A blog about politics in the UK and the US designed for students of Edexcel Government and Politics Units 1, 2, 3C & 4C.
Updated irregularly by teachers of History and Politics.
In brief, before I get round to dealing with Ed Miliband's recent speech at the Labour conference, the "Blighty" blog at the Economist has an interesting article summarising the Labour Leader's approach: not left-wing, but something much more nuanced.
Essentially, he has to build a coalition of voters who have very difference and mixed opinions on issues, and don't fit into a simple left-right scale.
Interestingly, and very useful for Units 1 & 2, is his announcement of an intention to lower the voting age to 16. This is a useful point to bear in mind when contemplating voting reform in the UK; mind you it may well not be an entirely self-less act. A quote attributed to Churchill goes something like this:
Labour leader Ed Miliband has at last explained briefly what he stands for - it is somewhere between Blairist use of the market to ensure efficiency and produce centrally-driven public service reforms, and traditional left-wing big government initiatives to produce a "rebalanced" economy.
He has of course made a little headway with the Labour vote increasing slightly after the recent by-election in Oldham:
The Lib Dems didn't do too badly - while their vote did slip, they are in government and traditionally parties in government do badly in by-elections. That's not forgetting the issue of cuts which the Government is inflicting on the nation.
This item on the BBC web-site highlights the desire for MiliE to appeal to disaffected Lib Dem voters (how dare the party of liberal idealism actually have to make difficult choices while in government and actually, well, govern!). Interesting for G&P students in the way that MiliE tries to cast the choice that the Lib Dems made last may in going into Coalition as a "tragic mistake" - personally I don't think they had a realistic alternative. A Lib Dem-Labour coalition would have been weak and would have fallen quickly ("a coalition of the loosers"). It would not have had the necessary seats in the House of Commons to demand a majority.
This post from the BBC's Nick Robinson has some very pertinent things to say about the way that MiliE's thinking is going:
My sense is that Ed Miliband's speech is made up of the things he instinctively believes and those bits of political positioning he's been advised to adopt. His own views are interesting. At one point he argues: "We can't build economic efficiency or social justice simply in the way we have tried before. It won't be enough to rely on a deregulated market economy providing the tax revenues for redistribution. New Labour's critical insight in the 1990s and 2000s was that we needed to be stewards of a successful market economy to make possible social justice through redistribution. The critical insight of Labour in my generation is that both wealth creation and social justice need to be built into the way our economy works."
By this he says he means a high wage economy, the introduction of a Living Wage and respect for communities so that their concerns about government targets, out-of-town supermarkets and post office closures are not simply ignored in the name of efficiency. What he does not say is how this rebalanced economy - something which, incidentally, I have heard both George Osborne and Vince Cable call for - can be created. Watching how his thinking develops will be fascinating.
Ed Miliband does not yet have a convincing narrative which excuses the previous government for its mistakes and flagrant dishonesty with the obvious truth. Nor yet does he have a clear indication (beyond warm words) of where he will be taking his party, and how he can put Labour-friendly policies into action without any money to spend as previous Labour governments have done:
Ed Miliband needs not only to provide a credible alternative to the coalition's policy of cuts and "Maoist" public service reforms. He needs to explain what social democratic politics looks like in an era without easy money to spend. To do so he may need to develop an account of Labour's period in office that addresses more than just a failure to regulate the banks and a slowness of language.
The Coalition has raised all sorts of questions over how parties approach issues and probes the way that party allegiances are currently mapped out. It wouldn't be beyond possibility that the dissatisfied Lib Dem supporters (former SDP / Labour members) would return to the Old party fold. The trouble is, that while it's all very well to be idealistic and to promise not to raise University Tuition fees (as the Lib Dems did before the election) when you are not expecting to have to go along with any promise you make.
The Lib Dems have for years been the posturing opposition to business as usual. When thrust into Government, tough choices have to be made, especially at a time when there are significant questions over government debt. Any party not prepared to govern is merely a Pressure Group.
The new Lib-Con coalition government has produced some thought-provoking new policies. Overall, they seem progressive and more liberal in a classical sense than conservative, and are going ahead with these policies at a time of major government spending cuts. Labour claims that the cuts are the "same old Tory" cuts which are what they would have done anyway because that is what Tories have always done.
The key problems for Labour are:
1. They are in the middle of a leadership election, in which the candidates are trying to appeal to Labour party members who, um, support Labour and like having increased government spending which is geared towards helping the poor.
2. They have just been kicked out of office after having caused a big structural defict of around 8% of GDP in 2009 (i.e. excluding the effects of the recession, government spending massively outstrips government income in the shape of taxes). This should be put in the context of the overall £90bn deficit reported in 2009.
3. It's more or less what they would have done if they had been in power. Further analysis of the parties' budget plans can be found in this presentation from the IFS from April 2010. Page 29 shows the overall cut in spending and increase in taxes planned per year being £15.8bn by Labour, £10.1bn by the Conservatives, and £19.7bn by the Lib Dems.
Further analysis of the budget deficit can be found elsewhere, including this 2008 PDF from the Institute For Fiscal Studies. The graph below (from the BBC) says it all I think:
It'll be interesting to see how the leadership election turns out and what the effect will be on Labour policy, especially given that it is very likely the coalition will not survive its full five year term, and Labour will have to have a credible set of policies in preparation for a quick return to government. It is, of course, possible the coalition will survive the 5-year term.
I'll explore some of these policies further in the future as they develop. All useful stuff for any essay about political parties and their policies, although there is plenty of time between now and the exam in May/June 2011, so much may change.
