Links between austerity and immigration, and the power of information

This discussion by Roger Scully about why people in the Welsh Valleys voted Leave is depressing although not surprising. In essence it is immigration, bolstered by local stories of Polish people coming into communities and reducing wages. I doubt if quoting econometric studies about how little immigration influences wages would make much difference to these attitudes (although that is no excuse for people in authority who should know better ignoring these studies). I think it is attitudes like this, in places unused to immigration partly because work is not plentiful, that makes some politicians say that arguing in favour of immigration is ‘politically impossible’.

This is the first link between immigration and austerity I want to draw. The Labour party before 2015 had also decided that attacking austerity was politically impossible: ‘the argument had been lost’. Focus groups told them that people had become convinced that the government should tighten its belt because governments were just like households. The mistake here, as I wrote many times, was to assume attitudes were fixed rather than contextual. I was right: austerity is no longer a vote winner. [1]

Why might attitudes to immigration change? I strongly suspect that anti-immigration attitudes, along with suspicion about benefit claimants, become stronger in bad times. When real wages are rising it is difficult to fire people up with arguments that they would have risen even faster in the absence of immigration. But when real wages are falling, as they have been in the UK in an unprecedented way over the last decade, it is much easier to blame outsiders. Equally when public services deteriorate it is easy to blame newcomers.

It is wrong to think that this only happens among working class, left behind communities. Catalonia is a relatively rich part of Spain, and there has always been resentment about this area ‘subsidising’ the rest of the country. But it is very noticeable how support for pro-independence parties increased sharply as Spain turned to austerity, although that could also be a reaction to corruption scandals.

Here is the second link between immigration attitudes and austerity. Austerity has contributed to the slow growth in real wages and is the main cause of deteriorating public services, but often outsiders are easier to blame.

This is particularly true when it is in the interests of the governing political party and its supporters in the press to deflect criticism of austerity by pretending immigration is the real cause of people's woes. This is the third link between austerity and immigration, and it is one deliberately created and encouraged by right wing political parties. In this way Brexit has its own self-reinforcing dynamic. People vote for it because of immigration, its prospect leads to falling real wages as sterling falls and the economy falters, which adds to bad times and anti-immigrant attitudes.

If all this seems very pessimistic, it shouldn’t be. While the right will almost certainly continue to play the anti-immigration card in the short term, because they have few other cards to play, they can be opposed by a left that makes the case for immigration. As just as views on austerity have clearly changed, so can views on immigration. particularly once hard times come to an end.

However it is a mistake to imagine it is all about economics, or even ‘culture’. One of the unfortunate consequences of the culture vs economics debate over populism is the implication that one way or another views are deterministic, and the only issue is what kind of determinism. The reason I go on about the media so much is that information matters a lot too. Although people may be anti-immigration because they have xenophobic tendencies which are reinforced when times are bad, they can also be anti-immigration because they have poor information, or worse still have been fed deliberately misleading facts.

In my intray of studies to write about for some time has been this paper by Alexis Grigorieff, Christopher Roth and Diego Ubfal. (Sam Bowman reminded me it was there from this piece.) It is well known that people tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their country. This international experiment showed that when people were given the correct information, a significant number changed their views. What is more, this change of view was permanent rather than temporary. Here is a VoxEU post about an experiment from Japan pointing in the same direction.

As well as emphasising simple information like this, politicians should expose the kind of tricks people promoting tougher controls on immigration play. The public tends to be receptive to the idea that it is beneficial for the economy to have immigrants with important skills, so they switch to calling for controls on low paid, low skilled workers. As Jonathan Portes demonstrates, that in practice can involve plenty of pretty skilled workers. The trick for pro-immigration politicians is to ask which occupations do we want to exclude: nurses, care workers, construction workers, primary school teachers, chefs? With UK unemployment relatively low, there are not many jobs where employers are not complaining of shortages.

Of course most people want to stop immigrants coming here and claiming unemployment benefit. This is why newspapers keep playing the trick of talking about the large number of migrants ‘who are not employed’, conveniently forgetting to mention that this includes people like mothers looking after children. In reality unemployment among EU immigrants is below that among the native population. In addition, we can already deport EU immigrants that remain unemployed under EU law if the government could be bothered to do so.

For politicians who do want to start making the case for immigration, the place I would start is public services. Few economists would dispute that immigrants pay more in tax than they take out in using public services. Yet most of the public believe the opposite. In this post entitled ‘Is Austerity to blame for Brexit’ I show a poll where the biggest reason people give for EU immigration being bad is its impact on the NHS. Getting the true information out there will have a big effect. Just as public attitudes to austerity can change, so can they over immigration, but only if politicians on the left start getting the facts out there.

[1] To be fair, whether I would have been right in 2014/15 if Labour had taken a clear anti-austerity line we do not know.   

When capturing the middle ground works or fails

In 2015 Labour went for austerity-lite compared to Osborne’s full on austerity. It failed. Yet in 2017 Labour went for Brexit-lite, and it worked. Why does capturing the middle ground (often called triangulation) sometimes work and sometimes fail?

