Brontides

How far should a government go in order to safeguard its citizens?

Two stories have emerged concurrently that cast the question into new light. While most citizens tend to be happy with the theoretical notion of covert defence, security agencies usually try to keep the visceral practicalities of that defence obscured, as support for their methods often vanishes like spit on a hot rock when exposed to the full scrutiny of public opinion.

Yesterday, I discussed the story of Shahram Amiri the Iranian who was kidnapped by / defected to the CIA in 2009. To my chagrin, the post was overtaken by events almost as soon as it was posted; Amiri was flown back to Iran and has started to talk about the events that led to his disappearance:

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to allow him contact with his family, but that he “never cracked” and had not revealed any secret information about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

[..]

“They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred me to the US onboard a military plane,” Amiri said in Tehran, before making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

“Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central Intelligence Agency.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Although it seems unlikely that the US will receive the censure it deserves for this, it is still unquestionably a scandal of severe proportions. The US government kidnapped a man on a religious pilgrimage, held him against his will for over a year and subjected him to torture and coercion. The man in question was not a military target, nor even a political one. Both the US and Iran deny that he was involved in the country’s nuclear programme, so whatever paltry justification the CIA may have had has become noticeably thinner.

Meanwhile, this morning the Guardian is reporting that the UK has also been complicit in kidnapping and torture, this time of its own citizens. The Guardian has helpfully highlighted many of the key passages, but the entire document is worth reading.

A few thoughts emerge from this. Firstly, dragging these revelations into the light of day is hard and the organisations that have done so deserve to be praised. Iran will probably not receive any credit for this in the wider world, but by doggedly and tenaciously pursuing the fate of its citizen it exposed a cruel double-standard at the heart of America’s security apparatus. Here in the UK, civil liberties organisations such as Liberty and, in particular, Reprieve deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their lobbying and legal action in exposing the worst excesses of the government in the early days of the Global War on Terror. These organisations should be celebrated for their achievements and offered every support.

Secondly, citizens should not be content to give abstract permissions to government in any situation, let alone one as broad-ranging as security and defense. We have an obligation to understand exactly what is being done in our name, and if we don’t ensure that the government is acting in accordance with our wishes then we are complicit in whatever acts they undertake.

Third, it is distressing that this is so unsurprising.

The coalition government is making many of the right noises when it comes to civil liberties in the UK. Unpicking the authoritarian streak that Labour exhibited during its years in power is a worthwhile task that shouldn’t be trivialised, but the debate surrounding civil liberties is still defined by the rigid limits set out by those who enjoy many of the greatest privileges.

The list of areas to be targeted describes a largely positive direction of travel. ID cards and biometric passports are to be scrapped; the fingerprinting of children at schools is to be curtailed. Government databases are to be pruned back. FOI is to be extended; libel laws will be reviewed to protect freedom of speech; CCTV is to be regulated. A “Great Repeal Bill” promises to cut through swathes of redundant and obstructive legislation; in an email to his supporters, Nick Clegg suggested that the bill would

…roll back Labour’s surveillance state, scrapping ID cards, the children’s database and restoring civil liberties.

In areas like education, health and policing people are going to get much greater powers over the services in their area. And we are going to hand more powers to communities and councils.

All very fine and worthy. But the proposals are geared overwhelmingly towards a single section of society as beneficiaries. ID cards and CCTV are middle-class concerns. Freedoms of information and speech can be seen as a stimulus package for Britain’s already over-eager newspaper industries and will result in ever-more salacious stories for their largely middle-class audiences. The power to modify the services offered by schools, hospitals and local police forces are dogwhistle sops to Middle Britain. And while the exact form of the Great Repeal Bill is yet to be revealed, it seems unlikely to tackle such personal infringements as stop-and-search, the Dangerous Dogs Act, control orders, or ASBOs, which tend to target the poorer sections of society disproportionately.

But even the wild class disparity in the conversation is mild compared to the glaring hole that exists when talking about the most disadvantaged groups of all: political and economic migrants, and asylum seekers (the treatment of whom can be particularly inhumane). While the government’s commitment to reversing extended detention without trial is a big, and welcome, improvement, ASBOs in particular continue to be used as a method of suppressing dissent, as in this account from 2006:

Recently, at a demonstration outside Harmondsworth detention centre in solidarity with asylum seekers, I was hemmed in with 50 other protestors when the police used powers under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to impose a blanket Asbo on anyone who tried to get near the buildings.

They then used powers under section 50 of the Police Reform Act 2002, which makes it an offence to refuse to give your name and address to a police officer who “reasonably suspects” that you have engaged in “anti-social behaviour”. A few people who refused were arrested.

This was no violent protest, and there was no threat to public order or anyone’s personal safety. But the demonstration gave the police an opportunity to use the laws to collect intelligence on “troublemakers”, without having to show that they had actually made any trouble.

This is particularly germane on the day in which the Parliament Square protestors lost their legal right to express their views – thanks to a decidedly illiberal misuse of existing powers.

The discussion on civil liberties in the UK remains too enmired in privilege. Part of this is because libertarians strongly tend to be middle class, white and male; their political preferences tend to reflect their (often unchallenged) social biases and privileges. Part of it, too, is because Labour have consistently chosen not to make social freedom a cause that they would fight for on behalf of the working classes, leaving it as a policy ground for the Lib Dems and the Tories – parties with their roots firmly in the middle classes – to scoop up.

But whatever the reason for the disparity, there is an opportunity now for the civil rights of all sections of society to be strengthened and extended. It requires that we not allow the discussion to be limited to those rights enjoyed by those who already enjoy entrenched rights and securities, whose political access is already entrenched. The work of organisations like Liberty needs greater support and needs to be extended to ensure that human dignity is respected at all levels of society. The rights enjoyed by well-off British citizens, while by no means complete, are some of the most extensive in the history of the world. It behoves us to extend those rights as far through our culture as is conceivably possible.

In the run-up to yesterday’s UK budget, the left wing of the internet – a cocoon that I comfortably inhabit – made merry with its buzzphrase du jour. No shock doctrine for Britain! we hear from such twitterlectuals (and Green Party luminaries – many of the most vocal Green activists have been really going for the Lib Dems of late – but that’s another post) as Sian Berry and Adam Ramsay. Now, look; the budget was painful. We all got hosed, the poor proportionally more than the rich. And the government spin hasn’t been even remotely coherent; even the usually credible Lynne Featherstone came over all loyally dishonest.

But “shock doctrine” is one of those phrases that just annoys me. It annoys me all the more because it comes from the left – a space which I nominally occupy – but yet is such a deeply incoherent piece of intellectual padding.

It was popularised by Naomi Klein in her 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which she argued that free-market capitalists and their political backers have used, and occasionally manufactured, crises and disasters in order to inflict social change on populations that are unwilling to accept them but unable to resist, due to the aforementioned upheaval. The term gained traction on the left after the Haiti quake, when the US right-wing Heritage Foundation caused an uproar by suggesting that aid be tied to economic reforms. Here’s Adam Ramsay again:

News stories about Haiti are full of tales of looters. There’s less talk of a bigger scale plunder to come. In Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine‘ she maps the rise of “disaster capitalism”. She describes how, over 40 years, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pentagon, and various mega-corporations have increasingly used (or created) disasters as an excuse to push through unpopular right wing economic policies, and asset strip vulnerable economies.

I was just finishing this book on Thursday as the scale of Haiti’s earthquake was becoming clear. My immediate fear was an obvious one. So I did what all young lefties do in a time of crisis. I set up a Facebook group: “No Shock Doctrine for Haiti”.

I plucked that quote a little bit selectively but it illustrates my first problem with the term and its use: shock doctrine is a methodology seeking application. Exponents of the theory tend to force this most fashionable of ideas onto situations rather than respond to the unique characteristics of an individual incidents. The book, for example, rests on the idea that the policies of free marketeers tend not to be very popular. For the most part this is unarguable – even Milton Friedman would concede as much – but in her zeal to apply her theory to every possible case Klein makes some dramatic reaches. Apparently, Hurricane Katrina led to the “privatisation” of New Orleans against the will of the population; however, the reforms imposed on New Orleans were structural and mostly welcomed by a population frustrated by lazy and corrupt local government. Haiti is another example of this; although tying catastrophe aid to any kind of condition would have been horrifically wrong, measures to curtail corruption and establish good governance in one of the world’s poorest countries would have enjoyed overwhelming local support. Klein’s depiction of the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis as a conflict between grasping capitalists and honourable democrats shows a profound lack of historical understanding, and her claim that the protests crushed in Tiananmen Square were against further market freedom is based on pure ignorance. And those are just the cases that stretch credibility; the claims that Margaret Thatcher fabricated the Falklands War as a way of breaking the unions shatters it irrevocably.

