Jonathan Todd

I went to the Progress political weekend and wrote about it on their blog:

In two separate sessions at the Progress political weekend Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy both said that Labour needs a draw on the deficit and a win on growth. Spooky. It was almost like they were singing from the same hymn sheet.

These two fronts contain various interrelated battles: jobs, the cost of living, tax and public spending. Can Labour convince that we can reduce unemployment without sparking fears that we’ll let spending get out of control? Can we identify tax changes that will reduce the cost of living while being credible on the deficit?

While this economic terrain will determine the next election, the shared formulation of Alexander and Murphy set me thinking about other policy areas. As shadow defence secretary, Murphy is committed to challenging the perception that Labour is the party of the NHS and the Tories are the party of the military. The catalogue of incompetence that has been this government’s handling of perhaps the most consequential foreign policy shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall means that we might aspire to more than a draw on defence. We are better placed here than we might have expected to have been at the start of the parliament.

Andrew Lansley has also left the Tory chin much more exposed than his ‘promise’ of ‘no more top-down reforms’ suggested would be the case. John Healey should be aiming for a knock-out. This will require that the debate is framed as good Labour reform versus bad Tory reform, not unaffordable Labour spending on the status quo versus Lansley’s reforms.

Iain Duncan Smith did not so much enter the welfare debate at the DWP with his chin exposed as with a baseball bat in his hand. Labour had become so synonymous with unfair welfare payments that we were ripe for further kicking on the issue. Alexander began to recover Labour’s position as shadow DWP secretary. Liam Byrne seeks to complete this journey. But we began it so far behind that the best we can now possibly achieve is a draw.

We also remain far from victory on immigration, in spite of the inevitable chaos of the government’s misguided cap. Mrs Duffy remains more potent in this debate than the Labour party. The temptation is for Labour to give in to the instinct that Mrs Duffy embodies. But so long as access to highly skilled and mobile labour remains important to economic success – that is, so long as we continue to live in a global economy – this instinct, while containing fears that should be properly responded to, cannot lead in a straight line to optimal policy.

Labour also faces dilemmas on the battlefield of education. First, Andrew Adonis wants to convert all of Birmingham’s lower performing schools into academies, as he told the Progress gathering. Does Andy Burnham? Second, my regard for my alma mater isn’t enhanced by its confirmation that it will now cost £27,000 to cover the teaching costs of my degree. But what’s Labour alternative? Can a graduate tax be both workable and escape the perception, so damaging to us, of big government?

Last weekend gave me much to think about but I remain convinced that we are best when boldest.

I reviewed “The British General Election of 2010″ by Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley for Labour Uncut today.

“The characteristic virtue of Englishmen is power of sustained practical activity and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles.”

So said R. H. Tawney. Whereas the mantra of Alicia Kennedy, Labour’s director of field operations, during this year’s general election was ‘where we work, we win’ – a eulogy to the power of sustained practical Labour activity. Now, we can test the quality of that activity by reference to a simple principle: did it secure Labour representation as effectively as it could have done?

Only now is it possible fully to answer this question. Because Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley have just published the 2010 edition of what used to be known as the ‘Butler book’.

Kavanagh and Cowley have ably stepped into the big shoes of David Butler, whose foreword to the 2010 volume means he has been involved in these election studies for 65 years. Cowley’s revolts project, which, though struggling for funding, has so far just about made into this parliament, has debunked many myths about backbench behaviour. This study of the 2010 general election is equally successful at disentangling hype from reality.

The anatomy of our defeat is laid bare. But amidst these ruins lay signposts to recovery. Hard doorstep graft is part of this. In the ten seats with Labour’s highest voter ID contact rates there was an average swing to Labour of 0.6 percent.

Commercially produced voter information, such as Experian’s MOSAIC data, is also here to stay. Around 15 years ago, MOSAIC allowed parties to target at postcode level only; at the 2005 election it enabled targeting by households; in 2010 it allowed individual voters to be targeted based on their MOSAIC code. These highly disaggregated data are deployed, via direct mailings, centrally by parties.

