general election campaign 2015

Posts Tagged ‘general election campaign 2015’

Labour used to know how to win elections. We need to re-learn. Fast.

09/05/2015, 04:01:27 PM

by Ian Moss

We, who came into the Labour party in the late 80s and early 90s thought we had built an invincible election fighting machine – after laying the foundations to get Labour back in contention and become an electoral force again the New Labour project embraced the changes in society and was the only party that looked in touch with modern Britain.

In reality, when we look back in 2020 the last 41 years of our endeavours will have seen only 13 years of Labour government. Labour is back into its natural state – as a party of opposition. The only virtue to make of letting the Miliband leaderships run its course to the election is to say that the left had another go, and again it failed. We have tried this plan enough in my lifetime now and it needs to stop.

Cameron has now got the opportunity to be PM for as many years as leader as Blair was, although I suspect he will happily retire after 2 or 3 years. Think about that. Blair, the all-conquering, was PM for 10 years. Cameron could do the same, happily, given this election result.

But he won’t find it easy. The majority is thin and his party will only stay becalmed for a while before its inevitable tensions start showing – over Europe and social liberalism – and he’s not a man noted for knuckling down to the hard business of government or has the soft skills of wooing back benchers. His style of party management means he could be in for a rough ride.

Labour has the power in opposition given this result, to make life difficult for the government, but only if it joins forces with exactly the political groupings that the public were frightened it would. If Labour spends the next 5 years voting down measures in alliance with the Greens and SNP it should prepare itself for a long time in opposition.

The Labour party should not see the way out of this result as building a coalition of Green voters, left wing Liberal Democrats and various fringe campaign groups. The only connection to the non-metropolitan world they have is as they drive through it on camping holidays. Labour does not need to appeal to the drivers of motor-homes; it needs to appeal to the car mechanics that fix them.

The Labour party core vote is urban and liberal. It also needs to be suburban and blue collar. People who run small businesses, work in trades and, yes, drive white vans. Empathy with their issues was notably absent from the team around Miliband which was full of the types of people who spent their Saturdays in Fabian Conferences. Real people don’t spend their weekends in seminars. Labour need to appeal to aspirational and entrepreneurial voters.

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Labour needs to remember England

02/05/2015, 10:21:30 AM

by Renie Anjeh

Just over a week ago was St George’s Day. Crowds of people displayed their love of England with pride in the knowledge that the general election was just a fortnight away. All the polls presage another hung parliament. Few pundits are brave enough to predict the result. One thing is clear and that is that the outcome will be unclear.

It is very likely that the parliamentary instability which will ensue which may even lead to an election in the autumn.

The reason why the country is on the verge of political pandemonium is because the election result will not be decided in the land of St George but the land of St Andrew.

Since the referendum, the SNP has upended the political landscape north of border, placing them in pole position to be the kingmakers at this election.

2015 could be the first time that nationalists have held the balance of power in over a hundred years. As Jonathan Todd pointed out, the reason for this political earthquake is because the Scots are thinking about “who will get the best deal for Scotland?” rather than “who is best to lead the UK?”

Obviously this is catastrophic for the Labour party. Labour has always had a close affinity with Scotland. Keir Hardie was a Scot. Many of Labour’s greatest big beasts came from Scotland: Donald Dewar, Robin Cook, Alistair Darling, George Robertson, Gordon Brown, John Reid and John Smith.

Tony Blair, Labour’s most successful leader, was born in Edinburgh and educated at Fettes College. However, Labour has not had the same relationship with England.

Whenever issues regarding the West Lothian Question or the Barnett Formula have been raised, Labour has used constitutional conservatism as an excuse not to address a perceived unfairness.

Many English people fear that Labour treats English identity with suspicion at best, derision at worst even though it has no qualms about Scottish or Welsh identity. Labour has not always been the natural home for suburban and rural areas in England. The result of our long-term problem in England has not been great. 2001 was the last time that Labour won the most votes in England.

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Ed Miliband’s narrow political strategy is a failure

01/05/2015, 03:31:24 PM

by Samuel Dale

The Labour party is in a state of emergency. Rather than fighting this election with real momentum and confidence, we are in retreat across large swathes of the nation.

In the last five years of opposition Labour has drastically shrunk its core and failed to reach out to new voters. Ed Miliband has been outflanked on the left, right and centre leaving a party creaking at the seams.

