Jonathan Todd « Labour Uncut

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The politics of mutualising the NHS and reviving National Insurance offers Labour a big opportunity

25/09/2014, 06:20:52 PM

In the second of an occasional series of posts, from Uncut contributors, that look at the policies and political positioning needed to win the next election, Jonathan Todd reflects on Frank Field’s case for restructuring how the NHS is funded.

by Jonathan Todd

In March 1992, 22 per cent of voters thought the Conservatives had the best policies on the NHS. 52 per cent thought Labour did. This didn’t stop the Tories winning the general election two months later. This experience should caution us against seeing the lead that Labour currently enjoys on the NHS as sufficient to secure Labour general election victory. Labour’s trust and popularity on this issue is not a passport to election victory. But it is a political asset that might be deployed to create such a passport.

Some perceptions of Labour strength and weakness that are relevant are:

More voters say of Labour “even if I don’t always agree with it, at least its heart is in the right place” than say this of any other party. 30 per cent of voters say this of Labour, in contrast to 23 per cent of the Tories and 15 per cent of the Liberal Democrats.
57 per cent believe government cuts are necessary. But only 10 per cent of voters believe Labour leaders are prepared to take tough and unpopular decisions, while 45 per cent of voters think that Conservative leaders are.

The support Labour enjoys on the NHS is emblematic of the sense that Labour’s heart is in the right place. No one believes that Labour enjoys seeing nurses being made redundant, whereas there is a lingering suspicion, perhaps unfairly, that Conservatives do. Nonetheless, there is also a widespread recognition that government involves taking tough decisions, as well as a sense that the Conservatives are more prepared to take such decisions than Labour. While there are relatively few doubts about Labour’s heart, there may be more about Labour’s judgment and resolve around difficult decisions.

As popular as the NHS is, there is also a recognition that tough choices need to be made on healthcare. Nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) consider the NHS to be one of the UK’s greatest achievements. Yet more than four in ten believe the NHS will not survive in its current form to the end of the current decade.

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Milibelievers were thin on the ground at Labour conference

24/09/2014, 02:54:20 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Throughout Ed Miliband’s leadership there have been those at Labour Party conference prepared to mock and criticise him. There have also been Milibelivers. In between these pessimists and optimists have been pragmatists, seeing both positives and weaknesses in Miliband, seeking to accentuate the former and minimise the latter.

Milibelivers felt thin on the ground this week. I made a point of asking everyone I spoke to how they assessed the mood. “Flat,” was the usual response. After Miliband’s speech, I also enquired what they thought of it. The elderly delegate from a Labour constituency in the north east of England who described it as “the icing on the cake of his week” was the exception in speaking wholly warmly about it.

The dearth of Milibelivers had the effect that pragmatists felt less conference peer pressure to align themselves with the optimists and more to mirror the concerns of the pessimists. We entered a spiral of negativity. The conference vibe was much like twitter where the cheerleading tweets of MPs during Miliband’s speech were drowned out by the mirth of others.

The grounds for optimism cited by elected representatives, however, were not always without foundation. One told me of a Labour business breakfast attended by many more businesses and senior business people than in previous years. Public affairs agencies informed me that they were bringing more clients to conference than in recent years and clients were keener to attend.

Business is preparing for Labour government. They are right to do so. After Douglas Carswell’s defection to UKIP, presuming he succeeds in retaining his seat in the upcoming by election, the idea that UKIP will poll something in the order of 10 per cent in 2015 seems plausible. While an effective ground game is likely to secure the Liberal Democrats many more MPs than UKIP, probably somewhere between 30 and 40, their national polling has been on the floor for so long that it also seems plausible that they might poll somewhere in the same 10 per cent region. Both the persistence of UKIP and the non-recovery of the Liberal Democrats favour Labour over the Conservatives. As do the parliamentary boundaries. As does the incomplete nature of David Cameron’s half-baked detoxification of his party.

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What Ed must do in his speech: Respond to EVEL

22/09/2014, 06:30:10 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Quebec came close to voting for independence in the 1990s. It was then granted more powers and support for independence declined. It is to be hoped that Scotland follows the same trajectory. But it should be noted that Canada and Quebec achieved this in the much more economically benign era of the 1990s. When economies are growing and wages are rising, people display less of a tendency to be seduced by the false consolations of nationalism. Therefore, when Ed Balls in his conference speech moved quickly from English votes on English laws (EVEL) to the inequities of zero hour contracts, he was not talking about unrelated issues. But he was talking about distinct issues.

