Tag Archives: Labour Party

Labour’s message on the economy

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I’m a Labour supporter.  But Labour’s message on the economy is unclear.

Ed Balls is today saying he’s written to his would-be cabinet colleagues to warn them that their departments will face cuts every year until Labour fulfils its promise to eliminate the deficit.

And yet, since the Autumn Statement, Ed has been denouncing the Tory spending plans as unworkable, dishonest and ‘colossal’.  A return to the 1930s.  A country you wouldn’t want to live in.

In short, Labour wants to appear as determined as the Tories to eliminate deficit, whilst branding Tory cuts as ‘extreme’.

This is not an illogical position.  With growth (and more tax receipts) the deficit can be reduced with less harsh cuts.  Securing growth is, and always has been, the issue.

I prefer centre-left thinking on this, because the Tories are dogmatic in their focus on the supply side, and the supply side can push us out of recession the same way pushing a dog through a cat-flap by its tail works: not at all.  We need pounds-in-pockets demand in our economy before any right-minded investor will invest, and supply-side efficiencies cut demand rather than stimulating it.

But that is too complex to explain.  So meanwhile the broad messaging needs to be clearer.  At the moment it comes across as, “We are as brutal as them on the deficit – but they are wild-eyed extremists.”

That’s as clear as mud.  In a game where clarity is all.

Reality Bites

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7th January, 2013

Reality bites…

… but if Labour is hoping that the cuts kicking in will change the game, it is mistaken.

Writing in this week’s Observer, Andrew Rawnsley argues that the Tories’ overtly political attempt to put Labour on the spot over the proposed welfare caps could backfire badly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/05/labour-party-bill

The Tories are proposing a 1% cap on increases in most state benefits for three years. They are bringing their plan to the Commons for a vote – even though a vote is probably unnecessary – so that they can put Labour in the position of having either to support it (contrary to its core values) or reject it (and risk looking like the party of “unlimited welfare”).

Andrew Rawnsley’s analysis of this cynical strategic motivation is widely accepted.

George Osborne

But Rawnsley thinks it won’t work out the way Chancellor Osborne expects.

Rawnsley argues that once the “strivers” – those in work but also to some degree dependent on state benefits – realise that they too are going to be adversely affected by the squeeze (and by a raft of other measures which will kick in this year) then they will turn against the Tories.

It’s an argument I would like to be true.

It is a version of the argument going round Labour circles in the spring of 2010. The idea was that, since nasty cuts were inevitable after the election, it would be no bad thing for Labour to accept defeat, let the Tories take the helm for the bumpy ride, and regroup in time for the next election, when surely people would have had enough of austerity.

Again, I hope this line of thought will turn out to be true.

But I fear that it lacks psychological insight.

Rawnsley suggests that when blue-collar voters realise that the cuts are hurting them just as much as they are hurting the scroungers, then, far from punishing Labour for opposing the cuts, they will turn back to them. Biting reality will reverse the “C2 meltdown” of 2010.

I can’t see it.

Because, as Rawnsley himself points out, the Tory spin doctors have done such a wonderful job of dividing the nation, and painting the picture of the closed-curtain layabout getting fat on his couch while the rest of us struggle into work. (In reality, only 3% of the welfare budget goes to unemployed people, and fraud accounts for less than 1% of that 3%. Yet 47% of us think the government is “not tough enough on benefit” and should do more to force people into work. – YouGov)

Because the Tory spin doctors have done such an overwhelming job of pinning the blame for their cuts on Labour.

Because – although Labour (and indeed many right-wing) politicos are at pains to point out that the cuts have yet properly to kick in – the perception of austerity has been with us for two and a half years. We already think we are suffering. We’re already tightening our belts. We feel the pain already. And yet there are no signs of a dramatic shift in mood. The C2s are not flocking to Labour.

Will it be different when the perception of pain is matched in reality? I don’t think so. If I think there’s only £20 in my wallet, and it then turns out there is indeed only £20 in my wallet, I am in no worse a mood.

Even if I did feel worse off when the cuts actually bite, would I need a new scapegoat? If I already thought that scroungers or foreigners or bankers or Labour were the cause of my paltry purse, why would I suddenly change my mind and blame the Tories?

So if Labour is hoping that the imminent reality of austerity will, on its own, clear the path for a return to power in 2015, it is mistaken.

Labour can’t wait for the Tories’ economic strategy to be deemed wrong by dint of time or pain or miraculously changed perception. It must make the argument that the strategy is wrong.

Further, Labour must ensure that the blame for the attack on the state is correctly apportioned.

And above all, Labour needs to understand what the Tories so effortlessly tap into: the psychology of mean-spiritedness. People who are scared, who are feeling the pinch, and who, because of those anxieties, are inclined to believe daft, demonising stories about benefits millionaires need an alternative narrative. A narrative which enables them to feel better about compassion than about righteousness.

That narrative needs crafting, and selling, by Labour. The reality of austerity, on its own, will not do the job for them.

For now, George Osborne has nothing to worry about.

