Jonathan Todd

I had this on Labour Uncut yesterday. It was deemed a “must read” by Politics Home.

Stewart Lee describes David Cameron with his arm around Nick Clegg as being akin to “a bloke who has bred a prize pig”. The Liberal Democrats have been slaughtered to ten per cent in opinion polls and Cameron boasts of being “in a position in four years time where we win the general election and govern on our own”.

While Tories love this bullish talk, the plan for the “pigs” fight back is more obvious than that which will deliver Cameron this outcome. The NHS bill has shown what can be expected from the Liberal Democrats. Pick fights with their governing partners – even if this necessitates reneging on past commitments. Extract concessions. And present the outcomes as injecting Lib Dem sanity into the Tory madness.

In 2003, the Tories complained about the Liberal Democrats producing a “disreputable” campaign guide. It advised candidates to “be wicked, act shamelessly, stir endlessly”. The Tories might suspect that Lib Dem ministers have dusted it down. Chris Huhne seems eager to manoeuvre. He has attacked his Conservative colleagues as “rightwing ideologues”. He is, obviously, looking for a “win” on the environment.

Huhne’s constituency was Tory target seat number 12 last year. It is reported that Cameron will “not lift a finger to help” Huhne if he is found to have lied to the police. This disinclination may reflect bad feeling over the AV referendum. Huhne’s spoiling for a policy fight is unlikely to rebuild burning bridges.

Huhne retaining his seat through taking a joint Tory/Lib Dem ticket at the next election seems a diminished probability. As government policies are doing nothing to allow Cameron to make substantial inroads in the north of England, the prime minister looks intently upon Lib Dem seats like Huhne’s in the south.

With his scraps with government colleagues, Huhne seeks to retain his hold on his seat. Huhne won’t attack from the right in these inter-government confrontations. The Liberal Democrats are desperately trying to salvage their leftist identity from the wreckage of their entry into government. This boxes the Tories in to the right – limiting the extent to which the Cameron camp can be pitched on the centre.

Having devoured (but not properly understood) the Tony Blair books, this might unnerve Cameron. He wants to command the centre and shift it in his direction through reform, in contrast to the supposed failure of Blair’s first term. But nowhere in those books does it advise immediately firing out all your ideas, even if they are so half-baked they will inevitably fail to secure support and demand back tracking.

We know about the u-turns. The delayed white paper on public service reform also suggests that, while the Lib Dems are reduced to pettiness, the Tories are already scraping their ideas barrel. Tory ministers are risk-averse in assisting, because, as the likes of Andrew Lansley and Caroline Spelman attest, they will be hung out to dry if these risks don’t quickly come off.

There are threats and opportunities for Labour in these developments. We seem irrelevant when the debate plays out exclusively between two fractious governing parties. It is frustrating that, while it was long apparent that this was likely, the NHS bill has too often played out in this way. Huhne now threatens to extend this pattern to the environment. The need to insert ourselves into the national conversation places increased premiums on clear messaging and distinctiveness.

Senior Labour people insist that we “defend the record” of the last government. This cannot be at the expense of not learning the lessons of the last general election. We must not confuse babies with bathwaters in striking this balance. We’ve been too coy, for example, about the health gains we achieved by GP commissioning in government, which didn’t lose us any votes. Instead of being fearful of our own shadow, let’s take such good ideas to their logical conclusion. This won’t leave us in the same places as the government. It will, though, confirm Alan Milburn’s argument that only Labour can successfully reform public institutions.

Some examples of where this attitude might lead are: Labour believes that work should pay, so we want to rebalance taxation from income to wealth. Labour believes that power should be accountable to people, so we want a second chamber fully elected by PR. Labour believes that Britain is in Europe, so we will work constructively to create an EU that best enables the UK to adapt to twenty first century realities. Labour’s engagement with the EU is part of a belief in internationalism. This demands that we do not allow a narrow, ultimately self-defeating conception of national interest to stand between us and support for the kind of urgently needed reforms to global institutions championed by Mark Malloch Brown.

Advancement of these kinds of idea would show the country that we have the self-confidence to speak our truths about today’s biggest challenges. It would show the Lib Dems that if their core beliefs (on tax, the Lords, PR, Europe and global institutions) mean anything, that they could be better furthered under a Labour-led government than a Tory one. If we can secure the tactical objective of ensuring that Lib Dem MPs are inclined towards a Labour-led government, then the Tory/Lib Dem alliance cannot continue into a second parliament. If we can do this at the same time as achieving the strategic objectives of distinctiveness and relevance, then so much the better.

