Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 150

Liberal Democrats: Where Now?

They were slaughtered at the general election for three reasons. The first was that the young could not forgive them for breaking their solemn pledge not to increase tuition fees. The second was that their former Labour supporters who voted Lib Dem in 2010 could not forgive them for joining up with the Tories. Finally the Tories said to their people ‘ you will get us anyway so why not vote for the real thing?’

Since WWII the  Liberals have struggled to break through. They began to advance when Tory voters, who felt their party  had imploded in the post Thatcher era, could not bring themselves to vote for Blair. In 2005 they reached their high water mark of 62 seats because many left wing Labour voters stopped voting  for Blair, having seen that New Labour was little more than pink Thatcherism. The number of potential voters who believe in ‘Liberalism’ has not for decades been sufficient to get even the reinvigorated party anywhere on its own. It needs at least defections from one or the other of the two main parties, preferably from both, together with a favourable voting distribution.

The challenge is made the more daunting with the unstoppable rise of the SNP, the improving image of Plaid Cymru, the shift of the centre to the left and of the Tories to the centre, UKIP and the Greens and what looks like a re-energised Labour movement under Corbyn. Their feisty new leader, Tim Fallon, will fire them up to go, but exactly where may have to wait upon events.

The biggest problem of all, but also the biggest opportunity, lies in the disconnect between seats and votes for a third party. Here are the voting figures for the last ten elections and the seats won.

1974   5,346704  13       1979   4,313804    11       1983   7,780949    23      1987   7,341651   22

1992   5,999606  20       1997   5,242947    46      2001  4,814321     52     2005   5,985454  62

2010   6,836198  57       2015   2,415888      8

Study the figures and you will see how the party can increase seats and lose votes at the same time. It is all in the distribution. Between 1983 and 2005 the Lib Dems (starting as the SDP/Liberal Alliance) lost 2 million votes but increased their seats from 23 to 62. Their 2015 tally was the lowest Liberal vote since 1970, when they won six seats. Wishful thinking will lead them to hope for defections from Corbyn’s Labour in parliament. It is unlikely to happen but when it did in the Foot era, almost all of them lost their seats. Dissident New Labour MPs would be better advised to cross to the Tories, with whom they have much if not most in common,  especially if they want to advance their careers.

For Tim Farron this is an opportunity to shine. It can only get better, since if it get’s worse there will be nothing.

Voting Patterns.

A recent survey discovered that of those who thought of voting Labour in 2015 and then did not, the majority turned away because they found the party too centrist and not left enough. This echoes the conclusion of this blog posted months ago.

The same survey found that people voted Tory because they thought Labour useless on the economy. There is a subtle point here often missed. Those who vote regularly out of habit and custom always vote at elections and generally stay close to the centre. However those who vote out of the conviction they want to change things, vote for the left. but they do not vote at all if they are not convinced there is real prospect of change. Thus the SNP victory in Scotland was gained on a much higher turnout that the Tory victory in England.

For Labour to win it must attract not from the centre, but from the non-voting left. In other words if it had attracted back the 5 million votes it lost since the invention of New Labour, it would have had about 14 million in total. The Tories won on a low turnout with just 11 million. The mountain is not impossible to climb if you know which one to go for. 15 million registered voters stayed at home in May 2015.

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European Dis-Union

First we had the Euro crisis. Then came the Migrant problem. Now we have the Refugee crisis. The common feature of all of them is that the EU cannot come up with a workable solution. With the Euro they opted for kicking the can down the road. With the refugees, because of the unprecedented numbers, one by one countries with good intentions are being forced to shut their borders. Every commentator at the various crossings describes dreadful scenes of panic and dismay and uses the same word to describe events. Shambles.

There are two underlying causes. The first is the calamity of a foreign policy, mainly driven by the US and the UK, with which the EU mostly went along. The second is the fact, so often emphasised by this Blog, that you cannot have a currency without a government. Well it turns out you cannot have a Union either. Whatever the outcome of the UK’s negotiations over its relationship with Europe, the EU must address the fact that its complex and multi-headed structure of governance is fine for a sunny day, but if the weather changes to darker skies, it is not fit for purpose.