The theory behind why it should work is straightforward. Suppose you can grade an issue from 1 to 10, and we have a two party system: you can vote Labour or Conservative. In the case of Brexit, 1 would be staying in the EU and joining the Euro, and 10 would be No Deal. Now suppose voters are evenly distributed along this spectrum of possibilities: 10% want No Deal (10), 10% want a deal where we leave with minimal trade deals with the EU (9) and so on. An even distribution means 50% of the population want options between 1 and 5, and 50% want options between 6 and 10. Suppose the Conservatives go for option 8, which in this case is a fairly hard Brexit. Suppose Labour actually believe in option 3. What option should they campaign for in an election?

If all voters are well informed and are certain to vote, and there are no third parties, the answer is to go for the middle ground. If they campaigned for 3, they would capture only 50% of voters (those who prefer options 1 to 5), and the Conservatives would win those preferring 6 to 10. But if they campaigned for option 7, they would capture 70% of the vote. Indeed those voters who understood triangulation might have reasoned that although Labour were campaigning for 7, they were only doing that to appease some of their traditional core voters, and if elected they would actually go for a more EU friendly option.

You could read Labour’s position on Brexit in GE2017 as being very close to the Conservatives. But the language that stressed the importance of the economy allowed those who prefered options 1 to 7 to think Labour would be better than the Conservatives. Labour did indeed appear to go for something like option 7 in GE2017, and it seems to have worked: the swing to Labour was higher in areas that voted to Remain (their did not alienate voters who wanted options 2 or 3), but they captured some Leave voters as well. Whether that Labour positioning was based on triangulation or did actually reflect the leadership's true beliefs I honestly do not know.

Compare this to the 2015 election and austerity, where option 1 is wanting fiscal stimulus and more public investment because interest rates were stuck close to their lower bound, and 10 was an even sharper austerity than George Osborne was proposing. Instead he proposed option 8, and Labour went for something more moderate: on paper maybe 6, but they kept quiet about the difference so maybe in practice 7. Labour’s positioning is generally thought to have failed. Not only did they lose the election, but afterwards an ‘outsider’ became party leader on a platform that was clearly anti-austerity.

So why did triangulation work with Brexit in 2017 but fail with austerity in 2015? There are many ways of changing this very simple model to resolve this puzzle. My current favourite is as follows. What is missing from the linear scale of options outlined above is any account of the framework by which voters judge competence, and the option of not voting. In 2015 the dominant narrative was the one set out by the Conservatives: austerity was required because they were clearing up the mess left by Labour. By positioning themselves as austerity-lite Labour in effect did nothing to challenge that narrative. This had two consequences. First, those who took a strong anti-austerity line might have been tempted not to vote. Second, those in the middle did not go with Labour because Labour’s competence was questionable: they had caused the deficit problem in the first place.

So Labour’s positioning in 2015 to capture the middle ground failed. By not challenging the dominant narrative they appeared to accept their alleged past incompetence, and committed anti-austerity voters may have not turned up. In 2017 Labour openly challenged the austerity narrative. That meant they didn’t capture the middle ground, but they did not lose it either. (It should also be added that the middle ground on austerity has probably been shifting as the deficit itself falls.)

In 2017 with Brexit, there was no dominant narrative. As I have remarked before, the country is as divided as it was in the original vote. Labour had two options. It could oppose Brexit, and get the anti-Brexit vote. Or it could attempt to capture the middle ground by accepting Brexit but stressing that they would put the economy first. They, by preference or design, went with the second triangulation option and it seems to have worked.

Why were hard line Remainers not put off from voting Labour as anti-austerity voters may have been in 2015? In part I suspect because Brexit was not the only dominant issue. Labour campaigned on its anti-austerity manifesto, and for many Remain voters this was at least as important as Brexit. This meant that not voting was not an option. There may also have been the realisation that had Labour campaigned to Remain, this would have allowed the Conservatives to make the election a rerun of the Brexit vote, and the distribution of voters by constituency would mean the Conservatives would have won more seats even if the national vote had been evenly split. So in the case of Brexit, but not austerity, triangulation made sense.

Whether this is right or not I have no idea as I am very much an amateur on these issues. I only write about it here because I have not seen this comparison between the two elections made elsewhere. To the extent that Labour’s triangulation on Brexit was tactical, it means if (following May's failed election) the Conservatives move to a softer Brexit (from 8 to 7, say), it is important that Labour moves as well (from 7 to 6) to keep their Remain voters on side. 

What does Labour's poll surge tell us

This isn’t another discussion about whether Labour can ‘win’: I’m far less qualified than others to make predictions of that kind. Nor is it the appropriate point to ask whether the Parliamentary Labour Party (and to a lesser extent myself) were wrong to think a Corbyn leadership would be disastrous: that discussion should be postponed for a week. Instead I want to ask what the Labour surge tells us about the way political information has been disseminated in the UK.

