Presentation not principle, you see. And the Tories are getting increasingly good at it – artful, you might say – while the present Labour leadership is proving completely cackhanded. Against an appallingly under-achieving government, they’re failing to get the ball into an open goal, while constantly scoring own-goals against themselves.

I pray they may still pull off a victory in 2015, but on present form, it’ll be no thanks to any skill of theirs.

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.