The Jeremy Corbyn effect and the Labour leadership election: the death of New Labour?

A month from now, we'll know who the new leader of the Labour Party will be. The odds favour Jeremy Corbyn, given the massive groundswell of support from the party grassroots, which has left the three other "establishment" candidates struggling to come up with a plan. The latest one - involving all the "big beasts" - seems to be an all-out attack on Corbyn's values and what it would mean for the party electorally.
The surreal irony here is that the party hierarchy talk about Corbyn being someone who will have no resonance with the public mood, while he remains the only candidate of the five who has energised the party base and caused a massive rise in party numbers (more on that later). In other words, the hierarchy want someone who may have little in common with many of the actual party members, but will somehow resonate with the wider public. The surrealism of this point of view tells us what stage of absurdity the Labour party has now reached.

From party of government to political laughing-stock

In five years, the Labour party have gone through a seismic change in fortunes, at least as traumatic as that which they faced between 1979 and 1983 - arguably more so. The story of what happened in Scotland north of the border is highly educational. The party became complacent and relied on second and third-rate party hacks to run things on Scotland, while being dictated to from Westminster. The SNP took advantage of this ruthlessly, and took power in Holyrood with a majority. In 2015, Scottish Labour's MPs in Westminster found out when the same result is applied to a FPTP system: wipeout.

What we are seeing now is the accumulation of various factors, which have aligned together at one moment in time, bringing the spectacle of the current Labour party into full focus. Apart from the meltdown in Scotland highlighting an effective schism between the ideologies of the Scottish and English electorate, there are the changes that have happened within the Labour party itself over the last five years (and since the May election) that have contributed to this very public mess.

Ed Miliband's election as leader was due to the support of the unions. We can only guess now what might have happened if David had won instead; of all the possible candidates to lead the party after the 2010 election defeat, he was probably the best-qualified, having been Foreign Secretary, and being a figure who could easily articulate the "centrist" approach. As we now know, the grassroots of the party are currently much more leftist than many of its MPs, most of which have served through the years of New Labour. Ed Miliband has been seen as one reason for this realignment amongst the grassroots.
Then, after the Falkirk election scandal, the voting system within party was changed, with the intention of making it much more open to party members, making the process more obviously representative of members' views, and allowing for low barriers to entry to encourage increased party membership. Given that party membership is now more than 200,000, we can say that approach is a success. Unfortunately for the party hierarchy, the members are not looking to vote the way the party elite expected.  The horrible complacency of Labour's leadership has come home to roost. Having allowed a "token" leftist candidate on the leadership election, once more the Labour leadership took things for granted: their members would vote for one of the uninspiring, centrist candidates because there was "no other alternative". They had learned nothing from the debacle of Scottish Labour. In the same way that the SNP became the beneficiaries of Labour complacency, Jeremy Corbyn has become the beneficiary of this grassroots insurgency.

Having given the party base a weapon to democratise the election process, the party heads are appalled at how this has backfired on them. While those at the top of the party are New Labour veterans and stalwarts, the "Ed Effect", and the shattering loss of the 2015 election, seems to have galvanised the party base to "stick two fingers up" to the out-of-touch complacency shown by Labour in Westminster.
This is also partly a result of the lack of any inspiring new figures coming through the party. While the likes of Chuka Umunna and Liz Kendall are new MPs and can articulate the "New Labour" idea, the problem is that it is not what many of the grassroots want to hear. Worse, their generalisations and lack of a "common touch" make them out as being only a few shades to the left of the Tories. This is also partly the legacy of New Labour and Blair: selecting yes-men and party hacks as MPs, that have little real life experience outside of politics. Only Dan Jarvis of the "newbies" bucks this trend as being a former soldier with a genuine life story to tell; but for (understandable) family reasons doesn't wish to step up to the mantle.

Cavaliers and Roundheads

This is where the "Corbyn-,mania" comes from. Being cut from a different cloth to the many indistinguishable "New Labour" figures, he is the polar opposite, something that hasn't been seen in British politics for thirty years. A natural populist, he appears as a bearded prophet, who dresses in the style of puritan socialist. This is in marked contrast the "professional" look of the rest of the Westminster set, from the "New Labour" types to the ranks of the public school Tories.

In some ways, British politics these days seems to resemble the ideological contortions of the mid-17th century. Certainly, with the situation north of the border, relations between England and Scotland may be said to be almost as bad and distrustful as they were in the days of the Civil War. While no-one of course is suggesting violence, the political situation, and the complex political realignments across Britain, could be said to be as convoluted and as difficult to comprehend as they were at that time. There are factions and sub-factions now as there were then.

The Tories are certainly living up to their role as the party of the aristocracy (The "Cavaliers"), doing just enough to rule the country, but doing so in a highly-divisive and dangerously-reckless way. Like back then, the modern Tories - the party of the aristocracy - are unpopular in London. Like back then, the Tories had "lost Scotland" to a group of Scottish political insurgents.
But also like then, bizarre political groupings and alliances were formed. The modern Labour party (aka The "Roundheads") has factions of its own, as Cromwell's supporters did back in the 17th century. During the Civil War and up to the Restoration, Scotland changed allegiances a number of times. This was also the time of "The Levellers", whose values these days Jeremy Corbyn would be sympathetic towards. The "Corbyn insurgency" bears all the hallmarks of being a grassroots rebellion like that which was formed by The Levellers in days of the Civil War.

The current political situation within the Labour Party in Britain may soon become even more convoluted, if Jeremy Corbyn becomes the new leader. Corbyn's campaigning in Scotland has shown that he has drawn the support of many who had only just recently swapped their votes from Labour to the SNP in the general election. However, the new leader of Scottish Labour, Kezia Dugdale, is ardently against his values. So we may well have a situation where the leader of Labour in England is more popular in Scotland than England, and more popular than Scottish Labour's own leader, who disagrees with him. This would be beyond farcical, but also a reflection of how complicated British politics has become.

A Corbyn leadership may well be a "moment of madness" by the Labour grassroots, given the fact that they lost the general election on a platform more to the middle than anything proposed by Corbyn. A mass movement of Corbyn support would almost certainly face a bloodbath in the face of the "Cavalier" Tories in 2020; but it would be an "honourable death", as seen by his supporters.

The problem is what state the Labour Party would be in afterwards - or after five years of Corbyn leadership.

The Labour Party in crisis: Jeremy Corbyn, the leadership election and identity politics

Two and a half months on from the general election, the Labour Party is in the middle of a leadership election. The shock of the leadership election has been the surge of grassroots support for Jeremy Corbyn, the candidate who had been supported by a handful of MPs as a sop the traditional left. Originally backed by MPs to promote the notion of the leadership election being about a real choice of values and ideas, it looks to have possibly turned around and bit those "useful idiot" MPs on the behind. He may actually, god forbid, win the vote.

Corbyn is an unlikely-looking insurgent leader, even to his own supporters. He's been an MP since 1983, as one of the "suicide note" intake, and his politics look like old-fashioned '70s socialism. Bearded, over sixty, and dressed like a Marxist academic, he is the antithesis to the modern idea of  the "professional politician".  He also has a record as being a perpetual rebel during the Blair government. "New Labour" he ain't.
These characteristics are somewhat reminiscent of another "old Labour" politician who was (to Blair and his allies) inexplicably popular: Ken Livingstone. Like Ken, Corbyn speaks his mind, and speaks from the heart. He does not equivocate. He does not mind making enemies. He does not mind appearing "controversial". He appears to have the same energy and sense of purpose that Ken was blessed with so that, compared to the other candidates, he is a breath of fresh air (albeit circa 1983). He makes "Red Ed" Miliband seem positively Blairite by comparison.

The "change" candidate 

Speaking of Ed Miliband, some people blame Ed for the rise of Corbyn. The argument is that, because Ed was so keen to distance himself from Blair, it meant that those who joined the party post 2010 were drawn to Ed's anti-Blairite message. In the space of a few years, the makeup of Labour's grassroots had gone from being Blairite-supporting, to being anti-austerity Blair-haters. Miliband had thought that the "political centre" had moved left with the onset of austerity, but the 2015 election proved that, if anything, it had moved to the right. The rise of fads such as "Milifandom" have shown that while Labour has much greater appeal to the younger voter, it has likewise much less appeal to people who actually are more likely to vote. This is something that George Osborne, the Tories' master tactician, figured out a while ago.

