Tag: Conservatives

Public good

The Cummings farrago exposes a government which doesn’t grasp its own role

Wars give us enemies with faces. Coronavirus does not. Social media delights in both putting war metaphors up and shooting them down, but I suspect the lack of a clear enemy makes national cohesion harder. And as we start to talk about exit strategies, whose interests come first and when may well divide us further.

Dominic Cummings has, if nothing else, given many people’s fury a face. And many have written already about how offensive his conduct — and his disdain for explaining himself — has been. But the defence of his conduct betrays a basic failure to grasp the purpose of government, which I think deserves a closer look.

Family first?

When push comes to shove, of course people care about their own children more than anything. But an unpalatable truth is that much of what the state does aims at keeping that impulse from running riot. One of the biggest challenges in education is stopping monied parents elbowing less fortunate kids out of the way in the interests of their offspring. Fair admissions, access to higher education, school funding formulae: keeping loving parents at bay is the bread and butter of education policy.

When politicians put their kids’ education first — as Diane Abbott and Tony Blair both found — we tend to censure them for it. Sometimes, as in Abbott’s case, that’s mainly about hypocrisy. But it reveals a deeper truth. We may nod as politicians say any parent puts their families first, but we don’t like it when they actually do. Because they set the rules which keep that truth in bounds.

Coronavirus poses a wider, sharper, harder challenge. The vast majority of us are vanishingly unlikely to die from it. We are asked — instructed — to act against our own and our loved ones’ interests (at least our immediate interests) every day. Do my friends gain or lose when I can’t help look after my nephew-in-all-but-name? Do children gain or lose from missing months of classes in favour of the trench warfare we call home school? Do families gain or lose from not having loved ones at funerals?

‘Parents always want to do what they think best for their kids’, ministers say. Of course. Why do ministers think we have laws?

Following instincts?

As maxims go, ‘follow your instincts’ may well be beloved of start-ups. It’s also precisely what the coronavirus rules try to prevent. Humans are deeply social animals. We want to see friends and family in groups, we want to hug people and not voice-project at two metres, we want sex. But all these things can transmit coronavirus.

So the state took draconian measures to get us to suppress our instincts. I don’t dispute the need for them: I merely observe that they remain draconian. After a shaky and ambiguous start, we were told to stay home, protect the NHS and save lives. And it broadly worked. Possibly it overshot: the British are now among the most cautious of nations, and UK ministers (rightly or wrongly) are struggling to coax them out.

But to judge from the Prime Minister’s press conference, many ministers think we’re mugs. Having demanded a national effort, having given a simple instruction, having thanked us all for the sacrifices we’ve made, yesterday Johnson said Cummings ‘followed his instincts’. But people who didn’t attend loved ones’ funerals, let their children roam freely or see lonely family members resisted their instincts. From Grindr to grandparents, we built an edifice to contain a pandemic by keeping our instincts at bay.

As Johnson says, Cummings did what lots of us would naturally do. Why does he think we have rules?

Public demands

There’s something inhuman about what government — in truth, the policy world — requires. To work in policy, you have to be the kind of person who knows most government choices can kill. You have to embrace choosing whose lives and whose futures to put first every day. Most people don’t want to do it for a reason.

Most people don’t have to acknowledge that up front and they don’t like it when they hear it. So politicians often have to pay lip service to human instincts when half their task is to constrain or countermand them. Yes, it’s hard. And they’re allowed to say it’s hard. But what they cannot do is cite it as a defence when they put their private interests before what they say the public good demands.

On the evidence of the past few days, ministers and advisers neither recognise a higher public good nor care to pretend otherwise. That does not just constitute a culpable failure in public office. It constitutes an intellectual failure to understand what public office is for.

Unless and until they realise that ‘Wouldn’t you have done the same?’ is not just inadequate, but irrelevant, we will have no reason to believe they grasp the point of their own jobs. And even if we ignore every other issue, for that reason alone, Dominic Cummings must go.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 25 May 2020.

Dear sensible Conservatives …

I’m not just writing this with liberal Conservatives or Conservatives who voted Remain in mind. I’m thinking about all of you who know that politics involves trade-offs, opposition matters in democracies and disagreement with the Government is not treason to the country.

Your views on the current Government vary. A few of you are quietly or openly miserable. Many see Theresa May as one of the sensibles at heart, trying to keep the diehards within the tent. Others think her Brexit policy is broadly tolerable. But I imagine you all look across the political divide, see what’s happened to moderate Labour and think it could be much worse for you internally — even as you fear losing to Corbynite Labour.

Labour pains (and possibly precedents)

It certainly could be much worse for you. I’m a Labour moderate: I know what ‘worse’ looks like. But in some ways, your situation feels like a much more extreme version of Labour’s 2011 or 2012. At the time, we had a leader whose basic priority was to keep Labour’s internal coalition more or less on board. We also had a groundswell of feeling in, around and sometimes in complicated opposition to (combined with a sense of ownership of) the Party. In our case it was driven by a mix of being in Opposition and the sheer scale of Government cuts to the most vulnerable. And we had a longstanding hard left element of the Party — a small one in Parliament and a larger one in the country.

The soft left and many who now identify as moderates liked lots about this state of affairs— not wholly unreasonably. Ed Miliband went on the March for the Alternative in 2011. New Labour was self-consciously disavowed — either as too centrist, or as an outdated response in new circumstances, or both. Labour started to sound more critical of business, less keen on markets in public services, less interventionist in foreign policy. All of which was well within the mainstream of politics, whether you agreed with it or not.