Meanwhile the multitudes continue to flood towards what they suppose is peace, freedom and opportunity. Can the EU deliver on its promise?

People’s Quantitative Easing

The current ideas of the new shadow chancellor to pump money into the base of the economy are welcome, although not quite right.  If you want to find out how it should work you can download a lucid explanation of the original idea from the links below.

Download only .99p.  Paperback £2.99

Kindle or Paperback  UK        US            

Two Ex-Foreign Secretaries

Two former foreign secretaries were yesterday exonerated by the authority which supposedly upholds parliamentary standards, over allegations that they misbehaved offering to sell lobbying services to bogus companies for thousands of pounds per day in a joint sting organised by Channel 4 and the  Daily Telegraph. They were told they had done nothing which broke parliamentary rules. Really? Well if that is the case most people will feel that with rules which permit this kind of caper, parliament itself is broken.

To add insult to the injury of  astonished voters, the regulator blamed the broadcaster and the newspaper. It is like a repeat of Hutton. No wonder Corbyn got a landslide.

Hungary’s Razor Wire

There is something deeply disturbing about this fence that Hungary has put up. It is distressing to watch images of the anguished faces of desperate people as they see their route to freedom barred by an arrogant interpretation of a set of EU rules drafted without any comprehension of the kind of crisis now unfolding. Creating a bottleneck of this kind, backed by a new set of its own laws passed in a rush, in defiance of EU principles and some interpretations of international law  does Hungary no favours at all. Laws bereft of humanity are a throwback to an ugly past.

I recall the Hungarian uprising of 1956 put down by Soviet tanks, when many who had managed to escape before the Red Army intervened, arrived at the port of Dover to seek sanctuary in Britain. They received a warm welcome and were received, among others, by my mother in her official capacity as a Red Cross volunteer. She was on duty because of her fluency in German, the common language of most of the refugees.  It seems rather sad that a country which has suffered the trauma of flight from repression and war should be so heartless when destiny swings the onus of welcome towards it. Now that it is a member of the EU it should behave like one.

Corbyn And Labour MPs

We are now watching a situation entirely without precedent. A new voting process designed by a political party to extend its reach and appeal has done just that. It has expanded its membership way ahead of all the other political parties at Westminster put together with over 500,000 members and supporters. Of those over 250,000 voted for their new leader Jeremy Corbyn, giving him a landslide victory of 60% of the votes cast in the first ballot. He has a mandate from his party greater than any other leader and received more votes than the other three candidates put together  by a country mile. So what is the problem?

The problem is the death throes of New Labour. Because although it has little support among the membership and failed dismally in the general election, with a wipe out in Scotland, most of Labour’s MPs adhere to its centre left brand of Thatcherism. Indeed out of the 232 MPs Corbyn now leads, fewer than 20 (possibly no more than a dozen) voted for him. A substantial number of them have policy and ideological positions much closer to Cameron than to Corbyn. Nobody knows if this can work or if it can, how?

These thoughts may help. First New Labour is done. It is too close to the modern left of centre Tory party over economics, austerity, foreign policy and ideology. If you want that you might as well vote for the real thing. This is why it cannot win a general election again and why it is dangerous for the Union, because it will never win back the seats it has lost in Scotland. And the Scots will break away from an austerity driven Tory England if they get a second chance. Looking at it dispassionately it might be simplest if the group of MPs who cannot support what Corbyn stands for join Cameron. They would then represent the left of the Tory party which politically is where they are. In 2020 they would face Labour candidates selected to represent the return of Labour to its roots. These pink Tories might win or they might be wiped out.

