Archive for January, 2015
What has changed on the deficit since general election 2010?
07/01/2015, 08:31:55 AMby Jonathan Todd
This is the first of a series of pieces from Uncut on what has changed in respect of key political issues since the last general election. Looking over this timescale, we hope to distinguish the signal from the noise; what really matters from the day-to-day froth.
Liverpool played Burnley away on Boxing Day. The last time that happened was just before the 2010 general election when Rafa Benitez managed Liverpool. Roy Hodgson and Kenny Dalglish both did so between Benitez and the current reign of Brendan Rodgers. Hodgson’s tenure coincided with the near bankruptcy of one of the world’s great sporting institutions. Enter John Henry, deus ex machina. This American has invested in the club stadium and playing squad, including in Luis Suarez, who brought both disgrace and nearly a Premier League title. Life is easier off the pitch and harder on the pitch sans Suarez. Fans yearn to be made to dream again. And will soon have to hope to do so without talisman Steven Gerrard.
In summary, much has happened at Liverpool since the last general election. Soon after which, I wrote my first piece for Uncut on ‘the emerging politics of deficit reduction’. Since when, as much as politics feels like a rollercoaster, these politics have changed remarkably little. Around the time that piece was published, Peter Mandelson was fighting for airtime by launching his memoirs.
We would not convince the country, Mandelson conceded on the deficit, that the Tories were going too far unless we convinced them that we would go far enough. That reflection on the 2010 election exactly parallels the advice that both myself and Samuel Dale have recently given Labour’s current campaign. I called for ‘Don Miliband’ to show himself, Sam for a ‘carpe deficit’ moment. The terminology doesn’t matter, the point is the same. Mandelson returned to the debate before Christmas to make a similar point in a speech to a Progress and Policy Network conference. Labour, Mandelson advised, will only get a hearing on ‘what will the effect be on society and the economy?’ if we are clear on ‘how much must we cut public spending?’
Some gloomy general election predictions
06/01/2015, 08:55:06 AMby Atul Hatwal
The next election is not too close to call. Neither is it a contest where the current party system is under threat nor one where voter volatility renders meaningful predictions impossible.
There are excuses wheeled out by pundits and pollsters who are frit. Here are my predictions.
The Conservatives are going to repeat their 2010 performance and secure 36% of the vote while suffering a small fall in their number of seats to the range 290 to 300.
Labour will struggle to 32%, boosting its seats by 20-25 to the high 270s or low 280s and the Lib Dems will exceed their current polling to get to 16% with seats in the high 30s or very low 40s.
Ukip will under-perform their current poll rating to achieve 7% with one seat (Douglas Carswell) while the SNP will lose to Labour in Scotland. However, they will make some progress, boosting their representation by taking 6-10 Labour seats and reducing the majorities for most of Labour’s Scottish MPs.
This is why.
As May 7th draws near, three shifts will take place in the way that the voting public go about their choice that will move the current polling.
These changes happen in every electoral cycle and are the reason that decades of forecasts of new settlements, moulds being broken and unprecedented uncertainty are usually wrong.
They relate to the nature of the decision that voters are making, the criteria they use to make it and how they judge the parties meet that criteria.
First, the way most voters perceive their choice fundamentally changes in the run up to a general election.
For the majority of the parliament, when pollsters (or indeed friends and family) ask about voting preference, the question is taken as a referendum on the government.
Back to the future – Labour set to rerun the 2010 election campaign
05/01/2015, 08:07:31 AMby David Talbot
Labour, said Douglas Alexander, the party’s general election supremo, would tap in to voters’ “submerged optimism”. The coming election battle would be a “word of mouth” election fought street by street. Traditional mainstays of the election campaign – posters, leaflets and election broadcasts – would be usurped by the surge of digital campaigning. While the party would be heavily outspent by the Conservatives, Labour would instead focus on “community organisation and peer-to-peer communication”.
Announcing that the party had learnt heavily from the Obama campaign, Labour’s use of digital media would pioneer real-time defence against the opposition as well as digital attack ads, raising funds and recruiting volunteers. This was in comparison to the Conservatives who would spend their considerable war chest on “posters and paid distribution”. Labour’s campaign wouldn’t spend flashy millions and would win not through “one-way communication, but one-to-one communication”. Labour’s approach could be summarised by Alexander’s view that “traditional methods of communication are just inappropriate”.
Sound familiar? Last week Douglas Alexander unveiled Labour’s central campaigning themes for the 2015 general election. But the quotes and context above are all taken from Douglas Alexander’s comments made in February, 2010. The similarity between what Alexander said in 2010, when Labour was to fall to its second worse electoral defeat in its history, and his comments last Friday, are striking. The comments are, in certain passages, in fact almost identical.
In this election Labour will, according to Alexander, engage with “the anger felt by so many in the only way a progressive party can.” In 2010 Labour would deal with “anxiety and anger over bankers’ bonuses, expenses and the recession, a general sense of grumpiness” in, infamously, a “future fair for all.” Labour will “fight this election conversation by conversation, doorstep by doorstep, community by community” whilst in 2010, borrowing from Obama, naturally, it would be “regular people briefing Labour’s message to their neighbours, serving as our ambassadors, block by block, throughout the battleground seats”.
