Legitimate questions

The concept of legitimacy is central to organizations in many ways, most obviously in terms of who has the right to tell others what to do, and what kinds of things this applies to. That is one reason why many books about organization studies – including mine – begin by talking about Max Weber’s account of authority (in the meaning of legitimate power).

I was thinking about this in relation to the current political row in the UK about the House of Lords’ rejection of a House of Commons policy to cut tax credits for people in work. I won’t discuss the tax credits issue itself - important as it is – it is the issue of legitimacy that I want to look at. Britain, famously and unusually, has an ‘unwritten constitution’, and so relies on custom and precedent to determine what is legitimate. In this way, it could be seen as a system based partly on what Weber called ‘traditional authority’ in contrast to the rational-legal authority of written constitutions.

Since the House of Commons is elected on the basis of, certainly, a system of rules and to this extent rational-legal, and the House of Lords is an unelected body the government have been keen to say that the Lords’ action was illegitimate. More precisely, the argument is that it is illegitimate because it violates the ‘convention’ that the Lords will not block financial legislation or legislation deriving from an elected government’s manifesto.

But convention is a rather slippery terrain. As regards tax credits, what was blocked by the Lords was not, technically, financial legislation but, rather, a ‘statutory instrument’. It’s an arcane point that needn’t detain us except to the extent that it shows the imprecision of ‘tradition’ as a legitimating principle. On the other side of the coin, the House of Commons, whilst certainly elected, has a government majority on the basis that the ruling Conservative Party achieved 36.9% of the votes cast on a turnout of 66.1% of the electorate. In other words, 24.4% of the electorate voted for them.

Moreover, although the Conservative Party manifesto promised extensive cuts to the welfare budget, it did not specify that these would include cuts to the tax credits of working people. It is at least questionable whether they would have been elected had they done so. My sense is that what the electorate thought was meant by welfare cuts was cuts to benefits of people out of work. One might say so much the worse for them, but even so the point is that democratic consent to this policy looks rather threadbare.

The imprecision of party manifestos is by no means new. For example, at the 2010 election the Conservative manifesto promised that there would be no top-down re-organization of the NHS. In government (with Liberal Democrat support) there was massive and controversial re-organization. The disjuncture became an argument about what ‘top-down’ meant. At one time these manifestos consisted of quite precise lists of policies. Now, they tend to be much vaguer. And this in turn links with a far more ‘presidential’ approach to UK politics in which the persona of the leader is the key issue, even though the ‘constitutional convention’ is that a House of Commons is elected constituency by constituency and the leader is the person who can command a majority. Thus a key aspect of the last election was which of David Cameron or Ed Miliband was the most ‘prime ministerial’. So, here, what is at stake is what Weber called ‘charismatic authority’.

This complex mish-mash of rational-legal, traditional and charismatic authority makes for plenty of political spectacle and debate. But I wonder if it does not also show the limitations of Weber’s ideal-types of authority? Isn’t it actually rather common for, say, a CEO to draw selectively and eclectically on the different types*? And more challengingly, isn’t the idea that there is a distinction of authority and power a rather dubious one? After all, whatever is decided about tax credits, those affected by or hostile to the changes will ultimately be forced to accept them.

On a more personal note, this week I was awarded the title Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). This, too, is about legitimate authority – the Academy’s legitimacy to award the title, the legitimacy it bestows on me. But of course I am just shoehorning this in to make it fit with the rest of the post. The truth is that I am rather pleased and want to boast about it.

 

*Something like this has always been the critique of ideal-type reasoning and the defence, of course, is that these are ideal-types, for conceptual clarification rather than empirical claims. I suppose that my point is that in political debates like this one an ideal-type is treated, at least by implication, as an empirical claim.

Working assumptions

This post is inspired by Martin Vogel’s thought-provoking piece, on the excellent Vogel Wakefield counter-consultancy blog, where he discusses the politics of organization. In particular, he points out how little conversation there was during the British election of the changing nature of work, the social purposes of business and similar themes. With economic debate (and not just in Britain) dominated by the single theme of government fiscal deficit and cultural debate by that of immigration, work – so central to most people’s lives – barely got a look in.