Thank you Eds, Bob and Tom (and Greg)

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22nd December, 2010


On 10 December, Ed Balls sent out a link on twitter to an article he’d written about the LibDems serving as a fig-leaf to a radical right-wing government.  Quite right too.


I responded, “@edballsmp Good piece; now pls translate that into action. New PLP rule: don’t mention the LibDems?”


Nine days later:


Ed Miliband has banned the shadow cabinet from using the word “coalition” to describe the government because it sounds too moderate and reasonable, and fails to convey what he says is its true “ideological, rightwing agenda”.

 

In a memo to his front-bench team, obtained by the Observer, the Labour leader’s director of policy, Greg Beales, says that from now on they must use the term “Conservative-led government” to describe the alliance of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

 

(The Observer, 19 Dec 2010)


Thanks guys.  I’m sure you had that idea independently, but I am happy anyway.   I’ve been arguing for ages that the language of the er, Conservative-led government, has been brilliantly controlled and effective. 


Labour must respond in kind.


Calling Ed, Bob & Tom

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22nd December, 2010


In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, the answer is: on Twitter.  There are lots of things that are amazing about it.  Lots of things that are horrible too, but there.


One of the things Twitter is no good at is subtle arguments or packages of ideas.  You can’t always boil them down to 140 characters, and if you split your thoughts across 3 or 4 messages, someone will read you out of context and be confused.


So I still need my blog.


I wanted to say a couple of things about the Vince Cable story.  Vince has been tricked by a couple of female Telegraph journalists posing as giggling star-struck constituents into making at least two big mistakes.  Firstly, he boasted that if he was pushed too far he could use “the nuclear option” and resign from the government, which would (in his view) bring it down.  Secondly, we subsequently learn, he has “declared war on Mr Murdoch” and set himself against Rupert’s proposed buyout of BSkyB.  In response to the former boast, he was made to eat humble pie in Cabinet and out.  When the second element of the story broke, David Cameron withdrew Cable’s ministerial authority on the BSkyB transaction.


There are many issues raised by this turn of events.  My focus is on Labour’s response, which is troubling.


On Monday night, Cable had boasted about going nuclear and bringing down the government.  Labour’s response?  John Denham saying that this demonstrated the government was “paralysed by infighting”.  Of all the criticisms you can level at this government, paralysis is not one of them.  It is perhaps the busiest, most radical government in living memory.


Where are Bob Roberts and Tom Baldwin, Labour’s new spin doctors?  What are they thinking?  It could be that they were caught on the hop, it being Christmas and all, and needed an overnight to get their response straight.  That would have been disappointing, but worth it if they had come out the next morning fighting.  They didn’t.  On Tuesday John Denham went to press online with the same lame accusation of paralysis.  The pot, sadly, was calling the kettle black.


Surely there was an opportunity on Monday night for quick-fire political jibing.  Surely there was something in Cable’s unguarded comments which sharp minds at LPHQ could have fired right back at him.  I’m not arguing for glibness, just a sound-bite to tide us over before the measured response comes, as it surely will, from the political big guns.


But then, what about that measured response?  What does Ed Miliband say, the next day, when the story moves to its second stage and Cable throws away his credibility with daft comments on Murdoch?  He says that he, Ed, would have sacked him.


(Actually his response was smarter than that, to be fair – he said that “having apparently broken the ministerial code”, Cable should go.  He asked whether David Cameron had made the decision to keep him in post in the interests of the country, or just in the interests of the government.  The trouble is that all the press is going to hear is, “Miliband says Cable should have gone.”  And sure enough, the news tickers said exactly, and only, that.)


The trouble with an Opposition response which can be reduced to a call for resignation is that it sounds, and is, lazy.  Perhaps Ed Miliband thought it would help him to look stronger and more decisive than his counterpart, but we already know Ed can be ruthless.  And as for decisive, the flipside of that is to be collaborative and inclusive, qualities for which Cameron is rightly admired.  I fear Ed’s call for resignation only made Dave’s call for calm tolerance appear the more mature.


Ed Miliband was in a difficult position on this one because he wasn’t able to go in hard on the content.  Cable was only saying what a lot of people on the left want to hear on BSkyB, and I can’t imagine Ed Miliband being a stout defender of the Murdoch faith.  So Ed could only go on principle (the ministerial code) and on leadership qualities (“I’d have been tougher”).  Not thrilling.  Not enough.


What Ed so badly needs is a story for situations such as these.  He needs a line of attack on the government which sees past the headline events of the day (there are so many in these busy and uncharted waters) and gets to the nub of content.  Further, he needs to shape his critique so that it segues into a clear, passionate, inspired alternative policy offering.  He has hamstrung himself on this score by calling for an extended (two-year!) period of navel-gazing inside Labour.  If he leads from the front now with policy initiatives, it will be conspicuous that he is not waiting for his own policy review process.  If he waits, he will leave the public with nothing but his own sense of the Labour alternative to think about – a party, which in his own words, has “lost its way” (22 Nov 2010).


Ed’s is not a difficult choice.  Waiting is the worse of the two options.  If Cable shows us anything, it shows us that the Coalition is fragile.  If things “go nuclear”, Labour will need a leader.  Now.