On the side, sources like Another Angry Voice became quite well-liked and read by much of the left. Owen Jones was read and shared with sympathy by many social democrats. They were clearly to the left of the leadership — how far wasn’t too clear to many at the time. Organisationally, the unions had been shifting left over years. CLPs were moving that way too, with an inevitable impact on candidate selection. It’s not surprising that the 2015 intake had a significantly larger share of genuinely Corbynite and would-be-Corbynite-if-we-could-get-away-with-it MPs than the rest of the PLP.

We also tend to forget that nasty incidents relating to anti-Semitism and foreign policy predate Corbyn’s leadership. Under Miliband, three Labour MPs saw fit to invite Raed Salah to the House of Commons — and of the three, only Jeremy Corbyn was on the hard left. During the Gaza offensive in 2014, a shadow minister cheered the fact that protesters forced a Sainsbury’s to close — and yes, she apologised, but how did we ever get there in the first place? When an MP’s language called a Jewish Ambassador to Israel’s loyalty to the UK into question, it took a week for Labour to get him to apologise.

Meanwhile, Miliband tended to nod to the left of the soft left in his rhetoric, even when policy remained pretty resolutely social democratic. By 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn borrowed the same rhetoric and most of the policies too, Andy Burnham and (to a lesser extent) Yvette Cooper found themselves struggling to tell Labour members why they shouldn’t vote for him apart from saying he couldn’t win an election. Liz Kendall was the only candidate who consistently said Corbyn was wrong on policy as well as tactics. And the moral case against Corbyn was only made by a very few. The rest is history. Whether social democratic Labour will ever reassert itself against left-populist and hard left Labour I don’t know. But our parlous state is obvious to all.

Conservatives and the nationalist right

I see parallels with the Conservatives and the nationalist right now. Theresa May is no liberal and in many ways she’s an anti-liberal — a true Home Secretary turned Prime Minister. But she isn’t a zealot at heart. And most of the Cabinet is trying to keep the zealots onside en route to a Brexit which I would deem moderately hard, but would probably include a lot more regulatory co-operation and alignment (UK rule-taking in disguise) than said zealots actually want. But in so doing, too many of the sensibles are aping their language and assumptions.

May herself did it repeatedly. Her attempt to portray differences of view as somehow threatening to the nation when she called this year’s election was a case in point. Somehow we had reached a point where political division in the House of Commons — in an adversarial assembly! — was supposed to be a problem. She drew on the language of conspiracism as well as the nationalist right in her absurd claim that the EU was trying to influence the UK election. Earlier, her ‘citizen of nowhere’ remarks played into the same sort of rhetoric and language.

Boris Johnson, whose patriotism is so all-consuming he probably decided whether to back Brexit solely on the basis of his own personal advancement, has played the same game. (I normally disapprove of blanket cynicism about politicians. However, every now and again the evidence requires exceptions to be made.) Our born-again patriot Foreign Secretary recently declared himself ‘troubled with the thought that people are beginning to have genuinely split allegiances’. One assumes his convictions are of recent origin as he only renounced US citizenship this February.

Even more recently, David Davis — also a Brexiteer, but probably more pragmatic than many of his fellows — wrote to demand Labour MEPs have the whip withdrawn for voting in favour of a European Parliament resolution. The relevant section ran as follows:

The European Parliament … is of the opinion that in the fourth round of negotiations sufficient progress has not yet been made on citizens’ rights, Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the settlement of the United Kingdom’s financial obligations …

I think the UK national interest is served by recognising our weak negotiating hand and a) settling on citizens’ rights rapidly and in good faith, b) settling as much as possible on the Irish Border while pointing out that the extent of EU-UK divergence will dictate the nature of border management and c) agreeing the broad outline of a financial formula. As far as the money is concerned, getting a decent final relationship is worth virtually any amount. British MEPs also have a duty to their constituents’ interests as they see them (including, I might add, non-UK EEA nationals when it comes to citizens’ rights). They have every right to use their votes to nudge the UK Government towards reality as they see it.

You might disagree with me on the merits of that view. But it is not unpatriotic to hold it. It is not “acting against your country” to advocate it. The national interest is a contested thing, which is one reason we elect people with a responsibility to adjudicate upon it. To call on opposition parties to withdraw the whip for “voting against the national interest” is as toxic as it is disingenuous. It’s not all that far from “enemy of the people” as applied to judges. And “enemy of the people” wasn’t all that far from “traitor”.

This sort of rhetoric has made far deeper inroads into mainstream Conservatism than the hard left equivalent managed in mainstream Labour before autumn 2015. It’s a dangerous game to play. And if I can’t persuade you it’s wrong in principle, think on this: if you don’t want a total car crash in March 2019, at some point you will have to disappoint the people who actually believe this stuff.

You will have to compromise on the Brexit bill. Your deep and comprehensive free trade agreement will involve copying large parts of EU law in all but name. Even after any transition ends, the European Court of Justice will — though probably not directly — continue to have influence over law in the UK. You will probably find your two-year transition period isn’t long enough. You will discover that immigration can’t be cut to tens of thousands without damage you won’t be willing to tolerate.