True, there were some marginal references. Labour did seek to open up issues of lack of employment security, lack of quality jobs, and zero hours contracts. The Conservatives did talk at times about the number of jobs created in the British economy in recent years. Both parties talked occasionally about apprenticeships. But huge issues about under-employment, about the effect of technological change on white-collar employment, and about productivity (again, see Martin Vogel’s post for more on this) didn’t get mentioned at all. Moreover, nothing much was said on the many issues adjacent to or around work – for example the highly uncertain future of pensions and the exploding need to provide care for the elderly, much of which will be done as unpaid work, especially by women.

Perhaps it is the case that modern politics is incapable or unwilling to talk about such large and long-term issues. Indeed, it is not just in relation to work that big issues are neglected. In particular, no one in British politics seems willing to take a good look at Britain’s role in the world, something which has been ducked since, arguably, 1945. In fact, with the exception of the issue of EU membership, foreign policy of any sort did not figure in the election. And this is not just an issue for Britain. The mechanisms of international governance seem unable to gain any traction at all on a range of pressing problems from Ukraine, through to the dire and increasingly unstable situation right across the Middle East. The central structures of the UN, specifically the permanent membership of the Security Council, again reflect the world in 1945, not 2015.

One factor here – pertaining to work as much as to security – is the way that globalization, whilst largely created by the decisions of nation-states, has now undercut the purchase that nation-states have upon policy, leaving a political vacuum. From this viewpoint, what can national politicians say about, for example, job insecurity, pensions or de-skilling other than to see it in terms of the ineluctable effects of the global free market? The same could be said about things such as corporate tax avoidance which I posted about earlier this year. We just don’t have the political structures to deal with this situation, and very few people talking about how we might create them.

Yet there are some levers which national governments do have, especially around education and training, that might be pulled at least with respect to issues of employability and productivity. One reason why they do not get much discussed is, I suspect, the increasingly dysfunctional effects of media management. Political strategists seek simple, constantly repeated mantras to ‘frame the narrative’ – the fiscal deficit being the obvious example – which are by definition incapable of speaking of or to complex, inter-related problems. Add to this the almost inevitable short-termism of the electoral cycle and it is perhaps unsurprising that long-term problems get shelved for another day – witness the huge difficulties of developing a global approach to environmental sustainability.

Coming back to work, and thinking just from the standpoint of organization studies, I think that one striking and problematic feature of the subject is just how little it actually has to say about work. This is partly to do with the demise of what used to be called industrial sociology and the concomitant rise of studies that are more concerned with consumption and identity than production and the workplace. It probably also reflects the way that organization studies takes place almost entirely inside management and business schools, with more emphasis on management than on work per se. It certainly reflects the growing ‘theoreticism’ of the academic literature, with a disdain for ‘merely’ reporting what is actually happening in the workplace and an insistence that each academic paper should make a suppose ‘theoretical contribution’, something I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. As Barley & Kunda argued in 2001, there is a need to “bring work back in” to the discipline, but it is an argument that more than decade later shows little sign of being heeded.

In 1974, in a book probably better known in the United States than elsewhere, the writer and oral historian Studs Terkel published Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the title of which is self-explanatory. Its coverage ranged from farm workers to dentists, tennis players to nuns. It’s difficult to think of anything remotely like this book now, and certainly not anything by an organization studies academic. The neglect of work within political discourse may be an intractable problem but within the more limited terrain of organization studies may not be irredeemable. And who knows, perhaps the two might be linked. After all, an organization studies that educated students into the realities of contemporary working life might not only prepare them better for those realities but also encourage them to ask political questions about it.

 

References

Barley, S. and Kunda, G. 2001. ‘Bringing work back in’, Organization Science 12: 76-95.

Terkel, S. 1974. Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon/Random House.

Old New Labour

I’m going to continue with my posts about what is now the aftermath of the British election but before doing so I just want to restate why I am doing so on a blog which is first and foremost about studying organizations. There are two reasons. On the one hand, politics and organizations are really inseparable. The British political landscape matters for both British businesses and public sector organizations. But more importantly what lies at the heart of British politics, and has done for at least three decades now, is a contestation about different models of capitalism and of organization.

Britain matters not because it is still the seventh largest economy in the world, but because it has been the template and cheerleader for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model of capitalism with all that implies for organizations in terms of an emphasis on shareholder value, labour market flexibility, privatization and deregulation. Crucially, this conception of how to organize both the economy and work has been a joint production of Conservative and ‘New Labour’ governments. In that context, the defeat of Labour in the recent election matters, as to a limited extent the party offered a break with this model, by urging greater regulation of markets and more protection for workers. So its defeat has implications for the future of organizations and of working life.