This tactical error of judgement has led to the fundamental reshaping of the party's grassroots, in a way that makes it more difficult for a "neo-Blairite" candidate to succeed in the leadership election. While Corbyn has the backing of many unions, and a significant chunk of the grassroots, he also has another unlikely supporter from another party: David Cameron. It was reported recently that in parliament, Cameron took Corbyn to one side to give him a kind of "pep talk". He reminded Corbyn that like him, in 2005 Cameron was initially thought of as an outsider with little chance of becoming leader, but he marked himself as the "change candidate", who offered something different. It was unreported what Corbyn's reaction was to Cameron's cheeky little interjection. Its purpose can only been to cause greater mischief.
Corbyn as the "change" candidate seems like a bad joke, given the man's age, but this is also a symptom of the wider context. Further afield, the rise of SYRIZA in Greece, and "Podemos" in Spain, seem to act as beacons for those in the Labour grassroots who would believe that the impossible is possible in the UK. Also, as the grassroots under Ed Miliband have been replenished with a batch of younger members. this means there are also a whole cohort of activists who have no memory of life before Blair. It is scary to realise that there are Labour members now who were only two years old when Blair became Prime Minister in 1997. Because of this, they have no memory of the splits in the party in the eighties (which Corbyn would have played a part of); splits that saw the Labour party in opposition for eighteen years. Indeed, anyone under the age of thirty would have no direct memory of life under Thatcher and Labour's dark years; to them, it would be a part of folk lore that their parents might have talked about.

Political schizophrenia

Of course, the biggest inspiration for Labour's potential lurch to the left lies north of the border. The SNP has thrived not because it is nationalistic, but because its sense of identity is crystal-clear to its supporters (even if they are being mislead). Conversely, the Scottish Labour party has died because of its lack of coherent identity, plus a combination of complacency and poor management over many years. 2015 was simply the culmination and inevitable result of that. Furthermore, the SNP has benefitted from having two successive leaders blessed with intelligence and charisma. By comparison, the Labour party in Scotland has been ran by second-rate (even third-rate) party hacks, who were then dependent on having major decisions approved by the political heavyweights in Westminster. It was as bad as anything seen in the internal politics of Soviet Russia.

Staying on the idea of identity politics, the situation in the Labour party in general - let alone in Scotland - is pretty dire. While Jeremy Corbyn's "identity politics" is clear, the other three candidates offer "more of the same", albeit in different doses.
Of those, Liz Kendall is the most "neo-Blairite", who seems to most grasp the scale of the job facing the party, and the scale of the changes needed (and realities faced) before it can stand a chance of winning an election any time soon. The problem is that the starkness of her message, and its similarity to the politics of Blair, is deeply off-putting to the "Milifandom"-loving grassroots. Right now, many of them seek succour in the righteousness of opposition. This is why Corbyn message is so appealing, like the barman pouring you another of your favourite tipple after the acrimonious break-up. Corbyn's politics does nothing to help the party get back into government; it simply helps the party to better understand the face that it sees in the mirror. If the party sees its self-inflicted wounds as scars of pride, that is where the real problems start. Seen in this way, Corbyn becoming leader wouldn't even be the nadir: that would only be achieved with an even more cataclysmic defeat in 2020. It would only be after reaching that nadir, could the "demons" in the Labour party finally be purged.

Corbyn is not yet favourite to win. That honour goes to Andy Burnham, who is the most middling of the candidates. While a likable man, he and Yvette Cooper, the last of the four candidates, are former ministers who seem to be treading water politically. They are competent politicians, but lack any obvious charisma or drive that gives any real hope of the Labour party being anything other than a second-rate oppostion party for years to come. As long as Labour is led by people with no clear idea where to take the party or who the party stands for, the electorate will look at them with scepticism.

Politics is marked out by the personalities that dominate it. Thatcher dominated the eighties; the dull interregnum of Major's premiership was quickly overshadowed by the drive of Tony Blair, who went on to dominate British politics for ten years. The Tories struggled with Blair's drive until Cameron came along with the intention of matching it, which then saw him into Downing Street in 2010, by which time Labour's personalities were a fading force. While Blair and Brown dominated the last Labour administration, setting the marker for everyone else, Cameron and Osborne have done the same since then.
This is why of the four candidates for the leadership, Liz Kendall, as a newly-elected MP, offers the most legitimate claim as a real "change" candidate. Dan Jarvis, who was a name mentioned early on but quickly dismissed calls to stand, is another person of note; alas, like Alan Johnson before him, he has the personality but (for whatever reason) lacks the willpower to take on the mantle.

What is certain is that Labour face a task even more challenging than after the 1983 election. Faced with a war on several political fronts, the rise of multi-party politics has landed a hammer-blow to the long-term prospects of the Labour Party. Like their sister parties PASOK in Greece and PSOE in Spain, they face a long, hard slog. By 2020, no-one can even be sure what the UK will look like.

Westminster and First Past The Post: A British political system not fit for purpose

Westminster is a living museum, in every sense of the word. A recent piece in "The Economist" gave an accurate and thought-provoking reminder of how impractical a place the Palace Of Westminster is to deal with the day-to-day tasks of dealing with British politics in the 21st century. Built in the middle of the 19th century, no-one would disagree that the building is an architectural masterpiece. But still using it in the same way in the 21st century as we do now is like insisting on using the same clapped-out, classic car that keeps failing its MOT and you can't fit your family into simply because it was your grandfather's. As reported some time ago, the building needs urgent repair work that would probably take at least several years, resulting in parliamentary business being conducted elsewhere.

Even on a practical basis, the current arrangements are an ad hoc solution. There is not enough space in the Palace Of Westminster for MPs to work, even to fit all the current MPs into the House Of Commons. When there is an important debate, many MPs have to stand; when there is an important vote, because - as pointed out in the "Economist" article, MPs are housed in any one of three separate buildings - there is a dash to get to the chamber in time. This is ridiculous. It may look good on TV to have MPs housed in the Palace Of Westminster, but it makes no sense in reality, least of all for the MPs themselves who have to deal with these issues every day.
And this is before mentioning the antiquated procedures and "traditions" that the recent cohort of neophyte SNP MPs are  - rightly - finding an absurd distraction from the business of politics. Some of these points (and the "fighting" over where to sit in the House Of Commons) were recently mentioned in a "Question Time" debate on the BBC (in the episode's first question). The SNP is looking at the way things are done in Westminster, compared to how things are done in Holyrood, and seeing the London institution as a place trapped by its own history, unable to deal with the realities of the 21st century.

The Palace Of Westminster is a museum piece, and should be treated and preserved as one: it is not a suitable place of work for 650 MPs and staff in the 21st century. It is a museum, and should be used as one. And this is without even mentioning the electoral system....

The most unfair election in history

A recent article pointed out the fact that the election result of the last election produced a result in parliament that was the most unrepresentative (compared to how people actually voted nationally) ever.
On the one hand, the Conservatives gained a majority of the seats in parliament based on 37% of the vote. The SNP took 56 of Scotland's 59 seats in Westminster based a little over half of the vote in Scotland. The Greens, who received over a million votes (a little under 4% of the national vote) only returned one MP. And then there is UKIP, who gained 12.5% of the national vote...and also returned only one seat in parliament.

Those figures there tell you the nature of the problem: while the electoral system has for decades not been a true reflection of the political reality, resulting in distortions that favour the two biggest parties, today the system has created not so much a distortion as a perversion of how politics is meant to work. In the multi-party reality of UK politics in 2015, we have an electoral system that is loaded massively in favour of the two main parties; clearly, much more in favour of the Tories at the moment.
In short, it could be called a "fix". It is not "democracy". As the electoral system favours the party in government (currently with a majority), the party with that position has no inclination to change the system. Ergo, the party in government has a stranglehold on parliament and the electoral system that benefits itself at the expense of the other (especially, smaller) parties. Furthermore, in this parliament the constituency boundaries are due to be redrawn in a manner that will benefit the Tories, giving them a further in-built advantage. With Labour likely to be out of office for ten more years, it is difficult to say what the UK will be like after fifteen years of Conservative rule in 2025.

So the hideous irony here is that as British politics becomes the most multi-polar it has been for generations (arguably, ever), the "natural party of government" - the Tories - tilt the system in the exact opposite direction. The UK has a multi-polar political environment with a political system weighed massively in favour of one party: the Conservatives. Only in Scotland does the system produce a different result, now weighed massively in favour of the SNP.

