General election 2017 – The view through a smoked glass mirror

On one side of the House of Commons sits an opposition leader whose confidence is growing by the day.  Originally elected almost by accident and against the wishes of the parliamentary party, that leader enjoys huge support among the party rank and file.  Although slated as an extremist and as unelectable by the MPs, journalists and academics that make up the “Westminster Bubble,” there has been a growing surge of support for the leader from Britain’s young (18-35) generation.

On the other side of the House is a Prime Minister whose standing in the country is falling by the hour.  No longer able to command a majority in the house, barely managing to quell backbench hostility, and dependent upon the votes of Ulster Unionists to govern, it is only a matter of time before the government falls.

This is a reasonable description of the situation Britain awoke to this morning.  It is, however, also a description of the British parliament 40 years ago.  The difference was that in 1977 it was a right-wing Tory leader that stood on the threshold of tearing up the political “centre ground” consensus and replacing it with one of her own – the neoliberal orthodoxy that has been coming apart at the seams since 2008. 

Margaret Thatcher had been unexpectedly elected in 1975 after the favoured right wing candidate, Keith Joseph, was obliged to withdraw from the contest after expressing sympathy for the idea of compulsorily sterilising the poor.  The candidate favoured by MPs, William Whitelaw (who later became Thatcher’s Home Secretary) was regarded as being too similar to the defeated Edward Heath.  The expectation once Thatcher became leader of the opposition was that she would abandon her (in their day) extreme policies in favour of a platform closer to the post-war consensus that had prevailed since 1951 – when instead of reversing the 1945-51 Labour reforms, the Tories embraced them and extended them (for example, abolishing prescription charges and building more council houses) with the result that the Tories went on to govern for 13 years.

By the late 1960s, the post-war consensus was breaking apart.  Full-employment had resulted (predictably) in a wage-price spiral that made Britain’s industry uncompetitive in international markets.  This resulted in a falling pound and a growing balance of payments (current account) deficit.  Attempts by successive Labour governments to persuade trade unions to voluntarily weaken their bargaining position failed in large part by pressure from grassroots union members.  A proto-Thatcherite attempt by the Heath government to achieve the same aim was similarly defeated.

What Thatcher sensed was that there was a new anti-consensus mood in Britain, particularly among those younger voters who had not lived through the privations of war and depression which had shaped the post-war consensus.  As Ed Howker and Shiv Malik note:

“In 1979 Margaret Thatcher received a 16 percent swing in support from young people aged 18-35 – the baby boomers – significantly more than any other group… Without their support she wouldn’t have gained power.”

This is how political and economic consensus breaks down – as Max Planck once put it – “one funeral at a time.”  It is a political given that older people are far more likely to vote than younger people.  It is also a given that older voters are more conservative (with a small “c”) than younger voters.  This means that where there is consensus between the two major parties within Britain’s archaic first-past-the-post voting system, politics tends to gravitate to the so-called centre ground.  In the period 1945-1975, this political consensus – built around Keynesian economic ideas – was centre-left (i.e. social democratic rather than socialist or communist).  In the period since 1985, the consensus – built around the Monetarist ideas of economists like Hayek and Friedman - has been centre-right.  Rather like the 1951 Tories, in 1995 Labour’s Blairite “modernisers” embraced what by then was known as Thatcherism, and then went on to do it better than the Tories (e.g. cutting social security and beginning the process of privatising Britain’s public services) with the result that they, too, enjoyed 13 years in government.

There is some irony that so many people projected the ghost of Margaret Thatcher onto the flawed and damaged personality that is Theresa May.  Far from being strong and stable, Mrs May turned out to be an insecure and bullying control freak, whose fear of criticism caused her to exclude even her own ministers from drafting her election manifesto or from mapping out her election campaign.  The result was that she turned a 17 seat majority and an apparently unassailable 20 point lead in the polls into a minority and – if today’s polling is correct – a 5 percent lead for a newly invigorated Labour opposition.

But the deeper reason why Theresa May cannot channel the spirit of Margaret Thatcher (any more than Donald Trump can resurrect the ghost of Ronald Reagan) is that everything has changed.  In the mid-1970s:

• inflation was high
• profits were low
• employment and wages were high
• governments and unions were powerful
• business and finance were weak
• interest rates were high
• access to credit was limited
• taxes were high
• inequality was low

These are the exact opposite to the problems we face today.  Since 2008 we have experienced severe deflation which weak governments have failed to resolve through low interest rates, tax cuts and debt-based quantitative easing.  Nevertheless, there is huge structural opposition to any shift away from the neoliberal economic orthodoxy with its insistence on “sound finance” and austerity cuts.  In a foresighted paper from 1943, Michael Kalecki more or less predicted current economic policy:

“In current discussions of these problems there emerges time and again the conception of counteracting the slump by stimulating private investment. This may be done by lowering the rate of interest, by the reduction of income tax, or by subsidizing private investment directly in this or another form. That such a scheme should be attractive to business is not surprising. The entrepreneur remains the medium through which the intervention is conducted. If he does not feel confidence in the political situation, he will not be bribed into investment. And the intervention does not involve the government either in 'playing with' (public) investment or 'wasting money' on subsidizing consumption."