If you design a 35% leadership strategy that aims to benefit from boundary anomalies then this is what happens. He talks the talk on One Nation but he has not done much else.

Whatever happens this week, the long-term consequences could be immense.

Scotland has been lost to the SNP in disastrous fashion. The independence referendum that split the nation is clearly the catalyst but Miliband must share some blame.

He is ultimately the leader who oversaw a huge defeat in the 2011 Scottish parliament elections and failed to respond. When she left in October, Johann Lamont famously compared Scottish Labour to a “branch office” of London last year.

Miliband is more unpopular in Scotland than even David Cameron. In February a Survation poll put said just 19% of Scots wanted Miliband as prime minister compared to 23% for Cameron.

That puts a spanner in the works of those calling for Labour to move to the left to win back Scotland.

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Has Nick Clegg really dealt with 38,000 pieces of casework?

01/05/2015, 10:46:54 AM

Amazing guy, that Nick Clegg.

Writing in the Sheffield Star, the multi-tasking Lib Dem Leader and erstwhile Deputy PM says he has still found time as a local MP to deal with “38,000 pieces of casework”.

As any MP’s staffer will attest, that’s quite a claim.

Let’s be generous and suppose what he really means is that he’s dealt with that many cases over the 10 years he’s represented Sheffield Hallam. This works out at 3,800 cases each year.

Disaggregated over 365 days, this averages out at ten cases a day. Every day. For ten years.

Now let’s assume he and his staff don’t work every single day of the year.

Taking away weekends, Bank Holidays, Christmas and annual leave entitlements means there’s about 250 working days left (okay, that’s a bit on the high side, but let’s again be generous to him).

So now the figure climbs to 15 cases a day.

Again, let’s assume he has two caseworkers out of the £129,000 he claimed for his office staffing costs last year. That’s 7.5 cases dealt with by each caseworker, every single working day of the year.

And over the course of an average working day, this means dealing with a case an hour.

But what does ‘dealing’ with a constituents’ case generally involve?

It usually means meeting a troubled/angry/desperate constituent at a local surgery, or spending half a morning dealing with a rambling phone call, or poring over indecipherable handwriting, or wading through a densely-argued email before getting to the nub of the issue.

Then it involves writing on their behalf, often hitting the brick wall of officialdom (or the steel and glass wall of corporate indifference) while seeking a response.

It doesn’t end there. There are usually meetings with officials, site visits and even public meetings to follow.

All of which is to point out that MPs’ casework is often a slow, drawn-out process.

So is it uncharitable to point out that Clegg’s grandiose claim seems somewhat, well, implausible?

If we give him the benefit of the doubt, then it’s clear from their uber-efficiency that his office should have been put in charge of single-handedly rolling-out Universal Credit.

Or, perish the thought, could it be that Clegg’s just a fibber?

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A Labour-SNP deal could hold together for the whole Parliament

29/04/2015, 04:09:08 PM

by David Butler

On current seat protections, Labour, in an informal pact with the SNP, could be back in government in less than two weeks. Any deal would be painful and fraught with risk. Yet it could last the whole Parliament and enable Labour to secure a good deal of its programme.

In our system, the pivot legislator, that MP that decides whether a bill is passed or not, normally sits within at the governing party (or governing coalition as was the case for the previous parliament). Under a Labour minority government, this legislator would be outside the party. To pass a bill, Labour needs to make that pivot legislator, or the party group they are within, prefer the proposal to the status quo. On most policy positions and on basic parliamentary arithmetic, the nearest group containing a pivot legislator will be the SNP. Hence, creating an informal pact with the SNP would maximise our chance of passing legislation.

However, the SNP has a different set of motivations to Labour. They care about sustaining their emerging dominance in Scotland and creating the conditions for independence. For the Nationalists, policy positions are mere instruments for achieving this. Through observing this set of motivations, it is possible to see why they would continue to prop up a Labour government.

