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Sunday review: The election of Francois Hollande

13/05/2012, 07:00:53 AM

by Anthony Painter

Last Sunday, France elected a technocratic centrist. He tips slightly to the left of the centrist band but not far. He’ll shift the debate at the EU level about emphasising growth but expect incremental rather than seismic change. He’s really just a French version of Mario Monti only with a democratic mandate. The problem is that it is not at all clear that is who the French thought they were electing. They think they voted against austerity but they did anything but.

Hollande’s election slogan was ‘le change, c’est maintenant.’ More accurately, it will largely be a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – domestically at least. Hollande’s fiscal consolidation plans track Sarkozy’s for the first year then deviate slightly, returning the French budget to fiscal balance a year later. The major flaw in his economic programme is the lack of any determination to reform France’s labour markets. It has some of the heaviest regulation and highest unit costs in the EU. The best performers in Europe on unemployment are those with moderate regulation (lightly regulated countries such as the UK perform less well than the moderate group). France’s regulation is a drag on growth and employment – as is that of Spain – but these are structural concerns whereas there is an immediate issue with demand.

Overall though, his plans are largely sensible. He plans to cut small business tax, enable the state to employ the young unemployed and create a national investment bank. He intends to decentralise the French state. Any European moderate will be completely relaxed about all of this – indeed, they would applaud it. The problem was not in the programme, it was in the rhetoric. On Sunday, Hollande declared:

“In all the capitals… there are people who, thanks to us, are hoping, are looking to us, and want to reject austerity.”

The simple fact is that austerity has become defined in a very broad manner across the EU. It now basically means public spending cuts and tax increases. The bar is set very low and this narrows room for political manoeuvre. Europe’s voters (including in the UK) are being told by political leaders on the left that the choice is either growth or austerity. Would you like to chew on mud or munch a tarte tatin? I’ll have the tarte tatin please.

The problem is that, unfortunately, in this convulsive and volatile world, someone has sprinkled the tarte tatin with mud. And we’re very hungry. What to do?

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David Cameron lied to the House of Commons about Andy Coulson

11/05/2012, 07:00:07 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The reviews for Andy Coulson’s performance at Leveson yesterday might have been glowing, but he did reveal one critical fact. A fact with no caveat or wriggle room.

It came during the passage of questioning on Coulson’s vetting. When asked by the lead counsel for the inquiry, Robert Jay QC, whether he had attended meetings of the National Security Council (NSC), Coulson was unusually clear.

“Yes” he said.

There was no “maybe”, “might have” or “I can’t recall.”

It’s important because attendance at full NSC discussions requires the highest level of clearance, developed vetting (DV) so that participants can view content classified as top secret or above. As has been well established, Andy Coulson did not have this clearance.

So what you might say. If Coulson attended a meeting without the right clearance then that’s not ideal, but hardly front page news.

What elevates this from being another example of shoddy internal government process to significance is the identity of the chair of the NSC: the Rt Hon David Cameron MP.

In this context, Cameron’s reported comments to the House of Commons on Wednesday 20^th July 2011 take on a new salience. Responding to questions about Coulson’s security clearance, he stated,

“He was not able to see the most secret documents…It was all done in the proper way“.

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Time for politicians to be straight with the voters

10/05/2012, 07:00:10 AM

by Peter Watt

Real life is full of doubt and ambiguity; shades of grey dominate and we are rightly suspicious of people who peddle certainty.

But when it comes to politics it seems that certainty is still the preferred currency, or at least that is the perceived wisdom. Politicians cannot express uncertainty, only 100% assurance, because to allow for anything else is to invite a charge of weakness and ridicule.

Much of the time we are all complicit in this nonsense. Can you imagine if Ed Miliband, or any of the other candidates in the leadership contest, had said ‘I think I will make a good leader – but I’m not sure’? Or if David Cameron had stood at the despatch box yesterday and after being excoriated by Ed Miliband, angrily asserted he was ‘reasonably certain’ that Ed was wrong!

Yet the truth is that most political decisions are subjective involving the weighing up of evidence and options and then making a decision that is hopefully right. It’s not surprising that the public are increasingly sceptical about politician’s ability to tell the truth. They just do not believe that politicians can or will deliver.