The second problem is to do with the way that the argument is cased. At one level, the problem is that the issue is mischaracterised as being a tool used purely by the right wing to advance their corporatist goals. In truth, the technique of using a crisis to drive policy reform is as popular on the left as it is on the right. The New Deal in America was launched on an unwilling society as a result of the Great Depression; the great social reforms in the UK of the late forties and early fifties, which led to the formation of the NHS, arose off the back of the post-war slump; Barack Obama used the current economic collapse to the same ends. Blair and Brown spent much of their respective times in office extending the powers of the state, evoking the spectre of terrorism and war as justification.

But this gap masks a deeper problem with the argument, which is the assumption that governments should not use crises as a way of driving social change. It’s predicated on a somewhat condescending lack of faith in populations; it assumes that electorates, struck numb by catastrophe, are unable to resist the snake-oil of perfidious political salesmen. In fact, crises inspire rare moments of national unity; often these moments arise because the crisis in question has exposed a policy failing or fault that simply needs to be corrected, and the correction of which is obvious. Thatcher had to break the power of the unions; whether she needed to do so quite so thoroughly is an open question, but most even on the left now assume that the unions were too powerful, and that to persist in allowing them to run entire industries was a path to economic and social ruin. New Zealand, Chile and Brazil abandoned socialistic policies for freer markets because the former weren’t working well and induced economic crises.

There is some limited value to some of the ideas contained within the term “shock doctrine”. Attaching conditions to Haiti aid, for example, would clearly have been grossly wrong, and those who suggested it were rightly excoriated. The term itself, however, masks deep intellectual failings that continue to undermine the legitimacy of left-wing economic arguments. There is plenty to debate in the new UK budget; the rise in VAT, for example, will be economically and politically unpopular for some time to come. Branding it as “shock doctrine” is ludicrous and shrill, and will neither advance the debate nor grow the left-wing base in opposition.

Naomi Klein, meanwhile, remains an extremely poor role model for the left, and in an ideal world would join Michael Moore on the island of left-wing intellectual rejects. Honestly, we can be much better than this.

From the Guardian:

So no overlap on the venn diagram between “foreigners” and “decent, law-abiding people” then, Theresa?

(h/t Jenny for the spot)

As painted by Monet in 1904.

Pippa Norris has a great analysis of the parlous state of female representation in Westminster. This election has clearly demonstrated that more needs to be done to encourage women to run for high office. This can’t be achieved just by instituting all-women shortlists; not only are they controversial and prone to generating ill will, they also don’t address the problem of a lack of women engaged in politics at the lower levels – councillors, party activists and political pundits. America has a generally more robust mechanism for this; the Democrat party and the leftwing have EMILY’s List, a political action group dedicated to increasing female representation at all levels; a British version sprang up in 1993 but appears defunct. There is a clear need for a similar UK body.

So, the Labour leadership contest.

What on earth has happened to Labour? They’ve become a party of the spineless. The slimeball Milliband looks like being coroneted all but unopposed, the worst possible outcome in the circumstances. What’s worse is that the main candidates – the two Millibands and Ed Balls – are politically indistinguishable, belonging to the liberal, interventionist, statist school established by Blair, promulgated by Brown and rejected by the electorate two weeks ago. The differences between them are being talked up in the media – David the Ditherer, Ed the Equivocator, Balls the Bully – but their plausible manifestos, cabinets and policy priorities are more or less identical.

Labour needs to recover. It needs a proper, realigning leadership election between a wide range of candidates with competing visions. The Tory relaunch in 2005 was just that – a clash of ideas, between the traditional Conservativism of David Davies, the internationalism and fiscal prudence of Ken Clarke, the social conservativism of Liam Fox and the modernising, “compassionate” neo-conservativism of David Cameron. It’s not that the Labour party lacks these polarities – Alan Johnson represents the traditional left, a slice of the electorate under-represented over the last 30 years, and Hillary Benn, John Cruddas or Yvette Cooper would be modernisers who could pull the party back to the centre. There’s a huge intellectual gap in the opposition vacated by the Lib Dems when they joined the government; Labour could expand to fill that niche quite happily, but they’re choosing not to.

Part of the problem is that Labour has, over the last 13 years, been trained to value unity over intellectual dynamism. The final years of the Blair / Brown “dual government” were horrible; the lesson that Labour learned from them is that internal strife is a fast track to weakness and collapse. Thus Brown’s continued tenure, always keeping a grip on power as those who sought to topple him bottled their chances as quickly as they arose. But it was based on a false premise. Internal conflict can be destructive, but the essence of political renewal – as with any kind of intellectual discipline – lies in constructive debate, in the contest of ideas that are firmly held and passionately defended.

There is a leadership vacuum in Labour and I don’t think that any of the candidates can fill it. I hope that there’s another leadership election within Labour before 2015. Otherwise, the only outcome that seems plausible is that the Tories will find themselves with a much firmer grip on power.

I took a bit of a break from blogging after the excitment of last week. But for now let it be said that I am broadly happy with the outcome of the election, that the coalition document is mostly a delight to read (the civil liberties section gives me a special kind of glee, although the education and environment sections don’t go far enough), and that it’s a genuine thrill to see Lib Dem ministers in government at last. Theresa May grates, but she made the right noises for yesterday’s International Day Against Homophobia And Transphobia, and the awe-inspiring Lynne Featherstone – my constituency MP – is the minister with the actual responsibility for the Equalities portfolio. I don’t think that this government can make itself popular – it’s going to have to make some unpleasant policy decisions over the next five years if Britain is to survive – but the aims to which it aspires are promising.

The House of Commons at Westminster as drawn by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson for Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808-11). The Commons chamber shown here was destroyed by fire in 1834. Sourced from Wimedia Commons.

Today sees the re-election of the Speaker. Traditionally this is waved through unopposed, but the Tory back benches are in rebellious mood, and Lib Dem grandee Ming Campbell has indicated that he would be interested in the role. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that will happen – I suspect that Bercow will sail through on a 500-30 vote. More to the point, I don’t think it should happen. Bercow has been a fine speaker so far – again, Lynne Featherstone has an interesting perspective on this (and while I’m rhapsodising, it’s so nice to have an MP who blogs) – and the fact that he inspired Nigel Farage to run against him, and won, is a big point in his favour. More to the point, the coalition doesn’t need a big humiliating defeat so soon out of the gate. I suspect that the whips won’t allow that to happen.

Interestingly enough, though, it does go to show how marginalised the Tory dinosaurs are feeling in the new Government. The rebellion is being lead by bluer-than-blue Nadine Dorries (she of the abortion limitation bill and the £25,000 second home allowance expenses claims). One of the more interesting ideas thrown up by the coalition document is that the extent to which the Lib Dem’s proposals were incorporated was inspired as much by Cameron’s desire to beat down his own right wing as it was to pacify the Lib Dems. Whether or not that’s true, certainly the right wing of the Tory party feels beaten down. The Tories could be in the midst of their own Clause 4 moment, which would be entertaining if they weren’t having it while simultaneously trying to govern.

Anyway, I like Ming, but I hope that Bercow keeps his job.

That’s how Stephanie Flanders describes the €750bn bailout for Greece and the other troubled economies of Club Med: it looks impressive, and it buys the Europeans some crucial time. But they may not like where the ball eventually ends up.

Europe’s leaders have wedged their heads firmly in the sand.

I think that’s wrong – I think that Europe has a very good idea of where this is going, but is trying to pretend that it doesn’t, so when it happens they can look as surprised as the rest of us.

Is the bailout itself good news? Undoubtedly. The shock-and-awe action, forcefully advocated against a resistant Europe by government economists from America, Japan and the UK, probably saved the Euro and prevented the trashing of the continental economy, as well as ensuring the domestic stability of Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy. There’s pretty much no question that strong action was required to prevent a global fiscal collapse, of the kind that would erase the precarious recovery that the world economy has enjoyed over the last six months.

The intent is not in question, then. But the manner is somewhat more dubious. The Freethinking Economist does a better job of explaining the perverse incentives that the bailout has created than I could – politics is my writ, economics is really just a hobby – but political questions about the process that underlies the action remain. To whit: why would the EU have pursued such a knuckleheaded approach when a better, simpler alternative was on the table?

Sadly, it seems to be a result of weak government, both of individual member states and of the EU apparatus of agreement by consensus. As Simon Johnson and Peter Boone give us a flavour of the problems that afflict the governance of the Euro in today’s FT:

Given the incentive problems in the eurozone, it is no wonder more nations want to join – the requirement is just to appear prudent for a few years. No wonder also that it blew up. Nations with profligate governments or weak financial systems have a bonanza; overall, this system encourages a “race to the bottom” – led by governments in smaller countries, which relax fiscal and credit standards to win re-election (or just to enjoy a boom). They borrowed funds from the (unnaturally) less profligate in the eurozone. The Germans were austere; the periphery enjoyed the boom.

