Showing posts with label party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label party. Show all posts
Thursday 19 January 2023
Saturday 6 August 2022
The people about to choose Britain’s next prime minister
Despite rumours to the contrary, the Tory faithful are exactly what you might imagine writes The Economist
It might be a queue for Marylebone Cricket Club, or perhaps an upmarket prostate clinic. There is ample linen. There are panama hats and pink cheeks and pink trousers; there is white hair and bald heads and a lurking suspicion that someone in the vicinity might bear the title “Major”. There are few women. There is almost no one, except the staff, who is not white.
The identity of the Tory party membership is a matter of national importance. The contest between Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, to become the leader of the Conservative Party will also decide Britain’s next prime minister. The franchise for this choice belongs to members of the Tory party, at least 160,000-odd of them. Probably. For no one can or will say how many Tory party members there actually are.
What is clear is that they are gathering. In Exeter and Eastbourne, in Cardiff and Cheltenham, Tories are mobilising to attend the hustings for their new leader. Go to these hustings and you can see them queuing, punctually, outside. Some say that the Tory faithful are not what you might think. The queues put paid to that idea: the Tories are precisely what you might think.
According to research from academics at Queen Mary University and Sussex University, 68% of Tory members are over 50; 96% are white; 21% belong to the National Trust or English Heritage; 66% are male (see chart). They are not quite as aristocratic as the panamas and perceptions might suggest: policemen and teachers are among those queuing to get into the hustings. Women are manifestly in the minority. Many are unwilling to speak to a journalist, scattering like startled fish when approached and proffering their husbands as spokesperson instead. The term “Tory wife” appears to be less misogyny than justifiable taxonomy.
Tories may be mockable. That does not mean that they are malignant (or that unusual for members of political parties; Labour’s are 93% white). It is a trope that deviancy lurks behind the upstanding Tory exterior. George Orwell wrote that for a murder to make a truly entertaining news story it should have been perpetrated by a pious Christian preacher or a “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch”. Edward Heath, a former Tory prime minister, felt his party consisted of “shits, bloody shits and fucking shits”.
But the mood at the hustings is benevolent. Mike Trevor, working at the Exeter event as a security guard (and one of the few non-white people there), considers the Tories a “very easy crowd”. Mr Trevor usually does arena concerts. Tories, he says, are “very nice” to deal with. Another guard pulls a face: some members had become stroppy when she took away their water bottles. In the queue, Tories—polite, if prone to the odd harrumph—shuffle forwards.
The hustings do reveal two misconceptions about the Tory party race. The first is the idea that it is about Mr Sunak and Ms Truss. There are, as it were, three of us in these hustings. Many members are there less to elect a new leader than to mourn their old one—and to berate his killer. As one Tory, a fan of Mr Sunak, regretfully observes, in the assassination of Boris Johnson Mr Sunak has been cast as Brutus. On this reading Mr Johnson’s fall was not caused by his own incompetence and duplicity; it was caused by Mr Sunak. It is notable that the largest cheer of the evening in Exeter comes when, during a montage film of past Tory highlights, Mr Johnson pops up celebrating his 2019 election victory. Banquo’s ghost rarely made a better entrance.
The other misconception involves a confusion over conjunctions. Ms Truss is currently well ahead of Mr Sunak—the favourite among mps and the public—in polling of Tory members. A recent YouGov poll put her support at 58%, and his at just 29%. Surveying such a small, opaque electorate is hard but commentators still wonder how, “despite” jibes that she is “bonkers” and a “human hand grenade”, this lead apparently yawns. Speak to Tories at the hustings and it is clear that with Ms Truss—as with Mr Johnson before her—the correct conjunction is not “despite” but “because”. Ms Truss may be “bonkers”, says Colin Trudgeon, a Tory member, but “I love a bit of bonkers. Boris…was nutty as a fruitcake.”
Inside the venues, preconceptions about the candidates are generally confirmed. Ms Truss is, as a now-famous clip in which she discussed British cheese made clear, a friend of the full stop. She peppers her speeches with them. Often even stopping. Midway through a sentence. For effect. She discusses emotive issues: Vladimir Putin, fishermen and proper crops. In our fields.
Mr Sunak, meanwhile, is a man who speaks in subclauses. Sentences and ideas accumulate; complexity is embraced; nuance noted. He discusses corporation tax with enthusiasm. Neither fully wows the audience. Afterwards, Tory members who speak to your correspondent consider that Mr Sunak was more “statesmanlike”. But inside it was Ms Truss’s pauses for which they whooped more.
It might be a queue for Marylebone Cricket Club, or perhaps an upmarket prostate clinic. There is ample linen. There are panama hats and pink cheeks and pink trousers; there is white hair and bald heads and a lurking suspicion that someone in the vicinity might bear the title “Major”. There are few women. There is almost no one, except the staff, who is not white.
