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Posts Tagged ‘Jonathan Todd’

The right attack on Cameron’s handling of the floods isn’t about cuts or climate change, but competence

18/02/2014, 09:22:27 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Number 10 has long wished to minimise media coverage of backbench rebellions to maximise airtime on economic recovery. Hence, Cameron’s concessions to his backbenches. But members of the government have needlessly distracted media focus from economic recovery. For example, Michael Gove picking another fight with Ofsted and the failure of government whips to have any women on the frontbench for PMQs.

These own goals confirm that Labour is not up against a crack operation. The floods, in contrast, are a crisis that Cameron’s government would have had to confront even if he’d run a tighter ship. They are, obviously, a crisis for the people whose homes are underwater. The nature of the political crisis that they represent for Cameron and what they reveal about his government is more contested.

By announcing that ‘money is no object’, according to Jonathan Freedland, the prime minister has performed the last rites on the notion of inevitable austerity. The prime minister’s words constitute an incredible hostage to fortune and a risk that he didn’t need to take. The careless political slips of his government begin at the top.

Reflecting on his time near the top of the last government, Patrick Diamond recently noted: “Policy is increasingly about resolving trade-offs accentuated by financial constraints and fiscal austerity”. Cameron, though, leaves no room for trade-offs. No matter how bad the floods get, irrespective of whatever ill-considered building decisions may have been made, in spite of whomever may be at fault, public money is still supposedly no object.

In a world of scarcity, as this world inevitably is, the prime minister’s remark is vulgarly illogical. It’s not – pace Freedland – that there is money when Cameron previously said there isn’t. It’s that this money has limits. Resources are finite. Governments must, consequently, decide how to allocate these resources to best effect. In this sense, trade-offs are even more fundamental than Diamond argues.

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How does Labour secure a majority in 2015? Reheat the “white heat of technology”

03/02/2014, 11:13:29 AM

In the run up to tonight’s Progress event , we have been publishing a series of pieces on what is required for Labour to secure a majority in 2015. Here, Jonathan Todd looks at how Labour can re-calibrate it’s economic message to reflect the changing times.

Back in October, Uncut noted the trends over 2013 for a narrowing of Labour’s poll lead and rising economic optimism. We ran regressions on these trends that indicated the Conservatives would take a poll lead when a quarter of the electorate described the economy as doing well.

On 9/10 January, 15% of voters reported the economy as doing well. A small rise on the 14% that had done so in the last three polls of 2013. Then 18% gave this verdict on 16/17 January. This reached 20% by 23/24 January.

At the same time, Labour’s polling lead has further narrowed. Three out of four polls reported in the YouGov tracker between 22/23 January and 28/29 January gave Labour a poll lead of 3%. Less than it has tended to be throughout this parliament.

Looking at the trend toward rising economic optimism and Labour’s further diminishing poll lead, it seems plausible that another bump in the optimism tracker to 25% would secure the Conservatives a poll lead. Consistent with this, the regressions implied that for every 1% increase in the proportion of the electorate that think the economy is doing well, the Conservatives would close on Labour by 0.6%.

Sadly, therefore, things are playing out as the Todd thesis – as Lewis Baston called the regressions – indicated. Labour has two options. First, hope that the trend toward increasing economic optimism abates. Second, act to prevent this trend translating into a shrinking Labour poll lead.

The first approach is a “something will turn up” strategy. It rarely does. And even if it does, it – persistent economic gloominess – is not something we should be hoping for. Instead, Labour should appreciate the context in which we now operate – one of rising economic optimism – and adopt an approach that allows us to get on the front foot.

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Growth has returned, but Labour can still win on the economy if it can answer these five questions

28/01/2014, 10:39:00 AM

by Jonathan Todd

The return to solid GDP growth (at least compared to recent years) was always going to present Labour with a challenge. However, notwithstanding the immediate favourable headlines that the government has garnered from today’s figures, the present economic debate still contains numerous positives for Labour.

First, the 50p tax – enjoying 60% support – is popular. Second, the Balls fiscal consolidation plan is also. Polling for Labour Uncut prior to Labour party conference explored how voters would respond to Labour promising to keep most of the present government’s spending plans but to borrow more for public works such as building homes. Balls’ position now amounts to this and our analysis at conference revealed its appeal. Third, left popularism – otherwise known as bashing the banks and big energy – is, by definition, popular.

Inevitably, growth tips the balance towards the government on the economy, but if the public back Labour on the answer to the following five questions, the party can still win the debate. If, however, the public back the Tories, then Labour will need some new responses, and fast.