The failure of quantitative easing (i.e. “subsidizing private investment”) tax cuts and historically low interest rates to reverse the post-2008 depression has been felt most profoundly by the young.  Unlike their parents and grandparents, who enjoyed free education and cut price council house sales, today’s young face crippling student debt and house prices far greater than they can ever hope to afford.  Moreover, as the economic slump continues, the young are increasingly aware that it is their generation that is going to be asked to pay the price of an aging population and the tax costs of bailing out the banks while receiving no support to pay back their own debts.

Without wishing to take anything away from Corbyn/Labour’s campaign – which proved far more competent that any of the Westminster Bubble commentators had suggested – it was these deeper structural issues that caused so many young people to come out to vote to prevent another majority Tory government.  It is no surprise, that Corbyn – who was regarded by opponents and allies alike as an anti-establishment (i.e. anti-consensus) extremist – became the repository for youthful discontent .  If you have reached the point where you need to change the way politics and economics are done, you are going to look to the extremes for a solution. 

Nor were Britain’s young generation the only ones to rally behind Corbyn/Labour.  A large part of the older UKIP/Leave vote – which delivered the Brexit shock to a complacent political elite – switched to Labour too.  Since these were the voters that Theresa May assumed would embrace the politics of the hard-right, their switch to Labour was in its way as crucial as the youth vote.  It is likely that they broke this way for similar reasons – stagnating incomes, insecure employment, poor housing and public services, etc… issues that May either ignored or promised to worsen.

This isn’t 1979 all over again.  But I am minded of the words attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme.”  It might well be that the neoliberal economic/political consensus is coming to an end.  If so it will be helped along by the deeper political arithmetic of Mrs May’s failed attempt to secure a massive majority.  At the start of April, Mrs May was stood in front of three hundred cheering Tory MPs.  Today she is stood in front of at least 100 Tory MPs who face losing their seats at the next election.  They are no longer cheering; several are already sharpening metaphorical knives.  On the other side of the House, Labour MPs who stood despondent when the election was called – seeing it as no more than a mercy killing for their supposedly unelectable party – are rallying behind their leader.  Mr Corbyn now has around 100 MPs sat behind him who are only there because of the strength of the campaign that he ran.  Former critics are swallowing humble pie and jostling for their places in the new shadow cabinet.  Like the despondent figure of Edward Heath after 1975, only the most embittered Blairites continue to carp behind Mr Corbyn’s back.

We cannot know if we have reached one of those historical moments where everything changes.  For all of the euphoria around Mr Corbyn’s campaign, Labour still lost the election.  Mrs May is still Prime Minister and, with the help of the DUP, the Tories can maintain a majority in Parliament – the numbers simply do not work for any Labour-led “rainbow coalition.”  Nor should we rule out LibDem treachery at some point (perhaps with a new Tory leader) in the parliament – similar deals with the Liberals and the Ulster Unionists kept Labour in power from 1974-79, so we should not assume that the Tories will be gone anytime soon.

What matters now is whether Labour can cement a new coalition of political forces in the country.  This will involve developing a platform that can offer hope not just to Britain’s youth, but also to the downtrodden voters in Labour’s neglected ex-industrial heartlands.  That, in turn, means escaping the neoliberal consensus that says that rising incomes are always bad; that low taxes are always good; that public borrowing and investment are always to be avoided; and that public ownership is always wrong.  It is up to Labour politicians and Labour supporters to demonstrate that it is precisely these neoliberal ideas – that were entirely appropriate in the conditions of the 1970s – are the very things that are now holding everybody back, and that a new economics and politics can meet the needs of Britain’s young and old alike.

This election is rigged – here’s how to make your vote count

Theresa May, her rich supporters and her mass media cheer leaders would all like you to believe that you will be voting for a Prime Minister on Thursday.  The main reason why they are doing this is to encourage millions of people across Britain to waste their votes.  This is because the more parliamentary constituencies (aka “seats”) they can remove from the election, the more chance they have of securing a majority on a minority share of the votes.

