"You may not believe it
But I don't believe in miracles anymore
And when I think about it
I don't believe I ever did for sure
All the things I've said in songs
All the purple prose you bought from me
Reality's just black and white The sentimental things I'd write
Never meant that much to me"
This Train don't stop here anymore, Elton John (but really Bernie Taupin)

Over at Progress, you will find an article in which I confess to being a Blairite Zombie, declare New Labour defunct, and after a bit of pining for the Fjords, try and define a territory for a moderate left of centre post-Blairism when you don't have much cash to spread around but do have an awful lot of pain to offer.

Also, I incorrectly reference Elton John lyrics in the headline.

Can't say I don't lack rhetorical ambition, eh?

Last Saturday, I spoke on a panel at Progress Annual Conference on public services reform, with Stephen Twigg MP, Liz Kendall MP and Andrew Harrop of the Fabians, ably chaired by the wonderful Anna Turley.

You can watch it here, and be dazzled by the brilliance of my rhetoric shirt. My spiel starts at the 32 minute mark, but do watch the whole thing.

Just to give you all a break from tedious internal Labour debates about economic policy, I have an article in the latest Fabian Review concerning a tedious Labour internal debate about polling and political strategy. (I know how to pick the sexy topics, right?)

The article an attempt to take a serious look at the oft heard claim that since Labour has lost substantial numbers of DE voters since the 1997 election, the solution is to move to the left to attract them back to the Labour party.

Warning: There are charts.  Mmmmmm.

David Clark has replied to my reply to his reply about Fiscal Conservatism and in the Black Labour. These things can rapidly get unwieldy, so I apologise for the length of this reply. We may be reaching the point that the only way to settle this beef is through a poorly attended speaker meeting.

David Clark's latest post bases his case that I cannot be a "True Fiscal Conservative" on the fact that a google search reveals that fiscal conservatism is an American term used mostly about American Republicans.

I don't quite know what to do with this pearl of information.

Perhaps I should show it to Kevin Rudd, who based his 2007 election on being a Fiscal Conservative. Or to former Swedish Finance minister Goran Persson, who famously said "If in debt, you are not free" when launching a major fiscal consolidation from the left.

Or to Paul Martin, Canada's liberal finance Minister and Prime Minister? Or how about Thomas Sargent, who might know something about it, being the trifecta of being a self described fiscal conservative, a US Democrat, and a Nobel Prize winner in Economics?

Sadly, none of these people are Orrin Hatch, so presumably they don't count. For David the Slim Shady argument is what matters. Orrin Hatch is the real Fiscal Conservative, the rest of us are just imitators. Well, if that's the case, then perhaps the Social Democratic Federation of 1881 are the only true Social Democrats and the rest of us can go hang.

When I gave vent to this point on twitter, David asked for an alternative definition. Handily, we give one in the first paragraph of our paper. It may not be perfect, but hey, why not start with what we wrote?

"Fiscal Conservatism" we say "simply means that those from whom the state borrows can have absolute confidence that it will meet its obligations to repay, come what may.  This means adopting an approach which is careful, risk averse, and cautious".

Now perhaps this is an unastisfactory definition. Perhaps we should expand Goran Persson to say "If in debt, you are not free, so states should only create debt when there are clear benefits, and should reduce debt when they prosper and should always err on the side of caution".

Surely, whatever the inadequacies of our definition and whatever better definitions others can come up with, this is a more useful approach than treating Orrin Hatch as the lodestone to whom all with iron in their fiscal soul must be attracted to?

A large part of our paper makes the argument that the division David repeatedly makes between Keynesianism and Fiscal Conservatism is a false one.

Yet instead of engaging with this point, David simply repeatedly responds that it cannot be true. He says: "You cannot be both a fiscal conservative and a Keynesian any more than you can be both a Marxist-Leninist and an Anglican vicar". Why? Because Orrin Hatch might growl.

Well, OK. Fine. If you and Orrin say so.

Next, David asks why we don't describe ourselves as "True Keynesians".  But we do, David, we do.   In our paper we specifically said effective Keynesianism requires fiscal conservatism. We simply don't agree that the two concepts are locked in a combat to the death.

Can you sense my frustration with the circularity of this argument? We are not Fiscal conservatives, says David, because Fiscal Conservatives do not believe the things people like us believe in. If they do believe in them, they are still not Fiscal Conservatives, even if they take a conservative, cautious approach to the public finances, reduce deficits, pay down debt and do not engage in excessive spending in good years. Rudd, Persson, Martin, and all the rest? Just a pose.

This frustration boils over when we move from the definitional debate to the actual one.

First David attacks our suggestion that one option for a future fiscal target might be returning the budget to balance at the end of a concrete timetable as a dangerous lunacy akin to aligning fiscal policy with sun spots*.

Then, a mere two paragraphs later, he commends Francois Hollande for proposing to return the French budget to balance by the extremely concrete target of 2017 because "he can be reasonably sure that France will be at a very different point of the economic cycle".

If being "reasonably sure" that at a concrete point in the future you will "be at a different point in the economic cycle" is the test, I suggest any fiscal policy will pass it with flying colours?

As we said in our paper, I said in my post, and I say again here, there is scope for debate about what the best precise rule might be. You don't get to be soulless technocrats without wanting that sort of debate.