However, these data become richer when mashed-up with voter ID, which is generated through a mix of door-knocking by local parties and centralised phone banking. And, while no party gives constituency parties input into the content of these centrally produced mailings, these mailings are likely to be more effective if integrated with content which local parties and candidates are better able to provide than national operatives.

It is anything but joined-up for local activists to be knocking on doors without any knowledge of what their party centrally has mailed through these doors. All parties put their activists in this position on a massive scale, as the campaign was what one senior Liberal Democrat campaigner called “the direct mail election – more paper delivered to more houses than any campaign in British history”, and much more finely targeted.

Maximising the impact of direct mail in future elections may require improved co-ordination between local campaigns and national-local campaigns (i.e. the direct mailing and phone banking organised centrally). The more voter ID is picked up on the doorstep, the better targeted these mailings and communications with local content tend to have more impact than those without.

This local content should reinforce the rewards of ‘relational politics’; the gains attached to the candidate having regular voter contact and a reputation as a local champion. That it is generally easier for incumbents to develop such reputations and that the Conservatives gained many new incumbents in 2010 creates a challenge that Labour needs quickly to confront.

Part of the response should be about Labour making a virtuous circle of the paradoxical square that has seen local campaigning become more centralised, through the development of national-local campaigns, as the importance of local campaigning has increased. This shouldn’t mean an end to direct mailings and phone banks co-ordinated centrally, but it should mean much more dynamic, real-time interaction between these activities and local activism.

Such a way of working constitutes an immense organisational hurdle that no party has yet surmounted. But there must be tremendous rewards for the first party that is able, for example, to let local activists know what mailings have been sent centrally to the doors they are knocking on and even to allow these local activists some say on the content of these mailings.

The post-bureaucratic state has its advocates. But this might be the stuff of a post-bureaucratic party. Perhaps, however, a nimble, interactive and adaptive bureaucracy, rather than the absence of one, better describes what is required. Much as Labour should be the advocate of an intelligent state, rather than either a big or small one.

This party bureaucracy should be adaptive to what is and isn’t happening nationally, as well as within each constituency. The televised leadership debates, to pick up on the campaign’s most prominent national events, famously seemed, in the final reckoning, to have changed nothing. The result was consistent with polling prior to the debates.

However, they greatly tested the adaptive capacities of party bureaucracies. Cleggmania, for example, disrupted planned Liberal Democrat direct mailings, which were intended to raise the party’s profile. It was no good introducing our Barack Obama, as I distinctly remember him being described, when the country knew who he was and now expected something meatier than an introduction.

The Obama comparisons came most freely from Liberal Democrats, of course. Some became particularly silly drunks having imbibed Cleggmania. Completely unwinnable seats pushed for visits from “Obama”; fuelled by the belief that these seats had become winnable. This “hubris”, as one senior Liberal Democrat described it, undermined the party’s ability to allocate activists, who became reluctant to leave their home constituencies in the usually misguided view that they were winnable, to seats where they would actually have had most effect.

Social media, like the leadership debates, was a dog that didn’t bark or, at least, didn’t bark with quite the volume or the style that its evangelists had prophesised. And nor was it the Sun wot won it; though David Cameron, the authors conclude: “has cause to be grateful for Rupert Murdoch’s support”.

This is a conclusion upon which Ed Miliband may reflect, like much else in an edition that lives up to the best traditions of the ‘Butler books’. Improving the adaptability of the Labour machine is certainly an urgent task  for Andy Burnham, his newly appointed general election co-ordinator.

“Theirs is to win if it kills them, but they’re just human with wives and children.”

Oddly enough, these lyrics from Race for the Prize, a brilliant song by the Flaming Lips, quite often occur to me when thinking of politicians. For example, when Andy Burnham recently described his selection as the Labour candidate in Leigh to Labour Uncut:

“I represent my home seat of Leigh. That often isn’t what people associate with a career politician. I went to Leigh when Laurence Cunliffe resigned. I lived back at home with my mum and dad, and basically worked on it for a year. It was pretty much a year where I campaigned solidly every weekend to win the nomination for Leigh.