Do you think the obsessives on the nationalist right will spare you when you try to bring them back to Earth? Philip Hammond was sympathetic to Brexit not that long ago. He backed Remain in the end, but he was distinctly eurosceptic. He is implementing a policy of leaving the single market and not forming a customs union. He still has Brexiteers baying for his blood now. What is it about the record of lifelong europhobic obsessives which makes some of you think they can ever be appeased? What happens when you have to tell them Utopia doesn’t come wrapped in a Union Jack?

So if I were you, I’d draw some lines in the sand sooner rather than later. I’d resist the temptation to define disagreement as unpatriotic. I’d remind myself that pragmatists can’t control zealots forever. I’d get ready to fight sensible, moderate conservatism’s corner. And I’d remember that if you co-opt the zealots’ language and instincts for too long, you’ll have nothing to defend yourself with if they come for you.

For the good of the country — though of course your zealots would deny my right to say such a thing — please learn from Labour’s social democrats. Given the chance, the hard left turned on us. Given the chance, the nationalist right can turn on you in turn.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 28 October 2017.

Free votes: or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Whip

Free votes are funny things, and much overrated. We always have them for changing parliamentary procedure. We normally have them on things like abortion, equal marriage and euthanasia: essentially, ‘God issues’. Sometimes, we have them for no very obvious reason: fox-hunting was a case in point. And occasionally, we have them to make a point: Ted Heath held one on the ‘in principle’ vote for entering the EEC in 1972, largely to encourage Labour to split as badly as possible on the same issue.

It’s easy to see why they appeal. We complain about spineless lobby fodder, MPs with no independence of thought, rigid party dogma and so on. Allowing a freewheeling debate, with MPs able to vote their conscience, sounds great (though actually, plenty of MPs rebel). You even hear people saying we shouldn’t have whips at all.

But there’s a reason why in practice, MPs usually get free votes when either the party doesn’t care too much, the outcome isn’t in doubt, religion comes into play or party management means leaders think they have no choice. Equal marriage is important to me personally, for instance, but the whole of government policy on tax, benefits and inheritance wouldn’t have fallen apart if it hadn’t gone through. Not everything can be separated out so neatly.

Take the free vote principle too far, and eventually governments can’t govern coherently at all. If the Budget is completely rewritten by a series of splits, you’re not going to get a massively improved document with better policy for all: you’ll probably get a complete mishmash with everyone running round to try and square all the contradictions after Parliament has voted.

If you run a foreign policy on a ‘voting at will’ basis, you’ll also get an incoherent mess. The Government’s decision to allow Cabinet ministers to campaign against each other in the EU referendum and Labour’s free vote on Syria both illustrate the point. EU membership and decisions on military action are fundamental to UK policy. You can’t just say ‘Well, we’re neutral on leaving the EU, but basically our foreign, security and economic policies are the same either way’ or ‘Well, we don’t have a line on military action in Syria, but basically our policy on the Middle East is the same either way’. These decisions are game-changers: if you don’t have a position on them, you don’t have much of a position full stop.

Too many free votes don’t just make governing harder: they blur government accountability. Most people don’t think they vote for their individual MP: they think they vote for their preferred government, or their preferred party, or to send a message of some kind. The link between how we vote in an election and what policies we get depends, ultimately, on ensuring that MPs from a given party usually vote the same way. I don’t want a completely unwhipped Parliament for the same reason I don’t want a House of Commons filled with independents: parties may be unpopular, but they’re also necessary.

This isn’t to say MPs should be partisan lobby-fodder: dissent is important. But you can’t dissent when there’s nothing to dissent from. Most of the time, governments have to set out their stall and make sure their MPs are happy enough with the collective line that they can get it through Parliament. Rebellions serve a purpose, but so do concerns expressed on the floor of the House or in Committee: they allow for an interplay between a government and its MPs.

And if enough of your MPs won’t toe your preferred line, then you usually need to change it. When Labour MPs made it clear to Jeremy Corbyn that they wouldn’t be led down anything other than a pro-European path, that was the principle of parliamentary democracy at work. To his credit, he gave way, and Labour will now campaign to stay in the EU. No leader can survive without the acquiescence of the MPs they’re meant to lead. Tony Blair shouldn’t have had a free vote on Iraq: he should have had a policy with which MPs were more comfortable.

So yes, we need MPs who don’t always toe the party line. Sometimes MPs have to rebel. But let’s not confuse valuing dissent with not taking a position at all.

The single market: you can’t write the rules of the game on your own

It’s one of the interesting things about the Conservative Party’s EU crises: the militant Europhobes force the more moderate Eurosceptics to sound both more and less anti-EU. So we have David Cameron referring to the European Union’s achievements as a “precious thing” at the same time as he talks about using the eurozone crisis to repatriate powers from Brussels. Boris Johnson accepts that the City wouldn’t want the UK to find itself without a vote on single market rules, while he argues that we should opt out of pretty well everything else. And David Lidington talks about repatriation of powers, in order to “feel comfortable with membership of the EU”.

Lidington is no swivel-eyed Brussels-hater: he can see why some form of European co-operation matters. And clearly, you can have major opt-outs within an EU framework (the euro, the abolition of passport controls, large areas of justice and home affairs) – and this will increase for the UK and for at least some other EU member states, as the eurozone integrates further.