One option is a concrete timescale, with a clear budget balance position attached to a fixed date, as we and Francois Hollande (with David's clear approval) have proposed. This has the benefit of being a hard commitment and retaining total political control of the budget process, but has the weakness of being inflexible.

Another approach might be linking the deficit to the economic cycle, but with more rigorous external enforcement of where the government is headed, as we have also suggested, the Chilean government have enacted and David himself assents to. To make this work, however, you have to commit to giving up a lot of control over your budget. You must, in effect, give someone a veto power over your spending plans.

David is happy with this. So am I. David is also happy with our proposal for spending restraint. He is even happy with the SMF and my proposals for tax increases.

So what is David actually objecting to? For the life of me, I don't know.

It can't even be that he hates the word conservative, because his first post was about how he finds the term increasingly valuable for the left.

The only critique I can see is that after saying that he agrees with us on the need for tougher structural rules on Fiscal policy (while neglecting to propose any) and graciously agreeing with my (or rather, Ian Mulheirn's) suggestions on Tax increases to help close the deficit (while adding none of his own) David says we err by not re-envisioning Capitalism.

In his first post he said the error was that we "say nothing about the need for a different conception of capitalism". In his latest he tells us that there are many different models of Capitalism in existence, and he is right. But politics is not about picking models of capitalism from the rail, and seeing which one fits your ideal society most snugly. You have to have a way of getting there.

Want to create Rhineland Capitalism into the UK? Then you need an industrial policy to deliver it. (You need a hell of a lot more than that, but let's start with the basics) Such a major scale of Industrial policy costs money. We have argued for a switch of resources to support industrial policy, accepting that this will mean tighter constraints in other areas both in taxation and in spending.  This is a practical step, one with consequences.

David believes the problem is mainly that the left has lacked the will to take on "entrenched interests" to get our destination. It's always those pesky abstractions that are getting in the way. Yet he doesn't set out how he would raise the funds from these entrenched interests, beyond the proposals we have made. I believe the problem for the left is not that we lack dreams, but that too often we find we are short of shovels to build the path to the promised land.

In his conclusion David says that the difference between us may simply be that he is "no longer willing to settle for a version of progressive politics that turns a blind eye to the country’s real social and economic problems in order to buy off the opposition of wealth and power in the pursuit of short-term electability".

His past psychology aside, this radical intent is undermined by the fact David has spent the previous posts and paragraphs setting out precisely how he agrees with us on fiscal rules, taxation, the need for spending restraint, the need to return the budget to balance a la Hollande and so on. If we are turning a blind eye to things in order to buy off the opposition of the wealthy and powerful, then so is David.

Or perhaps, we aren't motivated by such base concerns, and instead are trying to do as well we can with limited resources, imperfect knowldge and big problems. I supect this is equally true for us and for David, it's just that frustratingly, he just doesn't engage with how he'd do any of this, how much it would cost, what other priorities would suffer in consequence and reserves his anger for telling us he doesn't like the words we use to describe ourselves.

This leads me to a conclusion. Only one of us is fooling themselves into the pleasant belief they are more radical, more edgy, more progressive than they really are. It isn't me.

That he has such a pleasant daydream is David's business. I would not bring it up if I did not fear that such a  delusion will lead to complacency in opposition and be self-defeating in government.  

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We all know the feeling. Something bothers you for ages, just eats away at you.

It's an itch you have to scratch. But if you do scratch it, won't it just make the itch worse? So you try and hold out. But then it gets too much, so you set about it with enthusiasm.

I suppose that David Clark, editor of new website shifting grounds, a former Robin Cook adviser and close ally of the Labour leadership, felt like this about In the Black Labour. Certainly, I regard it as the highest of compliments that six months after it was published, David has decided to launch a direct assault on our little pamphlet.

Or at least I think he has.

I am unsure if he has attacked us or not because David's article asserts a number of things about what Fiscal Conservatives believe that are not the case for "In the Black Labour's" authors.

For example David says: "True fiscal conservatives dislike the use of demand management as a tool of economic policy and seek to restrict its scope as much as possible"

No we don't.

Here's what we say "While there is a major absence of private sector demand, the government must fill the gap; not just to keep the economy growing but to protect long term fiscal sustainability."

David also says that "true fiscal conservatives essentially see government as the root of all evil, their solution is for government simply to get out of the way. They are positively hostile to an active economic role for the state"

Gosh, do we?

Here's what we say: "after the deficit is reduced, the state will still be spending some £700bn a year. That’s less in real terms than before the Crash but still a very significant proportion of the UK’s GDP. It means the state can still do much to promote equality and social justice but it will also mean facing up to big strategic choices about how to use existing expenditure"

I'm not sure what David means by "true fiscal conservatives" . He concedes in the examples given that we don't agree with the statements he makes about "true Fiscal Conservatives."

So why make them at all?

If David means we're not "true" Fiscal Conservatives, merely a different type of Fiscally Responsible Social Democrats, (a position he supports, saying that "to the extent ITBL endorses fiscal responsibility", he agrees with us.)  why attack us for being such?

David suggests we are just "like the kids of 1977..  who stuck safety pins through their school jumpers and called themselves punks" and so the left should be wary of us.

Except that when it comes to what we actually say, rather than David's caricature of what we say, we should be agreed with.

I confess I find this rather confusing.

Perhaps David thinks we are true fiscal conservatives underneath it all, but are merely hiding our claws behind a seductive soft and cuddly moderation that he agrees with.