Sir David Butler says “the movement in the polls over this campaign is bigger than in any election I’ve covered since 1945”. (Some data here.) There are three obvious explanations for this surge. A terrible Conservative campaign which led many to think Theresa May had serious failings, a good Labour campaign which led many to think Jeremy Corbyn was not the ogre some said he was, and a Labour manifesto which contained popular policies. The point I want to make is that none of those developments should have come as a surprise. Yet to the parts of the electorate that created the surge they have been a surprise enough to change their vote.

I have talked about Theresa May in an earlier post, and none of the failings that the campaign has exposed were out of character. For example the ‘dementia tax’ U-turn was little different to the U-turn on self-employed tax. One thing that was clear about Jeremy Corbyn is that he runs good campaigns, and the idea that his appeal would be precisely limited to Labour party members was never likely to be true. (Whether it can extend to older Conservative voters we have yet to see.) Finally it was clear to me from the start of his leadership that he would try and adopt policies that were popular, robust and which most MPs could live with. Those that suggest the manifesto marks the end of UK capitalism have no credibility, as an examination of other European countries would demonstrate.

So if May’s weaknesses and Corbyn’s strengths were pretty clear before the campaign began, why have they come as a surprise to those involved in answering the questions of pollsters? The difference between an election campaign and everyday politics is that in a campaign politicians get more time to talk directly to the people. Outside of a campaign, politicians have to rely more on the media to get themselves and their policies across. So part of the story behind the surge is a failure of the media to accurately portray the abilities of politicians. [1]

I’m not talking on this occasion about the bias of the Tory press, because if this was all we would see swings to Labour during every election campaign, and that normally does not happen. More important I think is a failure of centrist and left leaning commentators, who almost all took one side in Labour’s internal divisions. The impression many gave was that Corbyn was hopeless and his policies would be laughed out of court. When neither turned out to be true, his and his party’s popularity improved dramatically

Unfortunately for Labour supporters there is a potential corollary. One idea I have seen put forward is that the polls may be exaggerating the surge because those being polled are paying more attention to the campaign than the average voter. All of the factors I identified above may be having proportionately more impact on voters being polled. (This might explain why many Labour MPs say they do not recognise this surge.) All the more reason to leave retrospectives on Corbyn's leadership until after the vote.

[1] Another factor is Brexit. May emerged as Conservative party leader in chaotic circumstances, without even having to win a contest among Conservative party members. In such chaos, she did not get the scrutiny she deserved. Politics since then has been mainly about Brexit, and while the Conservatives largely united behind May, Labour were more divided. The election was a reminder that other really important issues exist.

Labour MPs are keeping Corbyn in power

If the title seems weird, remember that Corbyn only got onto the ballot in 2015 because some MPs felt it would be good for Labour party democracy if the left was represented. The current rule is that 15% of MPs and MEPs have to nominate you if you want to stand as Labour leader. That rule can preclude anyone from the left getting onto the ballot given the current composition of MPs and MEPs. Corbyn’s team want to turn 15% into 5%, but the great majority of MPs will do what they can to stop that happening.

It is this that is keeping Corbyn in power. A majority of Labour party members want to be able to vote for someone from the left in any future leadership election. If the 15% stands, that seems almost impossible. These members therefore want him to stay in power for as long as it takes to change the 15% rule. But Labour MPs have no intention of giving way on this, because they believe that if the rule is changed the left will have a stranglehold on the leadership, given the current composition and views of members. That is how Labour MPs are keeping Corbyn in power.

Corbyn’s popularity among the membership has changed significantly since the 2016 election. Then he won easily. Since then his popularity has decreased substantially, in part because of his poor handling of Brexit and also because it has become more difficult to claim that his unpopularity in the polls is due to Labour disunity. But MPs will not put up a challenger, because they suspect the challenger will fail. It will fail because by voting for someone who supports the 15% rule members believe they will be voting for their own disenfranchisement. This has become a power struggle between MPs and members, and Corbyn is becoming just a pawn in this game.

If that seems fanciful to you, just consider what happened last time round. In an emotional response to the referendum defeat, MPs passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn. It was a challenge that was far too soon, giving the impression among members that Corbyn was only doing badly because Labour MPs were out to get him. The challenger that MPs chose for the subsequent election contest, Owen Smith, adopted virtually the same policy proposals as Corbyn/McDonnell, but crucially did not back changing the 15% rule. As a result, the members understandably responded by saying if you do not trust us, we do not trust you.

Owen Jones has called for a deal whereby Corbyn would step aside in return for someone from the left being on the ballot to replace him, but I cannot see MPs agreeing to that. Their strategy is to exhaust Corbyn and the membership, and preserve the 15% rule at all cost.

This is not so much a battle about policies as a battle about power. MPs intend to win it by keeping the 15% rule, and waiting for Corbyn to go through sheer exhaustion, or waiting for members to give up and hand power back to MPs. Labour members hope Corbyn can hang on long enough to change the 15% rule. Events like Brexit, Scottish independence and a general election just pass by, only mattering if they have implications for who achieves final victory in this war.