The Germans were the only parties to the carve-up who had an interest in arguing for more a sensibly constructed bailout, but – not to put too fine a point on it – Angela Merkel botched it. She failed to prepare Germany for the necessity of a bailout, spinning from cool, popular disdain to agreement in a manner that bewildered and alienated her government and her country. She failed to articulate why the bailout was necessary for Germany and the Eurozone to support the Mediterranean’s failing economies. Many of Germany’s voters believed, and still believe, that clause 125 of the Lisbon Treaty – the one which mandates that there will be no bailouts for members who pursue reckless fiscal policy – was binding and should have been adhered to.

So Ms. Merkel has done the only politically expedient thing: joined the rest of her European collegues in pretending that the package’s obvious failings aren’t there. Germany has become a truly European state. Few are fooled; as Sunday’s result in North-Rhine Westphalia shows, Germany’s voters are inclined to punish their government for its prevarication, lack of leadership and deceit.

This bailout may have stopped the immediate contagion from spreading beyond Greece. But it has driven the longer-term rot deeper into the heart of the single currency, by reinforcing the system of perverse incentives and by undermining the will of Germany, the currency’s salward defender and balwark, to resist the excesses of its neighbours. More worrying is that Germany’s governing CDU is only one year into its term, and will likely not be replaced until 2013.

A bit of good news though: apparently UK manufacturing a booming, albeit from a low base. So that’s nice.

Finally, for those in the UK expecting a government to emerge soon, the chart below may prove instructive. Click for bigger.

The blogs (and twitter feeds) of the left have been talking about the need for a Lab-Lib government as part of a “progressive majority”. The term was coined last year by Will Straw, when he demonstrated that the combined Labour and Lib Dem vote has exceeded the right wing vote – and has, in fact, accounted for more than 50% of the electorate – for the entirety of the last sixty years.

The danger in that assumption is that it assumed that Labour and the Lib Dems have more in common than they actually do. The truth is that the Lib Dem party has become host to a bunch of squatters – statist left-liberals disenfranchised by Labour’s collapse and determined to see the Lib Dems as a kind of junior partner in anti-Tory axis. They supported the Lib Dems loudly in the run-up to the election but abandoned them at the polling booth, and now expect a diminished Liberal party to fall into line.

This isn’t how the Lib Dem party sees itself; much of the core Lib Dem support is as repulsed by Labour’s offences on civil liberties and market control as they are by the Tories’ anti-immigrant and socially intolerant stances, and that’s evidenced by their selection of Nick Clegg, a man once assiduously courted by the Tories for parachuting into a safe seat, as their leader. Perhaps the Lib Dems can’t reign in the excesses of a Tory government, or perhaps they can; they have as much chance of that as halting Labour’s next attempt to ram ID cards or detention without trial down the throats of an unwilling populace, though, so it’s not like that’s much of a disincentive.

Meanwhile, the economy continues its gentle decline even further towards southern European standards. A strong government with a safe majority is required to halt that, and there’s only one scenario under which that is possible. Let me make this clear: it is even worth choosing to play a longer game on electoral reform in order to deliver stable government.

Which isn’t to say that I want Clegg and co. to crumble. I want them to extract the most flesh for their support that they can, especially in terms of voting reform, and preferably even by installing Cable in the Treasury. But ultimately, I want them to do the right thing and allow the country to be governed.

I PREDICT that the Tories will edge a tiny majority – 4-5 seats tops.*

I PREDICT that the Lib Dems will do well but nowhere near the giddy heights of mid April – 25% or thereabouts seems fair. Labour will come second by a thread.

I PREDICT that the next government, no matter what the outcome tomorrow, will have collapsed or been wound up within 18 months.

I PREDICT that the winner of this election will make themselves so unpopular that they will not win another election this decade.

*If they don’t, then I’d be prepared to bet that they still govern – either minority or in exchange for electoral reform.

Whatever your opinion – and you only have another 20 hours or so to decide – make sure that tomorrow you go out and vote. You may not feel like it has an impact and you may, ultimately, be right. But the act of engaging in a political process is its own virtue. Own your vote, own your issues, and own your own little corner of the debate, and you will find that the politicians work pleasingly hard to meet your needs.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written an implausible amount on the three parties, their manifestos and their policies. I hope that someone has found it useful; it’s actually been quite handy for me as a way of gathering my thoughts on the various topics and investigating them at length.

But now it’s time.

—

Equality

I’m going to be slightly unusual here and admit that, as a young straight white male, I’m probably not your most likely source of insight into equality issues this time around. I can read the manifestos, certainly, but as an explicitly privileged generalist I’m unlikely to be able to deliver the kind of quality analysis that these issues deserve.

For that reason I’m going to point you in the direction of some excellent, non-partisan primary sources. I know that equality issues tend to be the province of the left, but there are a few scrupulously fair resources out there.

For issues of women’s rights and and how the manifestos will affect women in general check out the Fawcett Society. They sent a raft of questions to each of the parties on a wide array of issues and got detailed responses from all of them.

On issues of gay rights it’s pretty hard to find a single source that doesn’t editorialise. That’s somewhat unsurprising; only 4% of gay voters are planning to vote Tory, which is itself perhaps the only information you need on this topic. MyGayVote gives a fairly stark indication of how the voting records of the three main parties stack up.

On black and minority politics check out OBV. They’re doing great work on keeping minority issues in the spotlight, and I’ll be keeping an eye on them long after the election is done.

Issues related to the elderly and elder care haven’t received anywhere near enough attention online or off. Mary Ridell, the Telegraph’s token leftie, argues fairly persuasively that Labour would be the best bet, and my own read corroborates this.

Civil Liberties
An area in which I am much more comfortable.

First off, forget Labour. The party of ID cards, detention without trial, the massive extension of the surveillance state and the Digital Economy Bill couldn’t give less of a shit about civil liberties, and their manifesto reflects that. Labour would extend CCTV coverage to 700 new areas, strengthen the DNA database and ram through ID cards by hook or by crook.

The Tories are better – the party of David Davis and their excellent Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, has a significant wing dedicated to the rollback of liberty-encroaching legislation – but their approach is too punative. It’s moderately good to see that the party commits itself to rolling back the database state – ID cards, the ContactPoint children’s database and the vetting and barring scheme will be scrapped or reduced. The Tories would also curtail the surveillance powers of local councils, giving more power to the information commissioner, and would introduce privacy impact assessments on all new legislation. However, the party does not go far enough on changing the law in respect to the DNA database, and they still insist on repealling the Human Rights Act, which gives the European Convention on Human Rights full force in the UK. They would likely replace it with a UK Bill of Rights, which would be softer on prohibitions of torture and harder on legitimate asylum seekers. The Tories don’t even fully leverage their own dogwhistle policies of overturning the smoking and foxhunting bans.

But the truth is that this is the one area in which the Lib Dems have a clear, unambiguous and historic tradition of strong performance. They would curtail the use of CCTV, restore the right to protest, guarantee the safety of investigative journalists from prosecution, protect whistleblowers, scrap ID cards, role back “Escelon” measures (laws and secret doctorines governing government monitoring of email and internet traffic), repeal the Digital Economy Bill, scrap ContactPoint, reduce pre-charge detention to 14 days and scrap secret evidence. The DNA database would be heavily curtailed. It’s an absurdly complete wish-list for anybody who cares about the erosion of liberty in this country.

It remains unclear why the Tories were so anaemic on this issue, but they hand a clear win to the Yellows on what should have been a major plank of their election offering.

Most of the endorsements are in now, and the biggest surprise for me was that the FT – which has really been significantly to the left of its readership for much of the past decade – went blue. Guido suggests that the endorsement is a recalibration, attempting to halt the steady erosion that the paper has suffered in recent years at the hands of its bluer competitors. I wasn’t convinced; I thought that this endorsement was too tepid to act as a harbinger of the FT’s transition to the right-wing press fold.

But then I read the FT and Economist endorsements side by side. I was struck by the similarity; intriguingly, the FT and the Economist used very similar arguments when endorsing the Tories.

On themselves:
From the Economist:

The Economist has no ancestral fealty to any party, but an enduring prejudice in favour of liberalism.

FT:

The Financial Times has no fixed political allegiances. We stand for a liberal agenda: a small state, social justice and open international markets.

On what matters:
The Economist:

But in this British election the overwhelming necessity of reforming the public sector stands out [...] For Britain to thrive, this liberty-destroying Leviathan has to be tackled. The Conservatives, for all their shortcomings, are keenest to do that; and that is the main reason why we would cast our vote for them.

FT:

Their fiscal plans, while vague, suggest they would do most to reduce the size of the state – cutting more and taxing less than their opponents. They would create the best environment for enterprise and wealth creation… Britain needs a stable and legitimate government to navigate its fiscal crisis and punch its weight abroad. On balance, the Conservative party best fits the bill.