These strategic and tactical imperatives require candour about our beliefs and the policy conclusions to which they lead, rather than Clegg-bashing or any other form of personality driven politics.

Jonathan Todd is Labour Uncut’s economic columnist.

I wrote this recently for Labour Uncut.

“Pause, listen, reflect and improve”. That’s what David Cameron and Nick Clegg said they were going to do on the NHS bill. Most people know what these words mean. Cameron and Clegg don’t seem to, though.

The only thing that Clegg now reflects upon is how he can shore up his position as Liberal Democrat leader. With Chris Huhne and Tim Farron, two would-be assassins, both playing to his party’s gallery, he has reason to be worried. He sees the NHS as he now sees everything else: through the prism of his anxiety. For the NHS to relieve this, he needs to come to be seen as the man who saved it. The restorer of sanity subsequent to the Andrew Lansley-induced madness.

He wants “substantial, significant changes” to Lansley’s proposals. But the extraction of compromises is the least of the barriers standing in the way of him being re-born as Mr. NHS. He needs to explain away no Liberal Democrat MP voting against the bill at either first or second reading. Perhaps his MPs followed their whip because they thought the whole thing a Liberal Democrat idea. After all, that’s what Clegg argued not so long ago and, as John Redwood reminded Today listeners, the proposals are consistent with the Liberal Democrat manifesto.

Having broken promises on tuition fees and the depth and speed of cuts, Clegg’s attempt to reposition himself on the NHS bill is supremely opportunistic. Labour needs to expose this manoeuvre for the shallow gesture that it is. Only we have consistently opposed this bill and advocated workable reform in the NHS. The Liberal Democrats must not be allowed to steal our clothes.

Such theft would not be without risk for the prime minister. No government u-turn of such proportions can be without risk for its leader. It is indicative of the pickle into which he has allowed things to descend that Cameron now seems set to open this opportunity up to Clegg, particularly when his personal empathy with the NHS was central to his attempted detoxification of the Tories. Cameron may no longer be the man who loves the NHS if Clegg becomes the man who saved the NHS. It may make the “Thatcherite” label start to stick better on this somewhat Teflon prime minister.

We cannot allow the NHS debate to play out in terms of the politics between the governing parties. We need to make ourselves central to it. Ed Miliband’s speech to the RSA was helpful in this regard. It confirmed that we favour reform that works, not sticking our heads in the sand of the status quo. Our use of Commons debates can further assist.

Miliband is fond of saying “I get it”. The public needs to know that he gets the need to raise NHS productivity to maintain service standards in the context of the cost increases associated with society’s ageing. Obviously, real people don’t speak like this. But they don’t take NHS spending commitments alone to be virility symbols for the extent of a politician’s love for the NHS. They know that what is done with the money matters as much as the amount of money. And they also know that the country isn’t sitting on a bottomless pit of resources to devote to public services, and that tough choices, therefore, have to be made.

People are also worried about their own care and that of relatives, particularly the elderly and young. They want politicians to speak to these worries. But in ways that they consider realistic, given what they understand about the pressures on public expenditure.

The NHS in Cumbria shows that Labour reform works. It now shows that the facts on the ground are changing, even as the Lansley reform is supposedly paused. North Cumbria university hospitals NHS trust is to be taken over by or merged with another trust. This is because the current management has concluded that it cannot meet the strict financial criteria set to achieve the foundation status that the NHS bill requires it meet by 2014. This could well remove control of Cumberland infirmary in Carlisle and West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven from Cumbria – a curious form of localism. Try telling the 9,000 signatories on a petition organised by Labour MPs Tony Cunningham and Jamie Reed to maintain services at West Cumberland that the NHS Bill is paused.

Cumbria isn’t an isolated case. At PMQs recently, Labour’s Debbie Abrahams pointed out that the inception of cluster PCTs, which precede the GP consortia, including the Greater Manchester cluster PCT, was brought forward from 1 June to 3 May. The perception that significant swathes of the Lansley reforms are proceeding apace, irrespective of the pause that is meant to be in place, is encouraged by reports that the 50-strong “listening panel” set up to review them is stuffed with “yes men and women”. And, as the focus of the NHS is distracted, waiting times are rising.

Labour’s ground battle is to resist local changes brought about by the non-pause of the Lansley reforms. Labour’s air battle is to stop Clegg becoming the man who saved the NHS and Cameron being someone who gets the NHS. The war will be won when our policy review shows that not only does the government not have the right reforms, but that we do.

I had this on Labour Uncut today.