Now many in the political commentariat will assume that of course Labour members cannot be trusted, and so the strategy of Labour MPs is correct. Their pleas for Corbyn to ‘for pity’s sake go’ are just for show. But if that is also your view, consider two points.

The first point concerns MPs. The current decline of the Labour party as an effective opposition did not begin with Jeremy Corbyn. It began, as Larry Elliott clearly delineates, with the global financial crisis that happened on Labour’s watch. The unforced errors began when Ed Miliband, and the team around him, made the fatal mistake of not challenging the Tory narrative about the previous Labour government. That mistake meant that Labour was blamed for austerity, Labour were not trusted with the economy, and Miliband’s poll ratings just got steadily worse, even though many voters were experiencing an unprecedented decline in real earnings.

It was MPs reaction to the 2015 defeat, and a general belief among many of them that Labour had to move further to the right, which ensured a victory for the left in the subsequent leadership elections. Corbyn and McDonnell tried to create an opposition of all the talents (or at least those that were willing) and reach a consensus on policy. But at each turn they were met by a small group of MPs that constantly briefed against them, and other MPs that did nothing to stop this. Anyone with a clear head could see this strategy by rebel MPs was totally unproductive: Corbyn had to be seen to fail on his own account.

The most recent misjudgement by MPs was over Brexit. Again Corbyn gets all the attention, but it was the majority of MPs that decided they should focus on the challenge from UKIP and vote to give May total authority over the negotiations. I think this misjudgement epitomised almost a decade of bad decisions all of which involved an element of appeasement. John Curtice has explained why, with most Labour voters choosing Remain, voting through Article 50 was a very odd decision. As I’ve argued here, the referendum placed no obligation on MPs to vote to allow May to choose a Hard Brexit. If you are unconvinced about this, imagine the referendum had been to do nothing about climate change. Would MPs have been obliged in that case to follow the ‘will of the people’? Would it have been right to ignore a clear consensus among experts that their implementation of the vote would be disastrous? The actual EU referendum has the same ingredients as this imaginary case.

The second point is about membership. There is one clear Labour achievement since 2015, a huge increase in membership which numbers more than all the other parties combined. Is it really healthy that this should be regarded by most MPs as a problem? Arguments that half a million people are either Trots or under the influence of Trots are nonsense. Although it was Corbyn who inspired the increase in membership, it was not the left that wrote the rules that allowed the leader to be chosen by the membership alone. Having tried to make the leadership election more democratic, it is not plausible to then turn round and say you got the wrong half million.

There is a legitimate concern in allowing members to have almost complete control over which MP they choose as leader. It is not that they will choose a leader who is too left wing, but instead that they will underrate the importance of being able to win general elections, or at least not fully appreciate what it takes to win these elections. To this I would add that the membership may be insufficiently ruthless in getting rid of a leader who is failing to win, particularly when this failure is often very unfair (given our media, for example). But with questions like this we have also to ask whether MPs would be much better at judging success and punishing failure, and the experience with Miliband plus the constant attempts to appease the right suggest not. [1]

Elliott describes how many of the policies that Labour currently put forward - Brexit aside - are broadly popular when tested with the public. However if you attach the name Labour to these proposals, their popularity decreases sharply. Those who say Labour have become unpopular because they have ‘moved too far to the left’ misunderstand what is going on, or have more questionable motives. Elliot describes it as Labour becoming a toxic brand. Corbyn is part of that, but only part. The record indicates MPs are also responsible for the current mess.

As John Curtice explains, the question is not will the brand survive, but how and when it will recover. I can see two ways forward. The first way is for MPs to trust their membership, change the voting rules, and allow Corbyn to resign sooner rather than later. If he does not resign, the left has to bring forward a challenger. With good judgement, the new leader can lead from the left but with policies that the broad church that is Labour can live with, combined with a strategy for convincing the electorate that would make Owen Jones happy. The second way is that MPs keep the 15% rule, wait for Corbyn and the membership to give up exhausted, and then hope for a Macron type figure to emerge from among their number. The key question is which of those two do you think is more likely to give us a plausible candidate for Prime Minister?

[1] The Conservative Party shows that members can learn. They chose Cameron not because they wanted to modernise, or be green, or hug hoodies, but because (after 2 defeats) they realised the party needed to bury the image of the nasty party and they saw in Cameron a person who could achieve that.

Immigration and the experts

Why does society no longer blame immigrants for spreading disease? It used to. The Jews were blamed for the Black Death, and Irish immigrant workers were blamed for Cholera in the 1830s. (See this nice science museum website.) Syphilis has been blamed on all manner of foreigners: the French blamed the Italians and the Italians blamed the French! The obvious answer is that society now knows better as a result of medical science.

Nowadays immigrants are instead blamed for unemployment, lower wages and increasing crime. They are blamed for reducing natives access to the NHS. Yet just as in the case of immigrants and disease, most experts know that popular concerns are wide of the mark. Nor are some of the sources of popular misperception difficult to understand. For example immigrants use the NHS, but they also pay taxes that allow us to fund more NHS resources, but government funding may be slow in responding to changes in local demand. In current circumstances the UK government is holding back those resources nationally, but says it is ‘protecting’ the NHS and the media dutifully repeats that they are.