Looking back into history we can find the 1935 election results interesting. The Labour party fell apart in 1930 after its leader, Ramsay MacDonald, remained Prime Minister of a National Government comprised mainly of Conservatives. By the 1935 general election, Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour MPs who refused to join the enterprise, managed to get 52 seats. The Liberals totalled 35 and the Tories romped home with 473. Attlee had to rebuild his party in parliament almost from scratch. At the next general election in 1945 (Britain suspended its democracy for the duration of the war) his patience paid off. Attlee won 393 seats giving him a majority of 146, enabling him to inaugurate the biggest political and social changes in modern times. His legacy lasted till Thatcher. So if his MPs cause too much trouble, Corbyn may have to set about rebuilding the party. He would have the overwhelming backing of the membership and the Trade Unions. That last point is important. They have the money.

Interestingly Churchill did not have the backing of the Conservative party when he became Prime Minister in 1940 and did not become its leader until after Chamberlain’s death. When he stood up to give his first Commons speech as PM, he was cheered by Labour but his own party remained largely silent behind him. That thought should cheer Corbyn on.

Tories: A Word Of Caution

Evidently the political cabinet of the Tory party almost collectively wet itself it laughed so much at the thought of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Opposition. It was of course thinking back to Michael Foot. Like everybody else and especially the sulking troops of New Labour, unable to take in what has happened to them. But the Tories should think not of Foot, but of Thatcher, and her ghost should strike fear into the hearts of them all. This is why.

In 1983 socialism had overplayed its hand and was failing, all across the world. Foot offered even more socialism. Thatcher turned the clock back to pre-war values of challenging the unions through very high unemployment, reducing taxes, rolling back the state, selling off all the nationalised industries (an act Tory grandee Harold Macmillan described as selling off the family silver), selling off the nation’s stock of social housing ( much of it built by Macmillan) and inaugurating the era of the sharp elbowed and the primacy of the individual, with the declaration that there was ‘no such thing as society’. She became unstoppable. Had she put such a programme to the people twenty years earlier the Tories would have lost every seat. But she understood that the political weather had changed. The Attlee Consensus, which had shaped British politics since 1945, was over.

The reason nobody took Corbyn seriously and the reason he has won by a landslide in every section of the Labour party electoral register, not just the new supporters, is that he has tapped into something we can again call a change of political weather. The Thatcher consensus, out of which the centre left politics of New Labour was born, is over. The inequalities, the austerity, the debt, the wars, the food banks, the billionaires, the housing shortage and much else has brought what started as a breath of fresh air, to a dank and suffocating depression. Like all political weathers, change is what is needed now. People crave a new dawn. Like all new weathers that dawn will bring a new interpretation of an old theme. New Labour is now in the same place as Foot’s Old Labour, wrongly dressed because they do not see the weather has changed. If Corbyn delivers a modernised Left, as Thatcher delivered a modernised Right, like her he will be unstoppable. From a Tory Downing Street as May 2020 looms, will that still be funny?

Corbyn Earthquake

This blog is pleased to have been one of the first to point out that Labour lost the general election because it was not far enough to the left. Various posts have put arguments and statistics before you to demonstrate the reasoning, endorsed by the landslide victory of Jeremy Corbyn. Today is historic because it marks a change of the political conversation. For too long Opposition from either side has been arguments about degree, or detail or definition. But there has been no challenge to the Thatcher consensus which demonised the role of the state, idolised the power of the markets and accepted the economic model based on asset inflation and debt, rather than tangible wealth creation and real investment. This sucked resources from the base of the economy to its peak, creating exceptional prosperity for the few and grinding down the standard of living for the many.

While the top of the economy was awash with cash, the base was starved of money, impacting services, employment among the young, wages and services. Hardly a peep came from New Labour about any of the fundamentals since it was the joint architect of this distorted and unfair economic model, because within its boundaries lay the lure of power. And to gain that power New Labour abandoned it roots and the very people the Labour Movement was founded to protect. Tony Blair, probably the most discredited politician in British political history if judged in political terms and not through scandal, derided the notion of a Corbyn victory, telling those who might vote for him to get a heart transplant.

Labour did not need to do that, because by voting in Corbyn it has found its soul.  That will lead it to power.