Not fit for purpose

The author has made comments on the easily "corruptible" nature of the British political system before. The British political system has always been a "fix" of one form or another, ever since the electoral franchise was extended beyond the landed classes. It could be argued that the system worked at its best (i.e. it best reflected the political reality) in the 1950s and '60s, when Labour and the Conservatives dominated British politics.
That system began to break down in the '70s in Scotland with the rise of the SNP, and Liberals more generally. In the 1980s, the SNP/Alliance were the victims of a system that didn't give any "space" for a third national party. From the '90s onwards, their successors, the LibDems, managed a way to get over some of the hurdles in their way, while by the time Labour gained office in 1997, the next thirteen years saw the system skewed in their favour instead, up to (and including) the 2010 election.

Britain has changed, but its political system remains fundamentally the same as it was two hundred years ago. Stepping away from the House Of Commons, to the House Of Lords, we see an assembly of hand-picked individuals, aristocrats and bishops - one of the world's last remaining bastions of modern-day feudalism in the developed world. This is masked in the tones of deference to the "mother of all parliaments" and reverence for "families that have generations of experience at the highest level of the decision-making process".
But this is simply masterful misdirection; something that the establishment has been good at for centuries.

The Tories are the party of the aristocracy, and have been since the 17th century. They know how to make people want to vote for them, and when you are up against (in the words of Alastair Campbell) a set of "ruthless bastards", what can you do?

The 2015 General Election: how did the Conservatives win?

In the cold light of day, it is clear that the Conservatives' election strategy worked. Their aim - which seemed hopelessly fanciful when said by David Cameron during the campaign - was to win around twenty seats; what was need to achieve a bare majority. In that simple aim, the Tories were even able to exceed their wilder expectations (given the polls), producing a - precariously-small -  majority government.

The Tories are masters at winning elections, having been doing it on a regular basis since the 18th century. For this reason, to many people, they seem the "natural" government. The thirteen years of Labour government could be seen an aberration, only achieved by the Labour leadership under Blair by accepting many of the basic tenets of Thatcherism, the Conservatives' longest-serving leader of the 20th century. Meanwhile, the "post-war consensus", that saw the Tories move closer to the left than they have ever been, could be seen as the Conservative Party showing its chameleon-like ability to adapt to survive. Then, when the economic crises of the 1970s happened, the Tories under Thatcher seized on the opportunity to re-define and remake their party in its more traditional guise, and quickly shedding its support for the "consensus". Whether or not these facts are "fair" or "just" feels like a trivial point. The hard truth for those on the left is that, when it boils down to it, England is a "conservative" country in many ways.

This is a simplification, though. As we have seen, the election has shown us that the UK in 2015 is now more politically-fractured than ever before. The main point is that in spite of the fracturing of the political faultlines, the Tories still - in spite of everything - know how to keep their nose ahead of the rest to get over the finishing line first.

All part of the game

This author has talked before about the plethora of "dirty tricks" and negative campaigning used by the Tories in the 2015 election campaign. And the nakedly-cynical "divide and rule" strategy over the "threat" of the SNP - which even some Tory elders were warning of the dangers of - worked with clinical effectiveness at the end of the day. In the end, it was the Tories' sway over the "marginals" that ensured that Labour's result in England was no better than what they got in 2010, putting Labour's number of English MPs on the same level as what they got in 1992.

A BBC "Question Time" special on the day after the election provided some particularly insightful moments of analysis. Paddy Ashdown agreed wholeheartedly to the brutally-effective supposition put to the panel that the LibDems were punished for the mistakes of the Coalition, while the Tories were rewarded for its successes. As Alastair Campbell put it more bluntly, the Tories won because they were "ruthless bastards". Francis Maude, the Tories' member of the panel, kept quiet while these points were being made. His silence told its own story.

The LibDems, post-election, are - ironically - now having their biggest surge in membership in living memory. A wit might argue that this was many English voters now feeling guilty for realising that they had been savagely punishing the wrong party for the Coalition's errors. Certainly, Paddy Ashdown's indictment of how his party was punished for doing what it felt had been the right thing for the country was a very powerful point.
While the "divergence" of the two Coalition parties had been going on more at least a year prior to the election, it was Francis Maude - the Tory - who complained of the Coalition partners not "being fair" to the government. He should have known better, and Paddy Ashdown put his squarely right in his place. The Tories - and Cameron in particular - were shamelessly claiming credit for popular ideas (such as raising the income tax threshold) that were really LibDem policies that had never been in the Conservative 2010 manifesto.
But this is part of a trend with the Tories: to stab you in the back, and later harmlessly claim it was "part of the game" of politics.

This attitude is symptomatic of how people like David Cameron and George Osborne see politics not as a force for good, but as "sport". The two of them have made duplicitous, cynical and savage attacks on their opponents (and segments of society), but later on brush it off being "heat of the moment" stuff. A common accusation made against Cameron is that in spite of appearances, he never seems to take things very seriously. This feeds into a feeling that many of the Tories involved in politics still think they are playing by "boarding school rules"; certainly, the way that some of their MPs in parliament behave at times reinforces the view that Westminster is all "old school tie" and a callous "establishment" that treats democracy as an inconvenience to be tolerated

With this level of cynicism evident in the ranks of the Tories, it is no wonder that more and more people see the electoral system as a "fix". When things are constructed like this, how can they lose?

The 2015 General Election: the aftermath, and the implications for Labour and UK politics

The results of the general election were a shock, to Labour most of all. The Liberal Democrats suffered catastrophic losses, who - for their naive willingness to join in coalition with the Tories five years ago - may as well now be called the "Useful Idiots" of the last parliament. But this was not totally unexpected, given their low percentage of polling.

In spite of all the criticism of the pollsters getting the result so wrong, the reality was that they got most things more-or-less right - except for the polling for Labour and the Conservatives. All the other parties polled at roughly where they predicted. It was the "shy Tory" effect that the pollsters either completely missed or - just as likely - a collective "group think" that made polling companies discard "wrong" polling results that appeared to inflate the support for the Tories.

In this election, it was a "perfect storm" of factors that resulted in Labour overall losing twenty or so seats, leaving them a hundred behind the Conservatives in parliament. Several factors over the duration of the last parliament swung things - unexpectedly - for the Tories, leaving them with a surprise (albeit tiny) majority. The collapse of the Lib Dems left twenty-odd seats there for the taking for the Tories. The surge in UKIP over the last few years has seen a portion of the working class transfer their vote from Labour and into the purple, costing Labour precious votes in key Tory/ Labour marginals. And the surge of the SNP has effectively left the three main parties locked out of Scotland, which cost Labour forty-odd seats.

These three factors, coupled with the simple effectiveness of the Tory message (in spite of its negativity and bare deceitfulness), allowed the Tories to fend off any Labour advance in the key battlegrounds. The result was a net gain of twenty-odd seats.

The road to contrition

Labour now has some hard questions to ask itself about what strategy they can formulate to regain power. Where did it they go wrong? The Tories were allowed to dictate the "narrative" of the events of 2008 without a coherent alternative argument (namely, the truth!). Many will say that the Tories' message about Labour was based on a willful lie - which is basically true - but the fact that the Tories were able to so easily get away with it demonstrates the weakness of Labour's leadership and message.

Equally, many will - rightly - point to the loss of the key marginals (places that, under Blair, usually swung their way). Winning back the confidence of those voters is key to Labour being able to eat into the hundred-seat gap that separates them from the Tories. The battle over "Middle England" (i.e. the marginals) is the key to getting into government. Regardless of how popular a party is in Scotland or Wales, England will always be the only way a party can find its way into government. This may be not what some Labour people want to hear, but that is the reality.

And herein lies a problem - several, actually. First of all, there has to be a realisation that the next time there will be an election (presumably in 2020), many people will have forgotten why the financial crisis happened. If Labour were unable to convince people of the truth about what happened in 2008 this time around, five years from now it will be basically impossible. Think about it: any voter who will be, say twenty, come the next election, was only a child of eight when the financial crisis happened. Arguing over what happened in 2008 in a 2020 election will look parochial and backwards-looking in the extreme, regardless of the truth.

Labour may well have to swallow their pride and - to an extent, at least - accept the "lie" of the Tory narrative. It's already too late to change people's minds about what they think what happened. While Labour go on arguing about the facts, the Tories have their "narrative". The average person will believe almost any narrative if it is explained simply and repeated enough: this is the simple (if sad) truth. The extent to which Iain Duncan Smith can still convincingly talk about "welfare reform" is a case in point.

To get to that point in the party, however, will probably involve a prolonged "blood-letting" exercise within the party, like that which existed in 2005 after the Tories lost their third successive election. This is will painful for many after the bitterness of losing an election they thought they had a good chance of "winning" (after some negotiation). Those people will have to simply take in on the chin if the party is to move forward, or look at leaving the party altogether.

