On Sunday I took part in an enjoyable discussion for the House of Comments podcast on coalitions, Andrew Adonis’s ’5 days in May’, which you can listen to here, if you so choose.

This also reminds me that I haven’t asked questions 4 & 5 for Five days in May.

Briefly, they were:

4. Why had so little work been done on possible coalition policy agenda before 2010, given that Coalition was the absolute best outcome Labour could hope for  (Contrast this with 1997)

5. Given 4, why did Labour not request Civil Service support in preparing such an agenda?

Both speak, as Andrew’s book does generally, to a certain lack of seriousness about the possible retention of power.

Curiously, while I think Gordon Brown was largely a failure as Prime Minister and Party leader, he seemed alone in not sharing this apparent fatalism.

Amidst tumultuous political brouhaha and the confusion of ever-shifting public opinion, I have a North star which guides me true on whether my beloved Labour party prospers or falters. I scorn the polls, the sages, the seers, the cacophony of advice to our leaders, and I focus on the small still voices that tell me if things are going well or badly for the British left.

Yes, I listen to the most moderate Tories I can find.

I enquire after their wellbeing with the compassionate solicitude of a spendthrift ne’er-do-well lunching with his impossibly wealthy elderly maiden aunt. “Are things quite well at home?” I ask. “Getting about OK?“, “Everything all tickety-boo, shipshape and Bristol fashion?“.

The greater the misery that clouds the souls of the Tory moderate, the more full of the Joys of Spring I am. The more quavering the reply, the dimmer the eye, the heavier the soul, the more I rejoice.

Should they leave the impression they are teetering on the very edge of political life, I depart their company with my confidence renewed, a spring in my step and a healthy glint in my eye as I plot a spending commitment or two.

I am not proud of this, but if a moderate Tory is to suffer, well, a chap must live.

So  this ack emma, plowing my way through the my oeufs et pain, I stumbled across this agonised missive from a leading scribe of the moderate Tory tribe, a Mr Ganesh, which was full of sighs, wails and mournfulness, attempting to explain why the party of my opponents were in throes of great suffering. If shares of Tory Woe were being floated, Mr Ganesh was in on the ground floor and enthusiastically pushing the button marked up.

“A party in Agony” began the Tory wordsmith, which had the effect of a Corpse reviver on my jaded political palate. I sat up, I started. My eyes popped.

“Huzzah!“, I cried, startling the cat with a hearty bash of the breakfast table. “Fear no spending review or welfare trap, dear puss, for this is the very stuff to give the troops”

It was with no little glee that I progressed to the Moderate Tory view of how the last election was lost. Indeed, an unkind observer might have remarked that I appeared to be cornering the market in glee futures, preparatory to an assault on the common stock of smugness, delight and happiness.

The last election was a “shoddy campaign“, full of “esoteric waffle“. The current Tory party were “swivel eyed loons” or “arrogant losers” while even the best of the Tories were “chronically passive” with a ‘Lordly disdain for a fight“.

Best of all though, my correspondent  a fellow for whom I have the highest regard and who I understand to be in full communion with the best and brightest of his party, had got the whole thing completely bloody wrong.

Now, Janan’s tale of Tory incompetence is right enough, and his fundamental analysis – that the Tory modernisers had not gone far enough, rather than too far, in changing the Tory party is correct.

He is also right that the Tory election campaign was dreadful empty rubbish, which appeared less a credible agenda for government in tough times and more half baked flim-flammery and waffle.  On all this we agree. Yet, Janan excuses, even praises, the one crucial strategic error that led to the embarrassing emptiness of Tory modernisation. He says:

“The Tories’ poll lead had been dwindling since the previous autumn, which was when the party began to elucidate its plan to cut the fiscal deficit more aggressively than Labour would. This candour was admirable and far-sighted – the present austerity would be politically unbearable had voters not been warned it was coming – but even at the time the Tories feared it would cost them votes. And it did.”

Admirable and Far sighted it might have been. I cannot speak to that. But it was certainly politically bloody stupid. As Janan says, the Tories falling short  ”had more to do with the economic insecurity that nagged at voters when shown blueprints for austerity by a party they already mistrusted“.

There is a simple thing here. The Tories have one essential political task if they are to convince those who are unsure about them. If Labour’s challenge is to prove we possess a certain economic continence, then the Tories task is to display a tender human sympathy and compassion for their fellow citizens.

The best way to do this is through money. Waffling on about big societies is rather less convincing.

The Tory pre-election campaign was founded on a total failure to grasp this essential truth.

Instead, they looked and sounded  as if they could not wait to get in and start slashing about them with a spending axe. The correct modernising tone would have been one of fearful dismay, a desire to help and limited savings. “We are a different kind of Party now. We will protect all we can“, Cameron should have emoted, “but thanks to that dreadful grumpy man, things are awful grim, so we will save money on these few items of shameless profligacy and try and give you a little back from the proceeds.”

Given that they had chosen to reject this simple message in favour of confident severity, the Tory modernisers were forced to devolve their message of compassion and social conscience to the dreadful bollocks-peddlars, who promptly banged on about inviting people to join the government of Britain and new networks of social solidarity and other such guff.

If the Tory modernisers want to know why they are now without honour in their own land, it is because they sacrificed themselves on the alter of cuts.

Were they right to do so? I think not, neither economically or politically. Labour’s fiscal plans were already mighty tight, and after victory there would always have been room to recoil in horror at their poisonous inheritance.