Either way, attacking us for things we clearly don't believe, have argued against, and do not accept seems an odd way to engage in debate.

Should I reply by arguing that "true leftists" believe in the elimination of the Kulak class, conceding that while David doesn't believe such things, we should still be wary of his actual proposals?

This oddity aside, there are more significant points lurking beneath the caricature and comradely comparisons to suburban wannabe punks.

It's worth addressing these.

First, As we've seen David repeatedly tells us he shares our enthusiasm for "Fiscal responsibility", though he leaves undefined what such a fiscal responsibility might look like, any timescale for achieving it, and so on. 

Now I confess, such a vague commitment is one of my pet hates about the fiscal debate on the left.

Perhaps it's because as a fat man, I have taken a similar approach to chips. I would tell anyone who listened that I believed in a responsible approach to chip consumption. It was even true. I stopped eating so many chips a few years back.

Unfortunately, until I demonstrated how I was going to limit my eating of chips to such an extent I was in calorie deficit, or did more exercise to achieve the same goal, few people believed I was serious about losing weight.

If the Labour party parades an enthusiasm for fiscal responsibility, while decrying any and all concete proposals to actually achieve such a state of affairs, (and also imputing dark motives to anyone who does so) I suspect we will recieve the same polite scepticism. 

So I searched David's article for clues to how he would actually deliver the Fiscal responsibility he prizes.

I found "a commitment to rigorous spending controls, eliminating tax avoidance and making the better off pay thier share".

Well, OK. So we agree on "rigorous spending controls". I assume this means David agrees with our statement that  "Rather than relying heavily on extra public spending, social justice will have to be advanced through prioritisation, institutional innovation and reform."

Next, Tax avoidance. The left calling for the elimination of tax avoidance is like the Tories attacking waste. Tax avoidance exists. I suspect attacking it is both popular politics and a worthy policy aim. But if you think you can wholly eliminate it, attempting to do so will solve all your problems, or there are no political consequences in so doing, I've a bridge I'd like to sell you.

After all, this awful government is getting into trouble for adopting a fairly simple approach to one aspect of tax avoidance, by effectively demanding an alternative minimum tax. As a result, they are being assailed by everyone from Charities to the Church and will have to row back.

Next: making the rich pay their share. Absolutely up for that. For example, I rather like the SMF sugggestions for increasing growth and economic investment by doing just precisely this.

The SMF proposes a cap on ISAs, rolling child benefit into the Tax credit system, ending non-contributory benefits for wealthy pensioners, and halving higher rate tax relief. This would be tough, a hard political sell, but a worthy cause.

If David seeks to close the deficit by maintaining spending and increasing taxation, and feels that the sort of proposals outlined above are too small, then I welcome that commitment, I look forward to the debate and only ask for a few more proposals on how he'd actually do it.

Which taxes would he seek to raise to close the multi-billion pound post 2015 deficit, once growth is achieved? 

(To help David out a little, I suspect the two most likely options are some form of Land or capital gain taxation, and the old standby of a transaction tax.* )

After all the discussion of things we don't say, David makes two substantive criticisms of our paper.

First, David argues that the authors of "In the Black" Labour are not interested in real reform of the private sector. While he concedes we talk about the importance of industrial policy. David argues that we "say nothing about the need for a different conception of capitalism".

I agree. We don't. It is perhaps an error of ours that  we did not attempt a fundamental reconceptualisation of Market capitalism. Personally, I have an aversion to proposing changes that I have no idea how to achieve. As I don't know quite how we should differently conceive of capitalism, I didn't press for its inclusion as a priority.

However, if it will engage David, I assure him that I am entirely supportive of his desires to "build fairness into the DNA of our economy". I am very much for fairness, against unfairness and am even pro-Genetic modification.

I look forward only to being educated on how we will deliver his proposal to "do something radical to make capitalism functional to the needs of a just society".  I am, in addition to being pro-fairness, all in favour of doing something. Even better if that something is radical, makes capitalism functional and is pro-justice.

Finally, in his most acute critique (one based on something we actually say, rather than something we disagree with, argue against, or merely neglect), David attacks our suggestion that the left consider the aim of achieving a balanced budget at the end of the next parliament.

(We actually say "The precise nature of such targets is a matter for more detailed debate but one option might be a commitment to deliver a surplus on the public finances towards the end of a concrete timescale such as the lifetime of a single parliament. Other equally credible possibilities clearly exist.")

David regards this as dangerous, pointing out that there may be a further recession which leads to the need to further stabilising and that attaching an non-adjustable date to fiscal balance is a foolish idea.  

My instinct is to suggest that David takes this up with that dangerous fiscal conservative Francois Hollande, who is proposing to bring the French budget into balance by 2017.

Perhaps President Hollande is one of those fake-punks David dislikes? He certainly looks like he puts safety pins through his jumper to me.

However, such snideness gets us not very far.

David has a point. The precise nature of what a commitment to fiscal conservatism takes is an important one. Perhaps he would prefer adopting the Chilean model, where an independent committee judges the postion of the fiscal cycle, and sets the constraints the government will operate in to achieve fiscal balance?

The principle should perhaps be this: the more flexibility a government desires to adress the vagaries of the economic cycle, the more external enforcement is needed to show that we actually mean what we say about "rigorous spending restraint".