But that exercise in "contrition" is only half of the problem...

The "Party Of Britain" no more?

Blair's Britain was the high watermark for the Labour party: winning three successive elections, two of them successive landslides. Whereas the Conservative and Unionist Party at one time represented the nature of the United Kingdom, under Blair, Labour came to represent the modern-day "Party Of Britain", leading in all parts of Great Britain. The Conservatives were reduced (and still are) to being essentially an English party, looking parochial compared to Labour's embrace of the modern, diverse Britain of the 21st century.

Come 2015, and the the UK looks more divided than ever, between the nations and between different segments of society. While Labour still dominates in its Welsh heartlands, Scotland's politics has effectively detached itself from the rest of the country. Meanwhile, England looks politically very similar to what it did twenty or thirty years ago: with Labour dominating the North, the English cities and London, with the Tories having a sea of blue in everything between. England is segments and islands of red in a sea of blue. And under the surface, UKIP is the second party in many places up and down the coast of England.

This leaves Labour in a more difficult situation politically than in 1987, when they last won a similar number of seats in an election. While the Tories' majority is slender (even less than in 1992), Labour - due to the factors mentioned earlier - have their work cut out to claw back the lost ground.
Assuming that the party choose a "modernising figure" (i.e. "Blairite", for want of a better moniker), this will help them win back the Tory marginals.

If Labour is very smart, they will also exploit the (temporary?) collapse of the Lib Dems and try and muscle into contention in places like the South West, where traditionally Labour have struggled against a Tory/ Lib Dem two-horse race. However, even this may be a lost cause, given that the LibDems look keen to get a new leader in quickly. Tim Farron, chairman of the party and a leading left-wing figure, looks to be favourite. Indeed, the LibDems may already have the threat Labour poses on their mind more keenly than Labour does, given Labour's post-election introspection. The irony here is that while it was Labour's failure of introspection post-2010 that resulted in a lurch leftwards and Ed Miliband becoming leader, a surfeit of introspection post-2015 may lead to Labour missing out the opportunity to quickly fill the political space in the centre by the collapse in the LibDems.
Labour made the assumption back in 2010 that a collapse in LibDem support would leave a mass of support flocking to Labour. The 2015 election proved this to be a pipedream. While this effect won them maybe a dozen seats, the same effect won the Tories around double that. It is possible that the transfer of votes in Tory to LibDem is "soft", and therefore malleable to the right kind of Labour message; but it's tall order. The right kind of message from a LibDem leader would see them simply switch back to what they know.

Many Labour figures are talking about a ten-year plan, with no realistic hope of regaining the lost ground needed in time for the next election. Unlike in 1987, Labour's position is precarious because the diversification of the British political scene is mostly to the cost of Labour. If Labour, as necessary, move to the centre to reclaim the middle ground as Blair did, it leaves their left flank exposed. Under Ed Miliband, their positioning was deemed to far to the left to convince enough centrist voters to back them. If Labour move more to the centre as anticipated, it will be more difficult to dissuade the working class against switching to UKIP. As Labour move to the centre, more of their "core voters" will see them as increasingly out-of-touch compared to the straightforward message of UKIP. This may be a risk that Labour will have to take: will the votes they gain from undecided voters in marginals be more than those lost to UKIP?
Regarding the Greens, it is unclear if they had a decisive effect on the Labour vote or not. Apart from in a small number of constituencies, their numbers did not seem big enough to have a decisive effect either way, compared the striking performances of UKIP.

Lastly, of course, there is the SNP. Politically, Scotland is now separated from the rest of the UK, leaving Labour without one of its heartlands. The one-time "Party Of Britain" is now looking like a party without a country - in a sense, a "stateless" party. The Tories may have retreated into being "Little Englanders", but at least they have retained their coherence; the diversification of British politics has left the Labour party being ideologically and geographically pulled apart, with little unifying coherence remaining.

Ironically, while the Tories may be a party in hock with The City, Labour cemented its political dominance of London itself in the 2015 election. London remains the most "Blairite" part of the UK, and a Labour citadel. It is the miles of towns and countryside around the rest of England that are largely with the Tory camp. Meanwhile, the Labour supporters in the Welsh and Northern heartlands are politically closer to those supporting the SNP. Trying to keep these differing versions of "Labour" together is becoming a more difficult challenge given the changed landscape

The battle for the political soul of Britain is not over, but the forces that are pulling Britain's politics and identity apart are winning. And time is running out.

The 2015 General Election: what happened?

Politics is a brutal business, they say; but rarely has an election in modern times been so brutal. The Conservatives were the major beneficiaries to the dramatic collapse in the Lib Dems across the UK, and Labour's Scottish supporters switching en masse to the SNP.

While in the 2010 election, the Conservatives were ahead of Labour by fifty seats, now they are ahead of them by a hundred. However, this must still be put into context. Needing 323 seats for a working majority, David Cameron won 331. This is more than the bare majority that Wilson got in October 1974, but still less than what Major got in 1992 (336). And we know what happened to that "majority" over the course of five years.
In that sense, George Osborne's hope that 2015 would be like 1992 again, we was proved right, in that the Conservatives won a similar result in terms of seats (though around 4% less than 1992 in the popular vote).

However, there the comparisons end. For Labour, the number of seats won (232) was similar to what they won in 1987. But this was not because of collapse in the votes in England. Compared to 2010, they won nearly a million more votes this time around, in spite of the collapse of their support in Scotland. So something very strange - and perverse - must have happened. There were different factors (more on those in a moment) that resulted in Labour doing far worse than they were expecting in England.

Lastly, the poor Liberal Democrats - as many of their party members feared - reaped the whirlwind of working in government with the Tories. After losing nearly fifty seats, Tories seemingly voted tactically to save Nick Clegg's seat where so many other Lib Dems were ousted. This must have felt like a particularly cruel kind of mercy. No wonder that when Clegg gave his speech standing down as leader, he seemed like a broken man. Their cohort of MPs had been reduced to the kind of levels they had in the 1960s.

A perfect storm

For Labour, the election results were a stunning shock.

While the results in Scotland had been feared to an extent (if not quite believed), in reality they were caught in an unexpected "pincer" on both sides of the border.

They had been hoping that the losses they might have had to the SNP would have been offset by gains in English Tory/Labour marginals. Instead, in many marginals, Labour became victim to an unforeseen "UKIP Effect". In places like Bolton and Bury (close to this author's neck of the woods), the Tories unexpectedly won, sometimes by a margin of only hundreds of votes. This was repeated even in places like Wales, and across other towns and small cities in "Middle England". In these constituencies the common denominator was UKIP coming a strong third. What seems to have happened is that, rather than the Tories bleeding votes to UKIP and letting Labour through (as they had hoped might happen), the opposite was happening: Labour was bleeding "working class" votes by their thousands to UKIP.

This was one of the major factors that accounted for UKIP receiving nearly four million votes. And was - without doubt - the reason for Labour's biggest (and most unexpected) casualty of all - Ed Balls.
Of course, this does not explain all the results in the key Tory/Labour marginals, but it was certainly a key factor in a significant number of them. In many marginals, UKIP were the Tories "secret weapon".

The reasons why people chose to vote Conservative and not Labour in those key marginals will not be discussed here. Some of these factors have been discussed by the author before. It was also clear from anecdotal evidence that the SNP "fear factor" was playing on the minds of some key voters.

One more thing about UKIP. As UKIP themselves predicted, they came second in a number of "safe" Labour seats in the party's northern heartlands, and similarly, came second in a number of the Tories' heartland seats in the South-East. So Farage's claim as being the only "working class" party in England, was now beginning to look more and more credible, in spite of the reality.

A "lucky" Prime Minister?

As said at the start, the Conservatives won their seats due to the collapse of the Lib Dems, grabbing almost all the seats that were a toss between the Tories and the Lib Dems. Cameron claimed during the campaign that he only needed twenty more seats to govern, and he got them, from the Lib Dems. However, that presupposed that he didn't lose any seats to Labour, but as we have seen above - again - he was proved right, against all the odds. Thanks to the insurgent effect of UKIP on Labour's base, the "fear factor" of the SNP and worries over the economy on classic swing voters, the Tories emerged from the face-off in the Tory/Labour marginals relatively unscathed. Some seats were lost to Labour, but there were equally other (unexpected) gains from Labour. The losses and gains basically cancelled each other out. It was in these seats that the election was really won.