On Labour:
Economist:

In some ways, Gordon Brown is underappreciated. [...] (But) above all, the government is tired. Mired in infighting and scandal, just as the Tories were in 1997, New Labour has run its course… It is better for the country that Labour has its looming nervous breakdown in opposition. A change of government is essential.

FT:

As a crisis manager, Gordon Brown has been a better premier than his critics claim. But after 13 years, Labour needs a spell in opposition to rejuvenate itself.

On the Lib Dems
Economist:

Mr Clegg’s surge has been thrilling, all the more so since the viler attempts to smear him by a panicking Tory press seem to have backfired… We share his enthusiasm for civil liberties and his willingness to stand up for immigrants. And he is right that the current voting system [...] But look at the policies, rather than the man, and the Lib Dems seem less appealing [...] Their policies towards business are arguably to the left of Labour’s. A 50% capital-gains tax, getting rid of higher-rate relief on pensions and a toff-bashing mansion tax are not going to induce the entrepreneurial vim Britain needs. Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ chancellor-in-waiting, recently dismissed the bosses who argued against the government’s planned National Insurance increase as “nauseating”; that feeling might well be reciprocated by the nation’s wealth creators if the Lib Dems came into power.

FT:

The Liberal Democrats are more attractive. Their instincts are right on civil liberties and they are internationalist, albeit with the odd whiff of anti-Americanism. They would champion political reform, having fewer vested interests at Westminster to protect. It is on the economy that doubts creep in. Their policy is an uneasy mix of sanctimony and populism.

On the Tories:
Economist:

They plainly have faults. [...] But, more than their rivals, they are intent on redesigning the state.

FT:

They are not a perfect fit, but their instincts are sound.

Economist:

We dislike their Europhobic fringe and their exaggerations about Britain’s broken society.

FT:

The Tories’ reflexive hostility to Europe, for instance, is worrying, whatever his protestations that he wants a constructive relationship with Brussels.

What is clear is that neither party was prepared to entertain the prospect of endorsing Labour. Under those circumstances, this seemingly co-ordinated retreat to the safety and predictability of the Tories befits the highly, almost reflexively, risk-averse business end of the print media. But a deeper truth is being revealed here. These two papers are well-connected in the City, and the similarities in their arguments are likely not coincidental. For all the inane talk of capital flight and a gilt market collapse in the face of a hung parliament (mostly blether), the true temprament of the City and its financiers has been largely opaque in this election. I suspect that these two newspapers are simply reflecting the attitude of their core demographic; and the level of synchronicity suggests that the reflection is accurate. This may be the best window into the mind of the City that we’re likely to see pre-election day.

And what it tells us is that, while the financial sector would be dismayed by a Frankenstein Labour government, and while they would probably prefer a Tory majority, any other outcome would not trouble them greatly. This should quietly encourage the Lib Dems and their supporters on May 6th.

Rolling these two together makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, I’m secretly lazy, and in any case I’m running out of time before the election. And second, these areas are by far the most subjective, and thus don’t entirely benefit from an evidence-based approach.

Foreign Policy and Europe

I noticed the above on Strange Maps this morning, from the Economist. You can click through for a more thorough discussion. The bit worth highlighting here is the magazine’s take on where the UK fits within Europe: in the south, with the PIGS, contemplating its denuded public finances.

That’s one view. Predictably enough, I have three more views here, one for each political party. Whodathunk.

First, it’s worth noting that of the three, the Lib Dems are the only ones to have promised a manifesto on Britain’s membership of the EU. This is in reality a slightly nasty piece of political theatre. They’re pretty confident that they would win cleanly, and they’re probably right, as the UK has been largely comfortable with EU membership for the last generation. This isn’t to say that the UK is entirely comfortable with the Union in its entirity, however, and an easy majority of Britain’s population would resist a further drift of power away from Westminster; however, by holding and passing a referendum on EU membership, Clegg and his cohort would be able to plausibly claim a mandate for further integration over the heads of Britain’s largely Euroskeptic public. It’s a move that would earn them a deserved savaging in the press, but like it or not, the Lib Dems aren’t the blushing political neophytes that they like to claim to be.

Broadly speaking, though, the characatures of the positions of the three parties on Europe are correct. The Lib Dems favour more integration and a more enthusiastic leadership role for the UK in Europe; they are not unaware of the EU’s failings but thinks that Britain could do more ot mitigate those failings if it robustly assumed the role at the top table that it deserves, and that much of Europe is still looking to it to take on. The euroskeptics of the Open Europe thinktank are predictably dismayed, but have some not unreasonable criticisms of Clegg’s position on the Euro. It seems to me that Clegg himself (like his putative Chancellor) is personally ambivalent to the currency; certainly both accept that Britain’s reliance on the Pound has eased the UK’s passage through the economic storms of the last two years. But the party and its faithful remain strongly pro-Euro. This is one kink that won’t be ironed out in a hurry.

Meanwhile, Labour’s transformation into a Europhilic party is complete. It seems hard to believe that, before Blair, Labour was as torn on the question of Europe as the Tories; but now their manifesto is unequivocal:

We are proud that Britain is once again a leading player in Europe. Our belief is that Britain is stronger in the world when the European Union is strong, and that Britain succeeds when it leads in Europe and sets the agenda for change. Sullen resistance and disengagement achieve nothing.

Nevertheless, there is no appetite in the party for the kind of battles that a Lib-Dem-esque europhilic policy would entail. Its manifesto stops well short of calling for Turkish membership to the Union, and entry into the Euro is hardly discussed. Labour are clearly content to occupy a status quo position.

The Tories are what they are: while stopping short of opposing Britain’s EU membership altogether, they want existing powers to be rolled back and future treaties to be put to referendum (i.e. to fail). Their alignment with Europe’s hard-right and Eurosceptic parties is clearly mischievous, and may be actively malign. And so on. That said, there are still plenty of good reasons for Euroscepticism, even if the Tories are as bad at articulating them as the Liberals are at defending their pro-Europe positions.

On Europe, then, the question is very much one of personal choice.

The rest of the foreign policy gauntlet is somewhat dependent upon events. Of the leaders, Clegg has by far the most international experience, while the Tories are the most reliably Atlanticism of the three parties. The Lib Dems would be less likely to uphold the doctorine of liberal intervention (which states that a country can invade another pre-emptively to head off a threat or a catastrophic abuse of human rights; used to justify Iraq, as well as Bosnia and Rwanda, amongst others) in countries like Iran or Sudan. The Tories would be less likely to criticise Israel or support Palestine. Beyond that, predictions are a mugs game.

I’m working up the energy to make my final two long posts on the parties, their policies and their manifesto pledges – we have foreign policy, my personal pet peeve, and social policy, which promises to be highly subjective. I’ll get around to those, hopefully over the weekend, but first I’d like to speculate about endorsements.

It’s customary for each of the major newspapers, and many of the main weekly news-based periodicals, to endorse a party or candidate at election time. In the coming week we can expect to see all of this swing into action, which means that it’s prognostication time.

Expect the Murdoch press to go blue this year. The Sun is historically opportunist and has thrown its weight enthusiastically behind Cameron and the Tories. The Times has been more measured but is unlikely to be able to resist the pressure to obey the corporate line.

They stuck by the Blues through the lean years, and they’re sure as hell not going to turn on him now that he has a sniff at power. They have too much access and too much influence within the Conservative party to make a principled rejection likely or desirable. Expect all of these to stay reliably right-wing.

The flip side of that soin is the question of what happens to Labour’s pet press, when Labour is heading for the worst crushing they have seen since 1983. The Mirror has a phenominal amount invested in its support for Labour, particularly Labour’s left wing – it is largely bankrolled by the Unions and has a great deal of access to Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and the rest of the “Old Labour” remnant. In 2001 Mirror readers were 60% more likely to vote for Labour than the general populace, making them by far the most supportive constituency for the Government. In 2010 they will have to continue that trend. The Guardian is less dependent and thus less dogmatic, and may well go for the Lib Dems. Uniquely, they have an open endorsement process, in which all members of the production team can have a say and in which the readership can make their opinion felt; by most accounts the Lib Dems got a heavy majority of the support this time around. They have form; the Guardian embraced the Lib Dems in the European elections last year. If the Guardian were to go Labour then it would entail a dramatic editorial intervention. The Independent will almost certainly go Lib Dem, despite its generally more left-wing editorial policy.

