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“All parties are to blame here..”

Mar 26

Posted by James in Elections, Parties | 48 Comments

It’s the standard cry of flacks for the larger and more tarnished parties. Every time a secret dining club with the PM is revealed, every time a millionaire donor turns out to have come by his money through fraud, every time a PM is questioned over cash for peerages, every time a half a million pounds arrives just before policies the donor doesn’t like are dropped.

And of course it’s not true.

Every recent party of government is at it or has been at it or looks like they’ve been at it, but those of us who work for or volunteer for shoe-string operation parties like the Greens get seriously tired of hearing we’re just as bad. Tired as in, in my case, a strong desire to throw the radio out of the window. It suits the corrupted class to swirl their hands in the sewage floating up around their midriffs and pretend that all parties are in just as deep. If all politics is equally corrupt, they imply, why stop voting for us just because we are? No-one else is any better. We’re all in the sewer together.

Seriously, it’s not true.

Sure, Greens have had larger donations in the past, although I can’t remember anything above £20k. Sure, I hoped we’d find a rich donor in good time before the 2011 election to compete with the Soutar warchest and the unions’ money and all the rest. Perhaps we just haven’t had a chance to be corrupted yet. But I don’t think so.

So what can be done about this party funding mess? Leave it as it is and hope the fear of being caught will reduce the likelihood of it being repeated? The evidence is against that. Soutar gave the same amount of money again to the SNP last year despite the 2007 outcry over their abandonment of bus re-regulation, which remains comfortably abandoned. Neither Blair nor any of his associates ever faced trial over cash for honours. The Lib Dems never even gave Brown’s donation back to the people he’d defrauded it from (I regard this as the most egregious on this list, incidentally).

The current wrangle over donations founders on two things. First, parity – will the Tories take enough from Labour through capping union donations or fragmenting them and, conversely, will Labour block enough of the funnel that leads from big business to the Tories?

The “fairness” battle between Labour and the Tories is an odd one, but pragmatically I accept they both need to be happy with the outcome. Personally I’d ban all collective donations to political parties – corporations and unions (collectively) unbalance politics with large donations and are in that way undemocratic, although unions’ other activities remain vital. So by all means make it easy for individual Labour-supporting trade unionists to give to their party, or indeed trade unionists who support any other party to give as they wish. Similarly, individual shareholders are people too, and if they want to give to the Tories or to any other party, fine, so be it.

Second, what about state funding? The public won’t wear state funding, we’re told, although the return on investment would be substantial if the quid pro quid was a system capable of ending the money-go-round. And the large parties won’t wear living on the small and capped donations of their members. So where else could the money come from for state funding?

Well, here’s a crazy interim idea. Donations. Eh? What? Here’s the idea. Take 50% of every donation to every political party and redistribute it according to the votes cast at the last election (or a rolling average across types of election). A hypothecated tax, if you will. A big donor would know that his or her preferred party will benefit most from their donation, but their donation would also be supporting fair funding for other parties too. Yes, it’s crazy. Other suggestions welcome. We can’t go on like this.

Do the Lib Dems have an LGBT problem?

Mar 2

Posted by James in Media, Parties, Westminster | 27 Comments

It seems like an odd question even to ask. At Holyrood the rump of the Lib Dems is four square behind equal marriage, and their activist base is almost certainly less heteronormative than the other larger parties.

Furthermore, parliamentary politics as practiced either at Holyrood or Westminster hasn’t that much residual homophobia going on. As it was put to me in conversation this week, every political party is essentially LGBT-friendly now, even the Tories (imagine Ruth winning even ten years ago) – with the possible exception, my friend noted, of the SNP, where LGBT MSPs have to rub shoulders at group meetings with the likes of John Mason and Bill Walker. Even Jackson Carlaw, probably the most right-wing person at Holyrood apart from Fergus Ewing, has signed the Equal Marriage pledge.

And yet, and yet.

The story of Simon Hughes and his relationship with both the newspapers and his own sexuality is back on the agenda again. For those who don’t know the original story, he was the Liberal Party candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, taking on Peter Tatchell, then in Labour and now someone I’m proud to have met while we were both out campaigning for Caroline Lucas in 2010. Peter had already been an LGBT activist with the Gay Liberation Front, and as a result the Liberal Party leaflets were larded with innuendo, endorsing Hughes as “a straight choice” for Bermondsey, despite, as it turns out, his closetted bisexuality. Peter’s accepted Hughes’ apology for the hypocrisy and negativity, but that’s just because Peter’s a better person than I am.