If that's the case, we are can debate the model of fiscal restraint mechanism that is most appropriate for long term balance, and consider what policy choices might be needed to deliver such fiacal balance,

Naturally, I prefer a cautious, risk averse approach to such projections and choices. It's why I'm a Fiscal Conservative. Others may differ on such choices, and we can debate that.

Indeed, that might be a more productive use of all our time than drawing lazy caricatures of others positions.

* I'm open to the former, though whether it will be an early revenue raiser I'm not sure, I confess I'm doubtful of the deliverability of the latter, given it's a transaction tax, not a tax on the rich, the history of avoidance of such taxes (cf Stamp duty on shares), the nature of what we seek to tax, and the need for global agreement to prevent it simply becoming a boon for the Delaware of the global economy. However, I'm sure David has an elegant solution to all this, and I look forward to reading it.

Was the Queen's speech supposed to be Coalition mark 2? Was the visit to the Tractor factory supposed to be a second trip to the rose garden? Was there intended to be, somewhere in the thickets of the the government's legislative programme, a shared political agenda for us to unpick?

If these were the intentions, the address from the throne revealed a government running on empty.

A Green Investment Bank has been coming for two years. The Social care bill will be a draft, primarily because the cost implications will be huge, and will have to be part of the 2013 Spending review, which is showing all the signs of becoming a blood bath.  Lords reform will be a long parliamentary nightmare to enact. There's no sign of the HE bill. What you are left with are some fairly minor regulatory changes to the utilities industries, some fiddle-faddle about Supermarkets, and several bills in areas like defamation, voter registration, banking regulation and family leave, all of which are important, but not issues of obvious susceptibility to party division.

It is not be hard to imagine an alternative government pursuing a subtly different take on such issues, and it will be easy for the Labour party to take the primrose path of dalliance to demonstrate mature, responsible opposition (while all the time leaving little traps for backbenchers of the fractious coalition).

Perhaps a real Coalition Agreement 2 is in the works somewhere. It is possible that the minions of Osborne and Clegg are locked in a Cabinet Office basement and have been told they cannot emerge blinking onto Whitehall until they have produced a series of policies that are acceptable to both parties, popular, deliver economic growth, and have minimal spending commitments. 

I suppose they have until Conference season. Poor Souls.

It's the last bit that matters, of course. The government have no spending room, so what can they do?

This represents the consequence of the original sin of the Coalition Agreement.

It didn't have to be like this. They chose to go down this route, and now they are trapped together, with no tools to find a way out, just hoping for the up-turn.

Imagine if Vince Cable had won the argument in 2010, and we had been governed by a Conservative-Liberal Coalition that enacted a version of the Francois Hollande plan for France – We commit to austerity, but only after growth returns*. The Bond markets would have been quiescent, there would have been room to placate angry public sector workers while shifting resources towards encouraging Business investment.

Growth would probably be a touch higher, with unemployment and hence the deficit, beginning to track more rapidly downwards. There would be hints of Tax cuts to come, warnings that Labour could not be trusted with the restraint needed for the future. there would be room for both Industrial policy and a back bench friendly attack on over-regulation.  The government would be sitting pretty, no matter how many court dates they missed or emails to News International they sent.

Instead, Clegg and Laws ditched the one thing the Liberal Democrats could have given to this coalition – a sensible, well timed, deficit reduction policy.

In return for abandoning that, the Lib Dems received a series of empty commitments.

Some, like AV and Lords reform, were always destined to be difficult to enact.  Cameron had to sacrifice nothing of consequence to offer them. Lords reform was in the Tory manifesto but everyone and their dog knew it was virtually unwhippable. An AV referendum, without a commitment to support, was always likely to get defeated. (This is why the Prime Minister was able to offer them with a smile, which would turn rapidly into a smirk when explaining the deal to the '22)**

Others, like Libel reform, are worthy, but will fire the hearts of few beyond Newspaper offices and barristers chambers.

Now, the only thing binding the Liberal Democrats and Tories together is the consequence of immediate spending restraint in 2010. Reducing the deficit is what they are for. It is, increasingly, the only thing they are for. (Who today, outside the happy re-assurances of LibDem activist meetings worries, about achievements like ID cards?)

The cuts have to deliver growth to vindicate the coalition decision to join together on the terms they did. Only then can the two parties look to the future, whether it lies together or separately.

Yet ministers have no fiscal room to do much to ensure this happens. They can't go for tax cuts, or for spending, or they would be repudiating the only purpose for the Coalition.  Perhaps I underestimate the cynicism of the ambitious politician. I hope so. Part of me would like to see a dash for growth, whether tax cut or spending based, partly because it would help people live a little better, partly because it would be amusing to see the contortions that followed. I don't expect it though. The coalition is nothing without a commitment to keep the fiscal tap turned off.

So, Messrs Clegg, Cameron, Osborne, Alexander and the rest find themselves down in a hole, a deep dark hole, waiting for a return of global economic confidence to rescue them from their plight. It may yet do so, but they have little to offer the nation in the meantime but distraction and displacement.

Nor can either bolt until the sun shines on both once more. The Liberal Democrats know destruction would follow. The Tories are not confident of victory. As a result, they are helplessly trapped together, and we are stuck with them.

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Ken Livingstone has been quick to assign the reason for his defeat to the Mayoral election being a "personality contest". Many others have joined him in this analysis (or have said the same thing already).