The best of the Tories don’t know where they went wrong.

This is a cause for great joy. This morning, I granted myself an extra fried egg in celebration.

Health warning: In trying to research this article, it became ever clearer to me that I am about as far from an expert in Housing policy as it’s possible to get. So I offer the below in both the hope and expectation that people who actually know the subject will chide, correct and enlighten me.

You know what would be nice? It would be nice if every child got a free pony. Children like ponies.

In politics, we’re instinctively attracted to the hope that solving problems might be easy. You see a problem, something that is hurting people, stopping them from achieving all that they want, or costing too much money, and you want to fix it. If it looks like there’s a way to do so that’s straightforward and pain-free, all the better. ((Sometimes, political choices actually can be relatively easy, or at least appear so. When the economy is growing, tax revenues are good, things seem sunny, your biggest question is how much money to take in, and how to distribute it. These are still significant choices, ones that really matter, but ultimately, these choices are going to cause little pain, little suffering.))

Today, housing policy seems to be an area where such fantasy is particularly attractive, no matter your ideology.

It’s rather pleasant to imagine that there is a painless way of holding housing benefit down, while increasing the amount we spend on housebuilding, thus neatly saving money, extending social security and transferring money from the pockets of the unworthy (greedy landlords or welfare addicted tenants, dependent on political preference) to the worthy (the “hard-working families” we all hold in such regard so much).

Except it won’t work like that. It can’t work like that.

In part this is because, as Declan Gaffney explains, the story being told on both left and right about the rising cost of social housing subsidy is fundamentally flawed.

There hasn’t been a big surge in the numbers of people claiming housing subsidy, except due to recession. We’ve moved from subsidising demand rather than supply, but that doesn’t mean we’re spending more overall, as a share of GDP, on total housing subsidies.¹.

The observable increase in the costs of Housing benefit comes therefore from two sources. First, there’s the recession, which means more people need help with their housing costs. Second, there’s the shortage of housing in high demand locations, which puts pressure on rents and housing prices.

Surely then, the solution is easy? Just build more social housing, see rents come down, create jobs and help end the recession.

Except it’s not as easy as that. Let’s assume it was socially and politically straightforward to begin a social house building programme of around extra 100,000 housing starts a year (it isn’t, but let’s leave that problem aside). This would represent a major increase in housing supply.

To pay for this might require an increase in government financing of say £40 billion to £50 billion over ten years. (I’m working from this report that estimates that to build 42,500 extra social homes with a capital subsidy of £60,000 would require an increase in government funding of £23.5 billion over years 1-10)

Can we find that money by holding down housing benefit? It seems pretty unlikely.

Today, the total spend on Housing Benefit in the private rented sector is about 8 billion a year total, a sum that supports one and a half million households.

It seems clear spending 40-50 billion over ten years on new house building to reduce the number of people in the private rented sector by less  isn’t going to be a straightforward  fiscal win. A capital subsidy doesn’t mean there no ongoing housing benefit subsidy required afterwards – it’s just you’d be paying rather less to a council or a housing association than you would be to a private provider.

It’s not like you can knock five grand off the housing benefit bill for every family on housing benefit you move from private to social housing. The average rent for UK social landlords is £30-40 a week cheaper than private landlords. So we’d probably save something of the order £1,500-2,000 for each household each year, which obviously takes a while to save you any money if you’ve spent the capital up front, and assume some future responsibility for maintenance.

Worse, even once you’ve built the houses, the people you move into your new social housing aren’t always the people who need your financial help. People don’t always stay in their socio-economic classifications. Imagine Sarah is a young single mother claiming local housing allowance. We move her from a private sector landlord receiving Housing Benefit to a social landlord, saving the aforementioned £1,500 a year.

After a year though, Sarah finds a job. Wonderful news for her, but a problem for our housing budget.  We’ve now put a large capital sum into providing a housing subsidy for someone who doesn’t ‘need‘ it. It gets even worse if Sarah’s friend Emily, who is still paying rent in the private sector, then loses her job. In that scenario, we’ve spent several thousand pounds building Sarah a house, and are still paying the same out in Local Housing Allowance.

Today, around a quarter of local authority tenants are in jobs at or above the ‘lower supervisory and technical’ level, so this isn’t a small factor in planning expenditures.

Nor is it clear that if you hold down housing benefit levels you reduce the level of rents generally. As  Shelter have said

“Average claims for LHA households are falling as a result of the 2010 LHA reforms. However, this is
because of the move to set LHA rates by the 30th percentile rather than the median of local rents, and the removal of the £15 excess. There is as yet no evidence that this has resulted in reduced rents across the board and may prove to be untenably low in the long-term.”

If that’s right, and holding down LHA doesn’t reduce rents, things could theoretically get even uglier. Say we’ve stringently held down the benefits we pay in the private rented sector in order to pay for a housing boom in the social sector. Now Emily can’t pay her rent at all, while Sarah still has a subsidised house.

What all this suggests is that there are no free ponies in housing.

If we want to hold down the cost of housing benefit over the medium term, or increase the supply of social housing someone will have to pay, and none of the options are immediately palatable.

So what could we do? Well, if we want more social housing, something has to give.

We could increase rents in the council house sector to create additional income, effectively squeezing ‘hard working families’ in council homes in order to build more housing. We could borrow more. We could tax more. We could limit the value of Housing benefit for a decade or so, thus creating a theoretical saving that could be reapplied. All of these will make somebody very unhappy, and for good reason.