Remember how polls said that Ken’s fares policy was popular? Well the same polls often showed that the public also did not believe that Ken could make this happen. So for all Ken’s façade of certainty over his policy, including a promise to resign if he failed, the public were unmoved.

Politicians are caught between a rock and a hard place. They must appear certain at all times or they will be seen as weak. But this certainty does not mean that they are believed and in fact feeds a sense amongt voters of politicians as liars who do not, or cannot, deliver.

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What the Queen’s speech tells us about this dysfunctional government

09/05/2012, 06:37:20 PM

by Atul Hatwal

One thing is clear from this derisory Queen’s speech. Underpinning the paucity of content and the laundry list quality to this rag bag of measures is a central truth: the gangrene of government has well and truly set in.

The most obvious tell-tale sign is the absence of a top-line. If the BBC is calling your programme a “hotch-potch” with “no over-arching theme”, you know something has gone wrong.

The package of 15 bills and 4 draft bills is rare in that there is virtually no truly distinctive or news-worthy initiative. All of the headlines from these proposals will be generated by the politics of their parliamentary passage, notably with Lords reform, rather than the substantive impact of their delivery.

In coming forward with a programme like this the government has ceded the news agenda. It will be pushed and pulled by the rebellion du jour from right-wing Tories or left-wing Lib Dems on a variety of amendments to Dave and Nick’s anodyne bills.

The real question that should be asked about this Queen’s speech is why? Why is there not a single bill that will draw a dividing line between government and opposition? That will draw their side together and focus the debate on a distinction with Labour. How can the coalition party managers in have been so incompetent?

The answer lies not in their political ability or ambition, but the process of government.

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Vive la France, the truth is about to catch-up with Cameron

09/05/2012, 07:00:17 AM

by James Ruddick

The truth is out there, and not even a smooth and accomplished liar like David Cameron can hide it.

The truth is that you pay off more debt through growth than through austerity. It’s a plain fact. History confirms it again and again. Right now, in the US, where Obama snubbed austerity, the economy has not only come out of recession, but is booming, and the creditors, getting bigger and bigger monthly cheques, are swooning with surprise and delight.

Of course you never hear this in the UK media, which is lazy and self-interested and in thrall to the austerity lie of the hard right. You never hear that growth means more tax receipts and less deficits. No reference is ever made to the period after the Second World War when the whole of Europe was broke and in ruins, and yet boomed back within five years on Keynesian growth. Hush hush, that.

But now the lie is about to be exposed because the French people, sometimes a more sophisticated electorate than our own, have junked austerity and voted for growth. Unemployment in France will now fall, tax receipts will rise, consumer demand increase, debt repayments accelerate. It is what always happens. This is a disaster for Cameron and the Tory lie machine. Voters in Britain will see the extent to which their leader has duped them. They will realise that had we kept Labour’s economic recovery of 2009 going we would now have repaid more national debt.

As the truth emerges, we will at least have front row seats. It’s a small consolation but it’s not to be sneered at. We can watch the excruciating pay-off from this particular commedia dell’arte – David Cameron climbing the spiral staircase with the mob trailing behind him. The coalition is already teetering and his backbenchers, knowing the voters are going to sack them at the first opportunity, want his head. He has no answer. He finds himself in waters that are unchartered for him: no one now believes a word he says. There will be an election before long and he will lose. And who can feel sorry for him? He has been discovered secretly poisoning the patient he was supposed to be caring for.

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Both competence and purpose are needed to lead for Britain

08/05/2012, 07:00:43 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Politics as usual is under pressure. The old moves aren’t working.

We say they are “out of touch”. They say we are an “unaffordable risk”. The attacks of both Labour and the Tories claim that the other cannot lead for the whole nation due to possession by sectional interests; be that the mateocracy, bankers, or News International; the trade unions, the public sector, or welfare claimants.

Rebuttals evade charges of sectionalism. Attacks claim national leadership. At the same time, what we are, as a state and people, is fundamentally questioned by Alex Salmond and the Eurozone crisis.

And then, increasing support for smaller parties, from our first Green MP in Brighton to Respect’s revival in Bradford, create a myriad of further challenges to the national leadership sought by David Cameron and Ed Miliband.

To a significant extent, all of this can be thought, in Marxist parlance, the superstructure to the economic base: an economic crisis, which has impaired UK growth more than the 1930s depression, has both created an existential crisis for the Euro and with it the EU, as well as opportunities for smaller parties.