I think there's more to it than that.

After all, in 2008, Ken Livingstone significantly out-polled the depressed Labour vote. Presumably then his personality was an asset, and Boris Johnson's was something of a liability. Much has changed in the intervening four years, but the basic personalities of the two men appear fairly similar, at least to this observer.

If people's perceptions of the two men have changed, then perhaps there are other issues at play than their personalities?*

One argument might be that Ken Livingstone endured a more negative media environment in 2012 than 2008. I'm afraid I don't buy that at all. The 2012 Standard, which is what people mean, was much less negative than the 2008 version. Yes, Andrew Gilligan was relentless in the Telegraph, but he was no longer at the Standard, and frankly, the negative stories about Ken (notably the Tax issue) were entirely self inflicted. So I don't think media bias works as the differentiating factor.

Perhaps the most effective case for the "Personality" argument was made by Adam Bienkov in an excellent article in the New Statesman.

Adam takes issue with a tweet of mine in which I said that Ken's "Message, tone, strategy and agenda" were wrong. Adam points out that

"In all the polling that was done, Ken’s policies of lower fares and his measures to reduce the cost of living, were overwhelmingly supported by the public, with Johnson’s main policy of small cuts to council tax barely registering. The problem was not Ken's agenda, but the fact that it was Ken calling for that agenda"

There are two points to make here. First, I don't think there's any argument that Ken's policies were unpopular. As Adam rightly says, all of the polling makes that clear. 36% of people thought that Ken's policy was the best one for them. Note, however, that 36% would not represent a plurality of voters. Nor is it of much significance that Ken was 'Left wing". Ken has been left wing for decades, and has won elections by a landslide before. London is a now a more "left wing" city than the rest of Southern England, and I don't doubt that a left position can work politically in a city like London, but there are more complex factors than "personality" and "policy" at play in an election.

Message, tone, strategy and agenda are some of the most important of these, which is why I mentioned them. My issue with Ken's choice of policy priority is not that it was "too left wing" or insufficiently Blairite. I'm not quite sure to what extent lower tube and bus fares is left or right wing, at least in Labour party terms. I'd quite like lower bus fares too, you know! Nor is Ken particularly "left' when it comes to policing.

My critique is not that Ken's agenda was that it was too left wing in policy terms, but that it did little to help Ken win the election. Ken did not seek to persuade voters he had changed, listened and learned from his previous rejection, but rather that he had been right before, was still right, and would do what he did before in office. In effect, his message was "If you liked my last Mayoralty, you'll love my next one". I suppose one could argue that this is an aspect of personality, but I think it's something more. It was a conscious political choice to appeal to those who were already receptive to Ken's messages.

I assume, though I don't know, that the thinking behind this was rooted in an analysis that Ken did not actually lose the last Mayoral election, Gordon Brown did, and that the election of Boris Johnson did not represent a repudiation of Ken Livingstone, but of an unpopular Labour government. In effect, Ken wanted a re-run of 2008 with a better political backdrop providing the votes needed to win.

There is some truth to that analysis, but not enough. Labour and Gordon Brown probably did lose Ken the 2008 election. The trouble is the politics of the London Mayoralty changed in the intervening years.

It struck me that Ken ran against a caricature of Boris Johnson, not the real Boris Johnson mayoralty Londoners have lived with. His campaign message was effective in 2008, when Johnson was an unknown quantity as a politician actually running things. This time, however, Johnson had been in office for four years, and while he has achieved little, he also done remarkably little to conform to the image of him that Labour painted in 2008.

As Adam astutely notes: "Under Boris, spending on infrastructure, and the wages of Tube workers has risen whilst the mass bureaucracy at Transport for London has barely been touched. The multicultural festivals, diversity agendas and environmental projects have all continued whilst Boris has stretched every sinew to persuade Londoners that he is not the mad swivel-eyed Tory that Labour had tried to persuade them he was."

As Owen Jones puts it : "there was a lot of continuity between Boris and Ken’s reign: the Tory Mayor simply carried on with most of Ken’s projects. The fare hikes were his greatest injustice, but you can’t get as worked up about them as, say, trebling tuition fees, privatising the NHS or slashing taxes on the rich". This leads to an odd dissonance. Boris's victory is due to his policy continuity with Ken, yet the election was merely a personality contest. Perhaps it might be instead that Johnson's policy continuity was a deliberate strategy to prevent London Labour voters being able to "get worked up"?

In my view, this is not personality politics, but a veneer of Borisisms and Tory populism overlaying a reality of centrist political strategy designed to disarm the negatives Boris Johnson carried into the last Mayoral election.

The fact that Labour failed to address this strategy was a political choice, not a consequence of political personality.

This explains why Labour voters in London thought Boris Johnson was a better candidate for middle class Londoners and for cyclists. It provides a rationale for the fact that when one looks at those identified by YouGov as "Ken deserters", (ie Labour voters not supporting Ken) they preferred Boris Johnson on issues as varied as helping homeowners, leading London out of recession and fighting crime.  These are not mere personality issues.

I suggest that if Ken had focussed more of his campaign on issues like this, issues that concerned Labour voters who were susceptible to the reality of a fairly inoffensive and unambitious Tory mayor, he might have had a chance of both changing their minds about the policies of both candidates, and reducing the hostility that they expressed to Ken.

