Above all, try something.

“I’m doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them.”

Harry Truman, after the congressional elections of 1946

So. We’re behind.  We’re either a lot or a huge amount behind in the polls.

We don’t run Scotland. We don’t run London. Ten years of Labour hegemony of the machinery of Government have come to an end. Only in Wales do we manage to retain leadership - and Wales delevered a more negative verdict than anywhere else in the Country.

It’s easy to console ourselves with the details that show things aren’t as bad as hysterical media types say (I’ve done so myself, and rather elegantly too).  We know that we gained seats as well as lost them, we know that in Oxford, in Brent, in Liverpool, in Ipswich we gained ground.

Yet all those details are meaningless unless considered against the bigger picture of dissatisfaction. So how did we get here and how do we get out of it?

When considering what has made us unpopular there are a few things we can rule out. We can rule out  unemployment. We can rule out rising interest rates or soaring inflation. We can rule out recession or devaluation or the need to go cap in hand to the IMF for money. These are not small factors - they are the causes of most Government defeats in General Elections.

Yet there are real concerns about the economy out there. MORI’s monthly issues monitor shows that the number of people who feel the economy is the most important issue facing the country has trebled in the last six months, while two thirds of people expect the economy will get worse over the next year, up from one third this time last year. So twice as many people expect the economy to get worse than did so last year.

  

This isn’t a new phenomonomonomonom. This level of economic pessimism has happened twice before in the last ten year- during the fuel crisis and after Sept 11.

  

At the same time, the Government’s core issues are no longer as salient with voters. In 1997 around half the population said the NHS and education were among the most important issues facing the country. Today just 23% say the NHS and 15% say education. They’ve been replaced by Crime and immigration as the big issues.

So what does all that mean in political terms?

First, it means that the essential challenges the government face are policy and issue based, not personality based. The current negative poll ratings for the PM are trailing, not leading indicators. We’re losing support because people have serious concerns. We need to address those, not obsess about ourselves.

For me, this all suggests three interlinked challenges for the government until the General election. These are easily identifiable, but the answers are far more complex than I’m able to answer here. Forgive me then if my answers  broad brush. If anyone’s interested, I’d be delighted to come back to them in the future.

First and most important: get the Economy right. We need to go into the next election able to argue convincingly that the economy is growing because of the decisions we took. People are understandably nervous now, and although the economic data is reasonable, they will not be re-assured by rising repossession stats (even if they’re historically low). The current focus on supporting homeowners is right, but we have to make it a huge, visible commitment. Think the NRA under Roosevelt or Medicare or Macmillan’s homebuilding commitment.  the scale of what we’re going to do to help the economy through the credit crisis is enormous - the program that delivers it should be as enormously well known.

Second. Make Schools and Hospitals matter again. The decline in people believing schools and hospitals are big issues facing the country is good news for the Government. It means lots of people are relatively content with what we’re doing.  (actually it means they’re not actively compaining aboutwhat we’re doing - which is about as good as any government is going to get). There are huge areas of disagreement between Labour and Conservatives on how to deal with these issues. Building Schools for the Future, for example, or the need to improve primary care - even when that comes into conflict with the agenda of the BMA. 

We need to create political drama around those differences. What would the tories hate us to do most now? Invest more in consumer focussed public services. So Why not announce plans to spend millions on a huge wave of “free schools” with extra funding from the centre and perhaps some funding top sliced from the increases that would have gone to inefficient, beureaucratic and now Tory LEAs?

Third Be focussed and aggressive on Crime, while neutralising immigration as an issue. There should be no let up Anti-Social behaviour and Crime. The new points system for immigrants should go a long way to reducing fears about non-EU immigration, but while Britain has one of the most dynamic economies in the EU, it will attract EU immigrants. We need to actively manage peoples legitimate worries on that topic without pandering to anti-immigrant idiocy.  Skilled Immigration is good for Britain 

Finally, there’s some political ju-jitsu to be attempted. David Cameron’s great weakness is his eagerness to over-reach when he sees votes coming within his grasp. On the environment, on poverty, on social justice and the economy, When Cameron thinks he can find floating votes, Andy Coulson writes cheques George Osborne won’t cash.