As much as economic perceptions will do more to determine how votes are cast at the general election than anything else, it would be a mistake to think that everything in our politics can be explained in these terms.

While economic management is the primary competence issue, competency is a means to an end.

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Whips Notebook: Is Number 10 Thinking of Sacking the Wrong George?

07/05/2012, 07:00:02 AM

by Jon Ashworth

Was it the smartest move from Tory spinners to put George Osborne up as the face of the Tory fightback this weekend? The chancellor has had a shocker since his budget and his performance on Marr coupled with his Mail on Sunday piece won’t be enough to rescue his plummeting reputation.

By the time this hitherto presumptive heir to Cameron arrived at the BBC studios on Sunday, opinion polling had been published which showed just 10 per cent would consider him well suited to be prime minister against 73 per cent who said not.

What a turnaround for Osborne. Before the budget he was lauded by commentators and Tory MPs alike. Tories would approach me in the tearoom and proudly out themselves as really being in George’s not Dave’s gang. Political magazines would produce photo montages of him looking brooding and serious in the No 10 political meetings he apparently spends too much of his time in.

Now his budget is ridiculed by Tory MPs as the bodge-it and is generally seen as the beginning of the great omnishambles of jerry can fiascos and £40,000 give-aways for millionaires.

All while ordinary people were clobbered by further squeezes on their living standards. It was extraordinary in the Commons’ budget debates recently on the various VAT rises on caravans, pasties and church renovations that Tory MP after Tory MP stood up to criticise the chancellor’s proposals with no one coming to his rescue.

Following the local elections losses more Tory MPs broke out of the traps to criticise Osborne’s budget with one usually loyal Tory MP saying “my own view is that, for example in the budget, that there was no desire here for the 50p tax change.”

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Count me out

06/05/2012, 01:18:24 PM

by Kevin Meagher

I really don’t like election counts.

No, scratch that: I hate election counts.

Of course it’s something of an occupational hazard, but I have no affection for standing around in a hot and noisy fluorescent hall, listening to boring, ill-informed guesswork about who’s up and who’s down.

Seriously, people stand there extrapolating wildly on the basis of the flimsiest evidence, like 10^th century peasants speculating about when the dragon will next appear, is an annual endurance I’d happily pass up. Why can’t we just learn to wait until the results come in?

And any other former agents out there will know how annoying it is to have colleagues who are supposed to be there to sit and watch votes being counted instead float off to natter and plot, sharing defective intelligence about how Harry will beat Roger, only to be exposed as a false prophet moments later.

Hot, uncomfortable and tedious. And as venues for the count are mostly now abstemious, they are even more unbearable.

And there is no better place to be than amid the throng of a count to utterly lose perspective on the national picture.

Most of all I hate the phoney tribalism of the whole thing. The gaps between councillors are so utterly miniscule that the enmity is entirely forced these days. However, the smaller the political differences, the bigger the rosettes.

Was I up for Portillo in ’97? I was – and I actually thought he handled himself with great dignity. The politics of personal destruction is ugly and reductive, whoever the victim happens to be.

Counts represent the triumph of a sugar rush electoralism that puts campaigning above purpose.

But what is that we win to do?

Now that I am interested in.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut

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Ed was right, we need to rebuild trust in Labour. Here’s how.

06/05/2012, 07:00:28 AM

by John Woodcock

With so many councillors winning the chance to serve communities who rejected Labour at the general election, Thursday’s election puts us back in contention. But only if we treat this boost as a spur to raise our game.

On Thursday many cast a vote of anger against what the Tories and their Lib Dem helpers are inflicting on families across the country; many cast a vote that recognised that Labour was speaking their language again; but most did not vote at all.

So Ed Miliband struck exactly the right tone the morning after the results. This is a moment for determination, not hubris. Ed was right to address directly the overwhelming majority of people who who didn’t vote at all on Thursday. The pledge to ‘work tirelessly between now and the next general election to win your trust’ is exactly what a weary nation deserves to hear.

The grim mood on the doorstep felt like more than the usual reluctance to engage with local polls mid-way through a parliamentary term. The particularly low turnout was a symptom of a genuine malaise: people are doubtful that the mainstream parties can offer anything that will make a real difference.

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