This hostility was real. The counter argument to mine (that this was about people not being willing to listen to Ken) has some evidence to support it. If you look at "Ken deserters", 65% of them gave disliking Ken as their main reason for not voting for him. Only 23% said they voted Boris because they liked him. In addition a full 61% of the deserters described Boris as charismatic. This might be a telling point in favour of the "personality" question. But my argument is that this was an addressable issue, through a different strategy, a different set of political priorities and a different campaign tone. Ken chose not to ask for a second chance to be heard.

In my view, Ken generated dislike and scepticism because he appeared to have not changed from his earlier defeat. He campaigned on the same issues, used the same rhetoric, deployed the same attacks on the media and his opponent and ultimately, looked like he sought the same coalition of support. In the end, that's exactly what he achieved, to within 4,000 first preference votes. Yes, his policies were popular, but were they interesting for those who Ken needed to persuade?

If those who rejected Ken last time disliked him this time, it surely has to be related to the fact his campaign made little or no effort to persuade them otherwise.

Instead, he chose to tell the electorate what they already knew about him. I suspect this did him little good. Even "Ken deserters" still regarded Ken as better for commuters, for the poor, ethnic minorities, and even, by a slim margin, as "better for people like them". It just wasn't enough for them to support him. So constantly telling them that he would address the issues they thought he was best on was going to change few minds.

When I discussed this with a member of Ken's campaign team, it was pointed out to me that Ken went out to outer London repeatedly in this campaign. Indeed he did- but what did he tell them when he was there?  Did he talk about car drivers? Did he talk about voluntary groups, or try to outbid Boris Johnson's outer London fund? No, he talked about tube fares, infrastructure and EMA. Even when his campaign talked about crime, it was always in the context of cuts, of spending, of long lists of numbers.

For Ken to have won, he did not need to be more right wing, or more conservative, or more Blairite (though I confess, I would have been amused to see him try the latter!).

Instead, he needed to emphasise the concerns of those who had rejected him before, more willing to approach the campaign with new priorities, a different tone, and a fresher, less KenClassic agenda.

London knew Ken stood for lower fares, for London's working class and for Ethnic minorities. Voters agreed with him on that. I argue they needed to know much more than that if he was to gain the additional support he needed to win.

Full disclosure: I voted for Ken because I thought his policies on Housing, transport, crime and the economy were superior to that of his opponents, and because I felt a Labour administration in City Hall would be superior in all respects to a Conservative one. Yet I was one of those concerned by Ken's position on a variety of non-Mayoral issues who felt that it would be difficult to display the needed enthusiasm to go on the doorstep for him: I confess too, the number of times he has expressed disdain and loathing for my brand of centre-left politics sapped my enthusiasm. I've campaigned for people far more left wing than Ken, though, and will do again. It's just that I tend to feel party loyalty works best when it is reciprocal. With Ken, I don't think it is (To be fair, the blame here is not one sided. The party should have let Ken be Labour candidate in 2000. Either you believe in One member, One vote in internal selections, or you don't.)

In any case, I doubted I could express enthusiasm well on the doorstep. So I focussed my campaigning activity on elections outside London. I'm pleased to say that Labour won every ward I campaigned in, though that had precious little to do with my efforts! I mention this because I expect I will called an armchair critic.

*This raises the question of what we mean by "personality". If we mean the personality "as perceived by the electorate", as I suspect most of us do, a political personality is something that can be shifted by a multitude of factors, and is well within the ability of a campaign to address. To take a ludicrous example, if a campaign managed to organise a series of events where a candidate appeared to rescue small children from burning buildings, I suspect that candidate's ratings for charisma, bravery, and courage would go up. If this was then exposed as a fix, the ratings would crash.  The candidate would still be the same basic personality, but our perception of it would have changed with the information available. This suggests that if one of the barriers to your election as a candidate are personality issues, these are not unfixable. You just have to choose to fix them, and not by altering your candidates personality, but by altering the perception of such. Does this then no longer make them personality issues in any meaningful sense? It all gets rather metaphysical.

"But the voters must not think, like Clegg, that they can wash their hands of responsibility for their actions on Thursday if they fail to vote against the Tories."

Jon Trickett, Labourlist, today

Titular reference is to this.

Chris Lennie hired me to work for the Labour party, 12 long years ago.  Today is his last day working for the Labour party, and I wanted to say thank you.

Back then, Chris was the Director of Labour North, which meant he had responsibility for the Labour party in the North-East of England (and a part of Cumbria). While Labour North was the smallest English region of the Labour party, it was also solidly, consistently Labour. Of the 34 parliamentary seats we were responsible for, 31 were Labour held, and a large number of our MPs were political heavyweights. There was also the small matter of the Prime Minister being the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield. 

On top of that, Labour ran nearly every council in the region. Easy life, right? Wrong. With great power comes great infighting.  We had Labour groups at war with each other, or with their MPs, people positioning themselves for selection, or maneuvering others, or seeking to impress.

On top of that, Chris had me as the regional press officer. I like to think I was a pretty good press officer, but even those who love me best would not claim that a fanatical approach to detail and planning is the hallmark of my career. This must have been agony for Chris, but he seemed to think that there was something worthwhile in my work despite that. Though he did start suggesting that he come to pick me up from home to go to the office if we absolutely had to start the working day on time because the PM was visiting, or some such trifle.