So instead of looking suspiciously at each new Cameron promise, welcome it enthusiatically as a conversion to the true faith from a prodigal son and propose something that goes a bit further still. force them to vote it down or commit to our agenda. 

The Tories are edging onto our territory, so force the debate open. Make them vote against the objectives they claim to support. (This last will also help with the need to motivate labour supporters). Want to cut poverty? OK then We’re going to take people out of taxation, increase the minimum wage and pay a job premium to every long term unemplyed or person on IB who gets and holds a job.

Will some of this be expensive? Perhaps. Less so than you might think, but it might well involve some short term extra spending. There’s an economic justification for doing that.  What we’re likely to face in Europe over the next year or so is a battle over demand. If companies can’t access credit they won’t make as many purchases. A little Keynsianism might not be such a bad thing in a situation like that.

In any case, all the plans above would certainly be cheaper than the US approach of sending people and businesses $150 billion in cheques to spend. In fact, if you wanted to make Tories really uncomfortable you could even use the US model as an excuse to cut taxes at the same time as doing the above - though a plan like that would need a lot more economic justification than a political hack like me can provide.

When you’re in a situation like the one we’re in now though, It’s good to remember the words of Franklin Roosevelt when asked how he intended to handle multiple related crises.

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something”.

In defeat you can find liberation, as Truman found. If we use it well, we could pull off as big a suprise as he did.

Would the Tories have a vote on leaving the EU?

Fraser Nelson interviews David Cameron and Cameron won’t deny he’d have a referendum on withdrawing from the EU.

“One theory, which I have now heard from two shadow Cabinet members, is that the Conservatives would insert in their manifesto a pledge to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership of the European Union and then hold a referendum on the result. It would be a herculean task, which would take years. But when I put the proposal to Mr Cameron, I do not get the brush-off denial I expect.

CAMERON: ‘These suggestions are options for how to deliver what I’ve spoken about,’ he says — referring to his promise not to let ‘things rest’. ‘I am not going to comment favourably or unfavourably on any option like that until we are ready to do so.’

If the Tories were to renoegotiate the terms of membership of the EU, and then hold a referendum on it,  rejecting the resulting referendum would mean leaving the EU. If the leader of the Conservative party is thinking along these lines, this is probably the biggest story in politics. Are the Tories really considering a referendum on membership of the EU?   

Look Out, outlook!

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been lucky enough to be the “featured blog” at Labour Outlook, the new Labour blogging community site which features articles, Labour Blogs and debates on new ideas. (Labour Outlook nestles nicely alongside Bloggers4Labour, which is more of an aggregator)

I haven’t mentioned it because of my severe case of selfpromotinghackophobia, but now they’ve moved on to featuring Labour and Capital, I can happilly say that it’s an excellent site and you should all be reading it.

So go do so.  Go on go on go on go on go on go on go on.

 

Narrative Follies

Coming from a marketing background, my instincts are strongly with Danny Finkelstein in his article in the Times today about the importance of narrative. He says:

“The image of a product like Coke is not separate from the way it is experienced. Similarly, the way policies are explained and linked together, the story that is told about them and the brand image of the party advancing them affects the way those policies are experienced. Perception and reality, spin and delivery, style and substance are woven together.

I have one major amendment, which is I believe that the audience that most requires a convincing narrative is the media class itself and that changes what you can do as a politician.

What is a narrative, after all, but a way of turning a series of events into a story that is easily grasped and explicable? That is the job of the media, it is what they excel at. Hence, it is what they esteem in others. This isn’t a rant against the media (for once). In turning events into stories, by imposing a narrative on them, journalists and editors are responding to a human drive for explication.

We see the same thing in marketing. Sure Daz washes whiter, but how do we bring it to life to the consumer?  Those are the questions advertisers ask.  The answer is through drama and narrative. So instead of a man in a suit telling you the scientific facts about detergent efficacy, you end up with Danny Baker pitching up at someones house asking if they’d be willing to show their laundry to the nation, or a Persil ad that stresses how, because Persil can be trusted to get everything clean, mum can relax about her kids getting dirty.  These are impositions of narratives on consumer products.