The switching of many Lib Dem seats to Tory, and the collapse of the Labour vote in Scotland meant that Labour had to rely on the English marginals mostly going their way in order to ensure that the Tories lost enough seats to bring Labour into contention as a serious alternative to form a government. In this way, Labour really were fighting against the tide. Due to the three factors mentioned - the Tories being the biggest recipient of the Lib Dem collapse, the surge of the SNP, and the UKIP "secret weapon" - the Tories really held the best set of cards to allow them to consolidate on their 2010 result.

In hindsight, these three factors should have been more obvious, in spite of all the predictions of a hung parliament and a messy politics to follow.

As things stand now, both Labour and (even more so) the Lib Dems have serious questions to ask themselves about what direction they should take their respective parties. While Labour's result in this election is comparable with 1987, this fails to take into account the loss of so many MPs in Scotland this time around. They cannot expect to gain them back any time soon. So the 1987 comparison is not truly accurate. Labour now are much more an "English" party than they were on Thursday morning.
But the political scene in Westminster is more fractured than ever before, in spjte of the gross injustices that FPTP has brought to UKIP and the Greens (while massively rewarding the SNP). In that sense, the political scene feels, if anything, like that in 1983: a divided opposition allowing the Conservatives to continue ruling from Downing Street.

David Cameron may well have felt he has dodged a bullet in this election, and been rewarded with a political bomb landing in the laps of his opponent, leaving a multitude of political carcasses.

Perhaps he's just "lucky".

The Conservatives' election strategy and "dirty tricks": how to divide your enemies and threaten people

Q: How do the Conservatives, the party that represent the interests of Britain's rich and powerful, persuade others to vote for them?

There have historically been two strands to this answer, depending on who they are trying to persuade.

To the "middle class", the Conservatives use the double-pronged "threat" of the Labour party as the party that will take away their money through taxation (and destroy the economy), as well as the "threat" that the "feckless/ undeserving/ immoral" segments of society pose to the rest.
Married with the psychological "threat" of the alternative is the "opportunity" that the Conservatives say they can bring to the middle class - that they offer the easiest (low tax) route for the the middle class to rise upwards to the golden realms of the elite. The message is fear on one hand, and greed on the other.

To the "working class", the Conservatives use the similar "threat" of the "feckless/ undeserving/ immoral", which is presumably much closer to home to them, married with the message that the Conservatives represent the "party of opportunity", allowing the "hardworking" to rise up to the middle class. Again, it is fear on one hand, and self-interest on the other.  

Over the long history of the Tories, they have been adept at masking their recurring incompetence inside an exterior shell of assured self-confidence. This may well also be a metaphor for the state of modern Britain itself: but that's another story.

Divide and rule

George Osborne's use of the "strivers versus skivers" rhetoric is the latest telling of a narrative from the Tories that has been the same for many decades, which has intensified with the coming of Thatcherism.
The psychology of politics is a science in itself, and the psychology of the Conservatives is well worth studying in detail. The author looked at some examples from the Conservative government a few years ago, and came up with some interesting results. But as the only way that the Tories can become the government is by making their enemies hate each other, divide and rule is the best way to achieve it. As said earlier, this is a strategy they've practiced over many years.

This explains why Cameron's election strategy - devised by Lynton Crosby - has been all about the negatives, which reached a particular nadir a few weeks ago. But things have hardly got much better since, and there has been the relentless promotion of the "threat" that the SNP have over a possible Labour government - about the most cast-iron example of a literal "divide and rule" strategy you could witness.
The baseness of psychology required to formulate this strategy is stark, and it tells you much about how many Conservatives view human nature: as a game of winners and losers, where those who "lose out" have done so through their own mistakes, and therefore should be deservedly punished for it. As well as mirroring the thinking of Ayn Rand, it also - alarmingly - mirrors the thinking of one of the most destructive psychological disorders.

The kind of Britain that the Tories espouse is one where the disabled and the unemployed are presumed as probable fraudsters for simply wishing some financial aid from the state.  It is a Britain where the unemployed are sometimes forced to work for their benefits (which is not only immoral, but also bad economics). People have literally died as the indirect result of government welfare policy. But under the Tories "divide and rule" strategy, those people that died were not penniless and starving because the government withdrew their benefits, but because of the choices that those people made. They were defined as "undeserving" i.e. they deserved to die.

The use of "divide and rule" provides the most important element of electioneering - creating a "scapegoat". Whether it's the SNP (or Scotland in general), "immigrants", "skivers", or whoever, the electorate - from a psychological point of view - have convincing "hate figures" in order to turn to the Tories as their saviour.

But for a cynical and immoral "divide and rule" strategy to work to its best, you also have to know how to use cynical and immoral "dirty tricks"...

How to use "The Dirty Tricks Handbook"

First and foremost, you have to control the "narrative". This is the "story" of what has happened up to the election. In short, it's propaganda - a lie - that you tell voters. It must be simple to be easily memorable, and repeated regularly.
The Tories' "narrative" about Labour - repeated by Cameron - is that they "broke the banks", and that it was "Labour overspending" that caused the crisis. Only the other day a treasury civil servant said catagorically that this "narrative" was untrue and a historical fallacy. It was a banking crisis (partly caused by lack of government regulation) that created the financial crisis. The "Labour overspending" happened as a result of the crisis; it was not the cause of it. The fact that so many people in the UK have such bad memories that they don't remember this is deeply worrying. The Tories are relying on the notion that if a smart, smooth-talking politician keeps on saying something, people believe it is true. And - horrifyingly - the evidence supports that notion.

Secondly - but probably as important - you have to have the media on your side. In this election, there is convincing evidence (also carried out by Loughborough University) that the media are solidly on the side of the Conservatives. This also seems to extend to the BBC, given the regularly tough questioning given out to Ed Miliband especially, compared to the tame (and sometimes poorly-phrased) questioning given to Cameron and other Tory figures. Given the similar educational backgrounds that many media figures have to many politicians, this shouldn't be so surprising, but it certainly puts paid to any real sense of media "freedom". Also, given that Ed Miliband had effectively declared war on a large segment of the media "establishment" following the events of Leveson, it is even less surprising.
It wasn't always like this, though. Under Tony Blair, the media "establishment" was largely on his side, but again - especially in the case of Rupert Murdoch - it was a case of currying favour in order to gain the support of the media. If the media really wasn't so influential, why did Blair (and Cameron) so obviously want to win them over?

Next, and related to the two previous ideas, is how essential it is to control the agenda. The Tories did this with ruthless duplicity. The whole "debate about the debates" was a prime example of the Tories controlling events in order to allow David Cameron to dictate to the media and the other parties precisely on what terms things would be allowed to happen. It was a disgraceful - but horribly effective - strategy.

Fourthly, apart from the "big lie" to control the "narrative", is the use of character assassination. This was alluded to earlier with the negative attacks on Miliband as someone who would "Stab Britain in The Back". In the case of this election, they seem to have been fairly ineffective (even counter-productive), but in the past had a greater chance of success - with the help of the media (see above). Related to this point is using your opponents' comments in an out-of-context manner to try to destroy their reputation.

One of the most interesting - and to your rival party, confounding - tactics is the use of "projection". This is a psychological term more commonly used as a tactic of narcissists to confound those around them when under threat. In political terms, this is when you accuse your rivals of the exact same errors that they accuse you of - "projecting" your own weaknesses onto your opponents. As this is the last thing your rivals are expecting, it leaves them confused and unclear where to go next with their argument.
An example in this campaign is Cameron's claim the other day that the Tories are for "hardworking people" and against the excesses of bankers, unlike Labour (because they bailed them out, and allowed excessive bonuses). This statement is so catagorically opposite to the Conservatives' reality that it beggars belief that Cameron can even convincingly utter it. As anyone with a brain knows, the Conservatives finances are strongly-reliant on groups and individuals in The City and offshore clients.
This kind of statement tells us more about the worrying ease with which David Cameron can spout complete nonsense from his mouth while seeming to believe every word of it. But Cameron has a track record for being a compulsive liar (or - let's be fair - possibly just a complete idiot), as well as a bully; not to mention  a coward, and an incompetent.

Lastly, you can always steal the clothes (i.e. policies) of your opponent and claim they were yours all along.

The UK, the 2015 general election and the illusion of democracy

Some would say that England has gifted the world with two valued exports: parliamentary democracy, and football. As any Englishman would know, England "invented" the concept of football. Englishmen also know that after being the country that created the football "system", other countries over time developed the same system and evolved it, while England lagged behind, for a long time failing to update its "system" at all. We still were sticking to the same ideas from generations past, while other countries had taken the idea to the next level. his is partly why England only won the World Cup in 1966.