The story has come back again because, as the Guardian reports, Hughes finally pre-emptively outed himself to the Sun in 2006 following alleged phone-hacking that would have revealed he’d called gay chat lines.

That’s an understandable response to another shocking breach of privacy, but the article also contains a peculiar new angle. The Guardian quotes Hughes indirectly as follows. “Hughes added that he believed the forced revelation came at the time he was running for the party leadership and pushed him out of contention.” Really? Being bisexual would make it impossible to lead the Lib Dems? Either that’s true, in which case their membership is a lot more homophobic than one might expect, or Hughes has not just seriously misread his party, he’s also bad-mouthed his colleagues.

Hughes is not an isolated case, though. Leaving aside the more complicated situation of Mark Oaten, consider also David Laws. Despite the best efforts of his supporters, it wasn’t his sexuality that brought him down – it was the sight of a millionaire chiselling the taxpayer by lying about his living arrangements, not to mention doing so after making probity on his expenses a major part of his election campaign. But he couldn’t feel comfortable being out, and it wasn’t clear whether that was because he feared for the reaction from friends and family, or the party, or the electorate, or the media, or what combination of those.

What’s more, the specific language and way in which he announced his resignation were problematic. As a former Lib Dem friend of mine put it to me: “He said the past few days had been the “longest and toughest” of his life because he was outed – what a message to send to young people thinking about coming out. The whole thing about wanting to keep his sexuality a secret just had this tone of gay equalling shameful. It was horrible.”

The expectation is that the Lib Dems would be a safe crowd to be out amongst. But perhaps Simon Hughes is right, and perhaps that’s not the real truth.

Left hand holds the purse strings

Feb 15

Posted by Kirsty in Democracy, Parties, Westminster | 6 Comments

Ed MilibandParty political funding is the reform behemoth that refuses to die.

Several times it’s been through the wringer of inquiry and report to being roundly ignored in the last decade –the 2000 Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, the 2006 Sir Hayden Phillips inquiry, and most recently Sir Christopher Kelly’s Committee on Standards in Public Life.

The proposed reforms to party funding never secure parliamentary support, as they fail to reach agreement from all three main Westminster Parties.  The Phillips inquiry collapsed over deciding the best way to deal with Labour’s funding from trade unions, while Sir Christopher Kelly’s proposal, of £23m a year in state funding of political parties, met with disapproval from all corners of Westminster, reluctant to commit to such spending of taxpayer’s money during a period of austerity.

Last week Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called for a revival of the behemoth, writing to Ed Miliband and David Cameron asking them each to nominate party representatives for three-party private talks, aiming to set out some form of political funding agreement by Easter.

According to The Guardian, this agreement would “cover individual and company donor limits, the treatment of union affiliates, spending caps at elections and the distribution of existing state funding between parties, currently estimated at £7m a year.”

Additional state funding has been ruled out from these discussions, and this means the agreement will not include much reduced donation limits – such caps, minus funding from the state, could entail bankruptcy for the parties.

Much reduced donation limits from individuals or an organisation is the most frequent sticking point for the Labour Party in these discussions. Heavily dependent on trade union affiliation fees for income, any moves which limit or alter how these are made threatens Labour’s continued existence, whether it’s severely capping the amount a union can donate or proposing that political levy-payers have to contract in, rather than opt-out, when joining.

So while ruling out additional state funding and thus much lower donor limits means Miliband is likely to be more sympathetic to joining Clegg’s talks, another worry about party funding could be looming for Labour – this time from within.

A quarter of motions to the GMB’s annual conference in June are debating the trade union’s future relationship with Labour. The GMB describes the actions of so many of its branches raising this issue as “unprecedented”.

Giving around £2 million each year to the party, the GMB is Labour’s third largest donor. Of its 600,000 members, around half are either employed by the public sector, or in private companies contracted to the public sector. Comments by the Labour leadership in January regarding public sector pay constraint have ignited the union members’ ire; particularly Ed Balls’ statement in a speech to the Fabian Society that he could not promise to reverse the coalition’s spending cuts if Labour were elected in 2015.

In a statement on Tuesday, the GMB’s executive noted the concerns of its membership and said:

“The executive expressed concern and disappointment with recent statements made by senior party officials and registered their growing frustration at the lack of a cohesive policy to protect working people from the ravages of the Tory-led coalition Government.”