In this post, I want to focus on what has been a wholly predictable response to Labour’s defeat by the architects of New Labour. Both Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson have denounced Labour’s campaign for its failure to occupy the ‘centre ground’, by which they mean departing from that Anglo-Saxon model. If Labour is to win, they say, it must go back to being ‘New Labour’, whose defining hallmark was to accept the Thatcherite or neo-liberal settlement.

There is a huge irony in this. The central tent of New Labour in the early 1990s was that circumstances had changed and that Labour therefore also needed to change to reflect this. Yet now that formula, now more than two decades old, is held up as an unchanged and unchangeable verity. But even if it were to be accepted that the New Labour diagnosis were right at the time – and that is highly questionable, because by the time of their 1997 election victory pretty much any alternative to the Conservatives would have been a winner, so discredited – it isn’t right now.

Labour lost the 2015 election for two main reasons. First, because its hitherto impregnable heartlands in Scotland switched to the SNP because it offered a more social democratic programme. Those voters were sick of New Labour and won’t be regained by returning to New Labour. Second, because in key English marginal traditional Labour voters switched to UKIP, mainly because of anti-immigrant sentiment much of which derives from New Labour’s European policy. So, again, those voters aren’t going to be won back by a return to New Labour. But, equally, Miliband’s Labour were far too scared of the issue of immigration – probably because of the disastrous ‘Mrs Duffy moment’ of the 2010 election – to really challenge those voters. At all events, Labour’s 2015 travails were the consequence of New Labour, and cannot be solved by a return to New Labour.

Generals always fight the last war, not the present one, and the interventions of the New Labour old guard are a perfect example. If there is to be an effective strategy for Labour in the future it won’t be based upon nostrums derived from a quarter of a century ago, any more than New Labourites would have based their early 1990s approach on the basis of what worked in the late 1960s.

British election result: Decisively indecisive

So the British election is over, and it has turned out to be rather different to what the polls predicted, with a majority Conservative government having been elected. At first sight, it’s a return to business as usual – one of the two main parties forms the government. At second sight, things look much more complex and unstable.

For one thing, this will be a UK government which is really only supported in England. In particular, the fact that the SNP won almost all of the Scottish seats has radically changed the political landscape, and can only make it more likely that there will be pressure for second referendum on Scottish independence. But Wales and Northern Ireland, too, have not supported the Conservatives in number, yet will have a Conservative government. That may well place limits on what is seen to be legitimate.

On the other hand, the fate of the predominantly English UK Independence Party (UKIP) was notable. Despite being given unprecedented media coverage after the broadcasting regulator declared that they were to be treated as a major party, their claims to be a People’s Army on the move have been eviscerated. They got 13% of the vote and just one MP. Sure, this reflects the unfair nature of the First Past the Post voting system in the UK but they knew about that all along, and still made grandiose predictions. This looks, for the time being anyway, to be the end of the UKIP surge.

The failure of the Labour Party is truly historic, mainly because they have lost their traditional Scottish heartland to the SNP, whilst also losing out in England. The Scottish situation is really the final consequence of the New Labour project, which presumed that it could move the party to the right in order to garner English marginal votes and automatically hang on to its core vote. This election finally saw that idea fall apart. Labour had actually moved a tiny way to the Left but still lost Scotland, and additionally alienated the old Labour North and the floating south of England. They just about held on in Wales. It’s very hard to see where Labour go now. Returning to a New Labour approach certainly won’t bring Scotland back to them. Going further to the Left won’t give them gains in the south of England.

Yet it could be argued that this was a good election for Labour to lose: had they, as the polls up to the election suggested, formed a minority government with SNP support then it would have been a torrid experience, beset by accusations of illegitimacy. Equally, Conservative joy may dissipate when the problems of managing a small majority with a large number of MPs hostile to their leader and willing to vote against their party become clear.

But by far the biggest consequence of this election result – and it matters quite as much for Europe and beyond as for Britain – is that it is certain that there will be a referendum on EU membership. That will split the Tory party and possibly rejuvenate the Labour Party (it’s notable that they are strongest in cosmopolitan London where UKIP are weakest) as a pro-EU party. It will exacerbate the division between England and Scotland. It’s not impossible to imagine a complete re-alignment of British politics via the EU Referendum, rather as has happened in Scotland in the wake of the independence referendum. At the very least, it will make for some new alliances: the City and big business and Labour and the SNP and centrist Tories versus UKIP, Tory Eurosceptics, Irish Unionists and the far Left. We are in for interesting and unpredictable times.