What's more, dealing with people who had known almost every senior figure in the Labour party since they were fresh faced tyro's and who have been in power for a decade or more locally has it's own challenges. If a council leader is about to make a terrible, catastrophic error, it's relatively hard to tell them not to. Or at least, it was hard to tell them in a way that meant they listened.

Chris handled all of this with consummate ease, and as a result ended up being appointed Assistant General Secretary after the 2001 Election.  For the next decade, Chris was variously Assistant, Deputy and Acting General Secretary of the Labour party under five different General Secretaries (David Triesman, Matt Carter, Peter Watt, Ray Collins and Iain McNicol).

I used to feel that Chris got something of a hard deal out of his long time as Labour's No 2 manager. Part of it was that he tended to get a lot of the unglamorous, difficult, managerial jobs in the Labour party. While others were in charge of policy, or campaigns, or media, Chris always seemed to be the manager responsible for personnel – which in the Labour party mostly means telling people they can't have the staff they need and then getting rid of large numbers of staff after a General Election,  which never tends to make you popular, especially if you can't do a job without radiating enthusiasm, as Chris always did.

Chris also often seemed to be responsible for things like disciplinary inquiries and party suspensions, which is also an area where you make enemies both if you make a misstep and if you succeed.  I used to joke with him that the answer to the question "who'd do the dirty work under Socialism?" was "Chris Lennie". Even on the (two, three?) occasions Chris was Acting General Secretary, it was usually because some financial or political disaster had befallen us, and so everything had to be devoted to sorting it out, while many of those involved were worried, fearful and understandably concerned that they would be on the way out.

What's more, Chris was never particularly keen on the sort of internal politics that often defines success in party HQ. After I stopped working for the Labour party, I'd often try and get Chris to be a bit disloyal about someone, or something in the Labour party who was, I'd heard, being particularly difficult, or causing him problems, or just being a bit of a Prima Donna. He never once rose to the bait. The most I'd ever get out of him would be a slight pause before he mounted a defence of who-ever it was I thought was driving him up the wall.

Perhaps as a result of that, I wondered if Chris never quite got the respect he was owed in Labour's London HQ among junior staffers, who associated him mostly with P45s.  Because he was willing to energetically subsume himself in the hard, difficult, boring, rations and supplies work, maybe people outside the North-East aren't quite aware of how sharp his political antennae are. Because he was faultlessly loyal, perhaps others didn't quite see how he wanted the Labour party to change. Maybe this is why he didn't get the General Secretary job the last time it came up, though I suspect the answer to that is much more political, and also that the other candidate was pretty good, too.

Though again, it says something about Chris that he's been utterly loyal to Iain McNicol since the NEC chose Iain, much more so than some people who were heavily backing Iain for the job.

There's a lesson there, maybe. Some people deserve trust, and earn it, and you admire them the more you know them. Others, not so much. 

Certainly, in the more than a decade since I started to work for Chris, my respect, trust and admiration for him has only ever grown. That's true of very, very few people I've worked with. I've been lucky in that two of them have been my bosses.

Although this is Chris's last day officially as a member of Party Staff, I'm sure he'll be campaigning and working for the Labour party for a long while yet.

Personally, I'd love the party to give Chris an official role, so that free of the burdens of being a loyal paid servant of the party, people who haven't been lucky enough to work for Chris will get to see why so many of us who have have done, become not just ex-colleagues, but good friends.

Until then – salut!

(Also, I'm convinced the tan is real. Real, and a thing of wonder!)

In my earlier post, I made the argument that the roots of the Conservative party's current travails lie in the failure of the leadership to really confront the big strategic questions of what they want to do with their government, and instead, replace them with a series of tactical decisions based on securing short term political advantage. It's my basic thesis that this tendency has both stored up problems for the government, and, as it is still being applied today is causing fresh problems at an increasing rate.

In a way, this links to argument that both Steve Richards and Iain Martin have made: that a politics of the short term and provisional is unsuited both to the pressures of government, and, especially, to the challenges of the next few years.

Think of it like this. The decade of general prosperity we have been through allowed politicians to apply a spoonful of sugar to any and all difficult decisions they had to make. Now there is no spoonful of sugar, so strategies reliant on them are left badly exposed. Now, I'd argue that the Labour government used the spoonful of sugar rather well: on public service reform, on education, on keeping overall tax rates low and tax credits, on infrastructure spend and so on.

Obviously, all of this was accompanied by a tactical, political dance, which now distracts columnists and political types from what went on beneath. If I say Damian or Alistair, you probably know who I mean. If I say Conor and Paul C, you probably don't. Fundamentally, the task of the New Labour press team was to identify sore spots, and either prevent further self inflicted wounds or apply the cooling unguent of money. (Read Damian's excellent account of the Budget process, and imagine how much less well such a process works if overall tax takes were plummeting)

So I'd argue that not only are the Tories reliant on a strategy that is unsuited to the current times, but the accumulated errors of their past strategy mean they cannot even deliver that strategy reasonably competently.

Not only are Cameron and Osborne reading the wrong script, as Iain Martin puts it, they are reading it so badly.

The big mistake

Up to 2008/09 the Conservatives were following a reasonably effective political narrative. They hadn't really confronted the big policy divisions in the Conservative party, but by effectively matching Labour's spending plans, they were able to effectively promise prizes for all. He wasn't always successful in this – even in 2005 Tim Montgomerie was using the "And" theory of conservatism to demand a little more red meat for the Tory right. Rather than being shrugged off, such an ambiguous position was repeatedly embraced.