Some politicians and large sections of the print media deliberately fuel popular misconceptions because they can use it to their advantage. Others feel they have to go with those misperceptions because otherwise they will lose votes. Much of the broadcast media see it as their duty to ‘reflect popular concern’ but feel less compelled to reflect expert opinion. But if you think this is inevitable and natural, imagine what would happen if a senior politician started blaming immigrants for bringing in diseases. Well you don’t have to imagine.

Watching certain Labour politicians trying to get on to the anti-immigration bandwagon is painful to see. Some are the same politicians who also argued that Labour had to accept austerity after the 2015 General Election. Now immigration is much more complex than austerity, as I discuss here, but that is all the more reason to respect the evidence. (Those who still wonder why Jeremy Corbyn is so popular among party members should note he is sticking with his principles on both austerity and immigration.) But I think it is wrong to just blame politicians. Responsibility must also rest with most of the media, who (as we saw in the Brexit campaign) treat economic evidence very differently from medical evidence.

The total failure of the centre left

We have already begun to hear laments that Corbyn’s second victory means the end of Labour as a broad church. This is nonsense, unless that church is one where only people from the right and centre of the party are allowed to be its priests. Alison Charlton (@alicharlo) responded to my tweet to that effect by saying “It's the soft left, like me, who shouldn't be priests. We're rubbish at it.”

That I think captured my thoughts this last weekend. As Steve Richards writes “The so-called shadow cabinet rebels must be the most strategically inept political group in the history of British politics.” And although they were never the tightly knit group of coup plotters that some Corbyn supporters imagined, their collective thinking was completely flawed. It was self-indulgent folly by the minority group that I call the anti-Corbynistas to constantly spin against Corbyn from the start: as I predicted, it was totally counterproductive. But it was equally naive of centre-left MPs who nominated Owen Smith to believe that all they needed to do was adopt the leadership’s economics policies.

Forget all you read about Smith not being experienced enough, or about how he made gaffes (journalists just love gaffes), how he could have run a better campaign and so on. This is stuff and nonsense. Just as with Sanders in the US, Corbyn’s support is the result of a financial crisis the after effects of which we are still suffering from and where the perpetrators have got away largely unscathed. The crisis came as a complete surprise to the political centre, and only those on the left had warned about growing financialisation. Yet these warnings went unheeded by the Labour party, in part because the left had become marginalised. That is why politicians like Sanders and Corbyn can talk about the financial crisis with a conviction that others cannot match, and their supporters see that. The constant UK refrain about entryism is, frankly, pathetic.

In those circumstances Owen Smith had a mountain to climb. I wrote on 1st August a list of things he needed to do to win. Crucially he failed to back reducing the number of MPs required to nominate a candidate for leader, which in practice excluded any successor to Corbyn from the left being able to run. I wrote “If Smith wants Labour members to trust him, he has to show that he also trusts them in the future.” I also suggested he should now offer John McDonnell the job of shadow chancellor to show he meant to unify the party. How naive I was, some retorted: didn’t I know McDonnell was hated by much of the PLP. Of course I knew, which was partly why it was a good idea: at least I was trying to show some imagination that seemed absent from the PLP. Team Smith even seemed unable to acknowledge McDonnell’s positive achievements, like the Economic Advisory Council (EAC) and the fiscal credibility rule. No wonder he lost.

There is no getting away from the fact that the vote of no confidence is going to be fatal to Labour’s chances at the General Election. Of course Corbyn’s performance had been extremely poor, and he ran a deeply flawed Brexit campaign. But the no confidence vote was a do or die act, and the chances of it succeeding were always minimal. That is political ineptitude: sacrificing your party’s election chances for slender odds. All MPs can do now is help minimise the scale of that defeat, and if some feel that given all that they have said about the leadership that is best done from the backbenches Corbyn supporters should respect that. They should use the spare time to think about how to revitalise the centre left, but keep these and other thoughts out of the public eye. Talk of sacrificing being part of the single market so we can end freedom of movement is not a good start. As Chris Dillow argues, they are not even worthy of the label Blairite.

What Corbyn needs to do is clearly set out by Owen Jones here. To say he has a mountain to climb is an understatement. He carries the weight of the no confidence vote. Even if the PLP now unites behind him, much of the media will act as if it does not. He risks being outflanked in the traditional heartlands by UKIP: if voters think their problems really would be reduced with less immigration (and which politicians are telling them otherwise?), they will vote for the party that talks about little else. In the new heartlands of London and other cities, anti-Brexit feeling may well find LibDem clarity on the issue attractive. (Corbyn’s margin of victory in London was small.) Corbyn's ridiculing of warnings about the economic cost of Brexit (despite the advice of his EAC) does not set him up well to capitalise on any bad economic news.

In short, if he manages to defeat the Conservatives in 2020 it will be one of the most remarkable achievements in UK political history. Even to come close would be a great success. For what it is worth I hope he does, if only because it would force the centre-left to finally recognise their failure since the financial crisis.