We might well need a mix of all of the above, in which case it becomes pretty important to explain to people early on why this misery is being inflicted on them.

It would be nice if there are easy answers, but there aren’t.

To give into the desire to believe in them would be a huge error.

Ultimately, nobody is getting any free ponies.

1. Over the last decade we did start to spend a lot more on social housing investment, but a great deal of this was spent on modernising the decayed social housing stock, not directly building new homes [↩]

Andrew Adonis’s excellent ‘Five Days in May’ has left me with five questions. I asked the first yesterday, and here are the second and third:

Q2: Where were the PLP?

One of the noticeable missing elements in Labour’s approach to coalition was the bulk of the Parliamentary party. Given the incredibly tight parliamentary maths for any putative Lab-LibDem deal, Labour had to be united behind doing a deal.

As soon as PLP opinion on the merits of such a coalition began to splinter, whether from the bottom (discontented backbenchers) or the top (discontented grandees and ministers), the chances of Lib-Labbery being workable, already the subject of debate, would look infinitesimal. Indeed, that’s what began to happen over the Monday/Tuesday.

So Labour really needed to get the PLP together as soon as possible to secure mass agreement behind a common negotiating strategy. This would have been relatively easy to arrange; it could even have been done by Saturday evening, telling all Labour MPs to get to London for a big meeting.

Once the meeting was started, it would have been a relatively easy ride. PLP meetings are almost designed to allow the party leadership to unite the team together. Brown, as acting PM, would simple have had to spell out the possibility of staying in Government under him or, more likely under a new leader, set out the concessions what would be needed and the chance to protect people from the ravages of a Tory government.

I reckon if  Brown had asked for endorsement to try to form such a government, the PLP would have roared acclamation, giving such a process a legitimacy among the wider party it ultimately lacked. Frankly  if Labour couldn’t have delivered unity at that point, it never could, so even if the meeting went wrong, it would at least have prevented false hope.

Instead, Brown seemed keen to delay a PLP meeting as long as possible (one was finally held after Labour left government). Adonis reports that Labour people were dismissive of the LibDems rolling series of parliamentary and party meetings, but in this, it seems pretty clear to me that the LibDem processes were both robust and designed to create a lasting commitment across the wider party.

Indeed, the LibDems have shown an impressive parliamentary discipline on the key issues of Coalition for three years now. Labour can learn from this (and the Conservatives comparative unhappiness too – Tory MPs were never asked to formally bind themselves to coalition). Any future Coalition discussion needs to get the early endorsement of the PLP to the general approach and their full endorsement of the overall deal.

Q3: What effort was made to prove the Parliamentary Maths were really workable?

Adonis makes a convincing case that a Labour-Lib Dem government with 315 total votes in the Commons would have been able to govern in theory. But not much seems to have been done to prove it could work in practice.

There were three SDLP MPs and two Alliance/Ind Unionist MP who could be reasonably expected to regularly support the Government, making 320 MPs, more than either a Tory – SNP/PC or Tory-DUP vote, but less than a Tory-SNP-PC-DUP-Green group. (SFn don’t vote)

As Labour couldn’t rely on the SNP or PC not to bring the government down at a time of their choosing (Brown regarded the political cost to the SNP of permitting a Tory government as too great, but I think he underestimates the political opportunity an unpopular LD-Lab govt would give the SNP), this meant Labour really needed to prove that all the NI parties bar SF (all to prevent accusations of sectarianism) would be willing to support a Lab-LD government on a confidence and supply basis.

If this was agreed formally, a Lab-LD government would have had 328 votes even without any ‘rainbow’ parties. Can a coalition with such a small majority govern? Of course, look at Australia. But it needs to be clear. You can’t wing it. While Labour people were clearly talking to the NI parties, it’s not clear what evidence we had that the NI parties would grant such a deal in reality, not just in theory.

Without that practical evidence, the theory alone was likely to prove unconvincing. Labour really needed a firm, preferably written offer, publicly or privately from the NI parties to convince any other partner that a Labour led government was workable. This doesn’t seem to have been requested, let alone received.

Like my second question, this seems to point to an essential unfamiliarity in Labour with what it takes to build a stable minority or coalition government.

Andrew Adonis’s ‘Five days in May‘ is a fascinating account of a road not taken. It is the story of a negotiation that failed, from the perspective of someone who desperately wanted it to succeed.

The book is a gripping, pacy read, full of insight, human sympathy and flashes of dry humour. It’s also an angry book. Angry because Adonis feels that a chance of a better government than a Tory-Liberal Democrat Coalition was spurned by the Liberal Democrats, and at heart, Adonis cannot justify why this happened.

From Adonis’s perspective (one I share), a Labour-Lib Dem coalition could have governed, if not in perfect alignment, then in far greater mutual sympathy than the Conservatives and the Lib Dems.

The main responsibility for the failure to create such a government, Adonis argues, lies with the decision taken by leading Lib Dems  to embrace Conservative fiscal policy, despite their own manifesto position. (In a revealing aside, Nick Clegg sharply cuts Vince Cable out of Economic policy discussions between the Lib Dems and Labour.)

Further, it seems clear that the Lib Dem negotiating team were unwilling to take Labour’s approach for coalition seriously. Andrew Stunnell inadvertently confirms this in his rebuke to Adonis in the Guardian, saying “both Clegg and our team made it clear to our parliamentary colleagues every step of the way just what an intransigent shambles Labour presented“. Given that this was supposed to be a continuing negotiation over forming a common government, and Clegg told Brown right up until the last-minute that he was open to forming a government with Labour, Stunnell rather supports Adonis’s suspicions over a lack of good faith from Clegg and Co.