We saw this process on grammar schools, on welfare policy, on the NHS. It was possible, the Leadership argued, to support radical public service reform, a limited state and progressive goals all at once, because there was going to be the money to pay for it all. As a result by 2010, even a Tory critic like Montgomerie was arguing that "The manifesto is much more the latest installment of Cameron's simultaneous attempt to persuade the left that he is different from Thatcher, and to persuade the right that he remains rooted in historic, Burkean conservatism." .

That strategy, though riddled with internal contradictions likely to be exposed in office, was politically workable. However, it stopped being politically workable in 2008, when suddenly the easy decade came to a definitive stop. Labour's strategy was the most obviously exposed by this, but the Conservative leadership found themselves in an equally awkward position. Having gambled on detoxifying the Tory brand through moving close to New Labour positions, they were confronted by the apparent collapse of the New Labour political and economic model. George Osborne was under political pressure, with some calling for him to be moved from the Shadow Chancellor job.

In response, they entirely abandoned their strategy.  

At the time, this looked masterful. The Labour government were struggling, the economy was tanking, and the Tories were now free to attack them with everything they had. The only consequence was that the Tories were now committed to a policy of deeper spending cuts in government, no matter what Labour's chancellor actually proposed. this was, I submit, a colossal strategic error. Labour were caught on the horns of a dilemma. To get out of recession, Labour needed to spend. It was also clear that in the medium term, this would mean balancing cuts. Labour really did not want to disclose what those cuts might mean.

If the Tories had chosen to match Labour spending plans, they could have run on a mantle of trust, honesty and competency, arguing that spending cuts were needed, and that only they would deliver the tough medicine well. Labour would then both had to define it's own cuts agenda, which would have been extremely painful, and also been unable to attack the Conservatives for damaging the economy. In effect, David Cameron could have run a Tory version of the campaign Nick Clegg ran, thanks to Vince Cable.

Despite failing to win the election, the Tories were lucky in their rivals. Labour ran a truly dreadful campaign, and only managed to land a few effective punches in the final days, while Nick Clegg had a collapsed souffle of an election, and then failed to make any sort of case for his economic policy in the coalition negotiations. The Conservatives were in government, their economic policy intact.

Unfortunately, this economic policy locked them in to two or three years of sustained bad news. Budgets would have to be cut. Resources reduced. Living standards would have to fall. Growth would likely be anemic. Oddly, there was a moment in which the case for this could be made. It's needed, the coalition argued. We have to take the tough decisions. We have to do the right thing. The public listened, and broadly, agreed.

Yet here again, the preference for tactics and short term political advantage, the desire to manage the Conservative party rather than confront it caused problems for the leadership. The right wanted tax cuts, and deregulation. So the Conservatives leadership hinted their assent. Then, as the economy struggled, they could not fall back on a "stick with it" argument. They couldn't argue that these hard yards were essential. Instead, they had to try to find a solution to their party's desire for the sort of  distinctively conservative policies they had hinted they favoured. Nor could they tell the Tory right to wait, because by not winning the election (by not confronting the Tory right) they had not earned the power to do so.

Further, and even more inexplicably, when the times were good for their position, the leadership went out of their way to denigrate those they had cosseted in opposition, making it clear how much more congenial the Liberal Democrats were to the mouth-breathers of the Tory right.  Again, this sense of short term advantage, and political solutions over policy fights comes to the fore.

Making common cause with the LibDems makes a huge amount of sense politically. I've said before that a Conservative-LibDem permanent alliance is a great fear of mine. But to make it work, the Conservative party had to be entirely bought on board, either be persuasion or by the clear winning of an argument. Instead, the leadership briefed, hinted, and insinuated and in doing so, aggravated.

That might have even made sense if the Leadership had taken on the right and won in opposition, but the Carswells, the Bone's, the Dorries', the Redwood's could all remember times when they had been prayed in aid, and now without victory, their leadership was blatantly preferring their coalition partners.

Such behaviour created resentment, and that resentment had to be bought off, when, predictably, times got harder for a government implementing austerity.

So George Osborne found himself standing up as an economy stagnated, and announcing a tax cut for the rich that he insisted was actually a tax increase for the rich, alongside various tax cuts of small and provisional types, paid for by the sort of stealth taxes he had decried so often in opposition.

This then, entirely predictably, fell apart. By apparently cutting taxes, Osborne was overturning the "Hard yards" argument.  But he didn't have the money to pay for such tax cuts, and he couldn't back out of his deficit reduction plans, so he had to try and squeeze in bits and pieces, each of which caused an individual pip to squeak.

Nor would the Tory right come to fight for him, because they could see it wasn't really a dash for growth through tax cuts, while the LibDems were perfectly happy to see their coalition partners being stuck in the clarts for once.

At each turn, the Conservative leadership have chosen tactics over strategy. they've chosen political management over political argument. this didn't really work as politics, but relied on the failure of the government. Even with such a failure, it then provided only an incoherent and self-contradictory path for government. 

Cameron and Osborne are failing now. They may yet be rescued by the global economy, or by fear of the alternative, or by the hard work and entrepreneurial and social spirit of the British people. Either way, they should provide an object lesson to the Labour party in how not to prepare for government in tough times.