The longer Gordon Brown was prime minister, the harder it became, sadly, to picture him in post at the 2012 Olympics. His purchase on the future evaporated. Ed Miliband has to recover this to return to government. He has to convince that he has the answers to the challenges of 2015 and beyond. And personify these answers.

While his speech to the resolution foundation looked towards this, the past is always knocking incessant, trying to break through into the present. As Jim Murphy told the progress political school, in politics, the past is always the context, the future the contest. The spectre of Iraq hangs over Libya. The fiscal management of the last government colours arguments about the approach of this. In many areas – NHS, schools, welfare and, increasingly, foreign affairs – David Cameron presents himself as more heir to Blair than a return to the 1980s. Labour begs to differ. The public is uncertain.

What is not in doubt, however, is that the past has to be overcome to own the future. The 1997 victory couldn’t happen until Labour had outrun the shadow of its discontented winter. Tory detoxification hadn’t removed the stench of Thatcherism before 2010. That foul odour now emanates from Number Ten, in spite of Cameron needing Nick Clegg’s help to limp over the finishing line of the general election.

Cameron has hired a head of strategy, Andrew Cooper, who was convinced of the need to detoxify the Tories before he was. Cooper is determined to now complete this long march. Only when this journey has ended, liberal Tories like Cooper think, will a Tory majority come. Mainstream Tories, such as Tim Montgomerie, less abashed by association with Thatcher, disagree.

Clegg now blocks the route that Cooper wants to pursue. It will be difficult to avoid the narrative that anything progressive done by the government is a consequence of the Lib Dems. These actions would serve only to prop up Clegg, not detoxify the Tories.

So long as Margaret Thatcher is held in such low regard in the northern seats that the Tories need to form a majority, mainstream Toryism cannot own the future. Equally, liberal Toryism is compromised by the Lib Dems claiming any of their victories as their own. Mainstream Tories and liberal Tories may battle for the soul of Cameron and their party, but these factors mean that neither is capable of owning the future.

It doesn’t have to be this way for Ed Miliband. But, first, we have to move beyond our past. Voters felt, as Fiona MacTaggart conceded at conference last year, that we were “taking their money and giving it to people who are taking the piss”. This is no prospectus upon which to form a government.

Labour canvassers rarely field complaints that we let the state get too big. This isn’t how people tend to conceptualise things. The Tory charge of profligate Labour spending still stings, though, because too many people feel Labour took too much of their squeezed wages in taxation, with too little improvement in public services to show for it, while being too generous with those unprepared to graft as they do (namely, some welfare recipients and, less fairly, immigrants).

James Purnell argues that Miliband can neuter the Conservatives’ attack that Labour is spendaholic by committing that no new Labour policy will involve additional spending. He claims that this would redefine the political battleground. Rather than being reform versus spending, it would be good reform versus bad reform. The story of the Cumbrian NHS exemplifies the virtues of Labour reform over Tory reform. Such arguments have to be taken on and won.

Labour reform enables more to be done for less, which is integral to being fluent on the deficit, as is a compelling plan for economic growth. However, the economic argument isn’t simply about fiscal management and growing GDP, but raising wages unchanged in real terms since 2005. The biggest long-term challenges that the country faces – earning our way in an Asian century, decarbonisation, ageing, banks both too big to fail and save – are all bound up with this most bread and butter of issues.

More immediate changes can help: tax incentives to encourage wider payment of the living wage and use of smart meters; more advocacy of the kind that saw consumer focus earn households a £70m rebate in the week before it was callously axed. However, the squeeze is intimately connected with the advance of globalisation and the failure of public policy to keep pace.

To be social democratic is to be condemned to optimism about capacity for improvement. Yet, as a country, we are far from having found the policies to grasp all the opportunities and meet all the challenges of an ever more Asian-powered globalisation.

Ed Miliband needs such policy, and ways to present it that are doorstep-ready. The big society wasn’t so ready and has become synonymous with small-state Thatcherism. It is now a rhetorical cul-de-sac for Cameron. Miliband cannot, however, own the future by default.

Only when his blank pages are filled with policy that escapes big government perceptions and paints a believable picture of a Britain at ease in the global age of today and tomorrow will he be able to own the future. This will take time and be no easy task. So long as we are privately advancing in these regards, the right public posture is enough for now.

I had this on Labour Uncut before Christmas.