As Danny says, we respond to these narratives. We respond to them so strongly that we internalise them, coming to believe that Coke tastes better than Pepsi, or that Persil is somehow gentler on the skin than arch rival Ariel*. We’re designed to respond to narrative. Good thing too. Otherwise no-one would bother to write Crime and Punishment, or Grand Theft Auto, or Lost.  

So Politicians need to develop narratives.  But it’s a competive marketplace. It’s not enough for politicians to simply provide a hook to hang their latest announcement on. Their narrative has to encompass both what it is they’re trying to do, and a reason for consumers of the narrative (in this case journalists) should accept and propogate it, rather than other narratives that are on offer.

Why am I so insistent on the audience being journalists and the narrative market being competitive?

It’s not because narrative isn’t important to voters. It is, but it’s less important than crime, their mortgages, immigration, the economy and whether or not their local school is any good. Yet the only way those voters are going to see any political narrative on the areas that matter to them is through the agency of the media- and thus it is the media that defines the way every issue that matters to voters is covered**.

Politics is a mediated business.

You can’t buy a £30 million ad campaign to set out your narrative. Even if you could, that campaign itself would be drowned out by the commentary on the narrative created by journalists. Remember what happened to Dasani, the mineral water that wasn’t? That’s what happens to narratives when the media decides it preferes an opposing narrative. (actually, David Cameron reminds me of Dasani - a pale blue, expensively marketed, synthetic imitation of the real thing).

All of which poses a conundrum for political types. If the key for success is to develop a winning narrative, but the people who you need to spread that narrative are, as they are at the moment, already embrace a competing narrative and are primed to mock any narrative you try and come up with, what can you do?

The answer is to force some defining split that forces your narrative on the agenda.  Think back to 1994 when Bill Clinton was bloodied and beaten by a triumphant Republican party.  Here is the New York Times on “our generations greatest politician” TM

“…Mr. Clinton’s greatest political liabilities: his failure to give citizens a clear, consistent explanation of his goals, and the widespread belief that he is weak, that he can be rolled.”

Not that different to how the media sees the Prime Minister today, and just as wrong. That was the Media’s Clinton narrative in 1994 though. Weak. Beaten. Bloodied, Inconsequential.

Clinton managed to fight back by dramatising again and again his differences with the seemingly dominant republicans, while staying firmly in the centre ground. 

Here, the one thing that has changed to the Prime Minister’s advantage over the last week is that he’s now thought to be an underdog by the media.

Underdogs have to do one thing, and that’s fight hard. In politics, that means fighting for the people on issues that define you against your opponents plans.  It’s happened often in America- Harry Truman from ‘46 to ‘48 as well as Clinton from ‘94 to ‘96. 

With a media expecting a Tory victory a Labour narrative could be about fighting every day for the economic security of every family in Britain against those who would risk it for short term popularity.

No matter how I might wish for it, Journalists won’t just retail this story because politicians make speeches or give interviews. They’ve got better, more fun alternative narratives to hand. Why should they suddenly dump a world view that fits things perfectly for the one we’re selling? They won’t.

No, to be propogated widely a new Labour narrative need to be dramatised by a battle over issues that cleave Labour and Conservative on social and economic policy, while not retreating to the false safety of a core vote strategy.  (I can think of a few ways of bringing that contrast to a head- but as this is a discussion on narrative, I’ll leave the policy options to another post.)

Simply put, any narrative now has to embrace that feeling of battle, of something significant at stake, or it will be rejected by those who control whether it will be propogated as mere marketing and tinkering - a story line that fits very well with their existing mind set.

That makes me happy, because politics should not be merely competing narratives, but narratives that are based on issues that have real significance. In my washing powder days we used to call it the competitive demonstration or the “side by side demo”.  It’s the bit where you say “My product does what you want. Yours doesn’t. So try mine instead”

Time for some side by side policy demo’s to bring our political narrative to life, I think.