Being attacked by union activists while trying to woo middle-Britain back to Labour may not feel like being in ‘Red Ed’ Miliband’s best interests for positioning himself and his party to win the next election, but only a fool would dismiss these calls by the GMB’s activists.

Labour can’t try and defend the trade union link and its generous funding on one hand, while that crucial link and all its cash is slipping away from the other. Miliband is going to have to choose exactly how he wants his party to have a future; just have to wait and see if it will be a well funded one, with committed union activists campaigning on the ground, rather than skint attempts at triangulation with the Daily Mail reading masses.

Drop the clangers and find a cause

Jan 7

Posted by Kirsty in Parties, Westminster | 6 Comments

It’s not just the goofs and gaffes plaguing Ed Miliband and Labour at Westminster which are stopping the opposition’s recovery. It’s how Labour responds that needs improvement.

The week started with Labour guru Lord Glasman’s declaring in the New Statesman that Miliband has “no strategy and no narrative”. The turmoil continued with the leaking of Director of Communications Tom Baldwin’s memo, which insisted comparisons between Miliband with Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard are “well wide of the mark”.

Later in the week, Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy’s acknowledged that Labour has to start accepting some of the coalition government’s cuts. Although no different from previous statements by Miliband and Ed Balls, Murphy’s comments were covered in the press as adding to the general sense of seams unravelling.

But these were dwarfed almost entirely by Twitterstorms. A race row caused by Diane Abbot’s sloppy tweeting, and a sloppy social media faux pas of Miliband’s own making: a ‘Blackbusters’ Freudian slip on his Twitter feed on the death of national treasure Bob Holness.

Separated out, none of the above clangers are life threatening to Labour. Memos leak, tweets are mistyped, Diane Abbot says nutty things, Glasman’s pronouncements are usually ignored and when Obama’s cutting defence by $450 billion in the next decade, Murphy agreeing to £5 billion is a start, rather than a stop.

But altogether, it feels like the Labour Party is stuck in a real-life episode of The Thick of It. The party’s solution to this, as ever, will be the inevitable relaunch in the next week or so.

Back in 2009, The Economist rightly identified the set-piece parliamentary announcement as one of the “few trustier gambits in the Brownite playbook”, because “these opportunities to set the terms of debate, and to stage carefully prepared appearances rather than have to think and communicate” entirely suited Brown.

And they did work when he was Chancellor, with set-ups like introducing the pre-budget report giving him the platform to continue his ascent against Blair. But as leader they didn’t work so well. In September 2008, a year after his election, Brown’s first relaunch of his leadership was announcing a mortgage rescue scheme to reverse the plummeting house market. It was scuppered by Chancellor Alistair Darling’s (correct) assessment the weekend prior that the British economy was at a 60 year low and getting worse.

Since Brown’s tenure, Labour Party positioning has felt like Bambi skating. It gets to the point where it’s just about standing up and keeping it together, when a wobble causes mis-step and collapse.

As Brown’s former advisor, Miliband too favours the use of the set-piece announcement whenever the Labour Party needs to stave off a crisis. Miliband’s bigger problem, unlike Brown, is that too many of his announcements are about the party, not about policy or governing or even opposition.

Since his election as leader, Miliband has announced scrapping elections to the Shadow Cabinet, loosening relationships with the unions, reinvigorating annual conference and allowing ‘registered supporters’ to participate in internal elections as attempts to stamp his authority on the party. None have given Miliband his desired Clause 4 moment and is leading to a policy vacuum with the public.

So next week Miliband needs to make sure his recovery announcement trailed in today’s Guardian, on how the Labour Party will look beyond redistribution of wealth as the means to a fair society, is an announcement very much about policy, and not about party.

Unlike Scottish Labour at Holyrood, where much deeper reforms are needed to combat the malaise, what will make Labour electable in terms of Westminster isn’t how reformed the party’s internal structures are, but policy, popularity and proper opposition.

In another week, Murphy’s comments on defence spending would’ve worked; positioning Labour towards all three of the necessary strands for electability. Speaking this week, Murphy said:

“There is a difference between populism and popularity. Credibility is the bridge away from populism and towards popularity. It is difficult to sustain popularity without genuine credibility. At a time on defence when the government is neither credible nor popular it is compulsory that Labour is both.”