The core insight of Ed Miliband that we need an economy that better works for the broad mass of the population is correct. And while such an economy would diminish the charms of both UK breakup and UKIP, it does not adequately meet the challenge posed by proponents of EVEL. Without going further to address the constitutional implications raised by “the vow” made to the Scottish people and the ways in which EVEL would meet these implications by creating new problems, Miliband risks seeming to be a politician avoiding a simple solution (EVEL) simply because it doesn’t suit his narrow interests. He shouldn’t want to be such a politician and must ensure that he is not in his speech tomorrow.

Jonathan Todd is Deputy Editor of Labour Uncut

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Uncut Review: Ed Balls’ speech

22/09/2014, 05:00:28 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Soon after Ed Balls finished speaking to conference, Hopi Sen restated to a Policy Network fringe the core thesis of Into the Black Labour, which he co-authored: social justice and fiscal conservatism are complements. Sen praised the robustness of the fiscal rules that Balls proposes for a Labour government. But feels the party has not gone as far in explaining the practical steps that would be necessary to satisfy these rules. Balls’ speech did not take us greatly forward on this front.

The publication made by Uncut at conference last year, identifying an additional £34bn of public sector savings that might be made and reallocated to Labour priorities, remains one of the most substantive efforts made to explain how Labour might make the sums add up. Politicians like to talk of tough decisions but are often not as quick to make them. Uncut cast some light on how this might be done.

At the Policy Network fringe, Liz Kendall explained that typical doorstep questions are: What are you going to do? How are you going to be able to afford that? The point of the Uncut publication was to answer these explains, convincingly explaining how funds could be found to fund a Labour alternative. If there has been a reluctance to go as far as Uncut did, it is probably explained by Sen lamenting that additional fiscal consolidation “gets very ugly very quickly”.

Lack of engagement with these issues will not, however, make them any prettier. They are not wines that will mature but vinegars that will go off. Kendall reminded Policy Network that the OBR consider the ageing of society to be the biggest threat to fiscal sustainability. The ageing of society isn’t about to stop. The only thing that might change is our preparedness for it. Which requires honestly facing up to the issues sooner rather than later, even if this does quickly take us into ugly territory.

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The questions for #Lab14

22/09/2014, 07:00:06 AM

by Jonathan Todd

In 2010, Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership and started talking about the squeezed middle. The following year he gave us producers and predators. 2012 was the year of One Nation Labour. And last year the energy price freeze was the big thing.

Party conferences, as Kierkegaard might have understood, must be lived forwards but only understood backwards. There are various questions to reflect upon as we think how we might come to look back on this year’s conference:

Will Labour’s line on a constitutional convention hold?

“The vow” jointly made by David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband poses questions for Labour. The issues are whether the powers promised to Scotland will be granted and what the implications for the rest of the UK will be if they are. Cameron is clear that Scotland can have these powers but they will need to be accompanied by balancing reforms elsewhere, in particular provisions to ensure that MPs for non-English seats cannot vote on matters only impacting England.

Tom Freeman has explained why English votes on English laws could be destructive of good government and potentially even the UK. He’s also proposed what appears a sensible solution, which responds to concerns raised outside of Scotland by “the vow”, while avoiding the problems associated with English votes on English laws.

Freeman’s solution is not yet Labour’s solution. Labour doesn’t yet have a solution. Labour proposes a constitutional convention to find a solution. Such a slow paced approach is consistent with the preference of Vernon Bogdanor, Cameron’s ex university tutor, for not rushing. It’s not clear, though, that those outside of Scotland will have the patience for this.

Many have seen “the vow” and want to know how their rights and interests can be reconciled with it. Labour can’t tell them. Cameron can. With a response that creates the dangers Freeman flags. If Labour wants our line on a constitutional convention to hold, we might want to stop talking about “two classes of MP”, which we’ve had since 1999, and start talking in the terms of the problems Freeman describes.

How to play the A-Team away from Westminster more often ?

Keeping the UK together was arguably Gordon Brown’s finest honour. Jim Murphy also emerges enhanced. If they’d left the fight to Labour MSPs, Yes might well have won. Alex Salmond was given over a decade to dismantle the B-Team that Labour kept fielding in Scotland. We would be foolish if we think that we can allow Salmond’s successor the same easy ride.

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Labour now has big questions to answer

19/09/2014, 12:35:07 PM

by Jonathan Todd

The Scottish referendum is the most tumultuous event in British politics in my lifetime. Writing on Labour Uncut in February, I anticipated that Scotland would stay together but potentially on bitter and cantankerous terms. What I didn’t see until much later was that Yes victory would seem a distinct possibility and that bitterness and rancour would spill from Scotland into the rest of the UK.

Kevin Meagher has catalogued on Uncut the failing of Better Together. The factor that he sees as common to all of these failings is that Westminster leaders “seriously underestimated the prospect of independence”. In so doing, these leaders also underestimated how profoundly they are mistrusted and how deeply angry many are. This frustration is so intense that many were prepared to take the gamble of UK breakup. Such a step would certainly have been a leap into the unknown but many calculated that this was the best option because the likelihood of anything worse than the status quo was minimal.