Labour elections: a response to Chris Dillow

Chris Dillow’s post today is so concise, comprehensive and in my view largely correct that I cannot help responding to it.

The case against Corbyn

I only have two comments on this, which go in different directions

C1) A case can be made that Corbyn needs to stay in control for as long as it takes to change the voting procedures for leaders so the PLP can no longer block left candidates. He is, in that sense, a placeholder. That is why I suggested Smith commit to make similar changes, and he has not. The only caveat to that argument is that Corbyn’s popularity may mean he carries on too long: a placeholder who cannot give up his place.

C2) I am much less dismissive than Chris of the polling information we have on Corbyn. I have not found anyone who studies these things who gives Corbyn any chance at all, and they are not all politically biased when they say that. It is hardly a precise science, but there are regularities there that should not be dismissed. There is also for me the killer common sense point: why would anyone who is not a politics geek vote for a leader that 80% of his MPs had no confidence in.

The case against Smith

S1) I’m less worried about the ‘mis-speaking’: you cannot at the same time appear authentic and not do this, and the importance voters place on this is wildly exaggerated. It was trying to avoid this that got us Labour politicians who seem to speak in gaff proof platitudes. 

S2) I am more worried on the policy and judgement side. Alas, I see few politicians you do appreciate the big difference the financial crisis has made. I think the point about Corbyn and clocks is correct: part of the Owen Jones cri de coeur was about this. But equally I have seen little from Smith on any overarching political or economic vision. He has said nothing on the Economic Advisory Committee or fiscal rules: small things but so easy to do I wonder why he hasn’t done them. The one point I would make in Smith’s favour is he has Brexit right. Ironically it is here that Corbyn and his supporters sound like triangulators: we must not be too pro single market/freedom of movement because that will antagonise the traditional heartlands.

S3) The generational divide point is overrated. Also for the reasons I’ve already given Smith is likely to do much better in a general election than Corbyn.

Overall judgement

The way to look at this election is in terms of disaster avoidance. Corbyn risks a split left and a wipe out at the general election. I can see a path where a split is avoided and someone takes over from Corbyn in time and with the qualities required to bring the party back, but that will not happen until after 2020 so we are talking a Tory government for the next decade at least. But there are so many obstacles on this path, like boundary changes, or the absence of a strong successor in the Corbyn group, that I give it a very low probability. In other words a disaster of one kind or another is pretty likely. In short, so much of this is something I have already lived through once before.

One disaster with Smith is a return to triangulation and a drift back to the ways of 2010-2015. But it will not be the same as 2010-2015, mainly because the Conservatives will not put deficit reduction at the heart of their strategy. Brexit has changed that, which is something many Corbyn supporters fail to see. Brexit also stops appeasement on immigration. Partly as a result I think there is a good chance that the centre left have now learnt the right lesson from 2015. Another disaster will be more personal - he is just not up to the job, and Labour will do almost as badly at the polls as they will with Corbyn. Again possible but unlikely: he has passed the Today test. To sum up, I cannot by any stretch of the imagination get these two combined to come close to the likelihood of a disaster under Corbyn.

Which is basically it. If you think that something like the Blair/Brown government was little better than the Tories, and therefore want to shoot for the moon, it is clear what you do. If you do not think that, and want to avoid a disaster for the left, you do the opposite. Doing nothing, to be honest, is a cop out.

Competence and strategic vision

I keep trying not to write stuff about Labour: I think it will be therapy but it just makes me more depressed. But events, dear boy, events.

With Corbyn’s victory now almost certain, both sides (the Corbyn camp and the PLP) have been thinking about what happens next. This piece by Stephen Bush, reporting from inside the Corbyn camp, is very revealing. First, there is an understanding that Corbyn will have to try and bring at least some of the PLP back on board. Here are two direct quotes from the article:

“If we show competence, that will bring some people back onside,” says one senior figure. Another sums up the view: “The reality is that most MPs are not out to get him every day or talking to press. There are 10 or so who are, we could both name them, but there is a winnable middle out there.”

This suggests that there are those within team Corbyn who understand that

1. What I call the anti-Corbynistas - the far too vocal critics of Corbyn within the PLP - are a small minority. This is a very different picture from that held by some Corbyn supporters among the membership, who like to pretend that most of the PLP was always out to get Corbyn.
   
   
2. That the majority of the PLP are a “winnable middle”. Again, on most issues there is no fundamental policy divide between Corbyn and the PLP.
   
   
3. A major problem, as I have said many times, has been the lack of competence shown by the leadership. Once again, I have been told by many supporters that the countless complaints from MPs about this has been an exaggerated sham. Again, team Corbyn do not see it that way, which is positive (although I wish they would tell their supporters)!