Firstly, the SNP will able at to extract returns for Scotland and concessions on policy positions. They would seek to claim credit for any improvements in Scotland under a Labour minority administration, reinforcing their “Stronger for Scotland” rhetoric. Second, they would try to place the blame upon Labour (or Westminster or the lack of autonomy) for any painful reforms and the continuation of austerity. Thirdly, propping up a Labour government will enable them to claim credibility for their “Vote SNP, lock out of the Tories in Westminster” message. Fourthly, SNP MPs can ‘wing flap’, signalling about their ‘true’ position on pieces of legislation through tabling amendments and making speeches, even if they ultimately vote for the bill in question; the longer the parliament, the more wing flapping can take place. Finally, they can work with the thirty to forty MPs that John McDonnell claims will be sympathetic to Campaign Group positions to force Labour to seek Tory, Liberal Democrat and DUP votes on issues like Trident and welfare reform (reinforcing their narrative about Labour not being real progressives).

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Back to earth Milifans. Labour’s on track to get just 10 more seats than Gordon managed. That’s good is it?

28/04/2015, 07:12:15 PM

by Samuel Dale

Ed Miliband is having a party. He’s running rings around Boris Johnson, hobnobbing with Russell Brand and joking about the Boston Red Sox.

He is ready. He’s packing his bags for Downing Street along with the bookies, Labour members, some pollsters and an increasing number of political commentators.

Party confidence is growing every day after a well-run campaign has boosted Miliband while a brutally negative one appears to be damaging Cameron.

It looks like we’ve got the Big Mo.

But let’s look at the facts. The FT is projecting Labour on course for 268 seats and that’s before a probable late squeeze that always afflicts the party.

That is a net gain of just 10 from the nadir of 2010 when a monstrously unpopular Gordon Brown was battling the banking crisis and global recession.

That’s after five years in opposition against a fractious coalition that has missed its deficit target, lost the AA credit rating and rained unprecedented cuts on the nation. Just 10 more seats. Ten.

Just 268 seats would be by far the weakest mandate of any prime minister in modern British history. Differently polls tell slightly different stories but let’s use the FT as a barometer for now.

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Voting SNP is like taking a chance on the Lib Dems in 2010. It will hand the keys to Number 10 to Cameron

28/04/2015, 05:05:54 PM

by Ranjit Sidhu

Let’s be frank: Labour deserve the kicking they will get this general election in Scotland. Seven months ago the Labour led No campaign in the Scottish referendum was as negative and moribund of positive messages as the Conservative campaign is in this election. Seven months ago I wrote a piece called “The Three key lessons for the Left from the Scottish referendum” in which I predicted if Labour did not learn from the experience they would be, “20 Scottish MPs lighter come May, putting into prospective how Labour has got itself in such a tizzy about losing a possible 5 seats to Ukip.”

Well they didn’t and now they will, bar a miracle, lose those seats and 20 more for good measure.

Let’s be even more frank: Like the majority in Scotland, I have more than a little sympathy with the SNP anti-austerity economic agenda. Labour have been far too cautious in pushing growth rather than cuts as the positive social and economic way to reduce the deficit. By leaving this economic policy to the SNP they have allowed them to transpose the benefits of this policy that worked so well for the Yes campaign to the current campaign.

There are also similarities with the 2010 election that seem to be positive for the SNP: In 2010 the main two parties are polling low 30s and the Liberal Democrats were gaining the slack and ended up becoming king makers. Now in 2015 the two main parties again are polling low 30s, this time it is the SNP and Ukip gaining votes, and in the media and public mind it is deemed that the SNP will end up the king makers.

So, all the above seems to be in keeping with the tactical voting that Nicola Sturgeon so clearly has been propounding Scotland to adopt: Vote in a strong group of SNP to keep Labour to the left and make sure they “lock David Cameron out of Downing Street” and defeat the “slash-and-burn austerity” policies, right?

Well, there is an clear flaw to this tactical voting and it becomes clearly apparent when you understand that as a first past the post system it will be whichever party has the most seats, be it in a minority, that will have the mandate to form the next government of the UK first.

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Alex Salmond is the Ally Macleod of this election campaign

27/04/2015, 09:23:14 PM

by David Ward

We’re back in the 1970s apparently. Beards are back. A coalition government is slowly dying, and the world economy is in trouble. Another of my 70s favourites was Ally’s Tartan Army, poised to conquer the football world. And Alex Salmond thinks he’ll be writing a Labour government budget according to this video released by the Tories last week.

Now we can all see it’s in a ‘relaxed’ atmosphere where the crowd seem a few pints to the good, and Salmond has slipped into his music hall act. But given he’s spent 23 years in the House of Commons, you’d think Salmond would have realised – he won’t be writing anybody’s budget, anytime soon.