On the face of it, these two fairly serious publications are straightforward left-wingers in the UK arena. But this really reflects the nature of British politics over the last decade; the Tory party has been a decrepid wreck since 1995, and the Economist and FT have accordingly, grudgingly, kept their weight behind Labour. When the Economist tepidly switched to Labour in 2001 it was a bombshell; it was the first time in 40 years that the paper had gone red, and served to underscore the dramatic intellectual collapse that the Tory party had suffered following the collapse of Thatcherism. It is crushingly unlikely that the Economist will repeat this trick. The question is: have the Lib Dems made a pragmatic enough attempt at credibility this time, or will the Economist revert to form and go Tory? As an institution, the Economist is small-c conservative, and may be content to revert to the safety and familiarity of the two-party system. Intellectually its tendencies are far more Lib Dem, however – although the Tories’ school reform plans are meat and milk to the magazine, their record on civil liberties and economic populism will have dismayed many of their staff, and the Lib Dem’s ideas on Trident and immigration liberalisation will have pleased them. The FT should stay on the left, and will likely either endorse the Lib Dems or not endorse at all.

When a politician refers to “front-line services,” they are talking about a wide array of things. Firefighting, the Post Office, jobcentres, and embassies all qualify. But in truth, the politician is probably talking about something much more narrow. In politicianese, the term “front-line service” is really shorthand for two things: schools and hospitals.

If immigration is Britain’s equivalent to the bitter cultural clashes of America’s bipolar body politic, then schools and hospitals are more like the First Amendment: although arguments as to details may get heated, there remains a consensus across the political spectrum as to the overall direction of travel. If Britain is to succeed in the 21st Century, then education needs to be strengthened and broadened; and the NHS is part of our political and social heritage, and should remain well-funded and widely accessible. This level of broad agreement means that the debates surrounding school and hospital reform tend to be somewhat more advanced than those surrounding crime or migration – which can make “correct” outcomes hard to judge.

Schools
Despite the very best of intentions, schools have not done well under Labour. It’s a stark statement but not an unfair one; results have declined over the past decade. In studies by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, British 15-year-olds came well above the average in 2000, at eighth in mathematics and seventh in reading out of 27 countries. In 2006 they scored below the average in both, at joint 18th and 13th respectively. In science, at least, they remained above-average—but fell from fourth to ninth. The 2009 data are due but there is little evidence to suggest that they will to buck the trend.

One thing that the Labour years have clearly demonstrated is that this isn’t a spending problem. Real spending per student has doubled since 1997, to an average of £5,900 per student per year. School buildings have been improved and facilities extended; teacher pay has risen above inflation; teacher shortages, barring a few persistently problematic areas like mathematics and physics, are mostly receding, although tough schools in poorer areas can face a fearful struggle to attract a capable and qualified faculty. A lot of money has been spend on classroom assistants; a recent report (pdf) was critical of the impact that this influx of support staff has had.

Meanwhile, the Economist, amongst others, alleges that young talent has been ineffectively managed:

Able pupils have also been shortchanged. Labour has started and then wound down three schemes to stretch students in the top 5%, whether academically (“gifted”, in the parlance) or in music or sport (“talented”). Attempts to find some sort of talent in everyone, and teachers opposed to giving anything extra to those already doing well, scuppered each in turn.

While this feels like more of a political or philosophical point than one based in fact-based evidence, it’s noticeable that while all three parties have pledged to do more to support struggling students, there’s a general lack of willingness to engage with the question of how best to stretch those students whose capabilities exceed the necessary restrictions of classroom teaching.

That notwithstanding, the proposals for how to best support struggling students are mostly weak; Labour do promise to provide individual tuition for children who fall far behind their peers in primary school, but this is uncosted; the manifesto claims that:

This will include up to 40,000 six and seven year olds benefiting from extra tuition in English and Maths through ‘Every Child a Reader’ and ‘Every Child Counts’

but it’s unclear who would be delivering the extra tuition: existing teachers, classroom assistants, or additional resource. The Tories, however, seem to have a fairly narrow idea of what education needs; the manifesto devotes a measly 3 pages to it, mostly advocating a return to the 1920s – “better teachers and tougher discipline” seems to be the unifying theme. (Especially entertaining is the Troops to Teachers programme, in which the Tories envision ex-service personnel being retrained for the classroom – presumably to instil some barracks-yard drill-sergeant discipline into the youth of Peckham.) The Lib Dems are favouring the approach that they seem to have gone with in most of their manifesto promises – reach into the magic pot of Trident money and chuck it at the problem:

• Increase the funding of the most disadvantaged pupils, around one million children. We will invest £2.5 billion in this ‘Pupil Premium’ to boost education opportunities for every child. This is additional money going into the schools budget, and headteachers will be free to spend it in the best interests of children.

• The extra money could be used to cut class sizes, attract the best teachers, offer extra one-to-one tuition and provide for after-school and holiday support. This will allow an average primary school to cut classes to 20 and an average secondary school to introduce catch-up classes for 160 pupils.

The approach of targeting investment at schools that are struggling is welcome, especially after Tory and Labour proposals to link performance to results (apparently with the logical understanding that the way to fix schools with poor results is to give them less money), but it doesn’t hide the fact that the Lib Dems don’t really have any concrete proposals for actually improving performance: their manifesto contains such well-meaning emptiness as “improve discipline by early intervention to tackle the poor basic education of those children who are otherwise most likely to misbehave and become demotivated” – hard to disagree with but a long way from being an actual policy.

Having said that, both the Tories and the Lib Dems offer suggestions on how to recalibrate the curriculum (all Labour do in this field is promise to add a teacher training qualification for Mandarin). The Tories proposals are muddled (they promise a primary curriculum organised around subjects like English, Maths, Science and History; the current primary curriculum is organised around English, Maths, and Science) but they explicitly state a desire to make exams, particularly Key Stage 2 exams, harder. One interesting proposal is the suggestion that public schools would be free to offer international exams, similar to those offered by private schools, although one would hope that the governing principle would be a desire to ensure that GCSEs are competitive against these fancy international baccalaureates. The Lib Dems’ proposals are bolder. They would establish an independent body to regulate standards, incorporating OFSTED and replacing the existing (toothless) Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency. They would scale back Key Stage 2 examination, relying on teacher checking and ongoing assessment. They would remove the arbitrary distinction between academic and vocational education, and echo the Tory policy of allowing a broader range of courses and examinations to be offered in schools. Perhaps most radically, they would axe the National Curriculum, replacing it with a “minimum curriculum” upon which teachers can embellish. This last is bold, but probably problematic, as it raises questions of how testing will be standardised and whether tougher schools, with less experienced and qualified teaching staff, or smaller schools, in which the teachers already bear a greater burden for lesson design, will be able to offer as well-tailored a product as more affluent and better-resourced schools.

Teaching is not the sole driver of results, however. The way that schools are created, closed and run is also important. The Tories have their much-mooted Swedish policy, under which the decision on who gets to open new schools will be removed from the dead hand of local government. Parents, charities and other not-for-profit groups will be encouraged to create new schools that could be open by September. Funded by the state according to the number of children who attend, they will stand or fall according to their popularity with parents. Smaller, more expensive schools that local councils are ready to abandon could be rescued by a committed citizenry.

There are costs to this. Like the (existing, mostly popular) City Academies, this scheme will be expensive and will sit alongside the existing state school infrastructure, possibly to its determent. Discouraging well-intentioned and not-so-well-intentioned groups with agendas would be more of a burden here than in small, liberal Sweden. But the truth is that until it’s trailed, it’s hard to say how effective this will be. The one place where this will certainly be unpopular is the teaching unions, whose political power would be sharply reduced.

The Lib Dems are also keen on supply-side reforms but have no idea how to go about it; their policies mostly leave schools still dependent on local government, which means that they would struggle to seriously change how schools are instituted and funded. The manifesto speaks of well-meaning platitudes, such as an Education Freedom Act banning politicians from getting involved in the day-to-day running of schools, but little of any concrete worth.

On higher ed, the picture in Britain still looks mostly positive. As discussed in a previous post, however, the Tories have policies in place that would dissuade lucrative foreign students from gracing Britain’s elite universities. Meanwhile, The Lib Dems have reinstituted their long-held policy of scrapping tuition fees, which is still a terribly policy that seriously undermines their credibility when it comes to universities. The Tories and Labour go the other way, and both parties are likely to back a raise in the cap it tuition fees from £3,000 to £5,000 per year.

This will be unpopular but may be necessary, given the lean years which are ahead. Labour argue that they missed their target, under which they aimed to send 50% of young people to University, by a whisker despite raising the levy to £3,000 in 2003; the UK’s system of student loans and grants meant that the raise actually affected admissions very little. And, to be fair, the higher education participation rate for young people from the most disadvantaged areas has increased every year since 2004. Labour have also intimated that funding for expansion of university places will linked to course types – science, tech, engineering and maths will all be promoted.

Conclusion
I have used my last two posts to talk down the importance of some major electoral issues – the economy and crime in particular. But education is genuinely important – probably the most important single issue at stake in the UK right now, and our long-term economic and cultural vitality is dependent on the right mixture of policy, infrastructure and regulation.