As for the PLP, according to George Eaton they are following up a suggestion made by deputy leader Tom Watson to reinstate PLP elections for the shadow cabinet. It seems to me that, if suitably structured (in particular, allowing Corbyn to keep McDonnell as shadow Chancellor), this proposal could do two very helpful things for Corbyn. It would bring some of the talent among the PLP back to the front line, and it would have the possibility of rebooting Corbyn’s attempts to unite Labour. It would also give MPs something concrete to convince themselves, and tell the media, that things have changed since the vote of no confidence. But

“a Corbyn source dismissed the idea when I recently raised it: "It’s not going to happen, they don’t have the numbers to get it through conference." He added, however, that the election of a "PLP representative" was a possibility.”

It is not just about competence, but it is also about having an imaginative strategic vision. What team Corbyn should be doing now, before conference, is working with Watson to ensure that a compromise version of this idea can be agreed at conference.I am more than willing to be surprised.

Why Corbyn’s Brexit campaign matters

I sometimes think discussions with Corbyn supporters is a bit like talking to one half of a couple going through a bad patch in their relationship. Let’s call them PLP and LPM. There is no doubt that for many years PLP had taken LPM for granted. And as a friend to both you can wholeheartedly agree that PLP’s flirtation with austerity in recent years was a serious breach of trust, and more generally a very foolish thing to do. You agree that in those circumstances LPM getting into bed with Corbyn was quite understandable.

But you can see that Corbyn is no good for LPM. Their relationship is going nowhere. What is more PLP is, perhaps as a result, full of remorse. Austerity has long gone, and PLP is promising almost everything LPM wants. You know that when LPM and PLP work together they are a great couple, perhaps even a winning couple. Yet when you try to say this to LPM you either get the hurt of an aggrieved party (how can I ever trust them again), or worse still the poisoned words of despair (that even at their best as a couple they were no better than anyone else).

So when I ask how can you expect Corbyn with only the confidence of 20% of his MPs to get many votes, I’m told that the PLP should not be able to dictate who the leader is, as if that somehow negates my point. [1] Life with Corbyn may be going nowhere, but it is all PLP’s fault. When I point out Corbyn’s major mistake during the Brexit campaign, I’m told it probably had no effect so why should it matter.

But it does matter. What Corbyn and his team decided to do as part of their Brexit campaign was to rubbish Osborne’s claims about the economic harm Brexit could do. They were rubbishing the key part of the Remain campaign. That decision was certainly an embarrassment for that campaign, and for his own PLP colleagues. It was a slap in the face for academic economists, 90% of whom did think that Brexit would be harmful.

Not only was it the wrong thing to do for those reasons, but it also puts Corbyn in a far weaker position after the Brexit vote. Let me quote a comment from that earlier post from Mike Berry, who knows a thing or two about the media. He says it was

“a gargantuan, colossal and highly stupid strategic error. If Corbyn, McDonnell and the rest of the shadow cabinet had repeated endlessly the warnings of economists about what would happen and continued this after the results, day after day after day on all the main media outlets they would now be in a very strong position because they would be able to conclusively pin the responsibility for the negative economic consequences of Brexit on the Tories. They could have forced the Tories to own the slump and shredded their deserved reputation for economic competence for a generation. Deeply disappointing.”

So why did they make such a big error? According to this report, “the Shadow Treasury team vetoed a story developed by Labour’s policy team for Shadow Chief Secretary Seema Malhotra, which warned of the effect of Brexit on the value of sterling.” It goes on: “Those close to the Shadow Chancellor felt that the independence referendum in Scotland had shown how Project Fear went down badly with Labour voters. McDonnell’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC) would have felt the sterling crisis idea was counter-productive too, one source said.”

It was blindingly obvious, from either macro theory or from market reaction to polls, that sterling would depreciate sharply if the UK voted Brexit. Mike Berry’s point continues to apply. But the reason given for not going with this is bizarre. Leaving the EU, as with Scottish independence, will have serious economic consequences for the UK and Scotland respectively. To not mention this, or worse still trash others that do, because it might not be believed is extraordinary logic. (It is like saying a lot of people do not believe in man made climate change, so let’s start supporting climate change denial.)

It is fine to talk about some of the issues the Remain campaign was ignoring, like workers rights, but you can do that without rubbishing what other people on the same side are saying.

What added insult to injury when I read this account was the reference to the EAC. The EAC certainly did not say that Corbyn should discount economists claims about economic costs, or that the likely exchange rate depreciation should not be mentioned. Some of us may have said that talk of some kind of financial crisis similar to 2008 was going over the top, but that is completely different. (A substantial depreciation is not a financial crisis.) It’s not good to misrepresent the EAC as a cover for bad decisions. You do not need to take my word for this. To quote from the statement five of us made after Brexit and Danny Blanchflower’s resignation: “we have felt unhappy that the Labour leadership has not campaigned more strongly to avoid this outcome”.

The reaction of Corbyn’s supporters to all this is to respond to a very different accusation, which is that Corbyn helped lose the Brexit vote. But that is something that is virtually impossible to decide. The issue for me is not whether Corbyn in undermining the Remain campaign influenced the final vote, but that he did it in the first place.

One possibility of course was that he was quite happy to undermine that campaign because of his own ambivalence towards the EU. After all, he did take a holiday during the campaign (imagine if Cameron had done that), and he didn’t actually campaign that hard. But let us instead take him at his word. What we have then is a major strategic failure by him and his team, a failure that will have consequences for the future.

