Miliband Wordsearch

By polarii for The Daily Soapbox – @polar_ii

Here’s a ‘wordgram’ from Guido Fawkes of Ed Miliband’s set piece on the economy. The bigger the word, the more times Miliband said it. What words are missing that should be there?

1) Squeezed Middle

Yes, Miliband’s definition of ‘middle’, which encompasses 95% of the population, is probably a bit off. But the idea has legs. Most people (unsurprisingly) consider themselves average in terms of income, so talking about ‘the squeezed middle’ enables a large number of people to identify with Labour’s message. Since most people (according to polling) think the cuts are unfair, this idea is one that Labour can make easy headway in pursuing. Miliband has particular reason to pursue it because it was his initial idea.

2) Producer v Predator

Again, a Miliband theme which has some potential. People are clearly in favour of companies that ‘contribute’ to the economy and against those that ‘strip’ it. Again, let’s ignore difficulties in defining which companies are goodies and which baddies; it’s an idea that people makes people say “Ed’s on my side” and “Ed want an economically and morally healthy economy”. No gold in this speech however, as ‘Kremlinology’ (one mention during Q&A) gets a look in ahead of ‘predator’ (no mentions).

3) Vision

The word doesn’t need to be ‘vision’; it could equally be ‘goal’ or ‘future’ or ‘plan’ or even ‘hope’. Miliband does have some good points on the ‘fairness’ theme, but these will ultimately not carry home when the public thinks the cuts are necessary (see link above) and Labour is not really offering a detailed plan, nor offering a vision of where the future of the country lies. The lack of vision is the most important factor, I think, in why the Labour party seems so ethereal. It is concerned more about the future of Labour than the future of the country. This is particularly brought home by a recent BBC headline: Miliband has ‘a clear plan for the Labour Party‘ – he is focussed on the party not on the country. It’s not an inspiring or winning strategy.

Miliband needs to risk something beyond the bland, managerial pitch (the words here are certainly managerially bland) and go for a full-on idealistic vision. At this stage, it doesn’t matter that the rhetoric – whether on Squeezed Middle, Producer v Predator or a vision statement – doesn’t quite correlate with specific policies or even reality. Ed Miliband needs to do more than capture our attention. He needs to capture our imagination.

A Collection of Thoughts

By polarii for the Daily Soapbox – @polar_ii

So here’s time for a big apology to any regular readers – between us all at the Daily Soapbox, we haven’t had any time to put down some ideas for a blog post. That’s not for want of things to say (and how much we have wanted to say!), but for lack of time. So it’s our fault for not finding time. Sorry.

If you want the blog to be fuller, and you enjoy what you read, and maybe even reckon you could do better, why not join us? Email: dingdongalistic@gmail.com and we’ll set you up as the latest Soapbox contributor.

So to kick us back off, here’s a couple of thoughts from my ice cave in the Arctic… or Germany, as everyone outside the BBC calls it.

Euroscepticism

Why has everyone forgotten Cameron is a bona fide Eurosceptic in his own right? Sure, he doesn’t foam at the mouth with quite the aplomb of Daniel Hannan, but this is a good thing. In the Conservative leadership election (in the heady days of 2005), he was elected on and later delivered a promise to take the Conservative party out of the EPP and form a soft-eurosceptic bloc, which was further than David Davis (who is more ‘right-wing’) was prepared to go. While ConHome and others have been whingeing about the lack of a referendum, Cameron has managed to a) move the European issue to a more central stage while b) uniting his historically divided party behind a moderate Eurosceptic stance and c) not banging on about it. Clever or what?

A further thought: Labour wouldn’t have signed up to these agreements either, but that’s not half the fun of it. These agreements will enforce a statutory deficit-limit stricter than the ones in the Maastricht Treaties. The Maastricht Limit is 3% of GDP, so presumably the Merkozy limit will be 2% or 2.5%. But Labour’s ‘Darling Plan’, even on their own (overly optimistic) reckoning, will only halve the deficit over four years. Our deficit is currently about 10% of GDP. In the event that Britain was bound by the Maastricht or Merkozy Treaties, Labour would have no plan to bring the deficit within the legal limits. Brussels would throw Labour’s budget back in their faces, impose hefty fines, and tell them to follow Osborne’s plan. Now who thinks Merkozy’s scheme is in our national interest?

Euro

The charge levelled against Cameron is that he has left Britain without allies. This is, of course, untrue, because most every country outside the EU is taking a position very similar to Britain’s, especially the United States.

But even within Europe, he isn’t as isolated as some claim. Mads Persson correctly notes that the Irish, French, Swedes, Finns, Czechs, Hungarians and Poles all have not insignificant problems with the agreement as posed (see also this surprisingly excellent Indy graphic). But then, let’s look at some other countries, particularly Italy and Greece. There have been close votes in both parliaments on European issues, and it is not an unreasonable parliamentarian who, having been subjected to EU budget targets for the next ten years, objects to handing over control of their country’s budgets over to the EU for the rest of history. Rebellious parliaments can rebel again, and it’s hard not to imagine Eurosceptic parties like LAOS (Greece) and Lega Nord (Italy) doing quite well in upcoming elections. Of course, I could be completely wrong. But I wouldn’t write anything off either.