Balls v Big Business? Who will win?

It sounds like something the Ricky Gervais character Derek might ask but it’s a variation on a Huffington Post headline. The Post story noted coverage in the Financial Times (‘Businesses blast 50p tax plans by Labour’) and the Daily Telegraph (‘Bosses blitz Labour’s 50p tax rate’).

‘Big Business backs New Labour’ now seems a less likely story. Yet it was as recently as 19 December last year that Balls was quoted in the Financial Times as describing financial services as: “A massive advantage for Britain. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Having served with distinction in the prawn cocktail offensive, we might wonder whether Balls’ heart is really in battling big business.

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Westmorland and Lonsdale needs Labour as much as anywhere else

23/01/2014, 04:44:44 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Labour has invariably been in third place in Westmorland and Lonsdale, as Dr David Clark, Lord Clark of Windermere’s vivid history of the local Labour movement accounts. As Labour’s candidate in the constituency in 2010, however, I know that Westmorland’s Labour activists are as passionate as any elsewhere in the country.

They can see rural poverty around them. Which grinds as its urban cousin does. They can see locals priced out of villages dominated by second homes. Which is inequality as visceral as the contrast between the Square Mile and the poorest parts of London. They can see a country struggling to recover from the ruin reaped by the inhabitants of the Square Mile and a world scarred by injustice. And they know that only a Labour government can best respond to these national and global challenges.

As a party we cannot ask members in seats like Westmorland and Lonsdale to look upon the inequities of their neighbours and to hunger for a Labour government capable of alleviating them without then providing them the support to make a difference in their neighbourhoods and communities.

Pragmatists might point these activists to near-by parliamentary seats – Barrow, Lancaster and Morecambe – that Labour is closer to holding or winning. And I’m confident that John Woodcock, Cat Smith and Amina Lone will provide a warm welcome to helpers from Kendal, Ambleside and elsewhere in South Lakeland.

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Miliband’s reckoning must also reassure

20/01/2014, 02:24:17 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“The next election”, according to an answer that Ed Miliband gave on Friday, “will be a choice between a big reckoning and steady as she goes.” There wasn’t much that Mliband understated in setting out how Britain would change with him in charge. But this was one thing. There is no steady as she goes option.

George Osborne can only make his sums add up with a much reduced role for government outside of ringfenced areas and/or further cuts for the disabled, children and the working poor. That’s not so much steady as she goes as once more into the breach, as the ship heads towards the rapids. Osborne gave the impression in 2011 that the electorate had sacrificed all that he’d ask of them. Now he asks them to keep sacrificing till 2018/19.

His ‘baseline theory’ of politics encourages this strategy. This forces Labour to choose: Match my baseline and all the tough choices that entails or don’t and accept that the full force of HM Treasury will be thrown at undermining Labour’s credibility.

Miliband’s speech was his response to Osborne’s gaunlet. Which he picked up, tossed aside and dismissed as redundant. Deficit reduction alone can’t fix our economy, he told us. Nor alone can it make hard work pay or be a vision for the country, he continued.

Osborne tried to force Miliband to talk about the size of government but he insisted on telling business what to do. His refusal to play Osborne’s game may have had something of Jarvis Cocker’s snapping of a pencil about it (See two minutes in to this). There is, however, nothing scrawny about Miliband’s attitude to business. He is as muscular in articulating what he will require of them as Osborne is unrelenting in shrinking the state. It’s not a nudge – once a buzzword in David Cameron’s circle – that Miliband wants to give business but an unavoidable prod.

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Osborne’s made his move. Now it’s Labour’s turn

14/01/2014, 09:37:04 AM

by Jonathan Todd

We are a nation seeking to rebuild from the economic calamity of the past half decade. You might think this task merits a chancellor focused upon it. But George Osborne doesn’t look to Keynes, Friedman or other economists. He prefers his own ‘baseline theory’ of politics.

As we grasp for an economic rubber ring, we’re thrown the thin gruel of his politics. To the extent that his actions are informed by any economic strategy, it envisages a state so shrunken as to be beyond the ken of post 1945 Britain. Yet his political logic is robust enough that this troubling scenario may come to pass after May 2015.

Osborne’s theory is informed by an impeccable reading of recent general elections. It holds that oppositions never form governments unless they match the fiscal plan of incumbents. Governing parties hold the privilege of being able to set the fiscal baseline. Any departures from this baseline by oppositions will be subject to intense scrutiny. In 1992, this resulted in the Labour opposition seeming to threaten a ‘tax bombshell’, while in 2001 and 2005, it resulted in the Conservatives appearing a menace to public services.