Nor does Adonis spare Labour from criticism, though perhaps you have to know the contours of party loyalty to see the more stinging critiques.

It’s clear that Labour didn’t understand the main concerns of the Lib Dems. It is rather telling about the nature of Labour’s approach that it contained two peers, two members of Brown’s inner circle, several economic and investment experts but no Constitutional experts.

This means Labour were clearly not prepared for coalition with the Lib Dems on Lib Dem priorities. We could sketch out a common ‘progressive agenda’, but this was our understanding of what would excite the Lib Dems, not theirs. This shouldn’t have presented an insuperable obstacle: after all, such priorities could have simply been asked for, but that lack of understanding clearly elicited great hostility.

I  share Adonis’s view of the opportunity lost. A Labour-Lib Dem coalition was possible, and should have been fought for. I also suspect that the economic choice was definitive, and all rested on that essential judgement.

Despite this, I am left with five questions that nag at me, as a Labour supporter, which suggest Labour could have handled the coalition-making process far better. I will ask each in different posts

The first is: Why the Hell was Gordon Brown still the Boss?

Gordon Brown is the dominant figure of the book, twisting brilliantly in an ever narrowing space, tenaciously trying to find a way to hold on to power for his party.  He is capable of great self-sacrifice; resigning as party leader to make a Labour-Lib Dem deal possible. It’s hard not to admire the portrait shown.

Yet Brown starts out trying to hold on as PM for eighteen months or so. (I wrote WTF in the margins when this was revealed). The Tories may not have won, but any arrangement based on keeping Brown in anything but a transitional arrangement was never going to work, and I find it incredible he wasn’t told this by his inner circle even before talking to Clegg.

On Friday the 6th of May 2010, Gordon Brown was finished as a working politician. He was done. This was blatantly obvious to everyone except to the team in Number 10. His final service to the party have been to help a new leader form a new government, but he could never have led it. It would have been essential for a Labour-Lib Dem government to be an entirely fresh start.

Even the six months or so Brown eventually retreated to was unlikely to ever attract Clegg. That no-one spelled this out to Brown, (who to his credit, seemed to be pretty realistic about such things, despite a natural desire to stay in office) is jaw dropping.

It’s not as if the mechanism for a swift transfer of power to a new leader doesn’t exist in the Labour party. Standing order 4. E.  i states:

“When the party is in government and the  party leader is prime minister and the  party leader, for whatever reason, becomes permanently unavailable, the  Cabinet shall, in consultation with the  NEC, appoint one of its members to serve  as party leader until a ballot under these rules can be carried out.”

Gordon could have stood aside as Party leader immediately, even staying as Prime Minister temporarily, allowing the Cabinet and NEC to  choose a temporary replacement as party leader to lead the coalition negotiations, (probably Darling, Harman or Johnson, if David or the Eds didn’t want to cede ground) before a full leadership election was immediately held to choose the next PM.

However it happened, it was obvious to the Lib Dems (and pretty much everyone) that Brown could neither be Coalition leader nor the apparent father of the Coalition. It could not have his fingerprints on it and live.

I can understand why Ed Balls and Ed Miliband wouldn’t want propose this act of political parricide, but someone had to tell Gordon it was over for him, and he had to stay well out of it if there was to be any chance of Lib-Lab success. But it seems only Clegg did, and even he found it hard to be heard. Why David Miliband didn’t make it clear his support for Lib-Lab coalition was conditional on Brown’s immediate departure as and his giving up of control of the coalition negotiations, I have no idea. Instead, he seemed mostly absent.

In the end, perhaps it came down to hunger.

Gordon Brown was both the only person truly hungry to fight for Lab-Lib coalition and the only person guaranteed not to make it possible. Since the other potential Labour Prime Ministers weren’t prepared to kill his premiership off to keep the hope of Labour in Government alive, Brown was doomed to pursue a tactically brilliant but strategically doomed  attempt to keep Labour in power.

Tomorrow Q2: Why didn’t Labour know what the Lib Dems really wanted?

Never interrupt your enemy when he is the process of making a mistake.

Good advice. While the Conservative party is tearing itself apart with serial euro-idiocy, it’s probably best for the Labour party to join much of the rest of the nation in staring, mouth agape, at the strange sight of a great national party destroying their own government over the precise number of hypothetical referendums they can get on a scroll of vellum.

The question of whether Labour too would have a hypothetical referendum is one that can be surely safely postponed. (I’m not sure though, that the correct attack on the Conservatives is that they’re creating uncertainty. Nobody is offering certainty. What’s wrong are their priorities.)

So let us in Labour take this brief respite and examine ourselves.

Two articles appeared this morning that gave a tantalising glimpse into our Policy review. The first, by John Harris, appeared in the Guardian. The second is by the Sun’s political editor Tom Newton Dunn. That two such diverse figures should be writing on the same subject, and on the same themes, suggests a common heritage for their stories.

Harris’s is the more policy focussed of the two articles. Intriguingly, he suggests that Labour is prepared to sign up to accept every government cut, from the Bedroom tax to pay freezes. Remember, this provoked a howl of outrage from the Union movement the last time it was mooted.

Harris goes on to square this problem by suggesting both a new spending programme and an ‘iron’ commitment to reducing the debt to GDP ratio over a decade or so.