All three manifestos have some merit, as well as some obvious deficiencies. The Lib Dems’ approach to primary and secondary curriculum reform are probably the strongest; not just by default (Labour barely even have a policy on curriculum reform, and the Tories’ policy boils down to “whip them with nettles”) but because it contains ideas that are genuinely worth exploring, such as the flexible funding for school budgets. The Tories’ Swedish school commissioning model is interesting despite it’s potential pitfalls; although potentially expensive it could inspire some excellent results if implemented properly (neither Labour nor the Lib Dems showed up to this event). And Labour generally seem to have the strongest thinking on higher education and universities.

On the grounds that universities are generally doing reasonably well at the moment, I’m going to discount Labour on education; their manifesto reads more like a defence of their record than a serious or credible plan for reform at the mandatory levels. On education, then, it depends which area you think is important and what you’re prepared to hold your nose over. If you want a better commissioning model vote Tory; they probably won’t get their illiberal primary curriculum changes through parliament without a significant majority anyway. If you want better funded schools and a more rational approach to struggling children, vote Lib Dem – again, a tuition fee ban would never make it to law. I’ll probably do the latter but I don’t see the former as an entirely indefensible choice.

The NHS.
The health service has consistently been one of the three most important issues to voters since it was implemented over sixty years ago. This year is no different. What is different, however, is that broadly speaking there is consensus between the parties. There are no major policy objectives in this field; even the Lib Dems are saving their huge stack of Trident money for other areas.

The engine-tinkering is mostly minor stuff – all three parties have ideas about procurement, for example. The Liberal Democrats would have the Primary Care Trusts, which do the buying for hospitals, locally elected to give them more clout. The Conservatives would give GPs much more of a say by reviving the 1990s system of fund-holding, in which many GP practices had their own budgets for elective care done by hospitals. Both opposition parties would also drop or gimp performance targets; the government has been moving away from them of late suggesting that Labour would do the same. The Lib Dems would go farthest here, offering to cut the Department of Health by 50% (fun fact: I’m currently engaged in a downsizing project for a major Department, and cutting an organisation like that in half is much harder than you’d think). Labour and the Tories are also pursuing their bizarre world of perverse incentives here, threatening to use the payments system of the internal market to reward quality and penalise poor care – effectively taking money away from hospitals that are struggling.

One thing that is noticeably absent from the manifestos is closures and cuts. But some scaling back is not just demanded by the state of the economic climate, but also desirable. David Nicholson, who runs the NHS in England, thinks that by 2013 the service could wring 15% out of its budget, meeting increased demand with the same real resources. But pay would have to be held down and the workforce cut by around 10%. Some district hospitals would have to close, or do less. This will be unpopular but isn’t really a political issue. Expect whichever two parties don’t win to oppose it bitterly, and for constituency MPs of all strips to fume at length on local news programmes.

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Aside #1: On Typography
The Tories and Labour manifestos are both hideous on screen. They are clearly meant to be held and read in the hand; both go with dense, serifed fonts (Times New Roman for the Tories – suggesting that CCHQ doesn’t know how to change its defaults – and Book Antiqua for Labour). The Lib Dems’ manifesto is in a much more aesthetically pleasing Helvetica Neau. I may have mentioned in the past that there are good reasons and bad reasons for voting for or against a party. Typography is a good reason, and I look forward to punishing the Labservatives at the ballot box.

Aside #2: In Which I Discover Google Analytics
To the person who googled their way to this site asking “cet school tyumen good school?” the answer is: yes, as is the school in Nizhnevartovsk, or at least they were when I was there a year ago. On the other hand, the person who googled “did hassan steal the rubaiyaat from omar khayyam” – the answer to that is no, I’m afraid. It’s one of many narrative details that Amin Maalouf invented for Samarkand to make it a better story; the truth is that there probably never was an “original” Rubaiyaat – just a corpus of work that Edward FitzGerald pulled together and published, much of which is questionably attributable to Khayyam at best. Although Sabbah seems to have regarded Khayyam as an intellectual inspiration of sorts, it’s not entirely clear that they ever actually met in person, and there’s certainly no evidence to suggest that he was obsessed with Khayyam once Alamut became firmly established.

There’s been some chatting about a push-poll that YouGov allegedly put out as part of its daily tracker for News International. It was a quiet weekend so I can forgive that but it’s not plausible for any number of reasons.

Here’s the question:

Nick Cleggs says the other parties are to blame for the MP scandals, he has taken money from a criminal on the run, many of his MPs have been found guilty of breaking the rules and his own party issued guidance on how to fiddle the expenses system?

Firstly, that’s not a question. It’s a statement that has had a question mark stuck to the end. Secondly, YouGov would be out of their mind to publish such a flagrantly misleading question – it would trash their reputation and shut down their main competitive advantage: that they are the only firm posting daily poll results, which has gained them a phenomenal amount of publicity in this cycle. The key to this story is in today’s Guardian, where one of YouGov’s top brass have come out and stated that the question’s not actually from the tracker poll:

Anthony Wells, the YouGov political analyst running the poll over the weekend, said: “We test lots of messages and ask people in different ways to see which are the most effective ways to sell an idea. I cannot say who the client is but this was not part of the work we do for News International.”

The key point there is that YouGov (like every pollster) tests messages for whoever pays them to do so. This is part of their commercial business and is perfectly legitimate; they usually go out to small samples and are designed to see what happens to a generic voting intendion question when it is prefaced with the message in question that is to be tested. Polling firms are commercial businesses and political polls are usually posted at a significant loss; they are done as a form of advertising, to enhance the prestige of the firm doing the polling (especially if the polls turn out to be accurate) and to attract message testing work of exactly this sort. It’s not unreasonable to expect that all three parties are doing it, or have done it in the recent past; the Tories were just deeply unlucky to get caught out. I seem to recall that an episode of the West Wing dealt with this exact scenario.

Why the Tories? Well, whoever wants to test the message is testing the ground for a smear attack on the Lib Dems, and Labour don’t have any money. Another helpful clue is that the Tories have already overtly stated that they are using YouGov for message testing. It doesn’t take a genius to thus ascertain that someone in CCHQ is planning an assault on the Lib Dems’ change credentials. Whether this leak will deter them or not remains to be seen.

Immigration
Migration is Britain’s abortion. Nothing divides right from left in the UK in the way that immigration policy does; it engenders anger in more or less anyone who has an opinion on it. Polling data on the subject is surprisingly sketchy. One thing that we know for sure was that the Tory party ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket in 2005 and got thumped. Beyond that, the best I can do is a poll commissioned by the BBC in 2007. (You can use the hand to drag about, and the magnifying glass to zoom into and out of, the results table of the poll below.)

While Labour’s policies on immigration were heavily negative (72% against to 24% for), a slender majority thought that immigration helps the UK rather than harming it. A clearer plurality (37% to 27%) believed that immigration was specifically good for their community, although most respondents thought that it actually had no effect at all.

The idea that immigrants might pose a threat to public order and safety met with very low agreement (36%). On the ideas of immigration posing a threat to employment 52% agreed, 48% agreed that a lack of immigration might damage the economy. The most widespread agreement (62%) was with the idea that immigration might lead to Britain losing its identity. The young are far more pro-migration than the old; possibly reflecting any one, or a mixture of, the arguments that the young will need increased migration to pay for their pensions, the young have a markedly higher admiration for cultural diversity and a lack of investment in existing community structures, and the experience of the young shows that the idea of migration threatening employment is increasingly hollow.

So broadly speaking, the gap between left and right seems slight. Howard lost not necessarily because he argued for restricting immigration, but because he ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket; the position he occupied was fringe by the standards of Britain’s benignly migration-sceptic population. The positions of the three main parties are now broadly aligned with the will of the electorate: some migration, enough to keep the economy at a light simmer, just not too much.

This frothy summary masks deep divides.

The first big problem is the question of how much is too much. Britain once had one of the most liberal migration policies in the rich world, and migrants responded in kind – 5.6 million have entered Britain for a year or more over the last 13 years, and 1.6 million of them have been granted permanent residence. The population of the UK is set to rise to 70 million in the next two decades, and that worries many of those who already live in crowded, congested cities and have to cope with stuttery underfunded public services.

There is some irony to the effects that this has had. Recent curbs on migration have made truth of a lie. One of the earliest complaints against migrants was that the influx was causing British people to lose out on jobs, driving wages down and inflating unemployment. At the time this was a gross distortion, masking more deep-seated prejudices; most migrants were unskilled labourers, and Britain had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. There seems to have been some downward pressure on wages at the bottom end of the job market, but on one estimate they have fallen by less than 1%: the national minimum wage means that pay for people over 22 cannot legally go below £5.93 per hour, and many of these jobs were on that baseline already. The low-paid, outdoor, tiring jobs that Poles and Lithuanians have often taken are not ones that the long-term unemployed in Britain seemed wild about turning out for. Had Britain not imported the workers, it might have had to export the jobs. It became an issue regardless, however, and Labour reacted reflexively. The immigration controls that they implemented had the unintended consequence of making the criticisms that inspired them true, at least to a limited extent. By implementing curbs on unskilled migrants, Labour encouraged skilled migrants to arrive in the UK in greater numbers – most of whom settled down in congested London and rather than the parts of Britain that actually lacked labour.