Policy that acknowledges to tackle the fiscal deficit will need some cuts – they just should be the right ones, like cuts in defence spending, that don’t harm the vulnerable in society. Popularity in finding a position which most of the electorate also share. Proper opposition by getting the first two right and giving the foundation to properly take on the coalition government.

Behind all the goofs and gaffes, the rest of the Labour Party does seem to be getting on with this strategy – Gregg McClymont MP’s Cameron’s Trap pamphlet launched between Christmas and New Year indicates a strong awareness of the need to get the position with the public right, rather than worrying about party structures. Let’s just see if the Leader of the Opposition can start to talk policy, over party, without slipping again.

 

Prediction 2012 – Death of the Cybernat

Jan 5

Posted by Kirsty in Democracy, Elections, Parties | 13 Comments

 

To my ears, 2012 is a fantastic, futuristic,far-off place, populated with daleks and space odysseys. But the future is now, and like all good science fiction, this prediction is probably as preposterous and as far-fetched as its title suggests, but with that tiny grain of truth that makes it plausible.

Unlike the poor badgers, the death of the cybernat this year won’t be as a consequence of a cull. More accurate would be to say this year will see the demise of the stereotype negative cybernat. But that would make a more boring, less Doctor Who-esque post title. Nationalists and independence supporters will continue to dominate Scottish politics’ digital sphere. They’ll just do so in a relentlessly positive fashion.

To win in politics needs professionalism and edge. Professionalism in standing good, able candidates, in communicating your message to voters and in calculating your strategy and tactics to defeat your opponent. The experience of 2007 and 2011 demonstrates the SNP has this in spades, while every sudden unexpected Subway sandwich stop and rolling news headline crash of Scottish Labour demonstrates otherwise. No doubt the 2012 Local Government elections will continue to demonstrate this trend in results in May.

Edge is harder to define. It’s the magic ingredient in any election which decides a winner between two even candidates. Even taking the above, for all the SNP’s success, to most voters there is little in terms of policy, or outlook, or local representation, to separate most SNP candidates from most Labour candidates. It comes down to which party has the edge, the slight nose in front of the other, to give it the win.

Political parties try to win the edge off the other by framing the debate on their own terms and then amplifying their message within the frame. The simplest and often most effective way to do this is to go negative. In Scottish terms, it helped Labour claw back to within one seat of the SNP in 2007, but wasn’t a stratagem it could employ in 2011 after lifting the SNP’s manifesto.

The harder, but in the long run more effective, way to gain an edge is to go positive and stay positive. And this is where our beloved negative nasty cybernats will disappear, as a sacrifice for the good of the independence referendum.

The referendum won’t be in 2012, but the SNP’s campaign, given Scotland Forward‘s launch, is already in action. Compared to referendums, elections are a piece of the proverbial to win – I jest, but if you turn up, look and sound good to enough voters, don’t do anything stupid and spend wisely you’re most of the way there.

To win a referendum, however, requires a paradigm shift in people’s minds, an act of persuasion so big and inspiring they become willing to rewrite the base codes of how they live and are governed. Much easier to be on the side of No, where I suspect Labour will entrench itself,  where you simply have to tell people such a shift cannot be done, for positive and negative reasons, although I also suspect the latter will dominate.

But one way the independence movement can persuade people of the need for this this shift is through relentless positivity. If the transition from devolved Scotland to independent Scotland is associated with positive words like fortunate, blessed, diverse, beauty, unique, rich, colourful, potential (and all these words are just from Alex Salmond’s first paragraph of the introduction to ‘Your Scotland, Your Future’), then the paradigm shift won’t seem so big and scary, and the unionist side’s claims won’t ring so true.

I’d be shocked if several copies of George Lakoff’s ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ weren’t knocking about Gordon Lamb House, which explains in beautiful detail why this might just work for the Nationalists. The positive frame is where the SNP need to keep the independence debate to have a chance of winning, and the opposition haven’t yet managed to steer them off it. And this relentless positivity won’t just be from parliamentarians, but from party members, both online and offline. There will of course be outliers, but the SNP’s professionalism as it operates towards achieving its ultimate cause will ensure it amongst its membership.

So farewell cybernats. Given Scottish Labour’s new Twitter Tsar, negative digital discussion has probably just moved across to the other side of Scottish politics, but I look forward to editing your relentlessly positive commenting below and in the future. Remember, after all, a referendum is at stake..