However, the fact that other EU member states are going to need to integrate further in order to make the eurozone viable does not mean that they will suddenly agree to grant the UK a whole series of opt-outs on existing agreements. The UK already has pretty much zero goodwill left right now with most of its European partners. It isn’t hard to see exactly what they would think of London for deciding to halt the very measures it has called for the eurozone to take – which it has called vital for the sake of the global economy – in order to settle a purely domestic debate about ‘Brussels’. Furthermore, they would be very likely to do exactly what they have already done with the Fiscal Compact: that is, move ahead outside the EU Treaties and hope to incorporate the new measures later on. Depending on the exact reforms involved, this could be more difficult to achieve, but the amount which can be done without Britain’s say-so is likely to be a great deal more than Tory hardliners like to think.

Part of the problem is that the British are underestimating the commitment, when push comes to shove, of most of Europe’s political elites to the euro. They always do. They assumed that EMU would never actually happen; then they assumed it would never launch in 1999; many of them assumed in 2011 that eurozone governments would let the eurozone fall apart. They won’t – partly because they’re terrified of the consequences (and rightly), but also because they are committed to European integration in a way which London is not. British elites (mostly) see the putative collapse of the euro as an economic disaster: so do most continental ones, but they also see it as a disaster for the European idea. In the end, therefore, the rest of Europe simply will not be willing to let British self-obsession wreck the whole show: and the experience of the Fiscal Compact shows that they will probably find a way to stop it from doing so.

The other point which the British fail to see is the way in which other governments view their particular demands. Many Britons talk about focusing on the single market and nothing else. For most other Europeans, social and employment law aren’t separate from the single market, but part of the package. In order to remove barriers among ourselves to commerce and trade, we have some common rules to ensure that national rules aren’t putting new barriers in place. Most of these are meant to ensure that our laws are similar enough that we can recognise each others’ and thus operate freely in each other’s countries. From the point of view of other Europeans, if we’re going to remove those barriers, then part of the common framework should be a certain set of minimum standards of how European workers are treated, to prevent a race to the bottom.

So other European governments are going to see this as an attempt to access the single market without playing by its rules – and to undercut their own businesses in the process, by being allowed to treat employees in a way which none of them would tolerate. This is one thing from developing countries, who frequently compete on labour costs, for obvious reasons: it’s quite another thing from a fully developed country which joined the Social Chapter over 15 years ago. Furthermore, it’s dangerous to the whole concept: if one country can unpick bits and pieces of the single market, why can’t another? And where does it all stop?

Some commentators in Britain talk about Germany as a potential ally in helping London here. If anything, Germany is likely to be particularly stern in its opposition: it takes rules seriously. Angela Merkel may well want Britain to be involved in moving the EU in a free-market direction: that’s different from letting Britain drop the regulations and leave the others to it.

It’s perfectly true that other EU members want to ensure that eurozone integration doesn’t exclude non-euro countries from decision-making about the single market, either in theory or in practice. That is a separate, crucial debate. However, no other EU government wants to unravel large parts of what the EU has already created or to allow one country to duck out of anything it sees as inconvenient. And they won’t allow Britain to impose it on them.

Slipping behind: with benefit reform, keep an eye on the index

Historians generally agree that cutting back public spending is difficult in a modern democracy. Losers shout louder than winners; the most expensive programmes are generally the ones with the most interests behind them; radical cuts are more likely to provoke strong reactions. (Similar objections apply to tax rises, of course.) The current cuts are striking, not just in their sheer unprecedented scale, but in the extent to which they cut back on services on which a lot of people rely in a very visible way.

So governments have always tended to fiddle with the small print of tax and spending rules – it’s hard to twig exactly what’s going on, the consequences aren’t immediately clear and by the time the full impact is clear the deed will already be done. Freezing the basic-rate limit (or, in days gone by, the personal allowance) for income tax is a classic example. So, too, with changing the rules for calculating benefit increases.

Of course, the Government’s already played this game. Nearly £6bn of its £18bn of planned welfare savings come from changing the measure of inflation used in uprating benefits from RPI/the Rossi Index, depending on the benefit, to CPI (see p40 of the Emergency Budget). This is simply because small changes, repeated each year, add up. If you look at the chart here, the impact over a long period becomes very clear. Whether Gordon Brown specialised in stealth taxes or not, George Osborne certainly has a fondness for stealth cuts.

The exception to the rule is the Coalition’s ‘triple guarantee’ on state pensions, guaranteeing annual increases of the highest of an increase in earnings, prices or 2%. Of course, this will start undoing the work of the last Conservative Government, when it broke the link between pensions and earnings. The (clearly documented) consequence was that the basic state pension fell further and further as a share of earnings – from 20% in 1978 to under 15% by 1998; it has carried on falling ever since. That trend will now reverse over time; but note how differently a large, vocal, Conservative-inclined group is being treated from people on low incomes, with disabilities or in need of housing.

We need to spell it out: the decision to uprate benefits by CPI rather than RPI is a straightforward decision to make the very poorest people in Britain poorer. It hits people on Income Support, on Jobseeker’s Allowance, on Incapacity Benefit or ESA. As the Government are even cutting the link between Local Housing Allowance and rent levels, it will drive more and more people out of their homes: eventually, given long enough, it will make people out and out homeless. (This holds even if we ignore the effect of all the other LHA cuts.) The single biggest policy change, fiscally speaking, in the Emergency Budget and the Spending Review combined is a plain and simple cut to the incomes of Britain’s most disadvantaged inhabitants – one which will be repeated every year, until it changes.