Obviously I’m keen on this sort of stuff, having been banging on about it for years now and I am delighted to hear that eye-watering fiscal settlements are being talked about with approval by Compassites.

Despite sometimes feeling like I’m on a one man mission to be the most disliked person in the Labour party, I appear to have made some inadvertant allies!

Unfortunately, Harris’s attempt to embrace stimulus and fiscal restraint is less convincing when he moves to the terrain of how this will work in practice.

For example, while I welcome a focus on government waste, I accept that it’s one of those things that seems easier to do in opposition than in government. We should want to end all waste, but it’s not an area you can easily rely on as a funding mechanism.

Similarly, whenever a politician suggests you can save money simply by devolving power and budgets, the correct response is to raise a sceptical eyebrow.

Further, the work programme is flawed, but to replace it with nothing would be difficult and while there may be a case for not renewing Trident, there would be great pressure to increase conventional military spending in its place (indeed, that is the basis that some Army figures are so keen).

More importantly, Harris touches on Housing benefit and tax credits as possible areas for savings. These fall into the category of ‘Easier said than done’.

Let’s assume that we hold housing benefit down in cash terms over the next decade, moving the spending planned for this into boosting house building.

This would create some space for housing investment spend – but it would also lead to really significant difficulties in finding adequate housing for many thousands of families.

The same is true when it comes to tax credits. Remember the Labour outrage when Tax Credits increases were capped at 1%? To carry out real terms cuts after 2015 goes even further than this, putting pressure on work incentives and meaning lower living standards for some of the most vulnerable.

Even if you replace Tax Credits with a mandatory living wage (at a cost of some 160,000 jobs, according to the resolution foundation), this will not help many working families  above that level who rely on tax Credits.¹

This isn’t to say these things shouldn’t be done. It’s just to point out it’s not painless, and those who would suffer are not just wage subsidised corporations and greedy landlords, but low-income families trying to make ends meet in hard times.

These practical difficulties also appear in Tom Newton Dunn’s article.

I was slightly startled to read in the Sun that all tax credits were for the chop, so much so that I suspect not every detail of Tom’s briefing was reflected in his article.

I’m also far from convinced it would be a simple matter to renegotiate our relationship with the EU to exclude free movement of people, as is suggested.

This might explain why in both articles there is seems undercurrent of uncertainty whether these Blue-ish policies will actually be adopted.

In Newton Dunn’s article, Ed Balls appears as a roadblock to reform. In Harris’s a more general lack of bravery and radicalism stands in the way of change.

I suspect the difficulties will be less about any lack of radicalism or bravery in the leadership, but a scepticism about efficacy and practicality.

More pointedly, I think that if you’re going to argue from the left for things that will hurt people, you can’t hide from the pain it will cause.

You have to understand the pain and then explain why it is worthwhile. If you don’t do that, someone else will remind people of the pain, and deride the benefit.

Holding down tax credits, housing benefit and welfare will hurt people. We know this because as an opposition we are loudly saying this every day. This won’t stop just because it’s a government with good intentions making the cuts.

Finally, I return to my general theme. Given the sorts of limitations and difficulties I discuss, my preference would be to dump all the talk about vague radicalism and windy boldness.

It’s going to be damn hard to even achieve a little good with eye-watering fiscal limits we face over the next few years.

Add to that people’s doubts about politics generally, our less than stellar history in delivering our promises, political big talk seems designed to induce only eye-rolls.

We should still be able to do significant, meaty, inspiring things if we keep our focus tight- like on industrial policy, child care and social care, but even making these changes will require pain elsewhere, tax increases, and generally doing seven unpopular things before breakfast most days.

This matters. Explaining how you will do something worthwhile becomes more important than saying how much you want to do it.

We can only sell this, I think, if each step forward is utterly solid and practical, and offers direct, straightforward benefits, is clearly costed, limited in scope and targeted in approach.

When you can barely stand up, It seems a foolish time to boast of your intention to reach for the stars and accuse those who doubt your abilityto do so of a lack of courage.

Instead, can’t we just focus on how great an achievement it would be to get upright again?

1. It’s also not quite clear how all this fits together with the introduction of universal credit – are we suggesting a change in the taper? [↩]

Labour’s strategic choices are a central topic for political debate at the moment.

In my Policy Network ‘State of the left’ column and in a recent post I’ve talked a bit about the three strategic choices facing Labour.

I’ve described these as 1) embracing our radicalism with a populism of the left, 2) prevaricating (or more correctly procrastinating), keeping our focus on the immediate challenges before us and 3) trying to build an anti-populist politics of solutions based on a recognition of fundamentally limited resources and careful choice of priorities.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, during the lunchtime interregnum during the Queen’s speech (geddit), I thought I’d try to visualise the priorities that would lie behind each of Labour’s three political strategic choices. So see below:

Please do suggest amendments and alternatives!

A couple of years back, I was asked if I’d help out a Labour MP with a speech on the (then) upcoming AV referendum. When we discussed the issue, said politician was keen on making the point that in the eighties a split on the centre-left meant that a progressive majority was prevented from governing by the electorate’s inability to offer their second choice.

I looked into the data, discovered that this was not true, and said so. (Briefly, a plurality of SDP/Liberal alliance voters had the Tories as their second choice right up until the 1997 Election.) The planned argument of the speech was abandoned, which left something of a hole, and perhaps as a result I’ve not been asked for my wise counsel much since then!