That’s the preamble; what about the policy? Well, the Tories have proposed a tighter cap on the number of migrants allowed to enter the UK annually, while Labour want another crack at implementing a points-based system (which would effectively also function as a cap, but with a more rigorous process of selection). The Lib Dems agree, but go further still, saying that they will have regional points-based schemes in which each part of the country will be able to calibrate its own priorities, ensuring that migrants are sent to the areas where they are most needed. While EU law reduces the flexibility that the parties have when dealing European migration, the Tories have stated that they would place an absolute limit on annual non-EU inflows, although this is a task made near-impossible by the time-lag in the publication of reliable statistics on migration. The Tories would also force foreign students to pay a “bond” upon entering the country, to be repaid when they leave. This is a deeply stupid idea that borders on the criminally negligent; Britain’s universities are almost entirely propped up by these students’ lucrative tuition fees, and disincentivising these students from coming to the UK can only have a negative impact on our education system and thus all aspects of our social and economic future.

A large part of the UK’s problems with migration is that much of the legislation has been knee-jerk, riddled with unintended consequences; and this is partly because the information that the UK generates and gathers about migration have historically been lacking. The Lib Dems have pledged to improve border recording. Labour’s ID cards, regardless of their other demerits, would have the effect of enhancing the information available on migratory trends. Labour also want to insist upon harder English tests for entrants and promise to ensure that all customer-facing public service workers have an “appropriate” level of English, acknowledging that the problem is as much one of perception as fact. The Lib Dems will use some of their Trident / Mansion Tax money to bolster the border guard.

Advantage? Still not the Tories, who stubbornly refuse to accept that a problem this complex needs a solution that is more nuance than “squeeze harder”. Not Labour, who really have no new ideas beyond the ID cards, which are troublesome for other reasons. The Lib Dems have an interesting suite of proposals; the regional points-based system, the enhanced border guards and the greater focus on data-gathering seem like a sensible half-step in the right direction, if implemented correctly. But in truth, all three parties deserve a lot of the blame for the fact that it’s impossible to have a sensible debate about migration policy in the UK. Some level of migration is clearly needed, but wanting to manage the way in which our economy handles that migration makes good tactical sense. All three parties need to abandon the more extremist elements of their rhetoric and devote some serious attention to the actual effects of immigration policy, and come up with a suite that meets the needs of the country. At present, none of them do.

Crime and policing
There are three issues at stake when talking about crime. The first is how to deter them, the second is how to catch those who won’t be deterred, and the third is what to do with them after that. Britain is average at the first, very good at the second, and lousy at the third.

First, I’ll look at the second part, because some errors in the electoral propaganda of both the Tories and Labour need to be straightened out. Crime has been falling in the UK uninterrupted for the last 15 years. It’s currently at its lowest rate since before World War 2, and is some 45% lower than it was when Labour took power. Violent crime, the crime that tends to excise, is at its lowest rate since 1991. Labour deserve a lot of credit for that, as do the police forces of the UK – particularly the Metropolitan Police in London – who have modernised their methods, drastically reduced the corruption in their own ranks, and increased the level to which their communities support them. People are generally much happier about the level of criminality in the UK than they were twenty years ago. However: crime is an election issue, because crime is always an election issue. ‘Twas ever thus.

The parties are thus fixing their sights downwards, at what is termed “anti-social behaviour”. The Tories plans are pretty anaemic; they want to crack down on bars that sell alcohol to children, increasing fines and making it easier to shut down repeat offenders. Labour have more teeth, but their policies remain avowedly statist; more benchmarks for chief constables to meet, including the power to sack police heads if they don’t “improve standards”. On the other hand, they have a stated policy to allow “restorative justice” – ‘where they are able to tell offenders directly how their actions affected them and accept an apology’ – which is a bit bewildering. The Lib Dems will put more police on the streets (that pot of Trident and Mansion Money is going to run out soon, guys), and will put prisoners to work in a policy that may just contravene several key facets of existing human rights legislation. Punishments for anti-social behaviour may also be devolved to local Justice Panels under Lib Dem proposals.

All parties agree that the paperwork and centrally-imposed targets designed by Labour to drive up standards must be reduced, to eliminate the perverse incentives that they created. The Tories would like to abolish the form that officers must fill in when they stop someone to search or question him; details would be speedily radioed back to the station instead. The police themselves are making some efforts to get a bit leaner: the head of Scotland Yard recently announced that officers in London would walk the beat alone, rather than in pairs, in order to increase the number of patrols.

Incarceration remains the big problem, however.

Britain’s prisons are underfunded and wildly overcrowded. Labour are taking an amusing shot at corporate fraudsters, insisting that high-earning offenders will need to foot the bill for their own incarceration. But the party that has done the most to come up with creative solutions to the problem is the Tories, who would sell off old prisons (which often occupy prime real estate) to finance the building of new, modern, larger prisons in more remote areas. The credit crunch may affect that policy but it still seems reasonable to expect that selling off Wandsworth Prison would easily finance a larger, more effective construction somewhere outside of the Home Counties. This should create a virtuous cycle; more space means better resourcing for rehabilitation, which means reduced recidivism.

The Tories are also planning, however, to initiate some upheaval in the current sentencing regime. They propose to scrap the automatic release on parole that many prisoners enjoy after service half of their sentence, forcing them to “earn” their early escape instead. What form this “earning” will take remains opaque, but it seems clear that this will drastically increase the prison population. Given the financial pressure the next government will experience, this policy seems unlikely ever to see the light of day.

When it comes to preventing crime and recidivism, all three parties are clearly constrained by budgetary priorities. All parties agree that more needs to be done to treat drug addicts rather than imprisoning them; Labour will support “family interventions” rather than implementing new policies. The Lib Dems and the Tories have both made vague promises about enhancing rehabilitation policies but there are no new ideas here.

The Lib Dems are generally not to be found on the issue of crime. Their claim of 3,000 more police is eye-catching but given the fall in crime, and the fact that the number of police officers has risen by nearly 30% in the last decade, suggest that it may even be overkill. Labour have some smart policies but their lack of ideas on prison reform is distressing. For that reason it seem to me that the Tories have the strongest suite of crime-related proposals.

I’m starting with the economy because, rightly or wrongly, for many it will be the defining issue of the campaign. Did you notice the hedge in that last sentence? I’ve argued against the economic alarmism of the times before, but it bears particular emphasis today. For the most part, the economy will be what it is. The capacity of the government of the day to affect economic performance is, yes, measurable, but by and large the economy will continue to perform in a manner dictated by forces beyond human control. For most of us, things are going to feel pretty bad for the first half of this decade regardless of who occupies Downing Street.

Nevertheless, we have to play the game, and the first point that needs to be made is that past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance. The Tories managed the economy very successfully – until they failed. Labour managed the economy quite successfully, too – until they failed too. The Lib Dems were widely seen to be failures in waiting, and are now reaping the benefits of unexpected success. So before we delve too deeply into this, it’s worth taking a moment to let go of existing sentiment – even if you, like me, are feeling the effects right now – and engage directly with what’s ahead.

The headline fiscal policies of the three main parties have largely converged, to the extent where heated arguments about whether and when to cut are more of a distracting sideshow than a real issue. In a way, this is a shame; it was easier to point our straightforward right and wrong when there was an appreciable difference. The concensus that has emerged, happily, is the right one: the deficit needs to be cut but not yet. Public sector spending needs to be counter-cyclical, and in these lean times a robust public sector is a necessity. The real debate will come with the good times; look, then, for the party that appears to be happiest to cut. In the meanwhile, the meat of choice is in the details.

Banking
Despite the often incendiary rhetoric coming from the three main parties, only one – the Liberal Democrats – has pledged root-and-branch reform of the financial services sector. The Lib Dems’ Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, has called for the big banks to be broken up, and for those in state ownership to be forced to lend more to credit-hungry companies. This is probably the right thing to do, although doing so in a manner that avoids the impression of declaring war on finance is important. The straightforward truth is that London’s economy needs banks, and Britain’s economy needs London; and while clear failings existed in the regulatory status quo ante it will be important to resist the temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Banking can be safe, profitable and positive – financial services have been at the heart of human civilisation since Darius – they just need to be run and overseen properly.