To understand this, you need to understand how Britain’s somewhat antiquated electoral system actually works.  Because Britain is a representative democracy, in theory we do not have a single election where we vote for the governing party – still less the Prime Minister.  The Prime Minister is chosen by the majority of MPs elected to parliament.  While this is almost always the leader of the largest party, there is no constitutional requirement for this.  For example, in 1931 parliament elected Labour’s Ramsey MacDonald as Prime Minister even though the majority of MPs were Conservatives.  Voting for Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn no more guarantees that they will be Prime Minister until 2022 than voting for David Cameron guaranteed that he would be Prime Minister until 2020.

During a general election we participate in what are in effect 649 separate, winner-takes-all  local elections (the Speaker’s seat is usually uncontested) to decide which MPs will represent our respective constituencies.  It is these MPs who decide which party/parties will form a government and who will be Prime Minister.  Normally, this would be the party with the majority of constituencies unless – like in 2010 – there is no winner.

Constituencies contain roughly the same number of voters.  However, the way the boundaries have been set up tends to favour the two largest parties – Labour and the Tories.  If you look at an electoral map of the results in 2015, it appears as if the overwhelming majority of England and Wales is Tory:

However, this is because most of the UK population lives in cities where Labour tends to do well.  The Tories, in contrast tend to fare better in rural seats.  This matters because it results in the overwhelming majority of parliamentary constituencies being “safe” for one or other of the two largest parties (since 2015 a large number of Scottish seats have become safe for the SNP).  The majority of the largest party in each of these seats far exceeds the vote of all the other parties combined.  Votes for losing parties in these seats are simply wasted.

This means that the entire general election can turn on a couple of thousand votes in fewer than 100 of the 650 constituencies.  Encouraging voters to cast their votes for parties or potential Prime Ministers ensures that the number of seats – and the number of voters within those seats – whose votes actually make a difference remains small.  This gives the advantage to the party with the deepest pockets (i.e. the Tories) as they can focus their advertising effort on the relatively small number of voters who will actually make a difference on Thursday.

There is a means by which people could thwart this cynical means of winning elections.  However, it relies on voters doing a bit more homework than we usually do.  It also involves our making hard choices about where to put our votes.

Let’s stop being tribal

Far too many of us treat political allegiance as being hereditary.  That is, we vote the same way as our parents did, just as they voted the same way as our grandparents.  However, what may have been appropriate when our parents or grandparents were raising families, building careers, buying a home, etc. need not be appropriate today.  For example, a lot of today’s older voters supported Margaret Thatcher because she sold off Britain’s social housing stock at a discounted rate at a time where the large baby boomer generation was struggling to find accessible private housing.  For young families today the situation has reversed.  Under Theresa May’s Tory party there is plenty of – often unaffordable – private property, but a serious shortage of affordable social housing; particularly in the areas where people want to work.

Many others among us treat political allegiance in the same way as supporting a football or rugby team.  We assume that we have to stick by our chosen team through thick and thin, no matter how atrociously they perform on the pitch.  There is a psychological reason why we tend to do this.  It is called “the law of previous investment.”  In effect, to change the team we support or the party we vote for can appear to make our previous choices wrong.  But again, the policy position of the parties has changed dramatically over time.  For example, the Tories “support for business” in the 1980s involved considerable support for young entrepreneurs, many of whom went on to create the successful businesses of the 1990s.  Today, that “support for business” amounts to little more than corporate welfare handouts to large multinationals and banks; many of which do not even pay their fair share of tax for the public services and infrastructure they benefit from.

It’s about policies

Tribalism and hereditary voting emerged in the past because of the difficulty in finding out what the various parties stood for.  For most of the twentieth century this resulted in people voting along class lines.  The rich, the middle class and those working people who aspired to join middle class tended to vote Tory, while working people and many among the academic middle class tended to vote Labour.  The decision to vote in this way was a matter of tradition and gut feeling coupled to those elements of the various parties’ manifestos that were presented through the biased lenses of newspapers, radio and television.  Very few people were able to go directly to the parties’ manifestos to see for themselves what was being proposed.  Even as recently as the early 2000s, we often only discovered the unpleasant small print in manifestos after a government had been elected.

However, the development of Internet-based apps provide us today with the means to check our personal policy preferences against the proposals made by the major political parties.  The ISideWith political quiz, for example, provides a pretty comprehensive questionnaire that allows you to give your preferences on a range of policies.  Based on your responses, it will list the parties in order of your preferences.  This information is essential to bringing more constituencies into play in the general election.