However, much the same could be said of parliamentary democracy, England's other "export". When foreigners understand fully how the political system in the UK works, many of them are in disbelief. This author has witnessed this reaction a number of times.

In many ways, the UK's progressive "public image" to the world abroad is in stark contrast to the grubby and backwards reality. This is one of the many ways in which the "elite" of the establishment fool those abroad, and their own electorate, into being turkeys that vote for Christmas.

England's parliament gained its power over the monarch during the events of the 17th century, when the actions of two Stewart kings (Charles I and James II) took England back into the realms of autocracy that had existed in previous centuries. The result was a much more powerful parliament, composed of combination of aristocrats, landowners and "men of means", that substantially reduced the power of the monarch. That system has remained unchanged since, and was gradually extended over the 19th century to better reflect the changes in population and society.
The idea of parliamentary democracy spread to America, resulting in the War Of Independence, and throughout the 19th century, across parts of Europe. Even by the end of the 19th century, it could be argued that Westminster was still one of the best models of democracy in the world, compared to the embryonic attempts of much more limited "democracy" across parts of Europe.

How To Waste Your Vote

Today, almost all representative democracies in the world use the system of Proportional Representation, which has existed since the early 20th century. Although there are rules that give a threshold for parties to pass in order to enter parliament, this voting system allows the fairest reflection of the electorate's will in parliament. Of course, this usually results in coalition governments, but this is accepted as the natural result of the system. Coalition government has its critics, but the electorate is used to it, and would struggle to think of an effective - and fair - alternative.
The "First Past the Post" system (or a variation of it) is still used in the English-speaking world - in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This is the same electoral system that existed more than two hundred years ago. While the franchise of the vote has extended, the electoral system remains the same.
The natural result of that FPTP system is fewer parties in parliament. To become an MP, a party needs to have more votes than any other party in that particular electoral district (called a "constituency" in the UK). Naturally, this means few parties will be able to gather that kind of support, and this get into parliament.

Advocates of this system point to the fact that it allows local representation that is not the case in PR. However, it can equally be argued that as one of the effects of the FPTP system is a large portion of "safe" seats, this puts into question the motivation of any MP who has the luck to be sitting in one. Because of the way that district boundaries can be "gerrymandered" (e.g. in the USA or the UK) to suit a party's interests, it means that a large portion of the electorate are effectively disenfranchised - their votes become "wasted" simply because of where they live. Prospective candidates in a party can easily become MPs in "safe seats" through smart politicking and networking, and then once in place, the party "favourite" has little incentive to be an effective MP for his constituents, but far more incentive to spend time in Westminster for the purposes of self-promotion. This is how the game works for many.

Many of the "safe" seats can easily become "rotten boroughs". Any voter that happens to live in a "safe" seat but doesn't support their MP's party, has no effective way to get rid of him. Only a highly-organised "tactical vote" by supporters of other parties working in unison for an agreed candidate would work - one rare example of this was the election of Martin Bell standing as in independent candidate in the 1997 election against the sitting Conservative MP in the constituency of Tatton (currently George Osborne's seat). This demonstrates the extremely high level of organisation necessary to "beat the system". Only significant (and, therefore, rare) changes in political mood - such as those in Scotland since the historic referendum last autumn - make this possible.

In this sense, the FPTP system makes the electoral process a "closed shop". With the election - and 2015 is likely to be a prime example - often decided on the votes of some tens of thousands living in "marginal constituencies" in England (in the USA, read: "swing state") - it makes a mockery of the supposed power of the electorate.  Only those who happen to live in the right areas have real power, and it is always these "swing voters" (that supposedly represent "Middle England") that decide things. This is the reason why the political parties focus so narrowly on the issues that matter to those specific voters.  The effect is not far from that which existed two hundred years ago, when it was the voters in "rotten boroughs" that had a big say in things.
In this way, the UK is really ran in much the same way it was in the 18th century. While the franchise has been extended to all adults, the electoral system basically is the same as it was in the 18th century, with the "power" of the electorate's vote highly dependent on where they live. Millions of votes are "wasted", while the established parties tussle over a smaller and smaller proportion of the electorate.

And this is even without mentioning the House Of Lords - or what might better be called the "House Of Boyars". Like in the days of the Russian Empire, the House Of Lords is simply a parlour for aristocrats and political appointees, a pathetic joke on the concept of "democracy". The "House Of Lords" is a place where giving enough money to the governing party can "buy" you a place in the upper parliament of the UK. None of them are elected and - along with the theocratic Iran - is the only "parliament" in the world where theologians (i.e. bishops) have a place alongside those who have gained their place through a nod and a wink.

In more unpleasant ways, of course, there is plenty of evidence that the "establishment" has been covering up the truth for years.

A "managed democracy"?

It is no wonder that as politics in the UK has become more "professional", it has also become more of a charade separated from the reality of ordinary people's lives. The current Prime Minister is a self-evident example of that: a son of a minor aristocrat (and distant relative to the Queen), he represents the psychology of the "establishment", in spite of his protests: seemingly self-confident but actually incompetent, publicly sincere but privately scornful.

And yet, in the 2010 election, Cameron said - with a straight face - "Vote Change, Vote Conservative"(!).

Apart from the political system being a "closed shop" in many ways, in any case the way the country is ran - through the economy - is effectively a debate-free zone. The economic orthodoxy of austerity and the neo-liberal model has transformed the UK from a diverse economy with a large manufacturing base, to a largely reliant on the fortunes of the (now bloated) financial industry. Having tied the fate of the UK economy to finance, the banks then promptly crashed the economy and made the government pay the bill. And now the rest of society is "paying the bill" in the form of austerity, the shrinking of the state, and the (often dubious) selling-off of government services to an incompetent private sector.
In this way, the UK is barely operating as a country at all, and more like a corporation that should be "restructured", with its population as "employees" that can be offloaded. There are always cheaper supplies of labour, and cheaper ways of getting things done.

Lastly, there is the media, which during this election campaign has seemingly done its best to promote the virtues of Cameron and his "long term economic plan" (see above). As Cameron himself has said in the past: "There is No Alternative".

Well, we may as well all go home, then.

The Conservatives, Labour and the SNP: the Tories' cynical strategy of divide and rule

The Conservatives' election strategy has been marked by negative tactics and low politics. This reached a low point with the personal attacks on Ed Miliband the other week, but has not stopped. In spite of the fact that there is little evidence that this is actually having an effect on the polls (and some suggesting it may have had the opposite effect), the attacks on Miliband have continued by major Tory figures.
Cameron seems intent on flogging this particular dead horse. One particularly-telling moment was a Cameron interview with Sky News the day after Fallon's remarks, where Cameron admitted that he didn't know Miliband personally (or really, at all), but still felt justified in making these highly-personal attacks. This is just absurd: the Prime Minister trying to defend making unsavoury personal attacks on a person he barely even knows. The fact that Cameron has to resort to them to make a point, while Miliband simply has to talk about the effect government policies are having, tells you a lot about the character of the two men vying to be Prime Minister after the election.

The wider truth about the Tories is that they would do and say almost anything to have power. Their manifesto was full of ridiculous promises; where the money came from, nobody knew. While all parties are guilty of exaggerating the danger of other parties, the Conservatives' threats at times have bordered on the nonsensical: that they would create "millions" of jobs, and that Labour would destroy "millions" of jobs. Since when do Conservative governments "create" jobs? Only the private companies can do that. The talk of Labour "chaos", which ignores the fact that - prior to the global financial crisis - Labour presided over the longest period of growth in living memory. Yes, there was a crash, but it was a worldwide crash, that cannot simply be blamed on Labour. In any case, the Conservatives' economic policy at the time was even more gung-ho than the then Labour government's. But these facts must be conveniently forgotten to project the fallacy of Conservative competence.

Divide and rule

The Conservative Party is the historic party of the old aristocracy, and the party still rules the UK with the same attitude the Empire had towards it's colonies. These days, with the empire long gone, it feels like the "empire" is just London ruling the other parts of the country like outlying colonies. For those in the Westminster bubble, the rest of the country certainly feels as remote. The country is ran as though it is just an economic extension of the London economy: this explains why London acts as a vampire on the "real" UK beyond the M25. The economic model the UK has had for the past thirty years has been made in London, for the benefit of London. Any beneficial effects on those areas outside of London have been incidental. It's essentially the same economic model as some parts of the Third World.
The only way the electorate can be distracted from this reality is by the Tories creating poisonous false narratives like "strivers" versus "shirkers". The "politics of envy" that the Tories hurl at Labour more accurately reflects how they use the politics of fear to protect their own interests and positions. When you have a lot to lose - like the media barons that support the Tories  - anything that could possibly prevent your own expansion is perceived as a mortal threat.