That’s quite bad enough as it is, and it makes the Government’s claim that it’s determined “not [to] balance the books on the backs of the poor” look pretty hollow already. This September, the difference between CPI (5.2%) and RPI (5.6%) was fairly small, but the long-term effect will be dramatic. So for the Government to even consider ways of reducing the annual rise again, even for one year only, is a particularly nasty attack on the living standards of a lot of very vulnerable people. The reason inflation is high is that the cost of living is going up: a lot of that is to do with global food prices, which (as a relatively fixed cost) will bear especially hard on the poorest. When the IFS says that £1.4bn (out of £1.8bn) could be saved by averaging out six months’ worth of inflation figures, they mean that most of a badly needed boost to incomes for the very poorest people in the country could be removed.

If the Government want to argue that that’s justified, then I’d disagree, but it’s a point for debate. But they cannot then claim that they’re not “balancing the books on the backs of the poor”. As a matter of cold, hard, statistical fact – whether they go ahead with this one-off change or not – they already are.

Lords in limbo: apply the Salisbury Convention in spirit as well as letter, please

Lords reform has been fairly heavily trailed for some time now, and we’ve had a bit more confirmation that the White Paper is on the way in the past couple of days. I’ll be glad to see the Government make headway on this: despite the outcome of the AV referendum, Lords reform has been a longstanding commitment from politicians of all parties and the evidence has always been pretty clear that a majority of the public believe our second chamber should be (at least predominantly) elected.

Personally, I think this really should be a fairly cut-and-dried issue. Members of the House of Lords are not primarily independent experts, sources of warnings or nods to tradition. These are all understandable things to want, and we ought to think much harder about how we integrate expertise into our legislative process, but they are not the primary role of the people who vote in the second chamber. They are, first and foremost, legislators – and legislators whose record of changing Bills and therefore policy is significant and growing. If we want expertise, we should make sure we have it in the right committees and the right debates for the right issues. (Could some experts even sit on Select Committees, in the Commons and in a new second chamber, as non-voting, co-opted members?)

The people who actually do make our laws should be democratically accountable. In an ideal world, therefore, we should finish up with nothing less than a 100% elected second chamber. I’m relatively relaxed about the finer points of STV versus open lists (lists where you can choose a candidate within a party list rather than just opting for a party): so long as it’s a proportional system where voters don’t just have to tick a party box, I’ll settle for it.

With regard to the likely plans to come from the Government: I’m not ecstatic about the idea of 15-year terms and I have fairly serious reservations about single terms – I think it’s an important principle that legislators should have to at least consider the possibility that they might want to face the electorate again, and if we’re serious about democracy then we have to accept that that requires accountability. Electing by thirds (or halves, or quarters) is sensible, though: our new Senate should be a more continuous body than the House of Commons, and a combination of PR and staggered elections would help to make sure it fits the bill. In terms of dealing with the current members of the Lords, I think an arrangement along the lines of the Cranborne deal might make sense – which would mean that we’d have 200 left in 2015, 100 left in 2020 and none by 2025 (when the full complement of Senators would have been elected).

But I’m enough of a pragmatist to understand that, if you want Lords reform at all, you can’t let the best be the enemy of the good. The fact that people haven’t recognised that is exactly why Lords reform hasn’t happened, even with a Labour government who said they wanted it in charge for 13 years. So if Nick Clegg can even secure an 80% elected second chamber, even with twelve voting bishops (though the latter will cause me real pain …) and even with all the other peers staying until 2025, then I’ll see that as a major step forwards and a real achievement. Of course, that depends on his Coalition partners voting it through. Whether the Conservatives will choose to live up to the spirit, as well as the letter, of the Coalition Agreement remains to be seen: if they choose not to, no doubt Liberal Democrats will feel even more betrayed than many of them do already.

The other question is how fiercely the House of Lords will resist being reformed. Everyone seems to agree that they will fight tooth and nail against reform. I do appreciate that, when people find themselves on the red benches, they have an uncanny knack of seeing the wisdom of allowing the nation to carry on benefiting from their wisdom. The Cross Benches’ reluctance is understandable, given that there would undoubtedly be pretty few (if any) of them in a 100% elected second chamber and that their role would inevitably be questioned in an 80% elected one. In any case, the difficulties the Lords could cause for reform, and for large areas of Government business, are very substantial indeed.

It’ll eventually be a question of whether the Coalition has the political will to push change through, whether peers like it or not. But one thing I really don’t understand is: on what basis do the Lords think they have any right to derail this legislation at all?  All three main party manifestos called for a wholly or mainly elected second chamber. All parties have been reasonably clear, with some wobbling from the Conservatives in the past, that the second chamber would need to be elected by some sort of proportional system. In 2005, both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats also called for a wholly or majority elected second chamber too.

It seems to me that, if a pledge won the support of both parties in the Coalition when they went to the country (as well as the Opposition and a number of the smaller parties), we have a pretty clear case of the Salisbury Convention in action. I can see why the Lords might query some Coalition compromises in that regard: no one got to vote for the Coalition Agreement. But on this one, I just can’t see where the ambiguity lies. It was proposed: it was in the manifestos: it’s now in the process of being turned into a White Paper, and hopefully a Bill. If there’s any defence, it’s surely of the most technical kind. Where exactly did the Salisbury Convention include a bit saying the Lords didn’t have to apply it to their own seats?