A large part of politics over the next few years will be about Brexit. The Prime Minister is extremely vulnerable on this issue given the splits in her party. There is a huge difference between the various forms of Brexit, and a united Labour party with a passionate advocate of European engagement leading it could help influence events. If there is an economic downturn as a result of the uncertainty over Brexit the government must be made to own that downturn in voters eyes. You cannot do that if the leader of the opposition said the downturn wouldn’t happen.

Let me end with a quote from a recent article by Martin Jacques. While I disagreed with his unqualified description of New Labour as neoliberal, I think he gets Corbyn exactly right in this quote.

“He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political environment”

I know it has only been a year. I know recent betrayals still hurt. But the road Labour is currently on leads nowhere, and the longer it takes for the membership to realise that the more damage is done. Once you stop seeing the alternative through jaundiced eyes it is so much better.

[1] Logical consistency often goes out of the window in such discussions. I’m asked how can I know that this no confidence vote will damage Labour in a General Election by the same people who tell me Corbyn’s current unpopularity in the polls is because Labour is split.

Postscript [07/09/2016] It now looks like the reason why the explanation given for not supporting (or indeed trashing) economists analysis of the benefits of the single market reported and discussed above were bizarre is because they were a diversion. This report and this from George Eaton show clearly that Corbyn and McDonnell do not support membership of the single market. 

Hope, experience and the left

Paul Mason has an article in the Guardian which I think exemplifies where many on the left are right now. He looks back at the electoral failure of Michael Foot in 1983 and the formation of the SDP, which together began the gradual marginalisation of the left in the UK. He goes through the obvious differences between that history and now, but then notes a key similarity:

“As with the SDP, there is a prospect that a few entitled Labour MPs will split, and that the media will get behind the narrative that they are the “true” Labour party. Disunity has already damaged Labour in the polls, just as it did with Michael Foot.”

Why will that not matter this time? His answer seems to be that neoliberalism is on its last legs and the Labour party has 300,000 new members, which he describes as the main event of 2016. These are times of hope for the left, he says.

Of course a revitalised membership is great, as long as that membership understands that it is just one small part of what has to happen to actually change things. It has to combine with a united parliamentary party if it is to have any hope of victory. Just try putting yourself in voters’ shoes: voters who know little of politics, but want to elect a prime minister and a party that will govern well and govern in their interests. In Labour they see a party that has voted no confidence in their leader. It really does not matter if that happened yesterday or 4 years ago because the media will remind all concerned as if it was yesterday. They will say to themselves if their own MPs have no confidence in Labour’s leader, how can I?

I have made this point so many times over the last few weeks. Responses fall into two kinds. The first says that if Corbyn is reelected, MPs must unite behind him, and it will be disgraceful if they do not. If it all breaks down, it will be their fault. But MPs are not soldiers who must carry out orders (although even soldiers ordered into battle by a commander they think is hopeless do not fight very well), but people who have experienced Corbyn’s leadership at first hand. To disregard their experience as just the smears of Blairite plotters is escapism. There are some smears of course, but there is also real frustration and anger among MPs at failures of leadership. If this experience of MPs is ignored, it will be Labour party members, and they alone, who are responsible for the consequences of the votes they cast.

The second response is that the party will have to replace its troublesome MPs. Here history does suggest that this is a excellent way of achieving the split on the left that Paul Mason agrees may happen. To cross fingers and hope it does not happen, or to imagine it will not matter this time, is a triumph of hope over experience, to put it kindly.

But what about the imminent demise of neoliberalism? Here I have to disagree with Paul Mason. The main event of 2016 was the Brexit vote, not 300,000 new Labour members. To think otherwise is delusion. The Brexit vote, in its way, was a blow against neoliberalism, but of an entirely reactionary kind. Economic crises embolden both the radical left (those 300,000 new members) and the reactionary right, and how that turns out depends in part on how united, organised and smart each side is. Under Corbyn, even with 300,000 new members, the left was not able to stop Brexit. Thinking the next time will be different is again putting hope over experience.

What is more, this hope seems rather selective to me. What about putting hope a leader who is standing on a radical economic programme with no question marks over their commitment to closer ties with Europe. He cannot be trusted, I am told, even though he was once ‘core group plus’. Little hope extended there. What about a leader who will be able to unite the party, with a chance of taking power back from this Conservative government that is doing so much harm. He will be overthrown by the Blairites, I am told, even though according to the Corbyn camp the original number of hostile MPs numbered less than 40. This is close to paranoia. 

This is not a hopeful left, but a left that wants to rerun past victories rather than adapt to reality. A left that will not allow itself to believe that by electing Corbyn in 2015 the membership has stopped the drift of the party to the right. A left that does not want to see how Brexit has changed the political landscape. And above all else a left that will not let go of a leader who started out with less than 40 hostile MPs and ended up with 172. A man who is not a victim of some Blairite plot but of his own inability to lead.