The identity of the Tory party membership is a matter of national importance. The contest between Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, to become the leader of the Conservative Party will also decide Britain’s next prime minister. The franchise for this choice belongs to members of the Tory party, at least 160,000-odd of them. Probably. For no one can or will say how many Tory party members there actually are.
What is clear is that they are gathering. In Exeter and Eastbourne, in Cardiff and Cheltenham, Tories are mobilising to attend the hustings for their new leader. Go to these hustings and you can see them queuing, punctually, outside. Some say that the Tory faithful are not what you might think. The queues put paid to that idea: the Tories are precisely what you might think.
According to research from academics at Queen Mary University and Sussex University, 68% of Tory members are over 50; 96% are white; 21% belong to the National Trust or English Heritage; 66% are male (see chart). They are not quite as aristocratic as the panamas and perceptions might suggest: policemen and teachers are among those queuing to get into the hustings. Women are manifestly in the minority. Many are unwilling to speak to a journalist, scattering like startled fish when approached and proffering their husbands as spokesperson instead. The term “Tory wife” appears to be less misogyny than justifiable taxonomy.
Tories may be mockable. That does not mean that they are malignant (or that unusual for members of political parties; Labour’s are 93% white). It is a trope that deviancy lurks behind the upstanding Tory exterior. George Orwell wrote that for a murder to make a truly entertaining news story it should have been perpetrated by a pious Christian preacher or a “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch”. Edward Heath, a former Tory prime minister, felt his party consisted of “shits, bloody shits and fucking shits”.
But the mood at the hustings is benevolent. Mike Trevor, working at the Exeter event as a security guard (and one of the few non-white people there), considers the Tories a “very easy crowd”. Mr Trevor usually does arena concerts. Tories, he says, are “very nice” to deal with. Another guard pulls a face: some members had become stroppy when she took away their water bottles. In the queue, Tories—polite, if prone to the odd harrumph—shuffle forwards.
The hustings do reveal two misconceptions about the Tory party race. The first is the idea that it is about Mr Sunak and Ms Truss. There are, as it were, three of us in these hustings. Many members are there less to elect a new leader than to mourn their old one—and to berate his killer. As one Tory, a fan of Mr Sunak, regretfully observes, in the assassination of Boris Johnson Mr Sunak has been cast as Brutus. On this reading Mr Johnson’s fall was not caused by his own incompetence and duplicity; it was caused by Mr Sunak. It is notable that the largest cheer of the evening in Exeter comes when, during a montage film of past Tory highlights, Mr Johnson pops up celebrating his 2019 election victory. Banquo’s ghost rarely made a better entrance.
The other misconception involves a confusion over conjunctions. Ms Truss is currently well ahead of Mr Sunak—the favourite among mps and the public—in polling of Tory members. A recent YouGov poll put her support at 58%, and his at just 29%. Surveying such a small, opaque electorate is hard but commentators still wonder how, “despite” jibes that she is “bonkers” and a “human hand grenade”, this lead apparently yawns. Speak to Tories at the hustings and it is clear that with Ms Truss—as with Mr Johnson before her—the correct conjunction is not “despite” but “because”. Ms Truss may be “bonkers”, says Colin Trudgeon, a Tory member, but “I love a bit of bonkers. Boris…was nutty as a fruitcake.”
Inside the venues, preconceptions about the candidates are generally confirmed. Ms Truss is, as a now-famous clip in which she discussed British cheese made clear, a friend of the full stop. She peppers her speeches with them. Often even stopping. Midway through a sentence. For effect. She discusses emotive issues: Vladimir Putin, fishermen and proper crops. In our fields.
Mr Sunak, meanwhile, is a man who speaks in subclauses. Sentences and ideas accumulate; complexity is embraced; nuance noted. He discusses corporation tax with enthusiasm. Neither fully wows the audience. Afterwards, Tory members who speak to your correspondent consider that Mr Sunak was more “statesmanlike”. But inside it was Ms Truss’s pauses for which they whooped more.
Sunday 10 July 2022
Friday 1 July 2022
The parallels between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn
How did the Conservatives become Corbynites asks Bagehot in The Economist
Switch the names, change a few dates and squint a little, and the potted biographies of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn look very similar. After bohemian childhoods in the English countryside and stints at private schools, each makes his home in Islington, cycles a lot and marries thrice (to a much younger spouse on the third occasion). A career in politics is spent on the fringes of their respective parties, communicating with their most loyal fans via columns in the Daily Telegraph (for Mr Johnson) and the Morning Star (for Mr Corbyn).
Then, abruptly, each finds himself thrust into the leadership by party members frustrated about their wishes being ignored. In the case of Labour’s selectocracy, the desire was for unashamed socialism. Their Conservative cousins yearned for a proper Brexit. As leaders, both are written off by commentators and rivals alike before enjoying a surprise triumph in an election. In the 2017 general election Mr Corbyn was expected to be steamrollered by Theresa May, Mr Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister; instead the Conservatives lost their majority. Two years later Mr Johnson did pulverise Mr Corbyn, winning the Conservatives’ largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher.