BBC

In case you missed the gratuitous sideswipe at the BBC in the preamble, it’s coming again. If you didn’t miss it in the preamble, I am actually going to make a point. The BBC is getting into the habit of presenting things out of context. I’m normally annoyed that the BBC displays institutional (but not conscious) bias against Conservatives and Christians, but others complain about biases in other directions, which I assume means the BBC is doing a decent job (since it’s clearly not doing an atrocious one).

However, there were two glaring errors in this week’s programming. The first was coverage of Cameron’s veto. The one report suggested that the EU was suggesting the UK was separate and even inferior because Cameron was the last to sign Croatia’s accession agreement. The context: all countries sign in alphabetical order. The United Kingdom, being the last country alphabetically in the EU, signed it last. Snub? Hardly.

The other error caused me less apoplexy, but the public more. David Attenborough juxtaposed an Arctic female polar bear making an ice-den (in which polar bears give birth to their cubs) with some polar bear cubs in a den in a zoo in Germany. The seamless transition implied to many people that the BBC was actually filming wild polar bear births. Which is stupid because the cameraman would certainly have his head bitten off if that were the case. Nonetheless, in both cases, the BBC failed to properly explain the context of what was going on, and in each case, their coverage suffered because of it. The BBC is slowly metamorphosing into an institution that doesn’t care about the truth, rather sensationalism.

Leveson

Did you know who Neville Thurlbeck was before the Leveson inquiry? If you did, you read the News of the World regularly. Shame on you (unless you were his colleague or his relative).

On a serious note though, I’ve come to the conclusion that the public doesn’t care. This was evident because, although Ed Miliband made hay with it during the summer, the polls didn’t budge. And neither BBC Parliament nor Sky News is broadcasting Leveson live. It’s a Westminster Village thing.

Miliband

Ed Miliband is a completely unsuitable leader of the Labour party. Everyone who wasn’t in the Labour party knew this as soon as he was elected, yet only now have the socialists collectivised their brain cells enough to realise it. Read around, with people like Dan Hodges getting incredibly close to calling for him to go, if you still think Milibland is cutting the mustard.

However, who is going to run against him? If Ed Balls runs, everyone will laugh. If Yvette Cooper (aka Mrs Balls) runs, she cannot dispose of Labour’s least helpful asset, her husband. If David Miliband runs, Cameron can drag out the feuding brother story indefinitely – a back-to-backstab if you like. The only plausible candidate is Jim Murphy. “Who?” I hear you cry. “Precisely”, say I. Labour don’t have the talent or the policies to win the next election.

Osborne

So now let’s do the same for the Tories. Boris will win London 2012 (somehow), and will step down in 2016. He will win a by-election by 2017, which will give him time enough to be well positioned enough when Cameron goes sometime between 2019-2022. After a term and a half of Boris (for all I admire him, I don’t think he has a sufficiently grand vision to drive the country), the natural choice is Jeremy Hunt, a man of such impeccable composure that it is truly inconceivable he should never be leader of the Conservative Party. For all they seem worlds apart, both BoJo and Hunt are suitably amicably placed with George Osborne and William Hague to mean that they can come in without wholesale change of the top table. Osborne’s best bet is not to run himself, but pick the winner, keep the political strategy as a sideline, and go down in history as the kingmaker and the chancellor who fixed Gordon Brown’s mess.

Unemployment

Once again, I find myself in a statistical quandary. ONS says unemployment went up 128.000 people in November. Yet it says only 3,000 people signed on to Jobseekers’ Allowance. Which gap have those 125,000 people fallen into? They are either a) retiring early, b) decided not to work for the next few years and make home instead, c) in receipt of a sufficiently generous redundancy package to make claiming JSA unnecessary, or d) moving their labour into the ‘black market’ – taking cash payment and not declaring it to the Exchequer. Now, most people won’t be doing a) given how poorly pensions pots are performing. The general move of our culture has been away from b) for some time; there can’t be too many people who worked for long enough at a high enough wage to be in position c), so thousands of people are in position d). Really? Or are the unemployment figures inflated by people who otherwise wouldn’t be reckoned as part of the workforce (e.g. students) taking part-time jobs and then losing them?

I’ve come to the conclusion that the more important figure is the JSA claimant count, which is about 1.60 million. So hardly as bad as the 2.64 million Labour like to moan about. Incidentally, in 1992, pretty much everyone who was unemployed according to the statistics was also a JSA/Unemployment benefit claimant. By 2001, the gap between unemployed and claimants was 0.5 million, and now it is now over 1 million. I’ve had no brainwaves about why this gap is increasing so quickly. Any ideas?

