Looking forward in the spirit of Pratchett

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.

The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!

And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye.

Ah, the voice of Terry Pratchett. Communicating truth through humour. Presenting through his imaginary Discworld a picture of our own planet, distorted only so far as its most essential characteristics have been blown up to make them unmissable. Appealing characteristics as well as blemishes, even if there are more of the latter,

Since the superb yearly gift of a new Pratchett novel has now come to its fatal end, re-reading is now my only option. I’m laughing my way through The Truth at the moment, with its insightful treatment of the role and development of the press. But nothing in it outshines the glass-half-full quotation. And it just seems to become more and more apposite.

Another Pratchett novel, living up to its title

I was particularly struck by it when I read a post from a friend calling for sympathy for those, like doctors or petrol station attendants, who have to keep working through Christmas days while so many of us are enjoying time with our families. That reminded me of a young woman I met, thirty years ago, at a supermarket checkout on New Year’s day. Her looks betrayed her state, and when I put it to her she readily admitted that she was badly hungover from the night before. Even so, she was determined to do ten hours of work on that public holiday, because she was being paid triple time. Recently married, she and her husband were busily saving for a house purchase.

UK overtime payments have declined steadily since those days. Partly, this reflects a decrease in the number of overtime hours worked, which may well be a good thing but, anecdotally at least, I’m coming across increasing numbers of people being asked to work overtime for no raised level of payment, or indeed only for time off in lieu. The woman with the hangover might not, today, find that working on New Year’s day was quite as remunerative as it was thirty years ago.

This may be one of the reasons why the British Social Attitudes survey has found that, where 74% of people in 1986 would have recommended to a newly-married couple that they buy a house as soon as possible, the percentage had fallen to 53% in 2012. Britain is regressing towards an older dispensation in which home ownership was a privilege of the few, not a right of the many.

It’s no surprise to discover that the High Pay Commission finds that the remuneration of Chief Executives of our biggest companies is set to grow from 145 times the average salary in 2010 to 214 by 2020. It seems that the owners of the large glasses that are never full enough, are seeing their share growing even more starkly than before; meanwhile, at the other end of the bar, there are more and more people finding it difficult to catch the barman’s eye.

It all sounds pretty hopeless. Fortunately, there is a glimmer at least of optimism still. Labour has a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who is infuriating a lot of large-glass holders by refusing to stop speaking out, with energy and determination, for those with small glasses or no glass at all. Among those he infuriates are the supporters of the now old-fashioned “New Labour” school. When they ran the party, they were, as Peter Mandelson so aptly put it, “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” They were, unfortunately, just as relaxed about many others remaining filthy poor.

Their replacement offers a chance that we might be able to deal with the empty glasses. Perhaps that’s no bad note on which to end the year in which Pratchett left us, and prepare to push forward in his spirit in 2016.

Too soon to write off Labour. If we learn our lessons

There seem to be frequent reports at the moment of the death of the British Labour Party. I’m inclined to consider them greatly exaggerated.

Listening to a recent programme on the BBC – What’s Left, chaired by the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley – I was amused to hear speakers declaring the 2015 results the worst for Labour since 1918. Two of the panel were Labour MPs, the rest journalists or academics. Even the MPs shared the doom-laden view.

It just feels way over the top to me. Certainly, it was a lamentable result. We were beaten, and still worse, we weren’t even able to prevent David Cameron and his Tories winning an overall majority – right up to polling day, the opinion polls were suggesting he would at most emerge as leader of the biggest single party in parliament, only able to cobble together a minority administration. Instead, he took a small but working majority.

So it was lousy. But the detail suggests things were less dire than the prophets of doom claim. Perhaps I should say, like to claim.

Labour’s share of the vote was actually up on 2010. By only 1.4%, it’s true, which is anaemic, but that was marginally more than the Tories managed – they only increased their share by 0.8%. That still left them 6.5% ahead of Labour, which is certainly a sound defeat, but hardly catastrophic.