If Mr Johnson’s ascent has been oddly similar to Mr Corbyn’s rise, so too may be his demise. James Johnson (no relation), a pollster who worked for Mrs May, argues Mr Johnson is the Conservative Corbyn: an unpopular leader, dragging towards defeat a party that is split between those deluded enough to support him and those too impotent to stop him. The problems that beset Labour during the Corbyn years are now swallowing the Conservatives.
It starts with the manner of their elections to the leadership. Just like Mr Corbyn, Mr Johnson is not a creature of the parliamentary party. Mr Corbyn derived his authority from Labour members. In 2016 he lost a confidence vote among his mps, yet shamelessly stayed on. Mr Johnson claims his legitimacy from the 14m people who voted Conservative at the election in 2019. The fact that 41% of Conservative mps opposed him in a confidence vote in June can therefore be dismissed. That creates a surreal situation in which two-thirds of the House of Commons would rather the prime minister was gone. Constitutionally, it is a mess. But Mr Johnson cares little about such disorder.
Delusion has sunk in among Mr Johnson’s remaining acolytes. In the wake of two dire by-election defeats on June 23rd, Tory flunkeys were reduced to arguing that the Conservatives won more votes across both seats, akin to a relegated football manager pointing out his team’s sturdy goal difference. Such derangement has echoes of Labour figures in 2019 who, in the wake of their worst result since 1935, claimed that the party had “won the argument”.
The ineptitude of his internal enemies was the main reason Mr Corbyn stayed in power. When a leadership challenge was launched Mr Corbyn’s opponents alighted on Owen Smith, then the mp for Pontypridd, as a candidate. His most notable moment in the campaign came when he accidentally implied he had a 29-inch penis. He lost. Mr Johnson is similarly blessed when it comes to his enemies. Conservative plotters lumbered into a poorly timed leadership contest at the start of June, a few weeks before Mr Johnson’s electoral popularity was found badly wanting in the by-elections. Organising another crack at him will take time.
In each case, some mps stay loyal because they have no prospects under another leader. Some of the 2019 intake of Conservative mps are lucky to be employed, never mind in Parliament. Mr Corbyn introduced the world to Richard Burgon, an mp whose hidden talents remained just that during a brief foray onto the front bench. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary and Mr Johnson’s staunchest ally, may be the most successful novelist in cabinet since Disraeli, but the comparisons end there.
Mr Corbyn and Mr Johnson also share an ability to drive opponents to near insanity. Mr Johnson seems sometimes to be regarded as the first politician ever to tell fibs in office, when he is just the latest to do so. When home secretary, for example, Mrs May launched a salvo at the concept of human rights after someone could not be deported “because—and I am not making this up—he had a pet cat”. (Reader, she was making it up.) Likewise, Mr Corbyn threw out a range of often reasonable, if offbeat, policies such as increased provision of free school meals or free broadband, which generated disproportionately angry reactions. Rage at their faults blinded opponents to the qualities of both men; it is impossible to understand an enemy if you cannot appreciate his appeal.
Jeremy Johnson
Yet the critics are also right to be furious. Mr Corbyn did, eventually, lead his party to electoral destruction. The Labour leader was, notoriously, the dimmest member of the party’s left-wing rump, with noxious views on everything from anti-Semitism to Russia. Voters sniffed that out. Likewise, Mr Johnson is manifestly unsuited to the job of prime minister. Brexit, which Mr Johnson did more than any other politician to bring about, has been a slow-moving disaster, throttling the British economy just as its critics warned.
Such vindication, however, is worth little on its own. And as any Labour mp can confirm, changing leader—even an unpopular one—does not solve everything. Under his aegis Mr Corbyn’s critics argued the party would be 20 points ahead of the then wobbling Conservatives with any other leader. It is now three years since Mr Corbyn stepped down as leader. Despite the backdrop of an unpopular prime minister, police investigations into Downing Street and rocketing inflation, Labour cannot even sustain a double-digit lead in the polls. Allies of Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Corbyn’s successor as party leader, blame “long Corbyn” for this slack performance. At the dispatch box Mr Johnson brings up Mr Corbyn whenever he can. When the time comes, Labour will happily repay the favour. Long Boris may linger, too.
Switch the names, change a few dates and squint a little, and the potted biographies of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn look very similar. After bohemian childhoods in the English countryside and stints at private schools, each makes his home in Islington, cycles a lot and marries thrice (to a much younger spouse on the third occasion). A career in politics is spent on the fringes of their respective parties, communicating with their most loyal fans via columns in the Daily Telegraph (for Mr Johnson) and the Morning Star (for Mr Corbyn).
Then, abruptly, each finds himself thrust into the leadership by party members frustrated about their wishes being ignored. In the case of Labour’s selectocracy, the desire was for unashamed socialism. Their Conservative cousins yearned for a proper Brexit. As leaders, both are written off by commentators and rivals alike before enjoying a surprise triumph in an election. In the 2017 general election Mr Corbyn was expected to be steamrollered by Theresa May, Mr Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister; instead the Conservatives lost their majority. Two years later Mr Johnson did pulverise Mr Corbyn, winning the Conservatives’ largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher.