This calculus, in my view, was faulty. UK breakup would reduce the Scottish tax base and capacity to raise finance on money markets. Both of which would have increased pressure for public service cuts in Scotland, which many voting Yes thought they were voting against. All those who value well resourced public services, including all Labour party members, should be relieved that UK breakup has been averted.

But this certainly does not spell the end of Labour’s challenges. Broadly speaking, these now take two forms: cultural and constitutional. The cultural challenges are involved with the anger and mistrust that both Yes and UKIP have fed on, while the constitutional are concerned with resolving the west Lothian question in the context that now exists following “the vow” of additional powers for Scotland jointly made by David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband.

Yes and UKIP both have an appeal to some sections of traditional Labour support, particularly the disenfranchised working class. “UKIP is tearing off this section of the electorate”, Matthew Goodwin recently argued, “creating a fundamental divide in British politics between those with the skills, education and resources to adapt, and those who have little and feel intensely angry.” When we dissect why Yes won Glasgow, Scotland’s most working class city, I expect we’ll find similar voters to those that UKIP appeal to being decisive.

Yes was high on energy and short on detail. Nigel Farage has comparable energy. He was up early this morning posting letters to Scottish MPs asking them to not vote on English matters. He will be looking forward to getting his bandwagon into fifth gear in Clacton, seeking to trade on both English grievance at the strongly asymmetric devolution created by “the vow” and the anti-politics mood. Yes also benefitted from this mood, precipitating “the vow”, but Farage will now seek to augment his long-standing antipathy to the leading UK parties with the charge that they are a conspiracy against the English.

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Labour must overcome the Terrible Simplifiers

16/09/2014, 09:42:16 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Ben Watt recently won best “difficult” second album at the AIM Independent Music awards. In the chorus to the album’s closing song he sings that “the heart is a mirror where it’s easy to just see yourself”. One of the verses tells of a redundant man undertaking childcare and domestic responsibilities, while his wife is the bread winner. All this man can see in his heart is the pain of redundancy, which distorts his relationship with his wife, causing him to see her as a threat to his sense of himself.
We are awash with pain: the economic pain of unemployment, struggling to get by and dead end jobs; the social pain of loneliness, dislocation and addiction; and much else besides. All of which breeds anger and takes potent form in the politics of grievance.

This fits snugly and powerfully within the essential political narrative. The elements of this narrative are a critique of the status quo, a vision of a better alternative and a route map for moving from the status quo to this alternative, often accompanied by identification and condemnation of those who frustrate this transition.

Grievance politics trades on anger with those supposedly forestalling a better world: the EU that denies the ale sodden, sunny uplands of UKIP; the English oppressors of the Scottish. UKIP and the SNP, though, converge on a shared enemy: Westminster and the political class. The faraway elite chain us to the Brussels cabal; conspire against the Scottish.

These claims are ridiculous and are mocked. Daily Mash reports on a UKIP councillor being proud to announce “that Doncaster will be freed from the yoke of EU membership with immediate effect” and on a film called 12 Years a Scot, “the brutal but uplifting story of Brian Northup, a free man who at no point is forced to work on a plantation”.

When trust in Westminster is at an unprecedented low and the pain of everyday lives feels unending, unendurable and beyond the capacity of these mendacious leaders to eradicate, what is absurd – that the EU is an oppression, that the Scots are oppressed by the UK – gains traction. These kind of all encompassing narratives are not alien to Labour’s history.

Clause 4 socialism, for example, explained all our problems in terms of private ownership and saw all our solutions in its elimination. In the belly of the Labour Party, we always knew that this violated what David Mitchell later proposed as a liberal tenet: the instinct to offer, “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”. Tony Blair’s revision of Clause 4 communicated to the wider electorate recognition of this.

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Scotland: The madness has to stop now

12/09/2014, 08:06:04 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Mental health is said to be a ‘Cinderella’ service, lacking resources. Friedrich Nietzsche maintained, though, that madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. He would be unsurprised, therefore, that I’ve received an email from a friend in Scotland who reports the Yes campaign is coming across “like a millennial cult”.

Similarly, Carol Craig has lamented that the approach of Stephen Noon, chief strategist for Yes, “is nationalism laced with a heavy dose of what looks like a whacky personal development philosophy”. Yes vehemently insist that doubts about UK breakup evidence only a lack of belief in the Scottish.

The then European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said it would be “extremely difficult, if not impossible” for Scotland to rejoin the EU after UK breakup. The Royal Bank of Scotland will leave Scotland if the UK breaks up. Given concerns about the currency, Ultimo, the company of the Scottish business woman Michelle Mone, would also follow them south.