The Tories have been gradually losing support in Scotland over the last thirty years. The loss of the 1997 election saw the last generation of Tory Scots swept from Westminster, leaving only a vestige of support. The irony was that, after opposing devolution, the Scottish Conservatives found that they could have a larger voice in Holyrood's new, proportional system. The same was true of the SNP. When the nationalists became a minority government in Holyrood, the SNP had to rely on Tory support from time to time to get some bills through parliament. Then, with the collapse of Labour support becoming even more dramatic after the SNP won power outright in the following Holyrood elections. a historic change looked to be taking place. The aftermath of the independence referendum last year confirmed the historic nature of the collapse of Labour support to the benefit of the SNP. The Tories looked on in delight.

As said earlier, the Tories have a track record of doing and saying anything in order to have power. Regarding the national integrity of the UK, this will even extend to happily losing one part of the country if it means having a better control of the rest. For this is the calculation that Cameron and other figures in the government have clearly made. This is, quite literally, "divide and rule".

And yet, the Tories' strategy is at a complete counter to one of main tenets of their existence: the preservation of the UK. While it may be argued by some that it was the Labour party that "gave up" on the empire, it is the Tories who seem happy to give up on the idea of the UK - so long as they think they can rule what is left of it.

While in the election campaign they talk about the dangers of the "chaos" of the SNP somehow having control over Labour and the UK as a whole, at the same time people like George Osborne are talking up the talents of the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon. It is almost as if some Tories want the SNP to do well, regardless of the implications this may have on the wider future of the UK. And yet, while offering more powers to Scotland after the referendum, now they are talking about how Scottish voters' choice will have no effect in Westminster - words that seem almost designed to make the Scots even more angry and disconnected from the decisions in Westminster. This would no doubt suit the long-term aims of the SNP.
One theory doing the rounds is that the Conservatives are somehow hoping to destroy the Labour party in Scotland through the proxy of the SNP. With the simultaneous collapse of the LibDems north of the border, this then gives them a free run as the main "unionist" opposition to the SNP. A plot as nefarious as this couldn't be put past the Tories, regardless of how fanciful the aim. The enemy of my enemy is my friend (until he's the enemy again).

A Game Of Chess

In this light, the Scottish Conservatives may be trying to play a very long game. Meanwhile, the English Conservatives are trying to make Labour - the only party with serious levels of support in each part the union - as the party prepared to "do a deal" with a party (the SNP) that would split the union asunder. As we have already seen, this claim is as nonsensical as it is shamelessly hypocritical and disingenuous.
It would suit both the SNP and the Tories for Labour to be dislodged as "Stewards Of The North". To use a "Game Of Thrones" analogy (apologies to those not in the know) the Tories are playing the Lannisters, who secretly did a deal with the Boltons (the SNP) to take over from the Starks (Labour).

But this is not a game. While Cameron and Osborne play petty politics with Scotland for their own reasons, at the same time they are also playing games with the "insurgents" in British politics, UKIP. The Tories criticise Labour for refusing to rule out a deal with the SNP, but already in the previous parliament, Ukip's agenda forced Cameron into promising an EU referendum in the next parliament. And that was even at a time before UKIP had any MPs. While UKIP are unlikely to get more than a handful of MPs, they have plenty of "soft power" over the Conservatives in terms of the many Euro-sceptic MPs amongst the Tories themselves.
So, assuming that Cameron did get back into power, he would be beholden to the "insurgents" of UKIP on one hand, and powerless to prevent an angry and politically-disconnected Scotland breaking away, on the other. A Cameron second term could conceivably conclude with Scotland breaking up the union and the UK leaving the EU. While these might seem far-fetched scenarios, they would be even less likely if Ed Miliband were Prime Minister. 

To the likes of Cameron, politics is a game of chess, but one he thinks he is much better at than he actually is. His record as Prime Minister and statesman is actually pretty appalling. It sometimes feels like he's doing it for the lack of anything better to do.

Conservative and Labour manifestos launched: role reversal and fantasy politics in the 2015 election

Yesterday Labour launched their manifesto for the election, followed by the Conservatives today.

Before going on to some of the specifics, first of all it's worthwhile looking at the "first impressions" given by both parties' manifestos.

Both parties went for a "corporate" look using their party colours, with the Tories having a long angle shot of some of the cabinet "big names" (read: future leadership contenders) sat at a table. That said, it was also instructive about who wasn't in this particular photo  - the likes of Iain Duncan Smith and Eric Pickles, for example, or Grant "Michael Green" Shapps. The idea portrayed here is, one assumes, that of a solid, reliable team of ministers who work well together. The irony is that Cameron's speech talked about how "the people" were against some of his ministers' reforms, but they went ahead anyway; the reality is that it was Cameron who was against some of the reforms, but his ministers ignored him. IDS, for example, refused to resign when asked, and Cameron didn't want to fire him over the Universal Credit fiasco. So even the photo on the manifesto front page indirectly reflects some of the "behind the scenes" goings-on between the personalities in the party.

Staying with the Tories, their manifesto's "summary" page declares "we have a plan for every stage of your life" which was instantly mocked by some (see entry for 11.16) as sounding terrifyingly like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. So are the Tories now re-branding themselves as Stalinists, taking their tips from the Chinese Communist Party? Conservative government for life, from cradle to the grave! Clearly, some people in party headquarters doesn't get out much if they think that "summary" looks reassuring...

Talking about Labour, as they were the party of opposition, they needed to give the impression of reassurance and competence. Ed Miliband now regularly wears grey ties, which makes me think that someone has told him it makes him look like a bank manager (it does!). The impression Labour and Ed Miliband want to give is one of almost "boring" competence, compared to the "danger and risk" to the lifeblood of the country that the Conservatives offer with their continued drive to austerity and the EU referendum. Many commentators spoke of how impressive Miliband came across compared to the past, and how to some it "looked like Miliband, but sounded like someone else" i.e. it was Ed Miliband, but the "adult/serious/competent/confident" version. This was the "yes, I'm ready to govern" version that Miliband wanted to show, contrasting with the version that Cameron and the media have shown in the past.

One more point worth mentioning was about how the press were handled by both parties during their launches, which displayed the different tones and attitudes of both sides. Miliband was keen to have an in-depth feedback with the press, even telling his (jeering) activists to show respect when he was being asked a hostile question. By contrast (and again, very "Chinese Communist Party"), the Tories' press session was must briefer, with Cameron "answering" fewer questions (usually by completely changing the topic), and having an aide hold the microphone for the press to prevent any follow-up from Cameron's "answer". Once Cameron gave his "answer" the mic quickly went over to someone else. The event was shamelessly stage-managed to avoid any awkward moments for the Tories' "dear leader"...

The role reversal of Labour and the Conservatives is striking in their manifestos and the pledges that they have made. With the Tories having a "wobble" last week, and Labour appearing to set the pace at out-flanking the Tories on their "competence" pledges, the pressure has been on the Tories to respond. After the clumsy, un-costed and ill-thought-out policy announcements at the end of the week (£8bn extra a year for the NHS? What planet are they on?), the Tories were looking to their manifesto to regain the initiative. It's never good for the Tories when they - as Ed Miliband said - make the Green Party look fiscally responsible.

Losing the plot?

The "eye-catching" policy of the manifesto launch was introducing the "right to buy" for housing association properties.

Here is an idea that qualifies as "zombie politics"; resurrecting an idea that was brought to life thirty years ago, and trying to re-package it decades later as the "next big thing". This policy also summaries everything that is wrong about the Conservative Party and the people who run it.

As Thatcher's original idea was politically popular, Cameron and his allies think the same trick can work again thirty years on with offering to sell-off Housing Association properties. For one, shows a condescending attitude towards people who live in these properties: it assumes that they want (and can afford) to buy these properties outright, rather than preferring the security that the long-term HA leases have, without having to pay the maintenance costs.
Second, it is clear that this a policy cynically aimed at Labour voters (as most HA properties are in lower-income areas), while at the same time aimed at getting the attention of  middle-class "floating voters" that the Tories are the "party of aspiration". But it's arrogant to assume that people in the 2010s have the same attitudes as those in the 1980s, because the social circumstances have changed. The housing crisis is at the back of everyone's minds, and evidence has shown that this policy isn't even popular with voters themselves. If you forgive the muddled metaphor, the Tories seem to think that voters are like Pavlovian dogs that whose "lights" can switched on and off at the click of a finger. They think that voters are - essentially - simple.