The front page of the Spectator Christmas special depicts Nick Clegg crushed between David Cameron’s foot and ice. This captures the conventional wisdom. Cameron is doing well out of the deal that created his government. Clegg isn’t; and Ed Miliband isn’t in sight. The Tories hover around 40 per cent. The Lib Dems have shrunk beneath 10 per cent. Labour leads these polls, but we are told that Miliband is insufficiently visible.

While Cameron may glide over the ice on The Spectator’s cover – just as he glided away from the bullets that Clegg took on tuition fees – this ice masks ideological differences in all three parties. The strategic questions are obvious. How should Cameron consolidate his dominance, Clegg recover and Miliband become more prominent? The answers, however, reveal deeper ideological fissures.

John Kampfner urges a bolder articulation of Clegg’s liberal beliefs in the face of the existential threat to his career and party:

“He has to produce a radical narrative that differs from the Tories’ ideological opposition to the notion of government as an economic actor, while maintaining his distance from the overtly statist instincts of Labour traditionalists”.

Clegg will campaign for AV, while his Tory ministerial colleagues defend the status quo. Kampfner demands, additionally, a full and distinctive articulation of liberal principles from Lib Dems in government.

The more principled Lib Dems have been thought those who stayed out of government, voted against tuition fees and who have been wooed by Miliband. Tim Farron leads this cadre from the backbenches, as Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 committee, leads what Tim Montgomerie calls mainstream Conservatives. Kampfner wants Clegg to prove that Lib Dem principles aren’t the exclusive preserve of the backbenches.

For Clegg to do this he needs more policy wins to justify his cohabitation with Cameron. However, these wins would threaten liberal conservatism, the counter point to mainstream conservatism. As a Cameronian minister put it to Daniel Finkelstein:

“The narrative might easily develop that anything progressive comes from the Lib Dems, and that is very dangerous to us”.

Liberal Conservatives, like Nike Boles, want Tory/Lib-Dem government to last into the next parliament. Maybe they see more to like in Clegg than Brady. However, the Conservative brand may retoxify (assuming it ever fully detoxifies) if they allow liberal conservatism to seem only capable of delivering progressive outcomes in combination with Cleggite liberalism. The Lib Dem ideological renewal that Kampfner wants is not, therefore, without risk for Cameroons. Particularly if this renewal combines with louder and more organised complaints from mainstream Conservatives about dilution of Conservative principles on tax, crime, immigration and Europe, the need for liberal Conservatives to flesh out a principled argument for continued Tory alignment with the Lib Dems may become more pressing.

Two-party government is unusual in this country. Two parties clearly setting out ideological differences in government is more unusual still. The likes of Farron and Brady may sit on the same side of the House but they are sure to make ideological arguments of quite different flavours over the next year. Kampfner illustrates the pressure Clegg is already under to demonstrate the ideological consistency of decisions taken in government. Cameronian ministers may come to face similar pressure. How will they react?

In last year’s Spectator Christmas special James Forsyth wrote:

“The most important thing Cameron should think about over Christmas is why he wants to be prime minister. As the Times — normally favourable to Mr Cameron — opined last week, he has not yet conveyed a clear sense of this to the public”.

The failure of the Conservatives to win an outright majority shows that Cameron never managed this. Abandonment of Conservative principles is unconvincingly blamed for this by mainstream Conservatives. Cameron displayed agility in forming a government having failed to secure a Conservative majority. But it remains bizarrely unclear why he wants to be prime minister. It may be out of belief in the same things as Brady. It may be out of belief in the same things as Clegg. Or does Cameron stand for a liberal Conservatism that is distinct from both Brady’s mainstream Conservatism and Clegg’s liberalism?

He seems likely to believe whatever is necessary for him to remain PM for as long as possible. Undoubtedly, there is scope for Miliband – leader of the most ideologically united of the three parties – to make mischief. He should build bridges with disenfranchised Lib Dems. And encourage the disgruntlement of mainstream Conservatives.

But, first, this Christmas, Miliband should answer the question that Cameron didn’t answer last Christmas: Why does he want to be prime minister? He doesn’t want to be prime minister to make unhappy Lib Dems feel better. He doesn’t want to be prime minister to resurrect policies rejected by voters in May.

He wants to be prime minister to prove that Labour’s best instincts are in tune with the best instincts of the British people. That when the native genius of these people combines with the liberating force of Labour government, great things happen. Finding a way of successfully communicating this, and embedding Labour’s authenticity, is a more important strategic challenge than the tactical games of pulling at the ties that bind the Tories and Lib Dems together. This is, fundamentally, about ideology.