Dear ministers: poverty generally means not having enough money

Yesterday’s furore over Nick Clegg’s former interns rather missed the bigger picture. Yes, it’s not on for MPs (Clegg is, in this respect, pretty typical) to hire de facto labour and not pay for it: equally, Jonny Medland’s tactics aren’t exactly edifying (it’s not as if he suffered from the experience). The Social Mobility Strategy seems to contain a number of reasonable-in-principle-but-less-than-earth-shattering initiatives, most of which have already been announced and some of which are new. Fair enough, to a point: all governments try to reframe a whole series of policy announcements from time to time, and goodness knows oppositions like to repackage old policies too. It’s worth pointing out that much of it rings hollow in the current climate (commitments to Sure Start would be a bit more plausible if Children’s Centres weren’t closing all over the country …), but few of us are going to argue against the general principle.

The Government’s Child Poverty Strategy was also published yesterday. Of course, it received much less attention: poor children are always of much less interest to the British press than who ends up interning for the Deputy PM. But a key strand running through it was a commitment to ‘broader’ definitions of poverty. This ‘broader’ definition seems to stretch through from access to health services to – you guessed it – social mobility and life chances. Frankly, the Government seems to be in serious danger of confusing the words ‘broader’ and ‘different’: throughout the document, we get references to opportunities, to generational cycles of poverty, to unfair educational outcomes – to anything, in fact, which avoids the question of whether poor families have enough money.

Perhaps I’m narrow-minded, but it seems to me that poverty has rather a lot to do with not having enough money. It’s all very well to say that poverty isn’t all about money or that poverty plus a pound doesn’t equal fairness (not a statement, I suspect, that anyone who finds themselves one pound above the poverty line would ever make) – but ultimately, if a family struggles to put decent meals on the table, it’s about money. If an unemployed parent can’t afford the transport to a job interview, it’s about money. Finding the money for school uniforms is a question of, well, money. Children whose parents can’t afford enough space for them to study in peace and quiet are struggling with their schoolwork because their parents don’t have enough money.

There’s a cynical conclusion to draw here, which has a large degree of truth to it. This Government needs to have targets which go broader – and longer-term – than the current set: it knows perfectly well that its chances of the current targets going in anything other than the wrong direction, fast, are vanishingly small. £18bn of welfare cuts will cut savagely into poor families’ incomes; Housing Benefit cuts will mean that many poor people will find themselves forced to give up jobs as they move out of their reach, one bus ride too many to sustain or one extra half hour too much to juggle with another job; closed Children’s Centres translate into parents who find it that much harder to stay in work. All in all, income-based targets which can be measured in 2015 are unlikely to hold much comfort for Cameron and Clegg.

But it isn’t just that. The Government doesn’t really believe that income poverty is the measure of fairness. It pays lip service to it – it’s obliged to by law, after all – but in its view, as per its Social Mobility Strategy, ‘The true test of fairness is the distribution of opportunities.’ The Child Poverty Strategy trumpets the Fairness Premium for education – and the Child Poverty Commission will now be set up as a Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (note the order, by the way) – because the Coalition thinks that poverty and mobility can be elided. It believes that the question of whether people are poor is basically the same as the question of which people are poor in a generation’s time.

Well, it isn’t. Poverty is poverty: it is a grinding, day-to-day inability to share in the common life. As Polly Toynbee said of social exclusion, “It is a No Entry sign on every ordinary pleasure”. And if we subordinate tackling poverty to promoting mobility, not only will we fail to do either: we will condemn another generation of poor children to grow up in poor housing, without birthday presents, with the fear of falling into debt, with parents trying to make ends meet (often with several jobs at once) and often divided from each other under the strain. It’s very easy to treat the lack of money as a sideshow when you’ve always had plenty of it. Our Government ought to remember that.

Afterthought: A partial exception to this, in fairness, is a focus on getting people into work. This is something the last government worked hard on, and found dauntingly difficult, at a time of economic plenty. At a time when the best part of a million people are about to be put out of work by government policy, I find it hard to believe that the Universal Credit is going to get us very far towards raising employment in the next few years – especially when no one’s even going to start receiving it until 2013. Smoothing out some of the kinks of the current system is a good thing: but it’s a smoothing out, not a revolution, and it’s accompanied by plenty of benefit horrors – many of which, like the lowering of the maximum award for childcare from 80% to 70% of costs, will actually make it harder for people to enter or to stay in work.

Housing policy poses similar problems: the arguments around the Coalition’s plans to allow higher social rents in order to create revenue streams for building more homes are complex, but higher rents combined with Housing Benefit tapers mean that the barriers to work rise even higher. (And the need for this particular expedient might have been reduced had the Government not decided to cut the social housing budget in half.)

The March for the Alternative, and why it’s OK for the marchers to want different things

Like many (probably most) of my friends in London, I spent my Saturday marching in protest against the Coalition’s planned spending cuts. Like everyone else on the march, I don’t believe that £81bn of spending cuts by 2015 and only £29bn of tax rises represents a plan in any way compatible with social justice: and I do believe that it will do terrible social damage and wreck lives.

I’d have to concede, though, that the alternatives put forward by the marchers were many and various. People miles to my political left and my right were there – from those who were much more concerned by the speed than the composition of the fiscal tightening through to those who ‘opposed every cut and fought for every job’ (except Trident, usually!). The Coalition’s response has been, in essence: ‘You have no alternative; we have a plan; we’re carrying on with the plan’.