Alternative vote (sort of)

The biggest drawback with the British electoral system is that it forces us into a political duopoly in which most of the votes cast are wasted.  (This brief but informative video by CPG Grey explains why this is inevitable in a First Past the Post electoral system).  All too often, voting for the party we would prefer runs the risk that the party we dislike the most will actually win the constituency on a minority of the votes.  There is a similar – but fairer – system to the British one known as the Alternative Vote (AV) system which removes this risk.  Under AV instead of putting a cross next to a single party – as we have to do on Thursday – voters list parties according to their order of preference.  If a candidate wins more than 50% of the first preference votes, they win.  If, however, none of the candidates has a majority the one who came last is eliminated.  Their second preference votes are then added to the remaining parties.  This process is repeated until a candidate has the majority of the votes.

The exciting possibility today is the fact that because the last general election was just two years away, it is possible to calculate a likely Alternative Vote for yourself.  Wikipedia have all of the 2015 results by constituency.  These will provide you with a reasonable guide to how your preferences might work under an AV system.  Let me use the constituency where I live together with one where a Labour-supporting friend lives for an example of how you might do this.

Using my own results from the ISideWith quiz, my preferences would be:

1. Green (70%)
2. Plaid Cymru (68%)
3. Labour (57%)
4. LibDem (40%)

Since I would not vote for UKIP and really do not want the Tories to win, these are the only parties I would want to vote for; and I would ideally vote for them in that order.  If I look at the 2015 election result, I get a good idea of what would happen to my vote if I voted for my first choice – the Green party:

My vote would be wasted, and I risk seeing the Tories win the seat despite having a minority of the votes.  But suppose the green’s 1,254 votes were added to my second preference?  That would give Plaid Cymru a respectable but still worthless 3,555 votes and the result would be the same – the Tories get in with a minority of the vote and my vote is wasted.  But suppose the Green, Plaid Cymru and LibDem votes were transferred to Labour, even though this would not be these voters first choice:

This would give Labour more votes than the Tories, but still not quite enough for a majority.  That would depend on where those 3,953 UKIP voters go.  Nevertheless, anyone who does not want to see another Tory government – particularly one with a big majority – can see that in the seat where I live, voting Labour is the only alternative.

My friend lives in St Ives (Cornwall).  The 2015 election result there was very different.  My friend is also more pro-Labour than I am, dislikes the Greens, and personally loathes the LibDem candidate:

This said, the St Ives constituency is contest between the Tories and the LibDems.  If the Green, Nationalist and Labour votes were transferred to the LibDem candidate, this would give them more votes than the Tories:

Although closer, this doesn’t quite give the LibDems 50% of the vote.  Again, much depends on what happens to the UKIP voters.  Nevertheless, the best hope for avoiding a Tory victory in St Ives is a vote for the LibDem candidate… which is precisely what my friend – while holding his nose – decided to do.

The best of what is least

Okay, not everyone is interested enough to check the results in their constituency before voting.  But if you are unhappy with the way the government has performed over the past seven years and you want to vote for change, you might want to check the Tactical2017 website.  Simply type in your postcode or select your constituency and it will tell you which party is most likely to defeat the government candidate where you live.

In almost all cases in England and Wales, this will be the LibDems or Labour.  In one or two seats it will be the Greens.  There are also a couple of Welsh seats where it is safe to vote Plaid Cymru as an alternative to Labour.  In Scotland, the SNP are likely to be the best opposition party.  I fully understand that this will grate with many people desperate to see their favourite party make a breakthrough.  But against that desire, you really have to ask yourself just how you will feel if you wake up on Friday to discover that Theresa May is back with a large enough majority to do more or less as she pleases.

A tactical vote on Thursday may not give us what we most desire.  For me there will be no Green party breakthrough to raise environmental concerns higher up the political agenda (although I hope Caroline Lucas holds onto her seat).  Nor will Plaid Cymru be doing more than holding onto their three parliamentary seats (even though I would like to see them make a breakthrough in the south Wales valleys).  I wish it were otherwise, but previous results and current polling is clear that outside the Celtic fringe a vote for Plaid Cymru is a wasted vote; and in seats like Newport West, Bridgend and especially Gower, by splitting the anti-Tory vote it could be the difference between a Tory majority and a hung parliament. 

Even Labour voters will not get the majority government that they long for if they vote tactically in seats where the LibDem is best placed to defeat the Tory candidate.  But what tactical voting does give them/us is the best prospect of delivering a coalition for change – not just a change of faces around the cabinet table, but a shift away from the neoliberal ideology that has held us in its grip for the best part of four decades.  If successful, a tactical vote on Thursday will give us all some of the things we need from our government even though none of us will get everything we want.  The (still most likely) outcome, in contrast, is a winner takes all, two fingers up to everyone else, Tory majority that rides roughshod over any group that did not vote for it (and several groups – like pensioners – who did).

The choice is ours.  Let us hope we have wisdom to use our votes intelligently.