I wrote this in Labour Uncut recently:

For all Nick Clegg’s slightly vague talk of “giving the party with the biggest mandate the chance to govern” it wasn’t hard, given opinion polls, to see a Tory/Lib Dem government as a potential outcome throughout the general election. I warned Westmorland and Lonsdale that they might vote Liberal Democrat and end up with such a government. They didn’t listen. I was less surprised by the government we ended up with than the extent to which the motivations of my Liberal Democrat opponent, Tim Farron, recently elected president of his party, seemed so close to those of Labourites.

He professes “anger at the injustice” of Margaret Thatcher. At hustings he’d offer impassioned rhetoric on whatever social problem was most germane. Whether this was the struggles of hill sheep farmers or global warning, he challenged market iniquities. His stump speech tells of watching a repeat of Cathy Come Home as a teenager and being so compelled to do something about the injustice he’d witnessed that he decided to use his pocket money to join a political party instead of buying a Smiths single. While he was far more profligate in Biblical quotations than me, at hustings we battled to colonise the language of poverty and oppression.

Farron’s constituency once belonged to Tory grandee, Michael Jopling, whom Alan Clark famously recorded saying of Michael Heseltine that “his trouble is that he had to buy his own furniture”. Jopling stood down in 1997, bequeathing Tim Collins a majority of over 16,000. Collins was defeated eight years later by a candidate fired by rage at a Prime Minister in whose government Jopling served.

Farron first contested the seat in 2001, when Collins was a shoo-in. The next year he switched jobs to work in the constituency and at some stage – long before it was thought a potential site of a Tory “decapitation” – he settled his family locally. All of this suggests reserves of self-belief and a willingness to play the long game.

He may sometimes sound like a lost member of our tribe, but part of the reason for Farron turning a safe Tory seat into a solid Liberal Democrat one has been a ruthless crushing of Labour. His annihilation of me came after all Labour councillors had been vanquished. As considerable Tory support remains in the more rural parts of the constituency, which have recently formed the backdrop to Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan’s The Trip, he has assiduously worked wards that were once Labour.

Good Labour councillors have been crushed by Farron’s machine. While it would delight me to see these councillors returned to office, Farron represents a different kind of Liberal Democrat from, say, David Laws. In effect, they are now in different parties.

As Tim Montgomerie observes, this is a governing ensemble in three parts:

the almost indistinguishable front benches;

the Tory right;

the left of the Liberal Democrats who, in their hearts, would still have preferred a deal with Labour.

Farron is one of the leaders of the latter and Laws seeks – with, for example, his crass dig at Ed Miliband for buying a round of teas – only to help the former.

The difference between being a human shield happily (Laws) and begrudgingly (Farron) may seem trivial when you are protecting a prime minister as destructive as she who inspired Farron to go into politics. But there is significance in the distinction. The willing human shields will be appealed to by Cameronites like Nick Boles who intend the Tory/Lib-Dem alliance to endure beyond this parliament. Longevity in this axis is to be feared by Labour.

Immediately upon becoming Lib Dem president, however, Tim Farron dismissed the notion as “absolutely stark raving mad”.

Labour might build upon this by following the advice offered by Liberal Democrat David Hall-Matthews in Renewal:

“There might be more to be gained for Labour by trying to woo the Lib Dems – or at least by highlighting their (huge) differences from the Tories, rather than condemning their similarities. It would be a disaster for the left if a 2015 balanced parliament created the possibility of a clear Lib-Lab majority but five years of mutual carping had poisoned the well”.

It would be in tune with the post-tribal sensibilities of the public for Labour to be upfront about where we can agree with the Liberal Democrats and where we can’t. This should uncover a considerable basis of common ground, potentially on issues like a land tax and a second chamber elected by full PR, which the Lib Dems share with Labour and which neither can share with the Tories. The election of a social democrat like Farron as president and quotations like that from Hall-Matthews indicate that there are plenty of Liberal Democrats looking for common ground. For them, perpetual governance by the Boles-Law class is almost as nightmarish as it is for us.

We shouldn’t forget, and should continue to resist, the damage that Farron has wrought on a CLP. We should be suspicious of his ambitions (having been told he was crazy to think he could beat Collins, he may now secretly think he can lead the Lib Dems to be the largest leftist force). We should expect him to over-egg the progressive credentials of the Liberal Democrats.

But we should probe these credentials fairly and seek – rather than firing endless rounds into the human shields – to build bridges and back-channels with those of Farron’s bent. This will expose the greatest enemy: David Cameron. And we may even discover that Farron got Stockholm syndrome not six months ago but soon after watching Cathy Come Home.