Over the next 18 months or so, the TUC’s Duncan Weldon suspects, the implausibility of Osborne’s baseline will stretch this theory – perhaps to destruction. In this baseline, £25bn of additional spending cuts – much of them from the welfare budget – come after the next election. But, as Weldon notes, the necessity of running a surplus by 2018/19, which motivates these cuts, is not set in stone. It is a political choice. The UK will only come apart if Scotland votes for it, not if a surplus isn’t run by 2018/19.

In fact, there appears more likelihood of grim things happening if Osborne’s baseline is kept to than if it isn’t. It’s delivery – assuming no further tax rises, protection for pensioner benefits and continued ringfences for the NHS, schools and DfID – requires a much reduced role for government outside of ringfenced areas and/or further cuts for the disabled, children and the working poor.

This delivery isn’t impossible but it is likely to be brutal. Perhaps so much so as to effectively be impossible. The social strain and political pain might just be too much. Maybe Osborne knows this and has no genuine intention of seeing this through in the event of being in office after May 2015. But, in indicating that he will, he’s presented Labour with a set of unattractive options.

One such option is for Labour to accept Osborne’s baseline. In its toughest form, this would mean not only accepting £25bn of extra cuts but accepting that half of them will come from welfare payments to working age adults. This would put Labour in a position that Nick Clegg has already castigated as unfair.

It seems unlikely, therefore, that this will come to be Labour’s position. Instead, Labour might match the Liberal Democrat position: acceptance of the £25bn but rejection of the depth of cuts to working age welfare. This rejection, however, only deepens questions as to how the £25bn will be made up.

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There is only one Thomas Hitzlsperger

11/01/2014, 01:43:16 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“Football,” according to The Times editorial on Friday, “is trapped in an intolerant culture that most other sports of the nation have passed by.” I’m sure the writer of this editorial drew upon close knowledge of many professional footballers in concluding “change has to come from the top”. If you ask footballers, though, they’d say that the most important change has to come from the sides; namely, the fans on the terraces.

What footballers “are all agreed on,” reports the Secret Footballer, probably Dave Kitson, “is that there is one very good reason that gay players would keep their sexual allegiance firmly in the locker: the fans.” This is hardly surprising if you think about it. “Would you come out and then travel round the country playing football in front of tens of thousands of people who hate you?”

It would take a super human courage to say, yes. In contrast, for a footballer to come out to the England captain, Steven Gerrard, wouldn’t seem such a big deal. Asked yesterday by Sky Sports how he’d handle this, Gerrard said he’d “certainly help to make his position a lot more comfortable … There certainly would be no problem in the dressing room. He’s a teammate and friend.”

It’s easy to dismiss this and insist that footballers must be more homophobic than others. But, I’d guess, broadly speaking, the people who work in football are no more open or closed minded than workers in most workplaces. Coming out to colleagues may be a challenge but I’m not convinced that if these colleagues are footballers that it would be any more of a challenge than if they were butchers, bakers or candlestick makers.

Yotam Ottolenghi, however, doesn’t travel the country baking in front of thousands of people who hate him. If he had to, no matter how tolerant his fellow chefs, perhaps he wouldn’t have publicly come out. As other worldly as this thought experiment is, it reinforces the Secret Footballer’s claim that the biggest barrier to gay players revealing themselves is the fans.

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It’s all about Obamacare in America

07/01/2014, 07:00:34 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Beyond being the first African-American president, an achievement, obviously, secured on day one, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare is Barack Obama’s best, perhaps only, hope for a positive, domestic legacy. Opposition to it binds Republicans. While it’s almost 4 years since Obama signed it into law and as a result, as of 1 January 2014, 6 million Americans are receiving insurance that they otherwise wouldn’t, it remains the dominant issue in US politics.

Obama has improved the economy, repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” and exited the US from unpopular wars, while avoiding others and killing Osama Bin Laden. Largely creditable but not governing prose to match 2008’s poetry, which perhaps was pregnant with disappointment.

Equally, it shouldn’t seem too much to expect more concrete steps to eradicate the causes of the 2008/09 crash, a less dysfunctional DC, and a Middle East strategy that doesn’t cede so much to the regimes of Iran and Syria – especially when coinciding with an intended pivot to the Pacific that is not preventing China and Japan edging toward World War III.