I’m a bad bad blogger…

Actually, I just read my post over, and it was so mind numbingly tedious, it should all go below the fold.  I’m writing about being criticised by someone else for not writing about something. Then I go on to say that we get obssessed by micro-trivialities. Mote, beam etc.

Read it if you want to, but it’s pretty pointless (apart from the rant at the end about paper reviews, which is reasonably amusing.)

Daley doofus

Helpfully Illustrating my earlier point about there being lots of journalists who aren’t insightful enough to bother to read is Janet Daley, who falls in love with a Abraham Lincoln quote that happens to chime with her political beliefs. It goes a little bit like this.

“You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot get a mickle by muckling a mackle.”

OK, I made that last bit up.

Janet Luurrrrves the quote:

“this wonderful piece of oratory was not required reading when I was at school in the United States - perhaps because its political message is so much more contentious…  …Lincoln was speaking before the Marxist revolutions and the rise of the socialist economic doctrines which have become European political orthodoxy.. ..It is clear that what he describes is a much older paternalistic tendency which simply found a new guise in the left wing policies of the twentieth century. “

Sadly for Janet, the reason it wasn’t on her reading list at school was because Lincoln never said it.

As the first page of a Google search would have informed her, the quote is fake.  In fact it took me all of ten minutes to discover that the quote is originally from a pamphlet by a conservative priest called William Boeckter, who wrote it in 1916, well after the emergence of Marxism, which kind of makes Janet’s whole point well, utterly wrong.

Janet Daley is firmly on the wrong side of the Bell Curve of Journalism.

What a wonderful weekend..

No, seriously. Forest were promoted - how could it not be a good weekend?

I also managed to stick to my resolution of refusing to read sunday newspapers. Oh, I scanned the headlines, but since my working assumption was that every paper would be full of Labour gloom, Labour Doom and other words ending in -oom, (excluding boom, I suppose) I doubt I missed much. 

I’m becoming increasingly cynical about media coverage of politics (Increasingly? sweet jesus, I was pretty cynical to start with).  I think the problem is neatly illustrated by the following normal distribution curve.

 

It shows, as if you couldn’t tell, where journalists sit on a normal distribution curve of talent. After all, if the bell curve is good enough for IQ tests, it’s good enough for hacks.

As you can see Charlie Brooker and Nick Davies are enthroned at the “good” end by virtue of being edifying and amusing in equal measure, (and they would be joined by Ben Goldacre too, if I had space) while Henry Porter and Simon Jenkins sit smugly at the other, unaware that their pomposity and self importance is of less interest to us than it is to them. Natasha Kaplinsky would be alongside them, but I can’t shake myself of the worry that I dislike her so intensely because I’m jealous, so I left her out.

Yet focus on not on worrying of whether reading Comment is free comments will actually make you stupider, or whether your brain can handle Danny Finkelstein’s insights. These are outliers, extremes. The key to media consumption lies in the middle ground of writers, the great bulky mass, nestled together in the centre ground. This is 80% of what you read each day, churned out by worker bees with the same brilliance as you or me (i.e. none).

These journo’s don’t write anything particularly bad, or irritating, or outright stupid, but neither do you feel yourself exposed to any great insight. The end result is the great tide of words that washes over you over at politics home, or the sense you get one reading all the newspapers that you’ve read the same sentiments ten different times.

I placed Rachel Sylvester atop the pile for the moment, as she seems to be the current high queen of conventional wisdom, but really that’s just symbolic. Almost all of what you read in newspapers falls into the boggy middle ground, all trying to make sure they’re not the outliers, desperate to conform.  Read one, you’ve read ‘em all. So why bother reading any?

The challenge is to find the writers at the right end edge while avoiding the rest. All techniques for doing so are gratefully accepted…

About last night

“Life ain’t nothing but a blending up of all the ups and downs”

Drive by Truckers, Carl Perkins’ Cadillac

I didn’t stay up to watch the results programme last night. It’s pretty much a pointless show when half the councils are declaring the next day and the Mayoral vote isn’t announced until the following afternoon.  It felt very strange going to bed on an election night at a normal hour, not poring over results as they trickle in.