If Mr Johnson’s ascent has been oddly similar to Mr Corbyn’s rise, so too may be his demise. James Johnson (no relation), a pollster who worked for Mrs May, argues Mr Johnson is the Conservative Corbyn: an unpopular leader, dragging towards defeat a party that is split between those deluded enough to support him and those too impotent to stop him. The problems that beset Labour during the Corbyn years are now swallowing the Conservatives.
It starts with the manner of their elections to the leadership. Just like Mr Corbyn, Mr Johnson is not a creature of the parliamentary party. Mr Corbyn derived his authority from Labour members. In 2016 he lost a confidence vote among his mps, yet shamelessly stayed on. Mr Johnson claims his legitimacy from the 14m people who voted Conservative at the election in 2019. The fact that 41% of Conservative mps opposed him in a confidence vote in June can therefore be dismissed. That creates a surreal situation in which two-thirds of the House of Commons would rather the prime minister was gone. Constitutionally, it is a mess. But Mr Johnson cares little about such disorder.
Delusion has sunk in among Mr Johnson’s remaining acolytes. In the wake of two dire by-election defeats on June 23rd, Tory flunkeys were reduced to arguing that the Conservatives won more votes across both seats, akin to a relegated football manager pointing out his team’s sturdy goal difference. Such derangement has echoes of Labour figures in 2019 who, in the wake of their worst result since 1935, claimed that the party had “won the argument”.
The ineptitude of his internal enemies was the main reason Mr Corbyn stayed in power. When a leadership challenge was launched Mr Corbyn’s opponents alighted on Owen Smith, then the mp for Pontypridd, as a candidate. His most notable moment in the campaign came when he accidentally implied he had a 29-inch penis. He lost. Mr Johnson is similarly blessed when it comes to his enemies. Conservative plotters lumbered into a poorly timed leadership contest at the start of June, a few weeks before Mr Johnson’s electoral popularity was found badly wanting in the by-elections. Organising another crack at him will take time.
In each case, some mps stay loyal because they have no prospects under another leader. Some of the 2019 intake of Conservative mps are lucky to be employed, never mind in Parliament. Mr Corbyn introduced the world to Richard Burgon, an mp whose hidden talents remained just that during a brief foray onto the front bench. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary and Mr Johnson’s staunchest ally, may be the most successful novelist in cabinet since Disraeli, but the comparisons end there.
Mr Corbyn and Mr Johnson also share an ability to drive opponents to near insanity. Mr Johnson seems sometimes to be regarded as the first politician ever to tell fibs in office, when he is just the latest to do so. When home secretary, for example, Mrs May launched a salvo at the concept of human rights after someone could not be deported “because—and I am not making this up—he had a pet cat”. (Reader, she was making it up.) Likewise, Mr Corbyn threw out a range of often reasonable, if offbeat, policies such as increased provision of free school meals or free broadband, which generated disproportionately angry reactions. Rage at their faults blinded opponents to the qualities of both men; it is impossible to understand an enemy if you cannot appreciate his appeal.
Jeremy Johnson
Yet the critics are also right to be furious. Mr Corbyn did, eventually, lead his party to electoral destruction. The Labour leader was, notoriously, the dimmest member of the party’s left-wing rump, with noxious views on everything from anti-Semitism to Russia. Voters sniffed that out. Likewise, Mr Johnson is manifestly unsuited to the job of prime minister. Brexit, which Mr Johnson did more than any other politician to bring about, has been a slow-moving disaster, throttling the British economy just as its critics warned.
Such vindication, however, is worth little on its own. And as any Labour mp can confirm, changing leader—even an unpopular one—does not solve everything. Under his aegis Mr Corbyn’s critics argued the party would be 20 points ahead of the then wobbling Conservatives with any other leader. It is now three years since Mr Corbyn stepped down as leader. Despite the backdrop of an unpopular prime minister, police investigations into Downing Street and rocketing inflation, Labour cannot even sustain a double-digit lead in the polls. Allies of Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Corbyn’s successor as party leader, blame “long Corbyn” for this slack performance. At the dispatch box Mr Johnson brings up Mr Corbyn whenever he can. When the time comes, Labour will happily repay the favour. Long Boris may linger, too.
Saturday 14 May 2022
Friday 13 August 2021
Sunday 1 December 2019
Tuesday 25 February 2014
The Workers' party? That's us, say Tories in bid to rebrand
'Workers' party' will be used to describe Conservatives as David Cameron tries to rid Tories of their image as guardians of rich
Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps will say: "The Conservatives are the Workers’ party and we are on your side.” Photograph: Christopher Thomond
They are two words David Cameron's ancestors would more often have put together to describe a summer shindig for the employees on their estates.