I mention this story for two reasons.

First, because it reminds me that whatever one says in public, and any Labour politician, adviser, activist or candidate is duty bound to accentuate the positive, advisers constantly have to decide to give it to their bosses with the bark off, or with the bark on. Taking the bark off is easier, but it can mean giving people a false impression of how smooth things are.

It is very, very tempting to look at a set of election results and only see what is convenient. That might be an underwhelming performance by your opponents, or strong gains in a key seat. These are what you offer to the outside world as signs of progress. At the same time, it’s vital to guard against believing your own hype.

The other reason I mention the historical record is because it’s a useful reminder that it is not ‘division’ on the right or left that decides ‘first past the post’ election results.

Labour lost the 1983, 1987 and 1992 General Election because not enough people supported us, not because of a divided left. When we found an electoral message that resonated with more people, the question of a divide on the centre-left became superfluous. To put it another way, if the Labour party had not been so crap, the SDP wouldn’t have looked so good to so many voters.

Both Labour and the Conservatives face that challenge today. Both need to be worrying about how to expand their circle of support beyond current levels.

For Labour, of course we could win if the electoral map reflected last week’s projections, but it would be an ugly win, and it’s certainly not one you’d want to rely on for two years. It’s true too that a national poll lead in the 8-10 range and progress on the ground is to be celebrated, and there’s certainly no reason for pessimism about 2015, but it’s also true a projected national vote share of 29% is well, well below the level any prospective party of Government should feel comfortable getting, even in elections fought on pretty unfriendly ground.

Further, when you look at some of the key seats, the performance there is underwhelming, even when UKIP is not a major factor.We seem to have fallen back slightly, not made progress.

What’s more, the performance of UKIP, like that of the SDP, or the 1989 Greens, should leave us asking “why not us?”. We are the leading party of opposition. If any party is the natural recipient of ‘protest votes’, it should be us.

As far as I can tell, there are three internally coherent responses the left can make.

The first is to argue that what has let Labour down is a lack of inspiring arguments for radical change.

This approach would point out that it is not dull moderation that has led to UKIPs success, but a strong conviction about what it right and wrong. It would look at Labour’s problems and argue that our weaknesses stem from a lack of internal conviction and an unwillingness to follow through on rhetoric with real promises of change, leaving the actual campaigning message at best insipid, at worst hopelessly confused.

It would use the evidence that there is significant discontent with the government and argue that it is on offering something radical to those who are discontented that people can be inspired to the polls. From Nigel Farage to Beppe Grillo, the momentum is with those who make a stand.

There are different degrees to this argument, from the full-fat approach advocated by Len McCluskey and the “outside left” to the more low-calorie version of the Fabians, but all rely on the essential insight that to inspire people with a message of change, you need to be clear about what that change is, and explain why it is worthwhile. Only then will the disenfranchised, disaffected and the neglected rally to you.

The second argument would be to argue that Labour should steer well clear of any such radical commitments. It would argue that the evidence is that any pledge to spend more, or tax more, or borrow more would be rejected by an electorate sharply sceptical of the effectiveness of any such plan, while any positive low-cost plans could easily be pilfered by the government.

Better to focus attacks on the government, keep our own powder dry, and reveal, as late as possible, a costed programme of change that will allow us to maximise our political support among those who seek ‘change’ without alienating those concerned about borrowing, debt and so on. given the clear unpopularity of the government, this will be enough to secure victory.

This is, broadly speaking, the approach followed by Francois Hollande and Pier-Luigi Bersani, with differing results. (though both parties are in power, in a manner of speaking)

The third argument is that if we want to grasp ‘why not us’, we have to understand what we are not offering people who might support us, and address these concerns directly.

This would suggest that while we are widely regarded as being fair, in touch with people’s concerns and having good intentions, we are not particularly trusted on the economy, nor on welfare, or immigration.

I suspect these barriers to support are less about specific promises, nor about which bum is on which seat (always something over-rated in importance by politicians) but stem from a basic insight that while we very much want people to see us differently, we actually haven’t done that much to change, beyond the rhetoric.

What solutions do we offer that would surprise those people who we’d like to support us? (This argument also has different flavours: There are those, like me, who argue that the issue is essentially fiscal/economic/practical, and those in Blue Labour who argue it is cultural/social/philosophical. The first stresses fiscal restraint, economic policy, limited spending commitments, the latter emphasises protecting high streets, limiting immigration and helping working families, not welfare)

Labour can choose any of these paths, and although I know where I stand, I hope all of them have their advocates in the Shadow Cabinet and beyond, but it is becoming important that Labour does choose between them, and understand exactly why it is choosing the path it will take.

For me, I think reacting to a surge of populism with a radicalism of the left would be a mistake, as would trying to offend no-one. Instead, I’d want to be the reasonable anti-populist, offering the practical growth solutions neither the demonstrators or the Golf club bar bores can possibly offer, and I’d want to do so in a way that surprised people about Labour’s fiscal position. I’d also do nothing populist on immigration or Europe that imperiled growth.

For me, it’s being the anti-populist party of practical, realistic solutions that represents the electoral sweet spot, but to get there you have to admit it’ll won’t be easy to achieve or simple to deliver, otherwise it’s just platitudes.

Of course, whether you’re an adviser or a blogger, it’s easier to give difficult advice than to take it.

Still, for me, it’s a politics of solutions, not of populism or prevarication that represents the left’s best way forward.

The way we discuss Universalism in Britain is utterly, utterly stupid.

