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: 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.

The triumph of accountancy

This week, Natalie Bennett, the leader of the UK Green Party, suffered what has been described as a “car crash” interview on the day of the launch of her party’s election campaign. Challenged about the costing of her party’s housing policy, she experienced what she called a “brain fade” and couldn’t answer the questions. I didn’t hear that interview until later, but I did hear two others she gave that day and, frankly, neither of them was impressive when it came to questions about the funding of Green policies.

Naturally enough this provided ample ammunition to critics of the Green Party, but my reaction was to wonder about the way that political debate is now framed almost entirely in terms of accounting: what are the costs of this or that policy and where will the money come from? This is a relatively new development. In the past, political programmes were articulated in terms of broad commitments, principles and ideologies.

This isn’t a nostalgic false memory on my part. I went back and checked the manifesto of the British Conservative Party for the 1979 election. This was the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power effecting what is agreed by both supporters and critics of Thatcherism to have been a political sea-change. Yet it contains virtually no numbers and nothing in the way of costed policies. I went further back, to Labour’s 1945 manifesto at another sea-change election which created the post-war welfare state. Again, no costing of policies.

It might be argued that this is a good thing, that politicians should make concrete proposals so that they can be held accountable for their delivery, and that policies should be pragmatic. On the accountability point, it is chimerical. Does anyone think that politicians have become more likely to deliver their promises because they were costed? In practice, the earlier costings get forgotten or departure from them is readily explained away by reference to changed circumstances (and perhaps quite reasonably so, again undercutting the case for costings). Actually, this is very similar to the way that public sector management has in recent years been configured in terms of accountability, with more and more information (league tables etc.) being produced in order to give taxpayers and ‘customers’ re-assurance. Yet, at the same time, trust in public institutions has nose-dived.

On the pragmatism point, the problem is that what it validates is a stultifying small-c conservatism. The journalist Zoe Williams wrote an interesting article on Bennett’s interview, where she says:

“We have lost faith in any of the large available understandings of how structural change takes place in history,” the philosopher Roberto Unger said in a recent lecture in London “and as a result we fall back on a bastardised conception of political realism, namely that a proposal is realistic to the extent that it approaches what already exists.” This is the whole of British politics encapsulated in two lines: unless a policy looks exactly like what the mainstream parties are suggesting; unless it can be funded by minor tootling on existing tax instruments (and even that will be called a “raid”); unless it will leave the fundamental structures totally unperturbed – then it is the most outlandish idea that anybody has ever heard.

This is really the key point. By focussing on narrow issues of accounting, wider issues of over-arching principle are not just avoided but stigmatised and rendered illegitimate. One interesting aspect of this is that it reflects the complex, schizophrenic way that the language of politics and of business have intermingled. On the one hand, we have a discourse about ‘visionary leaders’ who charismatically inspire us with broad brush stories about where we, as organizations or societies, are going. Not for them mundane, prosaic budget spreadsheets. On the other hand, we have the ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ accountants, poring over the last penny of expenditure and the detailed cost-benefit calculus of every decision. In politics, leaders who lack the requisite charisma are seen as not looking like prime minister material but if they try to articulate a vision of a better society they are eviscerated for not having done the sums. Somehow, politics manages to fall into two traps: those of individualised charismatic leadership and bloodless accountancy. What gets lost is the sense, present in both the 1945 and 1979 manifestos (albeit in very different ways), of a collective project to re-imagine society, with the sums being left to take care of themselves.

None of which is to say that Natalie Bennett did a good job in those interviews, just that her mistake was to try (and fail) to answer the questions within the terms they were put, rather than to challenge their underlying premise. In that respect, at least, she might take a lesson from Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration party UKIP. When challenged on the dire economic consequences of his policies he said that these mattered less than the principle of controlling immigration. Readers of this blog will be aware that I am by no means a fan ofUKIP, but the idea that politics should be about big discussions of the shape of society is surely right.