“So nobody parachuted me in. Nobody gave me a ‘oh well, I’ll speak to this person, speak to that, all these doors will open’; none of that happened. I went up there, based myself there, knocked on every door of every member and won the Leigh nomination through grassroots campaigning. In many ways as a parallel to what I’m doing now in this leadership election. The establishment isn’t necessarily helping me; the media establishment, the union establishment. Even the Labour establishment. My connection is with the grassroots, ordinary members.”

Ok, Labour Uncut later filled in some details about his selection, as well as those of other Labour leadership contenders. But the sense of a quite lonely race for the prize for himself and for his community, from windy doorstep to windy doorstep, is evident in Burnham’s words; a sense that invariably seems absent from how politician’s are usually thought of. While this sense reflects the reality of many of the experiences of politicians, it is lost in the public perception amidst the dodgy expense claims, broken promises and general disillusionment with politicians and politics.   

Hopefully, Labour’s next leader can address this disillusionment. Someone who certainly has is Ed Rendell.  ”The most stunning turnaround in recent urban history” was how The New York Times characterised Rendell’s achievements as Mayor of Philadelphia. Yet, it wasn’t always like this for Rendell.

Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer for the City, an insider account of Rendell’s first term as Mayor, discusses the position in which Rendell found himself after the disastrous failure of his first attempt to become Mayor in 1987, which had followed a 7 year spell as District Attorney of Philadelphia.

“Those who knew him and saw the law firm that he worked at, Mesirov Gelman Jaffe Cramer and Jamieson, or saw him socially after work, could feel the anxiousness that still welled inside him, the bolts of energy still running through him, but with no place to go. He held court. He gave opinions, but fewer and fewer people were inclined to listen. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, hard not to think of him as one of those baseball players who after that great rookie season just fade away because the timing of the swing has gone sour.” 

This baseball parallel brings to mind – in my mind, at least - Morrissey’s Little Man, What Now? ”A star at eighteen and then – suddenly gone.” While Rendell may not be physically small, he must have felt small after his 1987 failure. It required great reserves of courage and single-mindedness – more important preconditions for his success, it would seem to me, than any talents - to raise himself from the rock bottom he was in to achieve what he eventually achieved for Philadelphia.

The race for the prize is tough, but Rendell is just human and he has a wife and child.

I had the piece below published on Labour Uncut on 28 July 2010:

Rahm Emanuel never wastes a crisis and neither does the Tory-Lib Dem government. The Thatcherite ends which this government use crises to advance would be anathema to President Obama’s chief of staff. Idealists who cheered Obama’s election have been frustrated by subsequent pragmatism. David Cameron, in contrast, has been much more of an ideologue as Prime Minister than previously; though one more concerned with the low cunning of making his beliefs real than with their principles.

Such an ideologue in Downing Street is more frightening than anything Labour has to offer. After a generation of New Labour, the contemporary meaning of Labour’s values needs restatement. However, the candidates’ visions of the socialist uplands are less important than resisting a PM who threatens the achievements of not just the last Labour government, but every Labour government.

“Dripping wet” was how right-wingers described Cameron a few years ago. The Harold MacMillan picture in his office seemed, in opposition, to prefigure a one-nation PM. His detoxification project accepted that mistrust of Thatcherism was holding back Tory electoral success; an understanding that every other Tory leader since Thatcher either didn’t share or was too weak to act upon. He was, consequently, the first of these leaders to make a determined pitch for the centre ground.

When this didn’t secure a majority government Cameron faced crisis. Tories who never accepted the need for repositioning felt vindicated. This wouldn’t have happened with a more solidly Thatcherite leader like David Davis, they thought. But this crisis created various opportunities.

First, Liberal Democrat cohabitation achieved a detoxification more profound than any previous. “If he agrees with Nick, then Dave can’t be so bad, can he?” Second, in acquiescing Clegg made his party human shields in Cameron’s public spending Blitzkrieg.

Still, what we might loosely call the Davis faction has never been wholly won over. They continue to attack the leadership, while Simon Hughes and other left-leaning Liberal Democrats do so from a different perspective. Being attacked from right and left makes Cameron appear reasonable and a creature of the centre ground, as does being leader of a coalition, with its attendant compromises and trade-offs.