The benefit of waiting until the next morning to look at the results is that you’ve already got some perspective on it. Reading Nick Robinson’s comments you can’t help but feel that this is the work of a man who has spent the last 24 hours being frantically briefed, and is running on adrenalin and espresso. Poor chap should get some sleep.

So what do I, fully rested and on my lunch break, make of the election results?

The first thing that jumps out is Wales. As I write, a quarter of our total national loss of Councillors* comes from Torfaen, Flintshire, Merthyr and Blanaeu Gwent alone, almost entirely to independents in each case. Results elsewhere in Wales were also pretty poor, (with the exception of Neath and Anglesey) I suspect this alone is responsible for the disproportionate decline in Labour’s vote in it’s heartlands that the BBC has commented on.

I don’t know enough about Welsh politics to reach an informed opinion, but my suspicion is that the party is paying the price for a combination of Wales assembly unpopularity, the Plaid/Labour alliance and local complacency (Labour were similarly humiliated in Rhondda Cynon taff four years ago, and the growth of independents in the valleys seems to indicate that residents are using them to attack local party complacency, as Rhondda stayed safe labour in the General Election)

The next point to make is that Wales aside, the changes over 2004 are not enormous. This isn’t saying much because the 2004 elections were pretty awful. That said the changes seem to be incremental rather than enormous. This is counter-intuitive, because we tend to focus on headline results and particular bad results like Southampton, but as you go through the council by council list, you see that we tend to be talking about changes of a councillor here, and a councillor there, not landslide changes. Stevenage we lose two, Basildon one, Lincoln one, for example. These are all key seats. (There are exceptions, of which more later)

Third. Don’t get too wild about Southern discomfort theories. While Southampton was disappointing and it looks like Reading will be too, there are some interesting exceptions that need to be looked at. Oxford, Ipswich, Hastings and Colchester (!) all showed Labour gains, while places like Swindon, Norwich and Worcester didn’t change at all.  

Fourth, there are places where the Tories are making strong progress. You see this especially in places that were 2005 gains (or they came very close) around London.  Reading, Peterbrough, Welwyn Hatfield and Harlow all see either strong growth or retention of total dominance. This isn’t a total rule though - see Stevenage, Basildon, Thurrock for examples of Labour doing OK in slightly stronger areas.  Seems that when Labour loses MPs and Tories gain them, the following council results are pretty bad. Which makes sense really.

There are also individual councils where the Tories have done particularly well- Southampton, Redditch, Sunderland. (The reporting on this last tilts me- there’s always been a decent Tory vote in the Sunderland suburbs, just as there used to be in Jesmond, Westerhope and Gosforth in Newcastle before the Lib Dems took it all. Not everyone in the North-east was a miner.)

There are exceptions everywhere. Liverpool, Bolton and Pendle all showed Labour growth in the Northwest, while Burnley looks like a bad result. Losing Wolverhampton and Redditch was disappointing in the West Midlands, but the Tories lost Coventry and Walsall stayed static.

Overall, a pretty bad set of results, no doubt. We’ve got a lot to do.  Yet there’s a lot more here than the headlines will scream. Organisation clearly matters, so does the reputation of the local council. I’d be focused on reconnecting the party in Wales and thinking carefully about the M25 band of marginals and how we can support them. (There’s a similar band of marginals around Birmingham too, and the same trends seem to be evident).

Other than that, the Government shouldn’t panic. The key thing is to reconnect with peoples values and aspirations, and make sure people stay in jobs and decent homes and have good schools and hospitals to go to. The rest is pretty much froth.

* 8 in BG, 9 in Merthyr, 13 in Flintshire, 16 in Torfaen for a total of 46/166. This proportion will decline as the day goes on and more results are announced, obviously.

 

All the best…

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last two days. Minor domestic crisis (small flood in tooting, no-one killed) that had to be dealt with, then catching up with work today meant little joy in blogging terms.

All the best to all the Labour candidates fighting elections today. As a special non-partisan bonus, best of luck to candidates of all democratic parties who are up against the BNP.