What is a Universal benefit?

Just as the ‘universal credit’ isn’t anything like universal, the one thing a universal benefit isn’t, is a universal benefit.

Instead, a universal benefit is paid to everyone in a specific family, life or work situation.

Parents get child benefit.  Pensioners get a Winter fuel payment. Pensioners over 75 get a free TV license. The unemployed (if they have made two years of NI contributions) get contributory JSA (though only for six months, after which they go onto income based JSA, which isn’t universal). The list goes on.

These benefits are universal in one sense only: They go to everyone who finds themselves is a specific situation of need. It is this which, adherents to Universalism argue, builds support for the Welfare state among net contributors. The supports of universalism say, with some justification, that the reason people who are better off are prepared to support a system that works against their financial interests is that it represent an insurance for them: against getting old, or sick, or losing your job.

To my mind, this is a powerful argument. It also seems to be backed up by correlating data that suggests that systems that offer benefits to every citizen also offer more generous benefits to the poorest. If you think you’ll get, you’re more willing to give.

So, surely we must have a system that offers something to everyone, rich or poor?

Yet some of these benefits seem utterly wasteful. What are wealthy pensioners getting a winter fuel allowance? Why were the cabinet of millionaires also a cabinet getting child benefit?

Surely that money could be better spent elsewhere?

These are the battle lines of universalism. One one side stand the means testers. On the other stand the universalists.

But the answer to both questions is yes.

Yes, we need a system that offers something to everyone. Yes, the current system is wasteful and puts money in the wrong places.

Jim Griffiths, a forgotten hero of the Labour movement

The key is to go back to how these universal benefits were constructed, and the needs they met.

Our lives have changed since Jim Griffiths¹ introduced the modern national insurance system.

The way we live, work, and relate to one another has changed completely since then. In 1948, the expectation was that the great mass of people would live in single income households, would rent their home, would have larger families, would be susceptible to unemployment during times of national depression, and barring that would stay in pretty much the same job until they retired, or were too ill to work, after which they would have a brief period of inactive retirement before death.

It was to address the near universal crisis points in peoples lives under this way of life that the universal welfare state was developed.

Think of the defining phrase of the welfare state “From the Cradle to the grave“. Is the implication of that statement that the state will support you uniformly between those two points? No, it is that at these points, and at others in between, we all need help, who-ever we are, whatever our circumstances.

Yet almost all of these crisis points have changed and evolved since then.

We change careers and jobs more often. More people own homes, so have to meet mortgage payments, Brief, temporary periods of unemployment are more regular, as is the need to change career or to re-train. More women work, so childcare and maternity leave is essential, but family sizes are smaller; so ongoing child support is less crucial. Pensioners live for longer, and more of them have private pension provision, or large assets, which are susceptible to the need to pay for care.

So surely the challenge for Universalism is not simply to defend the existing structure of benefits but to ask how well the current system of universalism meets the needs of all who might need help?

I’d argue it does not do this very well, that the resources of universalism are misdirected, and that we can use these resources to build a better, stronger universalism than that which we have now.

Take the Winter Fuel Allowance. This was introduced in 1997 by Gordon Brown, replacing the old Cold Weather payments, which went only to the poorest pensioners. Originally it was a hybrid – £20 for every pensioner, £50 for those on Income support.  (it was paid for, incidentally, by cutting payments to the EU!).  So Winter Fuel money was a universal component of a means tested benefit, itself replacing a means tested benefit.

Today, the scheme is targeted by age, rather than income. You get an extra £100 if you’re over 80, because the older you are the more likely you are to die from cold. It has also expanded massively, from a cost of under £200 million to a cost of £2 billion.

Where is the universal need for fuel payment greatest?

My challenge isn’t to the principle of universalism, but to its application as a method of meeting universal need in society. So let’s look at Winter Fuel Allowance in that light.

Is sending £200 to every 60 year old in the country a better use of resources, than, say, increasing the level of Contributions based JSA, or offering every toddler a breakfast club so parents can go to work?

Even if we wished to keep the money withing the “pension” pot and with the same aim of helping those vulnerable to cold weather, then wouldn’t the money be more effective, while still Universal, if it helped those only over 75 at a higher level, so there was absolutely no fear about heating bills among the most vulnerable to excess winter death? (you can see in the chart that excess mortality is concentrated hugely in the over 75 age group, with over half of all excess deaths occurring among the over- 85s).

But instead, a targeted, selective benefit intended to meet a clear universal need (old people feel the cold more than the young) somehow becomes regarded as a universal benefit, and becomes hallowed, and unreformable, and debate about how it is targeted and whether it is the best way of meeting the original need, or even whether that universal need is the right one to be focusing resources on, becomes impossible.

I don’t think this can be maintained. Not on the Winter Fuel Allowance, nor on Child Benefit, on JSA, on pensions.

The danger is that we defend a universal system that no longer addresses the right universal needs, a system that offers too much to those who don’t really need it now, but also offers those same people too little when they really will need a little extra help. By doing so, we try to protect a system that has ceased to be universal and started to just be unwise.

So we give families child benefit, but too little support in years one to five.

We offer contributory JSA, but at a level that is no different to incomes based, while we also offer mortgage support to people on incomes based JSA (though not, oddly to people on contributory JSA only. Not sure why).

Everyone is eligible for housing benefit, but the various supports for those paying mortgages who lose their jobs are complex and unwieldy.