But the words "Workers' party" will now be used to describe the Conservatives as Cameron tries to rid the Tories of their image as the guardians of the rich.
Grant Shapps, the party chairman, will stand alongside Sir John Major, the former champion of the "classless society", to announce that the Tories are now determined to show they want to spread – and not defend – privilege.
Speaking at the new Conservative campaign headquarters, the Tory chairman will say: "The Conservatives are the Workers' party and we are on your side."
The name of the Workers' party has a long, if less than noble, history. It was the moniker taken by former supporters of the Official IRA, which split from the Provisional IRA in 1969, when they broke from paramilitarism in the 1970s. Provisionals refer to the Officials as "stickies".
There is also the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' party, which rails against capitalism in the west and used to campaign against the "state capitalism" of the USSR.
The Tories are depicting themselves as the Workers' Party as they try to reach out to blue collar workers. Tory strategists believe that the only way to win a majority, by increasing the party's vote in the north of England and in the Midlands, is by reaching out to voters who may see the Conservatives as the party of the rich – hence the repositioning exercise.
Shapps has decided to go some way to accepting a proposal by the campaigning backbench MP Robert Halfon for the Tories to rename themselves the Workers' party. In a Sun article, Halfon said the party should replace its green oak tree logo with a ladder.
The Tory chairman will keep the party's name but will then describe the Conservatives in the next breath as the "Workers' party".
In his speech, extracts of which were released to the Daily Mail, Shapps will say: "Sir John Major campaigned for what he called a 'classless society, and I would argue this is the society we are fighting for in government today: a Britain where it doesn't matter who your parents are, where you can go as far as your talents and hard work will take you, and where work – rather than benefits – is what pays."
In a sign of the impact of the Tories' general election campaign chief Lynton Crosby, Shapps will release a five point pledge card modelled on the New Labour pledge card of 1997 which sets out the ideas for Britain's "long term economic plan".
The pledges, released to the Daily Mail, are: reducing the deficit, cutting income tax and freezing fuel duty, backing small business to create more jobs, capping welfare and reducing immigration; and delivering the best schools.
Shapps will say of Major: "Imagine a young kid growing up in inner city London – just a few miles from here. His mum and dad are working, but not very rich, trying to pay the bills.
"This young man was not particularly academic. He quit school at 16 and struggled to get on. So let me ask you something: what did the Conservative Party have to offer someone like that? I'll tell you. That young man's name is John Major, and the Conservative Party made him Prime Minister … His life is a symbol of our party. It shows whose side we are on."
The remarks by the Tory chair came as Downing Street did little to distance itself from a report in the Daily Telegraph that Cameron will give an undertaking during the general election campaign not to enter into another coalition even if he falls short of an overall majority. A No 10 source said: "The prime minister has made clear he is going all out for a Conservative majority."
Thursday 26 September 2013
Party politics needs to loosen up – the rest of us have
'Justine Thornton’s dress was deemed OK. Whose agenda is this?' Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Sorry I haven't had time to prepare this properly. I haven't been coached for weeks by film directors in how to walk and talk, and say: "Here's the thing." This is not written by a team so I can only react passively to Ed Miliband's hard-twerking speech because conference season commands passivity for the few, irrelevance for the many.
Not that you would know this from the media who are sure that a new kind of socialism is stalking the land or that power blackouts are imminent if anyone votes Labour.
What is new and modern and very American about these rallies – and so many Americans have been hired in as consultants – is this concentration on the leader himself and how long he can talk for. Lauded as huge successes at the time, most people, and I am one, find these speeches inherently boring. The last time I heard a good speech was at a fringe meeting.
Still the consensus is that Ed is not as vegan as we feared and put some meat on the bones of opposition. His wife, Justine Thornton, who is more than a dress, had to wear a dress,which was deemed OK. Whose agenda is this?
Against the jubilation and "modernisation", membership of all parties is plummeting because the relationship of the leadership to the member is simply one-way. The spin, the choreographed applause, the unlikely music, the stage-managed reaction. And that is if you are actually there. Labour, of all parties, could have some relationship with anti-fracking, anti-fascist or anti–hospital closure activists but it doesn't. Activism operates separately to the hierarchies of all the parties.
During conference season, the media simply reinforce this essentially passive relationship to politics. We are merely the audience who will judge performances, much as we would Strictly Come Dancing. The establishment's refusal to examine its own role in this top-down process again ignores the reality: the era of mass party membership is over. Most people do not want to sit and be bored to death by endless speeches. Ukip functions not only as coded racism but as a protest against the old hierarchies.
The actual organisation of political parties is not a sexy topic and one that only a tiny minority of people who are in them want to address. There are apparently bigger issues than democracy being utterly dysfunctional now.
But no matter how near Ed got to saying the S word – socialism – the personality-led, top-down, private schoolboy way of politics is failing fast. In geek-speak we need to replace vertical structures with horizontal. Party politics has become ever more rigid over the years. Blair dispensed with cabinet and had a sofa government, Brown and Damian McBride, it appears had sauvignon government. We end up with bigger and bigger decisions being made by fewer people, some of them unelected.