Scottish nationalists will insist that the Royal Bank of Scotland doesn’t really believe in Scotland. That Barroso knows nothing of the EU and simply lacks faith in Scots. That Mone is full of it. She probably isn’t actually Scottish. There is no concern that can’t be dismissed if you are a true enough Scot.

Sadly, Mone, born and raised in Glasgow, no longer feels safe in Scotland having been targeted by Siol nan Gaidheal, an ultra-nationalist group that boasts of ‘in-your-face-confrontations’ with Jim Murphy. Friends also tell me of Better Together posters resulting in smashed windows. Sections of the Scottish population have thuggishly moved beyond reason.

The exasperation of Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, speaking earlier in the week was palpable. Currency union in the event of UK breakup would be “incompatible with sovereignty”, he observed, wearily referring to a speech that he’d given earlier in the year. He might as well have said, “I don’t know how many times I have to say this”.

If the treatment of Mone and Murphy is anything to go by, he’ll never be heard by some. Maybe heard but not accepted. Perhaps they think he’s bluffing. Or having a laugh. But this is not a stag party or another occasion for laughs. It’s even less of an occasion for laughs than a general election.

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In a dangerous world, the UK prospers together or declines apart

08/09/2014, 02:06:21 PM

by Jonathan Todd

The British have been protected by NATO and grown richer through the EU throughout my life. Soon the breakup of the UK may drain Britain of meaning and Russian troops could be threatening a NATO member, while Martin Wolf of the FT thinks it likely that the Eurozone will remain in a “bad marriage “, too costly to breakup but so unhappy that its members would not have chosen it knowing what they now do.

Those in the “bad marriage” struggle to find the resources or the will to meet their NATO obligations. They seem ineffectual in the face of both Putin and ISIS. Europeans alternately look to the US to solve these problems and blame them on the US, while offering precious little by way of European solutions. If we remain united, the British can be part of achieving more than this.

David Cameron – pace Owen Jones – is right to compare Putin’s tactics with those of Hitler in the early stages of World War II. He follows Timothy Garton Ash, not noted for hyperbole, in doing so. Robin Lustig, another sober and astute observer, compares events in Iraq and Syria to World War I.

As we stand on the precipice of UK breakup, accurately described by Sir Edward Leigh MP as “a national humiliation of catastrophic proportions” during the last PMQs, we face mounting dangers. This catastrophe would irreversibly weaken us. Instead of possessing a united armed forces which count for something, as David Blair notes, we will have chosen to divide them into two shrunken militaries that would count for very little.

Never again we will we speak with the authority that we possess at international forums, such as the UN, G7/8, G20, and NATO. Significantly, UK breakup is likely to be used as a justification by non-permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to push for this status to be removed from what remains of the UK. This rump is also more likely to vote to leave the EU if this referendum occurs without Scotland, while those EU members with separatist movements, particularly Spain, will ensure that a post-breakup Scotland is locked out of the EU. British capacity to shape the EU as it evolves in the face of the continued challenges of the Euro will be non-existent.

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We need more Jim Murphy and less Douglas Carswell

01/09/2014, 07:05:00 PM

by Jonathan Todd

On two separate occasions this year I have been surprised by intelligent Scots telling me that they are considering voting yes in the independence referendum. Why would they contemplate something that seems to me small-minded and inward-looking?

When I put this to them, they both replied with words to the effect of, “there is a better way to run Scotland.” “Can’t that be achieved within the devo-max that is inevitably coming?” “What makes it inevitable?” “Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives are all committed to it.”

At this point in the conversations, one of them expressed cynicism in the capacity of these three parties to deliver. Another was more accepting that devo-max would come if Scotland remains in the UK and began to lament what would become of the rump of the UK if Scotland voted for independence.

Behind both of these responses is a belief that Scotland is a fundamentally different political universe from the rest of the UK. The first reveals a view that the leading UK parties are unable or unwilling to give Scotland the powers necessary to build the brightest possible future. The second is concerned about what will become of the presumed conservative England without the anchor of supposedly social democratic Scotland.

But at the last general election, only 3 per cent fewer people in Scotland voted Conservative than voted SNP. At the three general elections prior to this, Labour would have formed the government each time had only votes in England counted. Labour can win England. Scotland does have Tories. England and Scotland are not Mars and Venus.

Somewhat similarly, the Glaswegian comedian Billy Connolly has claimed to have a lot more in common with Liverpool welders than Scottish Highlanders with agricultural backgrounds. If we accept that Scotland is not an island of social democracy in a sea of conservatism, instead sharing a spectrum of political values with the rest of the UK, and also take the leading UK political parties at their word, meaning that devo-max is a coming reality for Scotland, what remains for the yes campaign to advance their argument?

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