While Cameron’s solid approval ratings suggest he is taken to be a pretty straight kind of guy, the substance of these compromises can be questioned. Raising the income tax threshold was once a Tory right policy. It is now debatable, given recent polling, whether the Alternative Vote would be to the Tory’s electoral disadvantage, if, as Kevin Meagher doubts, the referendum is even won at all. Certainly, the Bill which Clegg will pilot to secure this referendum contains proposals distinctly to the Tories’ advantage, such as reducing the number of MPs and the boundary review.

Clegg is undoubtedly being taken for a ride, but, as Peter Hoskin notes, he has transformed his party in ways that indicate willingly so. The small-state zeal of this transformation meant Danny Alexander didn’t hold George Osborne to the more even-handed trajectories for deficit reduction that the Liberal Democrats and Labour had proposed. The office of budget responsibility has confirmed that Labour’s plan would eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit over this parliament – George Osborne’s stated objective before the election. Yet he is executing £40bn of additional cuts. It requires blind faith in the capacities of private enterprise, once ‘liberated’ from the ‘dead hand’ of the state, to believe this wise.

The NHS White Paper proclaimed liberation, but it requires similar faith to be convincing. What is proposed, in giving such power to GPs, as the SMF’s David Furness notes, is “like asking your waiter to manage a restaurant. They might know what you want to eat but they won’t necessarily be any good at ordering stock, designing a menu or controlling the chef.”

What kind of faith sustains such action? The kind of faith that rashly and incompetently decimates the successful building schools for the future programme to fund the untried experiment of ‘free schools’. A faith in doctrinal conviction over the lessons of experience. A faith that isn’t conservative but Thatcherite.

This is a dangerous psychosis, which we must resist. But, as we do, we must avoid excessive defence of an imperfect status quo or being unrealistic about public finances. Cameron has proposed a new dividing line: “Is this Labour’s great new tactic, to be left defending the bureaucracy of PCTs and SHAs and all the quangos and all the bureaucrats, all of whom are paid vast salaries and huge pensions? They back the bureaucracy. We back the NHS.” We can expect this line to be run alongside the long-established coalition claim that our economic vandalism made cuts unavoidable.

Pat McFadden has highlighted the nonsense of this claim. Ed Balls has impressively opposed Michael Gove. Andy Burnham is equally forceful in taking on Andrew Lansley.  We need to join up the departmental dots and craft a narrative that exposes Cameron’s government across the piece. Joined-up opposition, if you will.

The deficit crisis is real. However, as McFadden has shown, there is a Labour response between Thatcherism and denial. While the government wants us to think differently, there are no crises in education and health. Nonetheless, for us to simply defend the status quo makes it easier for Cameron to caricature us as big state dinosaurs.

There is a Labour response between swivel-eyed, small-state evangelism and defending the status quo. This would distinguish public service reform grounded in past results from reform grounded in blind faith. The former builds upon 13 years of Labour success, and some disappointments, and the later senselessly risks all of these successes. A candidate able to convincingly deliver this response would have a strong claim both on leadership and the centre ground of British politics; the territory that Labour needs to dominate to return to government.

So, it wasn’t an April fool. Alan Shearer really is to be Newcastle manager. Nothing could have made “the best fans in the world” happier. But Shearer has rightly been critical of Mike Ashley. There must be doubt as to whether Shearer will remain as manager over the long-term if Ashley remains as owner of the club. 

Newcastle has previously given us “the people’s bank” – Northern Rock. Barcelona’s co-operative model of ownership is probably the closest that football has got to the people’s club. Andy Burnham has spoken warmly of this. So has Geoff Mulgan on the much smaller scale of Ebbsfleet United. If Ashley’s ownership is the bar to Shearer staying, then the obstacle to a long-term period of management from Shearer would be overcome by deploying Barcelona’s co-operative model and giving us the Premiership’s first people’s club. This might prove that Newcastle’s fans are, indeed, the best in the world.