A final note about former new Labour spin doctor Peter Mandelson. What I've read of his book, serialised in the Times this week, has been interesting but it has not exactly said anything we didn't know already; that new Labour and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown really didn't trust eachother, and spent time arguing about power when they should have spent all their energy running the country. It is an interesting contrast to the coalition government and the trust which civil service chief Sir Gus O'Donnell said was key in cementing the agreement between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, and between Nick Clegg and David Cameron in particular.
Just watch the coalition's first joint news conference:
I'm a bit wary about posting too much about the emergency budget, especially given that for G&P students taking AS, the autumn spending review will have happened by the time the exam season rolls around in 2011. I think the graph below (from the BBC) summarises the problem for the Government quite nicely, in that it shows the scale of the spending-cut and tax rises needed in the coming parliamentary session to reduce the budget deficit:
In short, as indicated here in a BBC article, the cuts announced by the coalition government are huge, but aim to balance the government books by 2016 (i.e. after the next projected election). There is much uncertainty, especially given that the coalition will face extraordinary pressure, and there is the possibility the government won't survive the next 5 years intact. More thorough business analysis here from Robert Peston and an economic view here from Stephanie Flanders, and here from the Economist magazine. The Think-Tank the Institute for Fiscal studies has a page here of useful links.
The interesting stuff for G&P students is contained here in an article by Bagehot in the Economist: that this budget challenges the dominant political orthodoxy of the past 12 years, that government spending has to increase:
Mr Osborne’s statement shattered and reversed the orthodoxy, which took hold in the last decade, that public spending must grow eternally. It has revised the relationship between the state and its employees, and signalled a reconfiguring of welfare support, which is set to be more generous to some of the very poor and stingier for many others. It was the start of a bid to create a new balance in the British economy: between the public and private sectors, and among industries and regions. This was the most painful budget in living memory, and one of the riskiest.
In short, the government deficit has encouraged the Coalition to think radically about certain areas of public policy, like removing income-tax for the less well-off, and public pension reform which previous governments have been wary of tackling. Nick Robinson highlights some of the impact the Lib Dems on the budget here. Don't forget, that Lib Dem Danny Alexander is the Chancellor's right-hand man as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Labour has not yet found a way of attacking the government policy except to decry it as a return to Thatcherist cutting of public spending; Polly Toynbee in the Guardian puts it this way:
There was nothing "unavoidable" about adding £40bn to Labour's already eye-watering pledge to halve the deficit in four years. There was no necessity to create a surplus in six years, returning to depression economics with mortal risk of sinking the country into second recession or slump. This was the budget to fulfil old Tory yearnings: it promises to shrink the state below 40%, which Mrs Thatcher never achieved.
There are, and will continue to be, complex arguments about the economics of all this which are not within the scope of this blog. We'll all see soon enough what the effects of these policies are; growth, or a disastrous double-dip recession.
It is obvious that no one party has total control of the House of Commons, despite a very large swing to the Conservatives and a loss for Labour of almost 100 seats. At least one commentator has called this almost as bad as the loss in the 1983 election.
Negotiations are on-going between the three main parties as to what the next step is; plenty of analysis and guess-work is available in most media, including the blogs listed on the left hand side of your screen. Minette Marrin in today's Sunday Times, and Andrew Sullivan both mention the extraordinary fact that the Conservative party would have won the election if Scotland's results were excluded, and that there is only one Tory MP north of the border. The analysis seems to suggest that a Tory administration which cut government spending severely would play into the hands of the SNP who could claim (quite legitimately) that the government had no mandate to perform these cuts north of the border. This would call into question the Union itself.
All of which is useful stuff for G&P students answering any question about why the British electoral system can be criticised. I would like to highlight the difference in result between the 2005 election where Labour won a clear majority with 66 seats on the basis of 35.3% of the vote, and the result of the 2010 election where the Conservatives won more of the vote with 36.1% but didn't win an overall majority with 307 seats.
The poor showing of the Lib Dems on 62 seats was a bit of a shock, but may reflect the fact that in the FPTP system we don't vote for the party leader but for members of their party to represent us; we make judgements about who to support based on a whole heap of local issues, rather than necessarily the national picture.
A key reason for having the FPTP system is that it tends to produce strong government, except that in this case it hasn't. Analysis from the BBC's Robert Peston suggests that coalition government would only happen in the event of a further financial crisis since there are significant obstacles to a stable government being created based on the voting done on May 6th, and more importantly further obstacles which may prevent government making the massive cuts necessary. As pointed out by him and Stephanie Flanders elsewhere there is currently little evidence that any party has got a credible plan to cut the deficit. Should the stock markets open on Monday thinking just that there will be severe problems in the city in terms of stock prices and the like.
Since economic policy is outside the scope of this blog and of the G&P course, I'll merely call attention to the events in Greece, and the potentially dire consequences to the UK, and the EU if a solution is not found. The Economist magazine's "Intelligence Unit" has suggested that a second election later this year is likely.
Not the promised blog about the Conservatives yet, but a quick note that the first Leaders' debates are happening Tomorrow (Thursday). It could be very interesting, or very dull if they spend their time sticking to pre-prepared scripts and not engaging with eachother.
Bagehot in the Economist has an interesting take on Nick Clegg, given that the Lib Dem manifesto is out. Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders have some good analysis of it. I won't go much further, given that there is unlikely to be a question in the exam about the Lib Dems directly. In short, they have some interesting ideas, but there are significant problems with their fiscal plans. Peston highlights that in some ways the promises in the manifesto are more traditionally left than Labour (and that Labour's manifesto is the most redistributive for years).
Nick Clegg has a great opportunity to engage with the public and get his message across in the debate. We'll see what he can achieve and what the impact on the election will be.