Vox Populi

In 1959 the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht published one of his most famous poems, Die Lösung (The Solution), which contained these lines:

…. the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

It was a biting satire of the Communist repression of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany and indeed was written at that time, and only published later, and then in West Germany, so subversive was it seen to be by the communist regime in the east. Since then, it has been taken up as an anti-elitist text, expressing how the political class see those who they represent as a problem.

I have been thinking about this because it seems to chime with much political sentiment in Britain at the moment. Last night the leaders of the ‘main parties’ (increasingly, a misnomer) were questioned by an audience of the electorate and the general verdict was that the audience ‘won’ by savaging the politicians. Here, supposedly, were the salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk sticking it to an out of touch elite.

My own view is completely different. It seemed to me that the audience engaged in the laziest and easiest kind of debate. Every politician is a liar and not to be trusted – but no one questions the audience as to what they want, other than a representative democracy. Any fact or figure can be thrown in by the audience, no matter how incorrect – and it is ‘elitist’ to challenge it. People who would rip into politicians for ‘gaffes’ complain when the politicians offer carefully calibrated answers to avoid gaffes. For the audience, every issue is easy, but they would not last five minutes if they themselves had to navigate the complexity of almost every issue. If the politicians talk about general principles, the audience denounce them as being fact-free; if they talk about facts the audience denounce them as lacking principles.

I had a similar reaction when I watched a Channel 4 debate between young voters and politicians this week. At one point, one of the audience got huge cheers for saying that she and her generation had no idea what the different parties stood for. But every day the media reports on the parties and their policies, and politicians bend over backwards to find new ways of engaging with people. Doesn’t she have some responsibility to engage in turn?

Heaven forbid that we should return to the political deference of bygone eras, when politicians were not challenged and the assumption was that the great and the good knew what was right for the rest of us. But now that situation has been inverted, and any ignorance, any cynicism, any sneer against politicians is taken as reasonable. The easiest and cheapest applause comes to the person who says that ‘they are all the same’.

But in most constituencies there are candidates ranging from Greens to UKIP, and in many constituencies candidates from the harder left to the harder right. They are not all the same, they stand for different things. It’s true that the electoral system in Britain makes it hard for smaller parties to gain representation, but even then the share of the vote matters in giving parties a legitimate voice. For example, for years the Liberal Party (as was) secured only a handful of seats but it had a certain legitimacy because of its vote share. Voting always makes a difference because legitimacy comes from the franchise, not the turn out, and abstaining has exactly as much effect as voting. But I think this is anyway just a sideshow – people point to the idea that their vote doesn’t count as an excuse for opting out of serious political engagement.

The lazy, easy sneer at politicians is meat and blood to more populist, supposedly anti-politics, parties such as, in the UK, UKIP. Yet as soon as politicians from such parties are elected, the contradictions are made clear. For example, UKIP MEPs take massive salaries and expenses from the EU even as they denounce it, and rarely turn up to vote. It’s actually the ultimate example of self-serving politicians but is greeted as if it were the opposite. Relatedly, on my local council, the UKIP councillors elected found it impossible to actually do their job because they couldn’t understand the procedures and legal framework of the council’s business. Caught up in slogans about ‘LibLieCon’ and the ‘Liberal Elite’, when it came to the actual business of governing and making practical choices – moving, so to speak, from being audience to being players – they just couldn’t cope. Within six months of being elected they had resigned. That isn’t an anti-UKIP point, by the way, just an illustration of the disconnect between anti-politics sentiment, of whatever persuasion, and politics itself.

I’ll finish with a telling quote, also usually attributed to Bertolt Brecht, although the attribution is not clear:

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”

British election: the second leaders' debate

In this latest post on the British election I will write about the most recent leader debate, televised last night. This was again dominated by the format. Because of the complex negotiations over these debates neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg were present. Instead, it was a debate amongst the ‘opposition leaders’: Natalie Bennett, Nigel Farage, Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood (see previous post for party affiliations). This made for some odd dynamics. All were opposed to the absent leaders, and could freely attack them, although interestingly only Cameron was attacked; Clegg was not even mentioned. Within the five, one could configure the alliances as the four on the left versus Farage; the three women versus the two men; Farage and Miliband as the only pro-nuclear arms leaders versus the rest; Miliband as the ‘mainstream’ leftist versus Bennett, Sturgeon and Wood; Miliband as the only potential Prime Minister versus the rest; and many other permutations.