This underwhelming record and the impending inevitability of lame-duck status makes ACA, the most significant US healthcare reform since the 1960s, vital to Obama’s submission to history’s judgment. The pendulum is swinging against his party, however.

In 2014, the Republicans are likely to hold the House and with victory in either North Carolina or Louisiana will probably take the Senate. There is a growing audience for what they have to say. It’s not clear, though, that they have much to say. Except how awful ACA is.

Re-election as governor in a traditionally Democratic state makes Chris Christie the Republican’s presidential frontrunner. To be this candidate, he’ll need to win the support of a party that brings together social conservatives and economic liberals, as well as Wall Street and rural America.

A positive platform to galvanise this eclectic bunch is a tough ask. ACA will loom large in its negative campaigning. That Republicans find it easier to agree on what they oppose, rather than what they support, means their legislative tactics will continue to raise the stakes on ACA.

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The big ideas of 2014 and what they mean for Labour: summing up

01/01/2014, 07:16:21 PM

by Jonathan Todd

I might be perverse and deficient to have enjoyed finding time during Christmas week to assess what Prospect’s big ideas of 2014 mean for Labour. I worry, though, that this is all the time that anyone in Labour has spent on some of these ideas. Larry Summers may, for example, be asking big questions about monetary policy but Labour still has precious little to say on this economically central topic.

Labour not only needs to get our thinking caps on in 2014 but convince the electorate that we have solutions to the big challenges that will face the UK of May 2015. This is a divided electorate. Between the 99% and the 1%, global London and the provincial shires, and those that see government as the problem and those that see it as their safety net.

Another division emerges beyond some of Prospect’s ideas. Between the doers and the downers. The doers are collaboratively consuming, popping up everywhere and making new news. In other words, seizing for themselves the opportunities of our times. Public policy appears barely relevant to much of this, except perhaps to the extent that it has facilitated the digital revolution. Certainly, politics feels marginal to the doers, who are too busy doing to have much care for it.

In contrast, the downers – those fuelling the politics of rejection – are angry with politics. As they are angry with much else. As the doers grasp fresh possibilities, the downers feel all their possibilities have closed down.

Successful politicians must make themselves relevant to the doers, while pacifying the downers. These are very different people, best suited to very different messages. The doers are only interested in politicians if they can enable them to do more. Maybe extending access to devices of more measured lives, while tackling the new risks identified by cloud sceptics, are some means by which this might be done.

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The big ideas of 2014 and what they mean for Labour: international challenges

31/12/2013, 07:30:45 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Yesterday, we had a look at the Prospect big ideas for 2014 that will impact domestic policy. Today, it’s the turn of international arena; Prospect identify 3 key challenges.

1. Secular stagnation

What if Larry Summers is right? And what if he is wrong?

The global economy has, according to Gavyn Davies’ summary in Prospect of the argument recently made by the former US Treasury Secretary, been grappling with problems of excess savings and under-confidence for well over a decade, raising profound questions about monetary, fiscal and exchange rate policy in the US and the rest of the world.

In lay terms, Summers is saying that this recovery from recession is different and will not kick in as recoveries from previous recessions have done. Gloomy days are here to stay. If he’s right, it will be harder for Osborne to say in May 2015: “Haven’t I done well?” Equally, the obstacles between an incoming Miliband government and securing its economic objectives may be insurmountable. Still, if this is hand that Miliband is dealt, he should reflect how he’d play it.

Secular stagnation is a term usually associated with the 1930s depression and was revived by Summers. His argument that this is caused by a dearth of investment opportunities reminds me of the latest Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell book, which provides an original and convincing analysis of the failings of western capitalism.

But Summers stretches credulity in the incredibly basic sense that the 1930s ended and the post-war boom arrived. It need not take another world war for a similar cycle to occur. The digital revolution and the rise of the rest create tremendous opportunities. While they also pose challenges, their potential and inherently cyclical nature of capitalism makes Summers seem too downbeat. Labour should focus on overcoming these challenges – which may require the slaying of some Labour sacred cows – and not presume that we are stuck in an inescapable secular stagnation.

2. The new Cold War

How does Labour see the future of the Middle East?

Beyond the Arab Spring, it seems ever less likely that we shall arrive at a Middle East of liberal democracies and ever more likely that we’ll confront a region polarised between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. This is the new cold war, which is as hot as hell in Syria. If Labour wants to confront the Middle East as it is, rather than as we would wish it, we need to think through the implications of the ever more encompassing and visceral rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

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