Whether a voter or even a party member, one's relationship is subservient. No party has properly embraced social media and sees how it may help them talk to "real" people. Miliband's Twitter feed has the passion of a dead potplant. And yes, I know it's not him really, but why bother? Politicians can simply pronounce or engage. For if you are asking people to join something, what do they get in return beyond clapping policy delivered from on high and delivering flyers?
The old-fashioned nature of conference season is a total turn-off. Do you want to see celebrities laughing at bad jokes, "well-crafted" speeches, media saturation or are you completely sick of the annual spectacle that reminds us of how unrepresentative, representative democracy is?
I have no truck with any organisation that won't challenge this newly invented "tradition" of these cloned guys who have to present their wives in nice frocks. I want nothing to do with the continuing dominance of the privately schooled over the rest of us. I don't want to be governed by people who have never made mistakes, never had the "wrong" kind of sex or taken drugs. Party politics and how it presents its leaders has become more and more straight, while social attitudes have loosened.
Imagine a Ted Heath now. No wife? No frock? Gosh, they fret about diversity but the current structures cannot produce anything that resembles the actual makeup of this country.
Changing the system is the big one, but why does everyone have to lower their expectations the minute they join a party? The most radical thing Miliband said was about giving 16-year-olds the vote. By God do they need some new blood.
But we also need new ways to organise. I propose a looser, less top-down party. Uslut. In my party, we would meet when we felt like it. We would do politics differently, though that makes it sound like a dating site. Still, we have to finance it somehow.
We will hammer out some policies as and when we get some signings. Personally, I want an English parliament and nationalised energy companies. We would challenge the left and the right. We wouldn't have "women's issues" because women's issues are everyone's issues. We would be women and men and everything in between. Usluts may not clean behind the fridge and we may not win power. But we would have an actual party trying.
Tuesday 9 July 2013
Looking for a party funding scandal? Try David Cameron's Conservatives
We know how much Unite gives Labour, but finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is more difficult
Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
I've just been reading about a political party in hock to shadowy donors who enjoy easy access to its leadership and untold influence over its policies. It's scandalous stuff. That's right: I've just been reading about David Cameron's Conservative party.
Few activities are more congenial to the British commentariat than an afternoon's fox-hunting that can be moralised away as "grownup" debate. So it is with Ed Miliband and Len McCluskey. Even as they fire upon Ed for not being his brother, the pundits insist their real subject is party funding and who runs British politics. Yet mentions of the Tories' paymasters are inevitably brief and come with the gloss of "they're all as bad as each other".
Actually, they're not. Yes, some of the allegations about Falkirk are shaming. And it goes without saying that all three main parties are damagingly dependent on big donors; no Obama-style flood of 20s and 50s on this side of the water. But when it comes to concentration of funding, the opacity over where the cash comes from and the overlap between policy and donor interests, the Conservatives look far more corrupted.
We know how much Unite gives Labour because it's out in the open: all fully checkable on the Electoral Commission's website. Finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is far harder. Cameron's funders seem to prefer channeling their money through conduits, or splitting the cash between multiple donors.
Through their forensic investigation into Tory funding, published just after the last general election, Stephen Crone and Stuart Wilks-Heeg discovered that some of the largest contributors would give a few hundred thousand: big, but not big enough to raise eyebrows. But then a funny thing could be spotted in the accounts: their wives and other family members would chip in, as well as their business ventures.
Take the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony Bamford, one of Cameron's favourite businessmen and a regular guest on the PM's trade missions abroad. Between 2001 and summer 2010, Wilks-Heeg and Crone found donations from Anthony Bamford, Mark Bamford, George Bamford, JCB Bamford Excavators, JCB Research, and JCB World Brands. Tot that up and you get a contribution to the Conservative party from the Bamford family of £3,898,900. But you'd need to be an expert sleuth with plenty of time and resources to tot it up.
One family: nearly £4m. Wilks-Heeg and Crone found that 15 of these families or "donor groups" account for almost a third of all Tory funding. They enjoy trips to Chequers, dinners in Downing Street and a friendly prime ministerial ear. Lord Irvine Laidlaw stuffed over £6m into Conservative pockets over a decade and, one of his former staffers told the Mail, liked to boast about his influence over party leaders: "William's [Hague] in my pocket".
Perhaps you're wondering why the Tories talked so tough on banking reform before election but have done so little since. That may have something to do with the money the City gives to them. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in 2010 donations from financial services accounted for over half of all Tory funding.
Three years ago, spread-betting boss Stuart Wheeler brazenly told MPs that "a party is going to take more notice of somebody who might give them lots of money than somebody who won't". He should know; he once gave the Conservatives a single donation of £5m. And certainly, the City has plenty to show for its investment. Across Europe, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and others are pushing ahead with plans for a Tobin tax or a small levy on financial transactions to start next year. Britain, on the other hand, is part of a small band of refuseniks, along with such other giants of financial regulation as Malta and Luxembourg.