The trouble is, their plan bears no relationship to anything the public could reasonably be said to have endorsed. Forget the fact, for the moment, that all three parties fudged and dodged a real accounting of what would have to happen in this parliament. Even on the points which did come up – should we cut over five years or over eight? – the current plan is at odds with the votes. During the campaign, the public displayed a preference for the more gradual approach. 52% of people voted for parties who (at the time) agreed. Whatever you think about the balance of taxes and cuts, this is not a mandate for shock therapy in Britain. But that is what we’re getting: the sheer depth of austerity we now face parallels the 1920s.

And a large part of the reason for this is that, in the coalition negotiations, the Liberal Democrats didn’t prioritise economic policy when they chose their sticking points. In fact, they may well have decided to reverse their policy before they even entered the room; according to Nick Clegg, at least some of them changed their minds before they went to the ballot box themselves. The result is that the basic process of discussion, of splitting the difference – of negotiation – which a hung parliament might have been expected to require has been short-circuited. Instead, we’ve got a deficit reduction plan written in outline by one party alone and occasionally coloured in slightly different tones by another. Perhaps that’s not so different from the norm in British politics: but then, a hung parliament was supposed to change all that.

The marchers wanted a range of different things, granted. A march for any other alternative, if you will. But what they were trying to start, in a way, was that very negotiating process which our Parliament so signally failed to carry through. That’s why it was a March for the Alternative: Saturday’s protesters all agree that there are alternatives, even if they don’t agree which ones should be chosen. And that’s why, rather than saying ‘what’s your alternative?’, the powers that be ought to look at the range of alternatives we do have.

If we’re looking at compromises from the Coalition, they might involve more capital spending, combined with a reduction of the structural deficit at the planned rate; they could involve a greater emphasis on taxes. I appreciate that a Conservative government is not going to give me the deficit reduction programme I actually want – but then the voters didn’t elect a pure Conservative government, even if the deficit reduction programme makes it look as if they did. It’s high time the government acknowledged this reality in its economic policy.

And by the way, they should remember that mass demonstrations don’t always have an effect on the government’s policy … but if that policy goes wrong, the demonstration has a habit of making the government look a whole lot worse later on.

Coalitions, majorities and mandates

One of the most interesting questions of the next few years is whether or not we’ve embarked on an era of hung parliaments, minorities and coalitions. I’m not necessarily convinced: I certainly don’t think we’ve started a period of constant hung parliaments, and post-coalition Conservatives and a more liberal Labour might even reinvigorate the two-party system (at least for a while).

So Vernon Bogdanor’s piece in The Guardian covers important ground. Our current Coalition has caused enormous anger for many – in large part because of the sheer scale of the damage being done to public services and the welfare state, but also because people feel that ‘this isn’t what I voted for’. Liberal Democrat voters, of course, feel this way particularly strongly. Bogdanor is absolutely right that the formation of government mustn’t become insulated from the people.

I assume he isn’t being literal when he says that parties should be required to signal their intentions and likely concession in a hung parliament scenario. It’s not just impractical for parties to show their hand in advance (no party leader is going to throw away all their bargaining power before they even know how much they have); it’s actually vital, if coalitions are to reflect the election results, that concessions by coalition partners have some flex. In terms of democracy, the Lib Dems should expect to make more concessions if they win 15% of the vote than if they win 24%; and no formula can pin that down in advance. He does have an important point about preferred coalition partners: British parties have, morally if not pragmatically, something to learn here. It’s worth pointing out that Clegg, for all his faults, did stick to his pre-election commitment (‘the party with the strongest mandate – the largest number of seats and votes – has the first right to seek to govern’) on government formation: but in Germany or Sweden, for instance, parties make it quite clear who they will and won’t work with. A Swedish vote for the Moderates, Liberals, Centre or Christian Democrats will go towards a four-party, centre-right coalition; Green votes in a German federal election will help support a centre-left, Red-Green government. That makes the electoral choice clearer and it helps legitimise the coalition process.

But I would also question the implied account of what actually happened in 2010 and in previous elections: the notion that normally we elect governments directly, but that in 2010 the third party decided who governed Britain and voters were excluded. I don’t think Bogdanor thinks exactly this, incidentally, but it’s a narrative which informs the argument. It deserves some scrutiny.

At the heart of the case for coalitions is a sense that the largest minority party, which generally wins a majority under first-past-the-post (and usually would under AV too), isn’t necessarily in possession of a clear mandate to govern. I am not convinced that the Labour Party, which won 35.2% of the vote in 2005, was a ‘directly elected government’. Granted, political negotiation plays an essential role in delivering the government in hung parliaments; the government’s election is, in that sense, indirect.

But normally, the voting system just turns minorities into majorities for us instead. I don’t see that that’s a more democratic approach. I believe that when the voters don’t give any political party anywhere near a majority of the vote, a coalition government – a compromise between two positions – has a better shot at reflecting the balance of views of the public than a single-party government. Would a majority Conservative government be nearer the political centre of gravity in the UK than the Coalition, for instance?

I’m also unconvinced by the (implicit) analysis of what happened in May. The formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was absolutely bound up with the electoral arithmetic and with perceptions of legitimacy. 306 Conservative, 258 Labour and 57 Liberal Democrat MPs meant that a Lib-Lab coalition deal didn’t have a majority: and crucially, it was felt that the Labour Party had lost the election. The Liberal Democrat leadership feared the consequences of a ‘coalition of losers’: a government which many might deem illegitimate. Far from representing an overriding of the election result in the name of ideological agreement – even now, we need to bear in mind that most Lib Dem members, activists and even elected representatives would have found Labour a more natural partner – the resulting government was absolutely bound up with a particular interpretation of who won, who lost and what the electorate wanted.