In this way, Cameron's Conservatives show how they are still living in the past, and think that they can win an election in 2015 on policies first thought up in 1979. It's superficial, arrogant and lazy thinking, and in a whole host of ways, is absolutely terrible economics. It's the worst of both worlds - a horrible political idea, and an economically-insane one. It also happens to be illegal, with HAs liable to challenge any Conservative attempts to enforce sell-offs in court.

This condescending attitude towards the public has been apparent from the stage-managed photo opportunities which people can see through immediately, and are heartily tired of seeing. It is odd that Britain is has of the most intelligent electorates in the world, yet the two main parties - the Tories in particular - treat the electorate as though they are idiots.

The overall impression of the Conservative manifesto was of a party in flight from reality. In government, they missed their economic targets by a mile, and made a mess of almost every major project and "reform" they handled. In many policies they announced in the manifesto, the costings couldn't be explained, and the cuts to made were only mentioned in the most abstract way. The Tories were telling us they could make massive savings with cuts (from where, they didn't say) while at the same time spending money here, there and everywhere. No-one with a brain could take this stuff seriously. Less than six months ago George Osborne was warning of the massive scale of the austerity to come after the election. Suddenly, the Tories have had massive attack of amnesia and self-delusion. Where does this madness end?

Cameron makes his party as being - wait for it - the "party of the working people". This is so laughable it's ridiculous. Why do so many of their party donors are tax-avoiders and have "non-dom" status, and why do the City invest in their party then? If anything, the Tories are the "trades union of the rich".

The only people that the Tories can be kidding is themselves.

David Cameron and the Conservatives' negative 2015 election campaign: are they losing the plot?

Two weeks ago, parliament dissolved for the election campaign, and Cameron and Miliband were preparing for their fate with Jeremy Paxman. I wrote previously about how that week was possibly a week that Cameron would have liked to forget. The PM did not exactly show himself off in his best light, and brought back the negative traits that Cameron and his supporters do their best to hide.

That was two weeks ago, and the following Thursday was dominated by the leaders' debates. Since then (and until a few days ago) the media coverage of Cameron was soft-focus, easy-on-the-eye segments of him visiting somewhere, looking kindly-but-earnest, and being photographed in kindly settings. This culminated in him being photographed with a lamb over the Easter weekend, which was perhaps the most overtly (and sickeningly) reverential photo opportunity yet.
In parallel to that, Ed Miliband and Labour were consistently shown in the mainstream media as hapless and not to be trusted. Even though this clearly flew in face of the conventional view that Miliband did - at worst - a decent job of explaining his platform in the leaders' debate, this "line" kept on being used by many in the media.

This blatant bias gave credence to the view that the media are just as much a part of the "establishment" as those in the ranks of the Conservative party.

However, the Conservatives' negative campaign looked to have stalled their fortunes by the end of the Easter holiday. It wasn't having any noticeable effect on the polls, which were showing the two main parties neck-and-neck. And then Labour turned up the heat a couple of notches.

How to lose the plot in seventy-two hours

The week began to get interesting when Tony Blair made a sudden appearance back in Sedgefield to make a speech on Europe. To an extent, this was Labour taking a risk due to the toxic effect that Blair has on some since the Iraq war. But Blair's speech displayed his statesman-like command of the English language is still a force to marvel, as well as being a devastating put-down on Cameron personally and the Conservatives in general. While Blair could be dismissed as a sign of desperation in the Miliband camp, Blair's message could not. The Conservative response was unconvincing and petty. The tone of that response would become a Conservative trend for the week.

The next day, Labour then announced that they would abolish the right of non-doms' tax privileges. As this policy was clearly a vote-winner, the Tories didn't have a coherent reply. What was even more ironic was that the Financial Times had even supported this change of the law. One of their ministers tried several different arguments against it, changing her "line" with each put-down, to ridiculous effect. The Tories were caught trying to defend the indefensible, as they tried vainly to defend the interests of their wealthy supporters. Labour had - to the Tories' evident surprise - played an absolute blinder, leaving the Conservatives flapping around for a response. It didn't come.

Things went from the sublime to the farcical the following day: Thursday. Defence secretary Michael Fallon then went on the attack about Labour's apparently "chaotic" and dangerous policy on Trident and the nuclear deterrent, going so far as to call Ed Miliband "ruthless" for robbing his brother of the leadership, suggesting that Ed would "stab" Britain in the back the same way he had done to his brother.
This line of attack was as stupid as it was embarrassing. Not only was Fallon blatantly getting his facts wrong about Labour's policy (which was essentially the same as the Conservatives), he was attacking Miliband in a way that was to quickly backfire on him.
Miliband's response to these attacks was a lesson in masterful, polite put-down. By this point in the campaign, Miliband was beginning to look more and more composed, more obviously, naturally "human", and quick to dismiss Tory personal attacks on him as "pathetic". It was clear that most people agreed with him.

To cap it all off, the Tories then decided to postpone their manifesto launch so it didn't clash with Labour's. The average person would conclude that they were scrabbling around for something - anything - to deflect the attention back on to Labour "chaos" versus Conservative "competence".

Only now, the roles had seemed reversed.

In footballing terms, gone from bad to worse for the Tories, by the end of Thurday reading:

Labour 3 - 0 Conservatives
Blair
Miliband
Fallon (o.g.)

On Friday, the Tories were clearly trying to get back in the game by throwing out a few policy ideas (calling them more than "ideas" would be too kind). These included a freeze on rail fares (isn't that a Socialist idea?), and a law that gave employees the right to three days paid "voluntary leave" from their companies.
Both these ideas were quickly dismissed as gimmicks - and according to industry experts, irresponsible ones as that. The Tories had somehow turned their campaign from a well-oiled machine into a farcical joke. No-one was taking anything the Conservatives said very seriously any more.

The Blame Game

The personal attacks, as insiders know, could only have been instigated by Cameron. It was Cameron who used personal attacks in front of 10 Downing Street as his way to start the election campaign. This has been Cameron's line of attack for a very long time, making it all a question of personality. But this is also another sign of the petty baseness and superficiality of the Prime Minister's personality. While it is true that Ed Miliband has not exactly shone in personal terms since becoming Labour leader, it is now also equally clear that the poor image given to him was an unfair misrepresentation.
With the election campaign properly underway, it almost feels as though the "real" Ed (rather than "Red Ed") has suddenly been unveiled, to the Tories astonishment. A wag might suggest it was all a "cunning plan" to lull the Tories into a false sense of security, with Miliband playing a "long game" that would only become clear to everyone right at the last moment. Miliband is far from an obvious statesman, but he is also clearly a decent person who cares about people far more than those in the Conservative party.

Poor Michael Fallon was clearly told to do a job on Thursday and he did it - this was what Miliband himself cleverly alluded to. Cameron is now seen as a petty coward, who attacks his enemies but doesn't have the courage to have a one-on-one debate with a man he thinks is useless, and nor the decency to talk to the real electorate during a campaign to remain as their leader. He would rather spend a day flashing around four corners of the country (if only for a hour or two), hang out in the "Game Of Thrones" set, and then talk to a small gathering of supporters in a huge, empty shed (but pretend he's talking to a large gathering of the masses). As Miliband said, it's pathetic.

Cameron is a man who can't take criticism. He has been seen losing his temper in Westminster when rattled. This is why he lives in a cocoon-like existence, detached from the real Britain of food banks, zero-hour contracts, and thirtysomethings living with their parents because they can't afford to rent a place for themselves (let alone a mortgage). This is the consequence of his "long term economic plan".

It was Cameron who brought in Lynton Crosby as the expert to guide them to victory in 2015. So far, all his strategy has shown is that the "nasty party" are back with a vengeance. They were in hiding all along.

Fundamentally, under the stresses of an election campaign people are now seeing more of the "real" Cameron and the "real" Miliband. People will decide which person they would rather have making decisions about how society works. If it was simply about "the economy" then, yes, the Tories would probably win, but that's an overly-simplistic judgement. "The economy" is a complex idea, with lots of different factors influencing it. This explains why the Tories are not in a better position.

There is too much distrust and uncertainty about how the economy is ran in the UK. Who does it work for? This is the question that Ed Miliband poses.