One of the mysteries of this government is why George Osborne made a priority of cutting the 50p tax for the super-rich, thus handing the opposition a stick to beat him with. One possible answer to that is suggested by an FT report from November 2011 on hedge-fund donations to Osborne's party. "There probably aren't many votes in cutting the 50p top rate of tax," one major hedge fund donor told the paper, "but among those that give significant amounts to the party, it's a big issue, and that's probably why it's a big issue for the party too". Just four months later, at the next budget, the 50p rate was scrapped.
What, by contrast, has Uncle Len ever got from Ed Miliband? A promise of an end to the pay freeze for public servants? Nyet. A commitment to break from austerity? Nein. In spring 2010, the Telegraph claimed that Labour ministers "echoed the union's opposition to Kraft's takeover of Cadbury". This would be the takeover that actually went through. There are shades here of the MPs' expenses scandal, when the Tory schemes for lifting money from taxpayers were so baroque that they attracted less opprobrium than Labour parliamentarians claiming for bath plugs and blue movies. So it is with McCluskey's plan to fill Falkirk's constituency Labour party with Unite's Keystone Cops, even while hedgie Michael Hintze puts nearly £40,000 towards the chancellor's expenses alone and reaps the reward of a cut in his taxes.
But there's something else going on, too. Westminster and the press are still ruled by the idea that if workers' representatives seek to influence politics they must be bullies; while if capitalists get their way, then that's inevitably good for capitalism. Five years on from the banking crisis and all the evidence to the contrary, that really is a link that needs ending.
Tuesday 30 October 2012
When corporations bankroll politics, we all pay the price
Letting taxpayers fund parties directly could revive our rotten system – and at £1 per elector, it would be cheaper too
‘Despite attempts to reform it, US campaign finance is more corrupt and corrupting than it has been for decades.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles
It's a revolting spectacle: the two presidential candidates engaged in a frantic and demeaning scramble for money. By 6 November, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will each have raised more than $1bn. Other groups have already spent a further billion. Every election costs more than the one before; every election, as a result, drags the United States deeper into cronyism and corruption. Whichever candidate takes the most votes, it's the money that wins.
Is it conceivable, for instance, that Romney, whose top five donors are all Wall Street banks, would put the financial sector back in its cage? Or that Obama, who has received $700,000 from both Microsoft and Google, would challenge their monopolistic powers? Or, in the Senate, that the leading climate change denier James Inhofe, whose biggest donors are fossil fuel companies, could change his views, even when confronted by an overwhelming weight of evidence? The US feeding frenzy shows how the safeguards and structures of a nominal democracy can remain in place while the system they define mutates into plutocracy.
Despite perpetual attempts to reform it, US campaign finance is now more corrupt and corrupting than it has been for decades. It is hard to see how it can be redeemed. If the corporate cronies and billionaires' bootlickers who currently hold office were to vote to change the system, they'd commit political suicide. What else, apart from the money they spend, would recommend them to the American people?
But we should see this system as a ghastly warning of what happens if a nation fails to purge the big money from politics. The British system, by comparison to the US one, looks almost cute. Total campaign spending in the last general election – by the parties, the candidates and independent groups – was £58m: about one sixtieth of the cost of the current presidential race. There's a cap on overall spending and tough restrictions on political advertising.
But it's still rotten. There is no limit on individual donations. In a system with low total budgets, this grants tremendous leverage to the richest donors. The political parties know that if they do anything that offends the interests of corporate power they jeopardise their prospects.
The solutions proposed by parliament would make our system a little less rotten. At the end of last year, the committee on standards in public life proposed that donationsshould be capped at an annual £10,000, the limits on campaign spending should be reduced, and public funding for political parties should be raised. Parties, it says, should receive a state subsidy based on the size of their vote at the last election.
The political process would still be dominated by people with plenty of disposable income. In the course of a five-year election cycle, a husband and wife would be allowed to donate, from the same bank account, £100,000. State funding pegged to votes at the last election favours the incumbent parties. It means that even when public support for a party has collapsed (think of the Liberal Democrats), it still receives a popularity bonus.
Even so, and despite their manifesto pledges, the three major parties have refused to accept the committee's findings. The excuse all of them use is that the state cannot afford more funding for political parties. This is a ridiculous objection. The money required is scarcely a rounding error in national accounts. It probably represents less than we pay every day for the crony capitalism the present system encourages: the unnecessary spending on private finance initiative projects, on roads to nowhere, on theTrident programme and all the rest, whose primary purpose is to keep the 1% sweet. The overall cost of our suborned political process is incalculable: a corrupt and inefficient economy, and a political system engineered to meet not the needs of the electorate, but the demands of big business and billionaires.