The prime axis of debate and the dynamic of most interest was between Miliband and Sturgeon as the increasingly likely pairing to form the next government. Both had a difficult task. Sturgeon had to show electors in Scotland that they can still avoid a Conservative government even if they don’t voter Labour, and that there is a deal to be done with Labour if they do, but that it won’t involve too much compromise. Miliband had the even harder job of trying to appeal to left-wing Scottish voters without frightening floating English voters; and frightening the Scottish voters into thinking that he won’t do a deal with the SNP whilst leaving open the door to such a deal given that it is probably the only way he can become Prime Minister. The consequences of the Scottish independence referendum, which I wrote about at the time, are still evolving in complex ways.

One consequence of this is that whereas many people, including me, though that the main issue to watch in this election would be how UKIP fared in fact that is beginning to look like a sideshow. There is no UKIP surge in the polls, if anything a slight falling off, and it is looking increasingly unlikely that they will win many seats or will have a role in the post-election negotiations. In the debate, Farage made little impact and was consistently outgunned, especially by Wood, Sturgeon and Bennett. And he made one enormous, but revealing, error when he attacked the audience as being left-wing and reflecting what UKIP regard as BBC bias. In fact, as David Dimbleby, the chair of the debate, immediately pointed out, the audience had been selected on a proportional basis by an independent organization, not the BBC.

Apart from being a tactical error, this reflected two other important features of UKIP. One is their propensity for paranoia and victimhood, fed by their belief that they speak for a ‘silent majority’ and its collision with the fact that, as the opinion polls suggest, they only speak for something like 10-15% of the population. The other is more interesting and hasn’t been picked up in the media discussion about the debates. It is that UKIP have made big play of their claim to speak for, and be supported by, the traditional Old Labour Left. They are to some extent right in that, which is not surprising because there has always been an element of the Old Left that is nationalistic and anti-immigrant. But if that is their pitch, then attacking the audience on the basis that it was left-wing seems contradictory. Either you are beyond such distinctions or you’re not.

For me, as in the previous debate, Nicola Sturgeon was the most impressive performer. She has a clarity that the others lack, and seems at once on top of the facts and figures of political debate but also human and empathetic. Farage seemed out of his depth and uncomfortable, and although he will surely have appealed to his core supporters, as he would come what may, he didn’t make the break out from that group that he would have wanted to. He seemed isolated and marginal. Leanne Wood again stuck mainly to her Welsh credentials, which was surely sensible tactics. She has done well in these debates, without dominating them. Bennett made lots of interesting points, and as in the last debate didn’t collapse in the way that her performances earlier in the campaign might have led people to expect. But the fact is that it is difficult for her to be the alternative voice when that ground is occupied so effectively by Sturgeon and, anyway, it is highly unlikely that the Greens will have many - or even any – seats in the next parliament. Miliband I thought was wooden. There has been much talk that he has been having media coaching and, if so, it shows. In a way he has become a better presenter, but at the expense of appearing synthetic. I also thought that he seemed uncomfortable when challenged from the left about being too close to the Tories because I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, he agrees. He has shifted Labour just a tiny fraction to the left of where New Labour was, but he dare not go further because (to be charitable) he knows that this would led to him being destroyed by the right-wing press, by sections of his own party, and losing votes in key English marginal seats.

Maybe the most interesting moments came right at the end, when the three left of centre women embraced, and then went to shake Miliband’s hand, whilst Farage stood alone, sweating and tired-looking, at – with an obvious symbolism - the far right of the podium. There was a sense here – if we leave aside the positioning of post-election negotiations – of a new kind of politics for the UK. For the first time in ages a confident Left, cautiously approaching a cautious Labour Party emerging from the shell of New Labour; an absent, patrician landlord in the form of the Conservatives; and a resentful, baffled split-off from the Conservatives in the form of UKIP standing alone, moaning about bias.

I should say that the polls on the debate disagree with me. The Mirror/Survation poll immediately after scored Miliband the winner, with 35% saying he had won, 31% saying Sturgeon, 27% Farage, 5% Bennett and 2% Wood. A CityAM study of the social media response ranked the participants in this order: Wood, Sturgeon, Bennett, Miliband, Farage. It’s worth saying that Survation polls routinely over-estimate UKIP support compared with other polls whilst CityAM, because of its London demographic, might likely to underestimate UKIP (I am not sure what methodology is used).