Part of the problem with our debate at the moment, I think, is that all parties were evasive at best about what lay ahead. All three parties failed to outline more than a minority of their plans to tackle the structural deficit: all three parties emphasised ‘waste’, fairness and protecting the vulnerable. No one said that they planned to take an £18 billion axe to welfare benefits!  Labour in government would have found themselves assailed by the same cries of ‘broken promises’.

Our present position isn’t an indictment of coalition government: it is in large measure the consequence of a belief, shared by all mainstream parties, that the people simply will not vote for frankness in a general election. I’m not convinced they’re wrong about that: but in any event, the fact that politicians are either too scared or too canny to face voters with unpalatable truths in an election campaign says very little about the merits of coalition government.

Taxes, taxes, taxes

I realise very few people see it as an interesting exercise to sit down and work out how the plans for £29 billion of net tax rises break down. But if you’re going to think about better ways to close the gap between what we spend and what we raise, then it’s not a bad idea to look at what we’re doing at the moment. And in rough and ready fashion, based on the Emergency Budget* figures, the planned breakdown of net tax rises in 2014-15 is about as follows:

Tax Net revenue raised (£ billion) Tax Net revenue raised (£ billion)
VAT and IPT 13.9 Green taxes 0.7
Pension contribution relief 4.6 Stamp Duty 0.3
National Insurance 3.3 Inheritance Tax 0.3
Income tax 2.5 Other tax rises 0.2
Bank levy 2.4 Other tax cuts -0.2
Other pension tax breaks 2.1 Council Tax -0.6
Capital Gains Tax 0.9 Various business taxes -0.8
Sin taxes 0.8 Corporation Tax -1.3

Those figures conceal significant tax cuts in terms of income tax (£3.9 billion goes to raising the personal allowance by £1,000) and National Insurance (£3.7 billion spent on raising the threshold for employers’ NI to offset some of the increased costs), as well as a number of tax hikes in Corporation Tax to help pay for a headline rate cut. But in terms of where the main burden is falling, you’ll get a fair idea here.

It shouldn’t take too much to work out that any attempt to raise another £26 billion, say, is going to be very politically difficult. Labour have argued for keeping the bankers’ bonus tax (£3.5 billion or so – assuming revenues don’t fall if the tax stops being a one-off), and they’ve pointed to their National Insurance plans too (£3.7 billion more). If you were to argue for, say, 5p on the higher rate of income tax (taking a very brave example), the Treasury’s Ready Reckoner suggests you’d raise about £4.6 billion. Lowering the starting point for the 50p rate to, say, £100,000 might raise £1.3 billion (or about half that, if you raise the 40p rate to 45p – otherwise you’re double-counting). The Liberal Democrats’ famous ‘mansion tax’ was intended to raise about £1.7 billion. If, in another act of extreme bravery, you were to raise Inheritance Tax to 60%, you might net about £1.4 billion. The exact amount of money you could get from tackling avoidance may very well be substantial – but it’s difficult to bank on, and I wouldn’t envy the Chancellor who tried to rely on it as a main tool for tackling the deficit.

This clearly doesn’t, even in terms of orders of magnitude, add up to a £26 billion alternative to the Coalition’s plans. So in the end, substantially higher taxes will mean that people on moderate incomes will also end up paying more – not just the wealthy and the banks. In saying that, I’m not arguing against the idea: in almost all cases, tax rises are more progressive than cuts to services – and of course, it’s quite possible to use some revenue to compensate the poor too. It’s no accident that Scandinavian social democracies pay substantially more VAT than the UK – if you’re serious about social justice, the volume of money for benefits and services will make much more of a difference than the exact degree of redistribution managed through taxes on their own, and the tax burden has to be fairly widely spread in order to be politically accepted.

So not only would a centre-left government almost certainly end up raising VAT at some point, for instance; it would probably be right to do so, though probably not right now. It makes sense that, in an economy which needs to move towards more saving over time, we might increase taxes on consumption. The debate over how progressive/regressive VAT is has run and run, but it’s certainly more progressive than even more service cuts – and if it’s difficult enough to find £26 billion extra, try finding £40 billion instead. In the same way, further income tax/NI rises would be pretty hard to avoid. Property taxes would be politically very difficult, but probably sensible as policy. And if the centre-left want to reduce the damage done to public services, welfare benefits and public investment more generally, then we’d better start learning how to argue it’s worthwhile for all of us to pay more taxes in a good cause.

How much of this does Labour need to spell out? Some of it, at least – at least as an indication. The Conservatives didn’t give much away on their plans in 2010, but they did highlight plans to raise the retirement age faster and taper tax credits more aggressively. Not an obvious route to electoral success, in a way, but a manifesto which made no mention at all of any difficult tax/spending changes wouldn’t have been more popular: it would just have made people think they either weren’t being given the full story (even more than they already did!) or that the party in question shouldn’t be trusted with the public finances. And in reverse, the same applies to any party of the left.

* Figures weren’t provided for revenue raised by the 50p rate, the restriction of the personal allowance from £100,000 or revenue raised from Labour’s changes to ‘sin taxes’ (alcohol, tobacco etc.) – I did find a Treasury figure for 2014-15 for the first, but the other two had to be extrapolated a bit from previous Budgets. But the broad outline stands.