I would go much further than the parliamentary committee. This, I think, is what a democratic funding system would look like: each party would be able to charge the same, modest fee for membership (perhaps £50). It would then receive matching funding from the state, as a multiple of its membership receipts. There would be no other sources of income. (This formula would make brokerage by trade unions redundant.)
This system, I believe, would not only clean up politics, it would also force parties to re-engage with the public. It would oblige them to be more entrepreneurial in raising their membership, and therefore their democratic legitimacy. It creates an incentive for voters to join a party and to begin, once more, to participate in politics.
The cost to the public would be perhaps £50m a year, or a little more than £1 per elector: three times the price of a telephone vote on The X Factor. This, on the scale of state expenditure, is microscopic.
Politicians and the tabloid press would complain bitterly about this system, claiming, as they already do, that taxpayers cannot afford to fund politics. But when you look at how the appeasement of the banking sector has ruined the economy, at how corporate muscle prevents action from being taken on climate change, at the economic and political distortions caused by the system of crony capitalism, and at the hideous example on the other side of the Atlantic, you discover that we can't afford not to.
Wednesday 9 November 2011
The short, sharp life of 'Chinese century'
By Nick Ottens
If there is to be an Asian century, it won't be China's alone. While it still has hundreds of millions of people living in poverty, the country is losing its cheap labor advantage to East Asian competitors while more industrialized nations in the region are far more receptive to international trade.
The Chinese economy is expected to overtake the United States as the world's largest in sheer size by the middle of this decade but the ruling Communist Party has ample reason to be worried about perpetuating China's impressive growth rates for another generation.
As China's middle class expands in the urban east, it is expecting more than just growth but in the western hinterland, a lack of development and, perhaps even more frustrating to the people there, a lack of political accountability fuels unrest and discontent. The party will be increasingly hard pressed to meet the aspirations of both these peoples. Economic and political openness, as desired in the coastal provinces, would weaken the state's grip on industrial development, which could exacerbate the existing imbalance between cities and countryside.
Chinese labor is already becoming too expensive for some manufacturers who are taking their business to countries as Indonesia and Vietnam while Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan are more attractive for technology companies that require an educated workforce and a business climate that isn't too burdened by regulatory restrictions and corruption.
Labor laws and tax regimes in the rest of South and Southeast Asia are generally more flexible. These countries welcome international trade and investment whereas China seeks to protect its "infant industries" from free and fair competition on the global market. This policy enables the ruling class in Beijing to build high-speed railways across China but the cost, which is less clear, could be hugely detrimental to its economy in the future.
Foreign investors in China have to cope with laws and regulations that are inconsistently enforced - sometimes arbitrary. The Chinese legal system cannot guarantee the sanctity of contracts, which is vital to a market economy. Capital account transactions are tightly regulated.
This is a system that thrives on cronyism where businesses that are connected with local and state officials prosper and companies that aren't could see their investment go up in smoke when a magistrate determines that factory wages should increase by a third, overnight.
China does attract huge amounts of foreign direct investment. In fact, it takes in every month what India assumes in a year. Yet China grows at a rate just two percentage points faster than India. And even there, corruption is endemic.
At its most recent congress in March of this year, the Communist Party affirmed the need to improve "balanced growth", which should translate into increased welfare spending, including subsidies for farmers and the urban underclass. Western stereotypes notwithstanding, the Chinese state is not sitting on an infinite amount of cash however. It cannot simultaneously build a proper welfare state and allow the subsidizing of companies, especially in real estate, to continue unabated. If it wants to expand social programs and thus prevent civil unrest, it has to challenge vested interest with allies in the party.
With major changes in political leadership expected next year, it may not be until 2013 before a comprehensive social agenda is implemented. That could be two years wasted while necessary economic reforms to further open up China to world markets are delayed.
There is another, less immediate concern that could put a stop to this Chinese century before the world has a chance to recognize that it's living in one.
By the middle of the 21st century, 400 million Chinese will have retired. That's more than America's total projected population by that time. India, which is set to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2030, is expected to have nearly 400 million people more in 2050 than China.
How is China going to pay for all these old people? China doesn't have an expansive public pension system, which means that many Chinese in their prime, often without siblings because of their government's "one child" policy, will have to provide not only for their parents but, as life expectancy rises, their grandparents as well. Naturally, wages will have to rise to accommodate this unprecedented level of dependency which can only happen if Chinese labor becomes much more productive and skilled - fast.
The party has to manage this while not only dealing with internal pressure to democratize; it is also expected to finance American and European deficit spending when these continents blame China for its "colonialist" scramble for resources, including water, in Africa and Central Asia - resources it desperately needs to continue to grow; to invest in its future industrial base and to alleviate hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
If despite this all, China somehow ends as tomorrow's superpower, "owning" the 21st century, that will be quite a feat.
Nick Ottens is an historian from the Netherlands and editor of the transatlantic news and commentary website Atlantic Sentinel. He is also a contributing analyst with the geopolitical and strategic consultancy firm Wikistrat.
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