I read the newspapers today. Shouldn’t have bothered. Pages of speculation that will be worth less than nothing by the time the results come out. Nobody knows anything. The same will be true on Friday because the papers can’t possibly cover the results well, they can only cover their guesses of how the results will go.

My advice is protect your brain from meaningless drivel and don’t read a newspaper until Saturday at the earliest.*

 

*make an exception for evening papers, bar the Standard. You shoudn’t bother with the Standard, not due to bias issues but because the Mayor result won’t be out in time for at least the early editions.

A poverty of debate..

I suppose I should be outraged by David Cameron’s laughable new found commitment to ending poverty.  I’m not. Any time a politician feels the need to say they’ll tackle poverty, I’m pleased, because it matters.

Of course when that commitment is matched by a series of policies that will actually make matters worse, then  some scepticism is in order.

Let me put it this way: If Labour in 1994 had said they were committed to a strong anti-crime policy, and that their policy for delivering this would be to reduce the number of police in the toughest areas and spend the money on laser triggered alarm systems for millionaires to protect their art collections, would this have been taken seriously?

This is what the tory “anti-poverty” proposals are; Cut Sure Start (which helps the poorest families) to fund health visitors (who go to the middle classes as much as the poor). Cut support for the poorest  families to fund  married couple allowances that help the wealthiest.  Push Inheritance tax up to the two million mark while introducing welfare schemes that are shown to increase poverty rates .  These are the Tory policies we know about. Others surely lurk undeclared inside CCHQ.

The Tory “poverty” campaign is a piece of short term political positioning. it’s the same as Geroge Bush in 2000 talking about compassionate conservatism (remember that?). What Cameron and his team seem to forget is that when you raise these issues, there will be a reckoning of whether you mean it.

At least there will if we get to have that debate.

Unfortunately the media* appears to have suspended all rational judgement about policy (from any party) and turned politics into “Heathers“, leaving us in the odd position that if you are popular you can say the most flagrant nonsense and have it reported uncritically, but if you’re unpopular saying that the sun would rise the next day would be parsed as a desperate push to reassure worried voters of celestial stability.

So great, let’s spend the next few months talking about poverty, about education, about the economy.  Let us compare programmes, investigate spending commitments, work out tax implications. I promise you, people are interested in such things, if they’re allowed to be.

Now, a cynical soul might believe that the tories don’t want that kind of debate. I’m not so sure.

One of the interesting things about the new modern Conservatives is their peculiar brand of political self confidence. I suspect it comes from a belief that they have finally convinced people of their rightness by using a form of political linguistic judo, rather than changing core policies.

Tories have spent the last decade trying to explain why Conservatism is better for Britain that social democracy and failed. Now they have discovered that by talking like social democrats they can convince people of their good intentions.

As a result, Conservatives have not had to abandon cherished beliefs, they’ve merely been asked to talk about them in a new way (Family tax allowances becomes an anti poverty measure, for example). Some of these policies are good, some bad**, but they are all essentially Conservative policies. at the same time the true believers are re-assured - Tax cuts will come (but in time). Employment laws will change (but we won’t talk about it) and so on.

This means that Tory campaigners  and strategists as confident as ever of the rightness of their solutions and now they have a new language to describe their beliefs, many Tories hunger for the debate that will finally destroy social democrat policy dominance.

I want that debate too,  because I believe that when it is joined Conservatives will be faced with a very uncomfortable choice. Join the social democratic consensus unambiguously and for good or stay true to their  values and lose.

The only way we all lose is if the linguistic jujistu goes undebated. Labour loses because the debate matters to us, the country loses because they won’t get what they thought they were voting for, and the Tories will lose because, well just look at what happened to George Bush and “compassionate conservatism”.

(and as a reward for getting all the way down here, make sure you read  Charlie Brooker on Obama and 24 hour news and Aaronvitch on Brown.)

* aided and abetted by hacks, politicians and assorted hangers on like me who far prefer talking about who’s up and down than about boring policy stuff. Even I notice that i get more interest and attention when I gossip than when I write worthy articles on welfare reform.

** for example, I’m one of the more relaxed Labour people when it comes to allowing private companies to supply services to the NHS.