As for the election opinion polls, these continue to show Labour and Conservative neck and neck, and the probability is still that there will be a hung parliament. At that point things will get really interesting. My take at the moment is that there will be a minority Labour government supported by the SNP. Actually, there’s nothing controversial about that as a prediction, although if it happens it will surely lead to claims that it is somehow 'illegitimate'. But I also think that Miliband will be pleased with such a scenario, as it will enable him to pursue the agenda he wants and to sideline the New Labour elements. If this happens, then the Tories are likely to fall into crisis and shift to a strongly Eurosceptic stance, I would guess under the leadership of Liam Fox. This will neuter UKIP and make the main political faultline in the 2020 election one between Labour/SNP and Tories pursuing an EU Referendum. It’s crazy to look so far ahead of course but if Labour are smart they will hold a referendum themselves and would in all likelihood win it on a stay-in ticket. All pure speculation of course!

British election: All change and no change

On the tenuous basis that Easter is a time for new beginnings, I’ve given this blog a minor facelift. The headline font is changed to orange which matches the book cover better. I’ve also updated my profile and the picture, much as I would like to remain forever youthful. Exciting times, but now back to the election.

I wrote in my last post that Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP was widely seen, including by me, as having been the best performer in the Leaders’ debate. She arrived back in Scotland to a rapturous reception. It is interesting to see the response to this from the British media, which has not attacked either Leanne Wood or Natalie Bennett who are not seen as a threat, but have gone to town on Sturgeon. Saturday’s Daily Telegraph led with a leaked story that Sturgeon secretly supported the Conservatives to win the election. This would, of course, be very damaging to her if true and she immediately issued a denial. The supposed leak is now being investigated.

Meanwhile in another right-wing paper, the Daily Mail, Sturgeon is depicted as “the most dangerous woman in British politics”, accompanied by a suitably scary picture in an article dripping with contempt and fear. The line of attack is two-fold. One is that she is a supposedly rabid left-winger (actually she is what in other European countries would be seen as a mainstream social democrat) who would try to “impose big-state socialism” on a Miliband government. It’s an odd accusation since the Mail has always depicted ‘Red Ed’ Miliband as a red of the deepest hue, not least in its despicable attack on his father, which I posted about at the time. Why, then, would Sturgeon need to “impose” such and agenda? The other prong of the attack is slightly stranger, but possibly more potent and we are likely to hear more of it if the current opinion polls hold. It is that it would be illegitimate for Scottish MPs to affect British politics against the wishes of the English, and were it to happen it would cause a crisis for the political system. But that does not begin to make sense. The political Right, including the Mail were all out against Scottish independence at last year’s referendum, insisting that Scotland should remain in the Union. How, then, can it be illegitimate for Scottish MPs to shape British politics? And, after all, Scotland in the 1980s had to accept Tory governments which had almost no electoral support in that country. Yet that was seen as perfectly legitimate: it was the overall national vote that counted, not the way it was composed as between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom.

There’s no great surprise in any of this. The British press is for the most part relentlessly right-wing and has for decades launched vitriolic attacks and character assassinations on anyone remotely departing from the Conservative Party script (as with former Labour leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock). In that way, I can understand the situation of those who I otherwise disagree with. New Labour’s courting of the mainstream media and UKIP’s resentment of it both make sense. But I wonder whether it any longer holds the power it once did. People now get their news from multiple sources, mainly from the internet. Even in the heyday of the print press it was said that the majority of Sun readers voted Labour, despite the paper’s anti-Labour editorial stance. Now, I would think that the print media is even less influential. And the Mail article, the opening sentence of which referred to Sturgeon's "stilettoes and new hairstyle", was curiously dated (gosh, she's, you know, one of those women) as was the patronizing follow-up on how she has become "sexier with age". At all events, the opinion polls seem to have been unaffected by the leaders’ debate and its aftermath.

British election: the leaders' debate

This is the second of my posts on the British General Election, this time on the televised debate between the party leaders which was held last night. This is only the second time there has been such a debate in the UK, and the format was different to last time. In the 2010 election only the leaders of Conservative, Liberal Democrats and Labour participated. This time, following various political machinations, they were joined by the leaders of the Greens, SNP, UKIP and Plaid Cymru (the Welsh national party). Thus the full cast was Natalie Bennett (Greens), David Cameron (Conservative), Nick Clegg (LibDems), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) and Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru). The debate lasted for two hours and was organized around four questions on the economy, the health service, immigration, and the future for young people.