Let’s take the position the SNP are likely to be in, should Labour be the largest party. If they have around 50 seats and their vote bloc is the difference between a Labour or Conservative administration, Nicola Sturgeon has already announced their decision to support Labour.

Under constitutional precedent at this point it would be clear that David Cameron would not have a majority in the house and would be expected to resign. If he chooses he can try to face the house as Baldwin did in 1924, and put a government address to vote. But if Sturgeon fulfils her promise he would lose, and as the next most likely leader, Miliband would be asked to form a government as Ramsay Macdonald was in both 1924 and 1929 in similar circumstances.

There will be no coalition between Labour and the SNP as has been made clear already, so no need for a specific agreement. Instead Labour are free to put forward their own Queen’s speech. Sure this might contain some shared items from both manifestos, but there would be no need to address controversial issues like Trident or ‘ending austerity for the NHS’.

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Labour’s doomed in Scotland and Ed needs to put Sturgeon in her place: so scrap the Barnett Formula

27/04/2015, 07:45:47 PM

Seemingly, there is little Ed Miliband can now do to diminish the threat posed by the SNP’s remarkable insurgency. Poll after poll shows Labour facing a total wipe-out in Scotland. It isn’t a case of just losing badly; this is the stuff of total annihilation.

Meanwhile, the Conservative campaign thinks it’s on to something by warning that a minority Labour government, reliant on a bloc of SNP votes, will be a bad deal for England. As a message, it’s an exocet targeted at voters in battleground seats south of the border, where the prospect of the Scottish tail wagging the English dog seems iniquitous.

Ed Miliband can’t fix the first problem; what will be, will be. Scottish Labour is going down in flames. The bigger question for Labour strategists is whether its woes in Scotland are cyclical, the tail-end of the vortex generated by last autumn’s referendum on independence, or a more structural shift. Has the SNP now eclipsed Labour as the social democratic voice of Scots, as they contrast their simple promise to end austerity with Labour’s more complicated (and more realistic) UK-wide offer?

Although Labour’s campaign in Scotland is doomed, it can still use its setback to address its second problem: showing the SNP would not be left calling the shots.

All the party needs is a popular measure that confronts the Tory narrative that Miliband is in Sturgeon’s pocket. Something that shows Labour can make tough choices and, crucially, reassures voters in English marginals that it’s is on their side.

There is a policy proposal that fits the bill, a magic bullet Labour can fire that hits all these targets: scrap the Barnett Formula.

There is no-one in British politics who can make a plausible case for a public spending formula that sees a fifth more spent on Scotland than England. The only reason it has not been amended out of history by now is down to decades of political inertia and a tactical belief that it would add grist to the nationalists’ mill in the run-up to last autumn’s referendum.

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How Miliband seals the deal

27/04/2015, 11:07:34 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“The Labour leader’s main problem,” wrote Deborah Orr last November, “is that the dialogue he’s attempting to have with the nation is just too negative”. At the Labour spring rally, I worried that this weakness persisted. But tell that to the hen parties of Chester. Or the Milifans. Or even Peter Mandelson.

There is a positivity about Miliband, which the public have not previously known. But the Labour Party has. When, for example, in summer 2010, he drew the biggest crowd to a Labour meeting in Carlisle since the days of Harold Wilson.

If proving that we could be trusted again with other people’s money was the key lesson that you felt Labour ought to take from the last general election, then Miliband’s brother, David, may have then been a more attractive leadership candidate. While David was stronger on this front, he had other limitations. He appeared colder than Ed. The “Ed speaks human” placards may have never wholly convinced but Ed was a warm, even inspirational figure, at least to those holding the placards, during the leadership election.

This Miliband has been submerged for four and a half years and only reappeared in the past fortnight, perversely assisted by a Tory campaign that lowered expectations about him. They told the country that Miliband is useless, he’s shown otherwise. They told the country that the economy is improving, for many what they see around them suggests not. They should have shown us their core strengths of leadership and economy, instead of telling a sceptical public to be grateful.

In turning derision to cheers, Miliband resembles Tim Sherwood, manager of Aston Villa, supposedly David Cameron’s team, while – and, as a Liverpool fan, it grieves me to say – Cameron has something of the Brendan Rodgers about him, at least insofar as, as was demonstrated in defeat by Villa in the FA Cup semi-final, a capacity to squander advantages, possibly induced by nervousness or over-thinking.

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