We pay incomes based JSA, but offer almost nothing to people who want to retrain for work, or start their own business, or go freelance, and need a transitional support package to make that work for them.

If we want to defend universalism, we should start, not by defending benefits designed six decades ago, but by better understanding the moments of universal need that our society faces today and designing our welfare state around supporting people through these. We could even start with the Winter Fuel Allowance.

We all still start from the Cradle, and we all still end at the Grave, but the journey we take in between has changed, and universalism needs to change with it.

1. a long time personal hero who seems, like another of my heroes, Christopher Addison, destined to be largely forgotten despite achieving more than most party leaders ever do [↩]

I was going to write about why a general strike would be a terrible idea for the left.

I bet you’re amazed, eh? Me, a moderate social democrat, saying I think that the Trade Union movement embracing a tactic of ‘explicitly political’ strike action (Which has worked so well, every time it has been tried before) would be a mistake.

But then I realised that precisely because such an analysis would surprise no-one, it was pretty boring. Centrists gotta centrist.

Instead, here’s the definitely not at all centrist Andy  Newman, author of the Socialist Unity blog, someone who in principle would welcome a General Strike against austerity if he thought it would have a reasonable prospect of success:

“Let us be clear that an ill prepared or poorly supported general strike could be an enormous self-inflicted defeat for the Labour movement.”

Andy’s point is about the tactics and practicalities of such action, while I think explicitly political industrial action is anti-democratic and mistaken in principle, so would be against it even if it were practical.

We may differ on that point, but I think his practical analysis is sound:

“I am far from convinced that any of those trade union leaders calling for such action could actually deliver it. Any such industrial action called without a ballot would be highly problematic and prone to failure; and there is a real danger of any industrial action call demonstrating weakness not strength. What is more, many unions, including some who took action on November 30th 2011, would likely decline to participate, endangering the unity of the movement.”

Andy’s more detailed article on the practicalities from last year is also worth reading.

I’m not trying to tie Andy to a past analysis of the practicalities if circumstances have changed, I’ve changed my mind on many things over the course of a season, and if circumstances change Andy and others on the left are free to do the same.

However, I don’t think his analysis is at all out of date.

The practical dangers remain as big as they were in January. Trade Union density is still low, the number of industrial actions is low, and any strike would be largely confined to the public sector, thus revealing weakness not strength. Andy’s comparison of a proposed General strike with that proposed back in 1980 is useful: The 1980 General Strike was such a disaster that until reading Andy’s article I was unaware it had even taken place.

So more usefully than explaining why I think a General Strike  would be a disaster. (It’s not as if it’d even be popular)  instead we should consider why calls for such an obviously impractical mode of opposition have begun to develop their own momentum. Why is the bus trundling gently towards the bridge?

I’d argue that it comes from a fundamental weakness in the Union movement, and a concomitant unwillingness to confront that weakness directly.

The weakness is clear. Union density has declined even as the law has become slightly more favourable for union recruitment, there’s an almost complete absence from key business sectors and population demographics, and union membership is becoming ever more educated, white-collar and public sector, which suggests that there is likely to be less enthusiasm for long-term industrial action. (Public sector white-collar strike action tends to be symbolic – a one day strike, rather than an attempt to bring down the ‘firm’ if demands are not met) (See here for a longer post on these issues)

Yet read the public utterance of key trade union leaders, and these trends appear irrelevant. Even the fact that industrial action is at a very low-level seems to be ignored in trade union rhetoric. Instead, there is an ever-expanding coalition of resistance, an inevitable march towards a radical future, and the only people who fail to recognise this are Tories and their fellow travellers, whether in the LibDems or worse, inside the Labour party itself. Since each of these are contemptible and immoral, they need not be taken seriously.

At the same time, the realities of the difficulties of organising this resistance impinges on the opposition itself.

So talk of a General strike permeates Unite’s strategy, but a recognition of how difficult such will be means that the General Secretary instead proposes only that “some unions, including Unite, might go away and talk among themselves about whether there is anything else they might wish to do, over and above the collective decision of the TUC.”

You don’t have to be Jerry Hicks to see how that will end up as a demo, a day of action and some tour of the Quaker meeting rooms of Britain, Owen Jones and Mark Steel in tow, rather than anything of any true impact.

So why do it?

I’m working towards the view that the position of the Trade Union leadership is in fact that it wishes to leave the impression that it could, if it chose, deliver a mighty blow to the Government, and use that potential for disruption as a social and political lever even though there is in fact no such potential.

Like a rake thin weakling posing behind the cardboard cut out of a weightlifter, the Trade Union leadership wishes to leave the impression of power, and use that impression to generate its own momentum.

This isn’t a stupid strategy, in the short-term. It can win tactical victories: the fact that Ed Miliband has been forced to condemn planning for a General strike that will never happen is the victory in itself, lending credibility to an empty threat. Indeed, some on the right will have their own reasons for talking up the dangerous power of the Trade Unions. Boris Johnson will love red-scare-mongering, even as he does a deal with the RMT.

Yet no-one fears paper tigers for long. In the end, this strategy is doomed by its own weakness. At some point the bluff will be called, either from the left or the right.

Unfortunately, this strategy can do significant damage to Labour until the fact it is a bluff becomes apparent. The red scare will have to be denied, again, and again.

Much more importantly, this strategy will do little or nothing to improve the prospects of Union members, as it requires the sacrifice of their real interests on practical issues on order to serve a doomed political tactic.

On this basis alone, it deserves to be utterly rejected.