In many ways it was this format that had the biggest effect. It meant that each leader had relatively little time to speak and when they did it was highly structured. There was little audience participation (I think by instruction from the broadcasters) and it was hard for any of the leaders to really get a sense of audience reaction – there was little applause, no catcalling and just one heckle towards the end. In short, the atmosphere felt quite sterile. Certainly it was difficult for any single leader to dominate proceedings, and none did.

Opinion polls and comments since the debates suggest that no one emerged as a clear ‘winner’or ‘loser’, although Nicola Sturgeon has been the most widely praised. I think this is deserved: she gave a strong, calm and confident performance. One quite likely permutation of the election result is a Labour minority government supported by the SNP and if so that will be an interesting outcome, since Sturgeon is some way to the left of Labour and would be likely to push strongly against austerity economics.

As for the other leaders, David Cameron, who had been resistant to the debates taking place, seemed somewhat ill at ease and disengaged. He can be an accomplished speaker and expectations would have been quite high that he would stand out, so I would think his supporters would be disappointed. Ed Miliband, by contrast, started against low expectations since he is widely seen as lacking charisma. Thus it was relatively easier for him to exceed expectations, so his supporters may be relieved. It would be hard to say that either of these two – the only ones with any expectation of becoming Prime Minister – decisively defeated the other.

Nigel Farage will have had high expectations from this debate. He is often an accomplished and effective speaker, skilled in projecting an image of straight-speaking normality. But his style relies a lot on the use of humour and bombast, and the rigid format and stage-managed audience weren’t a good format for these. He wasn’t able to dominate proceedings as he might have done in a head to head, and it was notable that Cameron and Miliband barely addressed him, treating him as almost an irrelevance. He was also the only one of the leaders who looked physically uncomfortable. His supporters profess themselves pleased but there was no breakthrough moment of the sort they would have hoped for.

Of all the leaders, Natalie Bennett started with the lowest expectations given recent painful media performances (which I discussed in another post). To exceed them all she really had to do was not implode, and she easily exceeded that bar. Leanne Wood was probably the least known of the politicians to a national audience and gave an assured performance, albeit one which (not unreasonably) mainlined on Welsh rather than national issues. Sturgeon, by contrast, had tended to emphasise the role SNP MPs could play in Westminster politics. But it was Wood who garnered one of the few rounds of applause of the night, in a sharp put down of Farage’s claim about immigrants using the health service.

Nick Clegg’s performance in the debate has been less commented on in the media than that of the other leaders. It was actually quite punchy and fluent. But whereas at the last election debate his was the runaway success, attracting by far the most praise and interest, the context has now changed and he has neither the edge of being a newcomer challenging the political establishment nor the significance that attaches to the prospective Prime Ministers.

Overall, we didn’t learn very much that was new, and it seems unlikely to me that many viewers will have changed their voting intentions on the basis of the debates. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating evening and, again, this was because of the format. Firstly, there was a far wider range of views represented than has been normal in British politics, and with each leader being given the same amount of air time these views were represented as all having equal weight. That felt like a refreshing change following an era which, as I wrote in my last post, has been dominated by the shared neo-liberal orthodoxy of Conservative and Labour parties. Secondly, the dynamics of the debate felt changed by the presence of three women – who, relatedly, each represented ideologies at odds with neo-liberalism. Since Margaret Thatcher’s departure, British politics has been heavily dominated by white men in suits and suddenly that domination has evaporated (as regards the men, but not the white bit). It was Thatcher who coined the phrase ‘there is no alternative’ (to free markets), otherwise known as Tina. But Tina, for one night anyway, was banished by Leanne, Natalie and Nicola.

The British general election

This is the first of what I plan to be a series of posts about the UK general election in the run up to polling day on May 7^th. I realise that this may seem rather parochial and as such may be of limited interest to readers of the blog from outside the UK. But I am not so sure that is so. Much of what is happening here has counterparts in many other countries. For example, there is a breakdown in trust in the political process and the emergence of new parties which are to some extent extremist (though perhaps less so than in other countries), and one consequence of this is that the result is far less predictable than at any other recent election.  Moreover, much of the context of this is the unfolding of the consequences of globalization and of the financial crisis. The other thing to be said at the outset is that this focus on politics may seem at odds with the focus of the book and this blog of the book, which is on organizations. But here I would just re-state one of the basic arguments of the book, which is the inseparability of politics and organizations.