Murdo Fraser Might Yet Be Very, Very Canny…

By polarii for The Daily Soapbox

‘Canny’ is a singularly appropriate word when discussing Scottish politics. It comes from the Gaelic ‘can’ – to know, and hence has come to mean (especially used derisively by Englishmen of Scotsmen) ‘with an eye for thrift or a chance’.

Canny is also a singularly appropriate word to describe Murdo Fraser’s plan to separate the Scottish Conservative party from the UK Party. Not just because it detoxifies the brand of the most loathed party in Scotland. Not just because it allows Fraser to cast himself as the uniquely Scottish defender of the Union, without being in hoc to London.

Canny because it allows the Scottish Conservatives to play the voting system by using ‘decoy lists’.

The Scottish Parliament uses the ‘Alternative Member System’. Voters have two votes – a constituency vote and a regional vote. Constituencies work as they do for Westminster, but the regional seats are distributed like a PR list system, except with penalties for the parties that did well in the constituency rounds; thus, hopefully, balancing out some of the improportionalities of the FPTP constituency system. This is how the Green Party, with a relatively low level of support spread widely across Scotland, have been able to gain a seat or two at Holyrood – since they won no constituencies, they are not penalised in the regional lists like the other parties.

The ruse here assumes that Fraser’s new party (call them the Scottish Tories) will be in, at least, a loose alliance with the Conservative Party. Essentially, they would function as the coalition between the German CDU and the Bavarian CSU functions. And here’s the trick: one of the parties, say the Conservative Party, runs for the constituencies, and one, say the Scottish Tories, runs for the regional lists.

What this means is that the Scottish Tories have no constituency MSPs, so they are not given any penalty when it comes to calculating the regional list seats. Thus the Conservative Party wins all the constituency seats it otherwise would have, and the Scottish Tories win additional seats on the regional lists, since they have no penalties for winning constituencies, whereas all the other parties have.

To give an historical example, Italian lower chamber elections used to run on a similar system – but instead of regions, they did the proportional vote over the whole country – like an Italy-wide regional list. In 2001, both major coalitions put up two lists, and told their voters to vote for one list in the constituency elections and one list in the national list election. Their constituency lists carried 360 of 475 constituency seats, despite receiving 0.2% of the national list vote; everyone had voted for their coalition under list-title A in the constituencies, and for the same coalition under list-title B in the national list vote. The national list ruse was so successful for the victorious House of Freedoms coalition that one of its members, Forza Italia, had to surrender 12 seats because they had not submitted enough candidates on the national list to fill them!

And just for political balance, Labour have tried this too. They are so strong in the Glasgow constituencies that they stand very little chance of winning Glasgow regional list seats. But instead of saving money by not submitting a list, they tried to submit candidates from the Co-Operative Party in 2007. This would have had exactly the same effect as with Forza Italia, since every Labour voter in Glasgow would have switched their regional list vote to the Co-Operative Party, meaning Labour/Co-Operative would have won many constituency and regional seats. But the Electoral Commission struck it down on the grounds that, since no-one could be a Co-Operative Party member without also being a member of the Labour Party, they were essentially the same party.

But, with Fraser’s plans for an independent Scottish Tory party, the Electoral Commission will find an arrangement between them and the UK Conservative Party much harder to strike down. This needn’t be a problem for the other parties: the Lib Dems can follow their natural dividing lines and reform as an allied SDP and Liberal party. Labour can detach the Co-Operative Party. The SNP might struggle, but there are muted internal divisions which could lead to the formation of two mainstream nationalist parties.

The effect of this would be to make the regional lists completely separate from the constituencies. No party would receive penalties from their constituency seats, and so the regional list vote would essentially become full-blown regional PR, as their would be no penalties applied to groupings who had done well at the constituency level. This would make it easier for the two major parties – Labour and the SNP, who currently carry the most constituencies and so attract the most penalties – to gain an outright majority, which is currently very difficult (making the SNP’s recent victory all the more incredible).

I don’t know if this plan is in Fraser’s mind. I suspect not, because as soon as he goes down the decoy list route, so will all the other parties. Thus he will actually reduce his electoral advantage, because the Conservatives are currently advantaged relative to the other parties, since they do not win many constituencies and consequently attract fewer penalties. Having said that, if he plays his cards right, he could use this ruse for one election earlier than the other parties, and thus hope to gain some sort of incumbency advantage.

Maybe it will just show up the system for its convoluted and absurd nature. The last survey done on public understanding of the Scottish voting system (in 2003) showed that only 39% of people understood the system, which had decreased (somehow) since its introduction in 1999. When you consider that this is also the system used in Wales and London, and is very similar to the AV+ system the Jenkins Review recommended (the only difference in AV+ is that constituency seats are elected on AV rather than FPTP), the possibilities for complicated coalitions and system subversion multiply greatly.

At any rate, Fraser’s plan to break away the Scottish Tories is canny itself, even without this fiddle of the voting system. But coupled with it, even for one election, it has the potential to win the Conservatives massive gains in Scotland.