The Tory’s proposals are in many respects bolder than Labour’s; they want to abolish the FSA, shift supervision of banks and other financial institutions to what they see as the safer hands at the Bank of England, and create a consumer-protection agency. Labour’s rhetoric is spicy but their proposals are flaccid and statist. The Government would assume greater control, grant itself greater powers of regulation and oversight, and institute a broad array of mostly ineffective bodies to administer each other onanastically.

The Economist, in their pre-election feature, said that:

the differences come down broadly to this. Labour offers more of the same; the Conservatives would rearrange the deckchairs; the Lib Dems would shake up the system but haven’t really said how. It’s a choice, if not a great one.

I think that’s pretty much on the nose. In almost all respects, Labour are the clear loser here.

Manufacturing and business
Again, the opposition parties have a clear advantage in both style and substance. Labour’s proposals for the post-election recovery have been most heavily tax-led; the increase in National Insurance is unquestionably a mistake, compounding controversial proposals to extend its tax reach over foreign subsidiaries controlled by British-domiciled companies. Talk of capital flight (when businesses, put off by a hostile tax regime, move overseas) are overblown, although some companies have already moved away to friendlier climes. But Labour’s more positive, business-friendly ideas are also muddled. They rely over-heavily on tax-breaks and other subsidies, which distort the tax code and create complicated and unclear incentives. This is a threat that the Tories and Lib Dems recognise; although the Conservatives also have their fair share of tax breaks, they are proposing to directly cut corporation tax and have pledged to look at simplifying the tax code and associated regulations. The Lib Dems have made a point of targetting “complex reliefs”.

The Tories would be slightly kinder to small businesses than their competition. From the manifesto:

As well as stopping Labour’s jobs tax, for the first two years of a Conservative government any new business will pay no Employers National Insurance on the first ten employees it hires during its first year. To support small businesses further, we will:

• make small business rate relief automatic; and,

• aim to deliver 25 per cent of governmentresearch and procurement contracts through SME s by cutting the administrative costs of bidding.

We will support would-be entrepreneurs through a new programme – Work for Yourself – which will give unemployed people direct access to business mentors and substantial loans.

All of this is tinkering with the engine, however. The main inhibitor of business performance is the deficit and the government’s domination of the credit markets. Until that’s resolved none of the parties will be able to do much to attract business, although they can still do plenty to repel it. Advantage Tories, but don’t base your vote on it unless you’re a small-business owner.

Employment and Inequality
Britain is more unequal than it has ever been.

The blue line in the chart above is the Gini Coefficient, the standard unit used to measure inequality. The higher the line is, the more unequal Britain gets. Two trends stand out; firstly, over the thirteen years of New Labour, inequality has slightly risen despite the huge amount of time and effort put into reducing it. And secondly, the rise under Thatcher was unnervingly sharp.

I mention this not in spite of my earlier injunction to ignore prior performance, but because it’s important to understand where inequality comes from and what can be effectively done to combat it. Labour’s anti-rich policies have been Sisyphian; high-earners liberated by Thatcher’s market reforms have raced ahead, far outstripping the government’s capacity to hold them back. This can be a good thing, if properly managed; wealth is not something to be feared, and in a truly equal society the promise of weath can in erode inequality by promoting inter-generational social movement. But the flip side of the coin is that Labour’s anti-poverty measures have been equally ineffective, and that causes a real problem. Real poverty, especially amongst pensioners and children, has barely fallen since 1997 despite the best of intentions.

So if tackling inequality was so hard in the boom times, what hope is there during the lean? The two main weapons to use against inequality are employment and education – education will be the subject of a later post, but employment is very much of the now. Unemployment has risen on Labour’s watch but not my much – it’s still well below the OECD and EU averages, and Labour have promised to move further and more decisively to squeeze employment. They’ve promised credits to ensure that working is always more lucrative than benefits; advanced apprenticeships; a Future Jobs Fund for young people and a crackdown on benefit fraud.

All well and good. The Tories take a far less liberal line on this, with populist policies bound to go down well with the middle class but unlikely to do much to tackle the employment figures. Under the Tories, long-term benefit claimants who fail to find work will be required to ‘work for the dole’ on community work programmes. Anyone on Jobseeker’s Allowance who refuses to join the Work Programme will lose the right to claim out-of-work benefits until they do. Those who refuse to accept reasonable job offers could forfeit their benefits for up to three years. While there are some positive reinforcements on offer, on the whole the Tory employment package is devoted more to sticks than carrots.

When addressing broader questions of inequality, the three parties have a broader suite of offerings. All three parties will scrap compulsory retirement ages and raise state pension ages, although the Tories will do so fastest; these are clearly the right thing to do, however much it may dismay us on a personal level. The Lib Dems will raise the tax-free earning threshhold to £10,000, which will be of benefit to most; paid for by a levy on expensive houses, this is a purely redistributive measure and is the central strut of what is probably the boldest and most innovative on inequality in this election. All parties would broaden flexible working options; the Lib Dems would introduce name-blind job application forms to reduce sex and race discrimination in employment, initially companies with more than 100 employees. Labour plan to extend elderly care and a publicly-funded national Care Service would be created, although probably not under the next government.

The Tories have a history of not taking inequality seriously and show no signs of reversing that trend here. The main theme of their manifesto is self-determination – the “Big Society” soundbite is really a fetching way of telling people that it’s time to fend for themselves. While it will, again, resonate with middle Britain it’s a proposal that will not bear fruit in the long term. Inequality cannot be combated passively, and while many think that inequality is not a problem that affects them, the lack of economic access and educational opportunity for a significant subset of the population is a huge economic problem that could undermine recovery or prompt a future collapse. If central government has any function at all then it is to avert exactly this kind of indicator.

Labour’s proposals are worthy, but will be expensive. Their costings remain opaque and some policies (“over the next Parliament more than 8,000 new therapists will ensure access to occupational psychological therapy for all who need it”) are just a bit odd, leaving one to question whether they’re strictly speaking worth spending money on at all during a time of recession. Labour’s guarantee to ensure that working is more lucrative than the dole is excellent, although the proof of the pudding will be in the eating – will an extra £40 a week really be enough to get those who currently resist working into jobs? The work-shy are, after all, work-shy.

And the Lib Dems? Their proposals are really the most robust. Theirs the only suite to be fully costed – thanks to the mansion tax and the proposal to scrap Trident (of which more in the post on defence) they have money to throw at their proposals without having to increase the tax burden or cut other, equally essential services. The ironic thing about the Lib Dem position is that, despite being generally not regarded as a credible prospect for power, their proposals are far more plausible than those on offer elsewhere. On this issue they have a clear policy advantage.

Conclusion
There are areas in which the next government can make a big difference. At present, the economy isn’t really one of them – or at least, not directly. The long-term health of the British economy rests on other indicators – migration, education – and the big economic changes that could make a difference, such as radically simplifying the tax code, aren’t being discussed. On the basis that inequality is the one area in which improvements can be directly made, and on the grounds that they appear to be more robustly in favour of reforming the financial services industry, I’d tepidly endorse the Lib Dems on economic matters.

Apologies for the recent silence. While there have been interesting bits and bobs on the world stage, the home media have been monomaniacal in their fixation on the usual trivialities of the early days of the election. Comme ci, comme ça.

I promised a post giving my view on the merits of the various political offerings presented in this election. Over the next few days I’ll do all that and more; a series of posts addressing the question from the perspective of various policy strands awaits. I’ll be doing this because it helps me to get the clutter out of my own head; although I already have a pretty good idea about where my vote is going, I’m not an adherent of any one party. As Jeremy Paxman once said,

I am a political person. But I’m not a party political person. I don’t believe there is a monopoly of wisdom in any one party. I suppose as one gets older – I would have described it at the age of 21 as the process of selling out, but another way of looking at it is to say, actually, the world is not a very simple place, and that as you get older simple-minded solutions seem less attractive.

And that’s the truth. Given the extent to which a political party can change from one election cycle to the next, where’s the logic in remaining unquestioningly devoted to them? Even claiming allegiance to a broad “wing” of the political spectrum is a futile gesture, because ultimately all political positions have some merit, if only in a cautionary or illustrative sense. Without engaging with those ideas and allowing yourself to believe – even for a second – that they may have some kernel of validity, then any attempt you make to ultimately reject them will be predicated on an incomplete understanding, and any attempt you make to defeat them will be undermined.

See, I warned you that this would be a space for mental de-cluttering. In a time of intense political activity, this political nerd will be taking the time to be introspective. The day-to-day minutia of an election is, after all, deeply tedious.

What it boils down to, though, is this. The key to deciding who to vote for is based on three small things and one large thing. The three small things are: deal in facts, know your sources, and don’t overconsume. The big thing is to know what matters and not to get distracted by trivialities. There are people in this world who will allow the Cameron’s upcoming bundle of joy to sway their vote; if what matters most is who can fix the economy then focus on it.

I guess I’ll be elaborating on all of those things as I go.