In this first post, I’ll just make some orientating comments. The period since the early 1990s saw a remarkable convergence between the two main parties, Conservative and Labour, with both being committed to the neo-liberal order, even though one was notionally a party of the Right and the other of the Left. That is to say, both converged on globalization, deregulation and privatization or marketization of public services. The assumption of that convergence was that Britain would continue to be a two-party system as it has been for many decades, with the Conservatives holding on to all the voters whose views were further to the Right than its policies and Labour holding on to all those to its Left. That assumption didn’t quite hold, even at the last election in 2010, principally because the ‘third party’, the Liberal Democrats, garnered quite a bit of support, especially from the Left, not because they diverged from the economic consensus of the other two parties but mainly because they alone had opposed the Iraq War. The consequence of this was a hung parliament and a Conservative-LibDem government that enacted a programme of fiscal austerity.

Although that austerity programme is a defining feature of the current election campaign, it is in a way a sideshow. The proposition is that Labour wrecked the economy with ‘left-wing’ policies, and it was rescued by right-wing policies. But of course the economic wreck of the financial crisis was a wreck of neo-liberalism, which happened to occur when the notionally left-wing party was in power but would have happened in exactly the same way even if they had not been (as in the United States). Moreover, had Labour happened to have won the last election they too would have implemented a similar fiscal austerity programme. In effect, Conservative and Labour parties have become two rival management teams, not differing very much in ideology or policy. And at this election, too, for all that Labour have perhaps very slightly shifted leftwards under Miliband (though to nothing like the extent that the media portrayals of him as ‘Red Ed’ suggests), the alternatives are really only between the extent of continued austerity and a few percentage points either way on the size of the state and the speed of deficit reduction.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the two main parties are only narrowly separated in the opinion polls. For what has happened now is that the assumption that voters had nowhere else to go but to that of the main parties to which they least objected has broken down. In Scotland, a social democratic Scottish National Party (SNP) has, as an unintended consequence of their failure to win the independence referendum, grabbed a massive chunk of the hitherto automatic Labour vote. In England, the anti-EU, anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has grabbed a chunk of the Conservative vote, and a part of the traditional Labour vote. Meanwhile, the Green Party has bitten off pieces of the Labour and LibDem votes. All three of these parties, different as they are, are very clearly alternatives to the neo-liberal consensus of the last 20 years. Each has fractured what were in effect the coalitions of the Conservative and Labour parties. UKIP fractures the nationalist/traditionalist and globalist coalition that Thatcherism created. The SNP and Greens fracture the social democratic and free market coalition that New Labour created. Yet the differences between UKIP/Green/SNP (and some potentially kindred voters in other parties) mean that there is no possibility at all of them forming a unified movement. Not the least of these differences are wildly incompatible notions within and between each of them as to the meaning of local/national and global/international. To put it crudely, UKIP are nationalist (on the EU, immigration and aid) and globalist (on defence and trade); SNP are nationalist (on Scottish independence and defence) and globalist (on the EU and immigration); the Greens are localist (on trade and defence) and internationalist (on aid and immigration). These differences become particularly acute in relation to the European Union (see my post here) and also relate to the tension between cosmopolitans and locals (see my post here).

In 1957 the American political scientist Anthony Downs published An Economic Theory of Democracy. It got taken up as an endorsement of a two party system such that each party would go to the centre ground and then take all the votes to its left or right. In fact, it only predicted that if certain assumptions about ideological consensus and the distribution of ideological views held good. In Britain, they have held until very recently. For example, in the two British elections (1955 and 1959) either side of Downs’ book Conservative and Labour parties between them secured about 99% of the vote on a turnout of about 78%. Even in 2010 they got 87% of the vote up to 96% with LibDems included, albeit on a 65% turnout. But for the forthcoming elections the current national opinion poll average is: Conservative 33%, Labour 34%, LibDems 8%, UKIP 14% and Greens 5%. And in Scotland the SNP is polling in the high 40% and Labour in the high 20% areas, pretty much an exact reversal of the 2010 election.

Outcomes are difficult to predict, but a Conservative or Labour majority government are the least likely possibilities. More likely are either a Conservative government pulled to the Right by reliance on UKIP or a Labour government pulled to the Left by the SNP. Either result would mark a significant moment in British politics and could have important ramifications for the wider world.