The biggest failure of Labour was to protect its Scottish heartland. From 40 seats in Scotland, it feel to just 1. Hugely damaging. On the other hand, overall it lost only 24 seats – in other words, outside Scotland it added 15 seats to its tally. With Scotland still heading inexorably for independence, Labour was going to have to wean itself from its reliance on Scotland in any case. The fact that it has been able to increase its number of seats in England and Wales is a necessary step towards guaranteeing its long-term success.

And let’s not forget that Labour hadn’t put itself in the best possible position to win. Ed Miliband is principled, insightful and probably great company. But he’s virtually unelectable: he’s accident-prone, constantly making disastrous gaffes, and with his lieutenant Ed Balls, apparently unable ever to get off any fence. They would repeatedly dodge the hard questions, preferring to appear a little Tory to Tories, a little socialist to lefties, and convincing nobody.

Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Tristram Hunt, Liz Kendall
Will one of them turn Labour's fortunes round as the next leader?

Peter Mandelson rightly points out in today’s Observer that, under their leadership, they failed to answer such opportunistic policies as Chancellor George Osborne’s proposal to devolve more authority to local government in the North of England. That was a policy Labour should have adopted before the Tories, but it failed either to adopt it or to respond to it. The result? Losses to the Tories in the North, another heartland area, including Ed Balls’s own seat, and deep inroads by another adversary, the far-right UKIP.

If despite these self-inflicted handicaps, Labour could still improve its standing outside Scotland by fifteen seats, and marginally improve its popular vote, what could it do with a more effective, more dynamic and, above all, more assertive leadership?

It strikes me that this is no time to throw one’s arms up in despair and talk about defeat on a historically unprecedented scale. Instead it’s time to take stock sensibly of where we stand, without understating the scale of the debacle but also without ignoring the more reasons for encouragement. And make sure we never again saddle ourselves with leaders so hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the day.

Because if we shoot ourselves in the foot like that again, then we would indeed be in serious trouble.

Faced with two options, Labour should look for a third

A great debate is getting under way inside the Labour Party, over what went wrong in the British General Election. It is boldly, unflinchingly and resolutely facing up to entirely the wrong question.

Which path to the light?
The high road? The low road? Left? Right?
Or should Labour turn around and look for something else entirely?

That question is posed in terms of whether Labour needs to go back to its winning ways under Tony Blair, as New Labour, or take a more Left-wing stance, as favoured, some suggest, by his successor Gordon Brown. The Blairite view is that Labour turned its back on people with aspirations, focusing exclusively on the poor and vulnerable.

Staunch Blairite Peter Mandelson, popularly nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness”, has bemoaned the fact that under the doomed leadership of Ed Miliband, the party was instructed to get out there with the message that “we are for the poor, we hate the rich – ignoring completely the vast swathes of the population who exist in between…”

Expressing essentially the same objection, he said that “we were sent out and told to wave our fists angrily at the nasty Tories and wait for the public to realise how much they had missed us. They weren’t missing us. They didn’t miss us.”

Mandelson isn’t entirely wrong: those fundamentally negative messages would damage Labour. But as someone who also went door to door a little for Labour, I can assure you no one told me to present that view. There will come a time when Ed Miliband, gallant loser and therefore a figure much loved by the English, will start to see the sympathy flow back towards him and I’m sure, when that happens, no one will pretend he was against aspiration.

Equally, I’m convinced that neither he nor Ed Balls who, as Shadow Chancellor (Finance spokesman), was with Miliband the main architect of Labour’s defeat and even lost his parliamentary seat as a result, were opposed to wealth creation. They wouldn’t deny the entrepreneurs responsible for it the right to become rich in the process. On the contrary, I think they saw themselves as committed to wealth creation, as the only way out of the difficulties the nation faces, and merely felt that there had to be some better regulation of just what was permitted in its name – and that the rewards people took should reflect real contribution. Huge bonuses for bankers operating their institutions at a loss ought, for instance, to be curtailed.

The Blairites are at least nominally committed to the same thing. At most, there’s probably a difference in degree between the two sides: should the top rate of tax be at 45%, 50% or 55%? Nobody’s proposing the rate of the sixties, 97.5%.

Sadly, however, the debate is going to be about backing “modernisers” (read Blairites) or “old Labour” (read those closer to Miliband). Whereas it should, in fact, be about entirely other matters.

It’s true that Tory economic policy is inequitable: the richest have doubled their wealth over the the last ten years, despite the crash, while those least able to bear it are suffering devastating hardship. But the real issue is that it doesn’t even work. Growth is stuttering. The debt is up, not down. The pain of constant cuts in government spending isn’t being rewarded by gain in economic recovery.

The answer isn’t simply to call the Tories nasty or hate the rich. It’s to offer an alternative to the constant cuts. We’ve known since Keynes that austerity doesn’t work. And yet Labour’s answer has been simply to offer the same with some mitigation of its worst effects.

We should be arguing for an alternative to austerity. We need to communicate the message that there’s no better time to borrow that when interest rates are just about zero. If the funds go into stimulating the economy, more people will find real jobs. They’ll pay more taxes, and they’ll buy more goods. A virtuous cycle will be kicked off, where the economy starts to fix itself, and the need for further government borrowing goes down as tax revenues go up. Without soaking the rich – simply by the sheer organic effect of relaunching the economy.

But what that means is denying the premisses of the Tory argument. It means saying “the problem isn’t about how much austerity we should have, or where it should be targeted, it’s about dropping the policy altogether.”

Sadly, it’s the SNP in Scotland, the true victors of the General Election, who pursued that line, and not Labour, who lost.

If you haven’t already seen the election night exchange between famously aggressive presenter Jeremy Paxman, and the former SNP leader Alex Salmond, then you should watch it now. It’s a master class in refusing to accept the premises of a hostile argument. Without being evasive, you just answer “no” and keep saying it as long as you need to. Which makes the clip also a great illustration of how to deal with hostile media, about which Labour also constantly complains – though with a predominantly right-wing press, Labour ought to be used to it by now, and have learned to see it off as Salmond did.

When Salmond ran rings round Paxman
A master class in handling hostile media and fighting the right battle

Paxman asked what lay behind the SNP success and, when Salmond answered that it was Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, tried to needle him.

“You’re a very modest man, aren’t you?” 

Salmond, unfazed, replied “modesty becomes me, yeah.”

Later, Paxman tried to get Salmond to deny the SNP’s earlier refusal ever to work with the Tories.

“Is there any possibility of any sort of deal between you and David Cameron if the Tories are just a little bit short of an overall majority?” he asked.

“No.” 

“None whatsoever?”

“Correct.” 

“If David Cameron offered you full fiscal autonomy, in other words control over taxes in Scotland, you’d still say no?”

“He won’t.”

“You’re guessing.”

“No, I’m not.”

Perhaps the most telling exchange came in the middle of the interview.

“I suppose you could take some of the credit for the Tory triumph in England, couldn’t you?” asked Paxman.

The reference was to the campaign whipped up by the Tories and their friends in the press about the possible election of a minority Labour government, dependent on SNP support. The SNP was presented as a bogey man, and Miliband only contributed to the damage by constantly denying he’d ever work with the SNP – in other words, he played into the lie that the SNP was dangerous.

Salmond stayed calm and told Paxman:

“No, I think Ed Miliband should take the credit for the Tory triumph in England. I think he should have fought a totally different sort of campaign. If he’d fought the sort of campaign that Nicola Sturgeon fought in Scotland, then he’d be in a much better position this morning.”

Now there’s the key issue for Labour. Not should we be more like Blair, or more like Brown. Instead, can we find a leader who doesn’t fall into the other side’s trap but fights the campaign we need and gets us elected?

In other words, can we find our own Nicola Sturgeon?