Russell Whiting

Local Elections pose interesting questions

The first week in May is always an exciting one for political anoraks, as people go the polling stations in their droves (maybe) and take part in democracy by choosing their elected representatives. This time around it is mainly county seats up for grabs, which means that while there won’t be as many of them, the impact which those elected can have in communities is significant.

This is a strange time in the electoral cycle, with still more than two years to go until the next general election. None of the three parties has moved towards anything even remotely looking like a manifesto or even an idea of what might be included in one come 2015.

The county seats up for election this time round were last contested in 2009; that strange, distant time when anything seemed politically possible in Britain but most politicians were hiding away trawling through their expense claims.

Gordon Brown was the prime minister who, despite being widely regarded as saving the global financial system, was one of the most unpopular in living memory. David Cameron was leading his Conservatives to what appeared to be an irresistible landslide in 2010 and cheeky Nick Clegg was the darling of the disaffected. Then there was UKIP, seen back then as a slightly oddball bunch who might be good for a protest vote at the European elections but not for much else.

So what can we be looking out for this week to give as an indication of what the future might hold?

Don’t expect big Labour gains

Remember most of the seats up for election are in the Conservative strongholds of the Home Counties and the rest of the ‘Shires’. While Labour should make good gains in the midlands and further north, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Cumbria and the like, don’t expect any big breakthrough anywhere else in the country. Anything more than a 400 councillor net gain would be a pretty remarkable result for Labour.

The UKIP factor

Having spoken to those campaigning in a few places around the country, feedback from the doorstep seems to be that while people are more inclined to think about UKIP, the actual effect they will have on the results remains minimal, perhaps between 5-10% in some seats, but in most places not even that much. As usual though, UKIP may end up being more of a threat in the safest Tory seats, so look out for Buckinghamshire, Suffolk and West Sussex for a good showing, picking up no more than 10-20 seats overall. David Cameron will also be watching his own backyard of Oxfordshire closely.

Can the Tories hold their own

It’s the nature of the cycle of support that about halfway through a Parliament the governing party has to defend seats won when they were in opposition, and they do so badly. In the 1990s Tony Blair won crazy council seats in places Labour would never usually even stand, then haemorrhaged those winnings throughout his premiership. There have been plenty of predictions on both sides as to how badly they will fare, with the Tories saying up to 800 losses and Labour saying 400ish, probably somewhere in the middle is a reasonable prediction. Don’t forget that many people in the Tory heartlands are not only largely unaffected by the cuts to public expenditure, but indeed actively support it and believe more can be done quicker.

What about the Lib Dems

In many ways 2009 was the high water mark for the Liberal Democrats. The time when voters still believed all that stuff about being Social Democrats and wanting to abolish tuition fees before they made their pact with the Conservatives and appeared to give it all up. However, don’t discount them here, while they will undoubtedly take some losses, the ability of the Lib Dems to dig in once elected is well known, and on top of that they have some very hardworking local councillors. After the recent Eastleigh by-election a Labour foot soldier was heard to remark that “after the nuclear apocalypse the only two creatures surviving will be the cockroaches and the Liberal Democrats telling everyone that the cockroaches aren’t local.”

The Independence question

One thing that makes local elections slightly more difficult to predict than general elections is the role independent councillors play. Many communities don’t want a member of a political party to represent them, much preferring to have someone who has, in the voters’ mind, only the interests of the area at heart, rather than some political career ambitions. This may have more bearing this time, given that in 2009 the expenses ‘scandal’ lowered the standing of any politician in the public mind.

Three things are certain on every election day and in those which immediately follow. Firstly, there will be some results which are total anomalies and don’t stand up to any analysis. Secondly, every party will say that the election had nothing to do with them, but was a damning indictment on the state of the other party/their leader/their policies/their lack of policies. Thirdly, the most sobering though for those of us who are interested, the vast majority of people don’t care about the elections, the candidates or the results.

Margaret Thatcher is gone, but she’ll never be forgotten

I was going to write my weekly blog this week about the crisis in North Korea and what steps we could take in the West to actually stop some kind of nuclear madness in the Far East. However, when the news broke at lunchtime about the death of Baroness Thatcher it seems churlish not to add to the masses of views being expressed, but try and do so from a slightly different angle.

Let me start by stating the obvious, so as not to give the wrong impression. It is a sad occasion when any human being dies, whatever you think of them personally or in their political, professional or personal life. In this occasion two children have lost a mother. That does not, however, mean that we have to pretend that we liked everything about someone or agreed with everything that they did in political and public life. I also make a declaration that I was only born in 1986, and therefore have no recollection of anything Mrs Thatcher did while in office. I grew up in a household where she was referred to in glowing terms as the saviour of the nation by some, and simply as ‘milk-snatcher’ by others.

There are those who adore Thatcher, and will be affected by her passing in a real way. Those who got rich on the back of the deregulation of the banks in the 1980s and those who paid for the shares in many of the privatised companies she created from the old nationalised telecoms, water and gas companies, among others. There will be those who love her because she defeated socialism in Britain, changed the Labour Party into an essentially right-of-centre party and smashed the Trade Union movement beyond all recognition.

Then there those who will be far from mourning the passing today. These will be the people who may well take to the Internet behind their pretend identities and say some pretty nasty things and most other people will call them names. Some of these people will have (what they think are at least) valid reasons for their comments. Whether they were miners, public servants, trade unionists or believers in nationalised utilities. The sentiments will be shared by many, especially in the northern cities and the rural areas that formally relied on mining.

It’s hard to explain to someone who was either totally in love or totally hated Thatcher that she did some good things and some bad things. She will most likely be remembered for two key events which are seen very differently depending on how you see them. The first event is the Falklands War, with supporters believing it was Britain defending the Empire and coming to aid of those poor Islanders who had been overrun by the Argentines. Those against point to the chronic waste of money and human life involved in retaking an ultimately pointless piece of land 8000 miles away, most of all the sinking of the Belgrano as it sailed away from the UK fleet.

Secondly there is a miners’ strike. It was either the crushing of the over-powerful unions and the enforcement of the law in the place of an illegal strike or the once and for all blow against the working class, to exert the authority of the state over the working man. It was all about showing them who was in charge. It is hard to find anyone who would hold an opinion which falls somewhere between this two positions.

What is not in doubt, however, is that she continues to cast a shadow over both the country and the political system. Liberal economics and the rampant deregulation of the UK economy laid the foundations for the economic crash which occurred in 2008, with the consequences we live in now. She also instilled a small state ideology in the Tory party which is partly leading to the wild slashing of the state we see today. Most importantly for the political system, her election views in 1983 and 1987 changed the Labour Party into one which is now almost indistinguishable from the people in her own party who Thatcher called ‘wets’. Ed Miliband is even trying to rebrand his party as ‘One Nation’.

But now that she is dead, why have we gone so loopy for the afternoon? Complete suspension of usual TV and radio programmes. No other news stories for the entire afternoon. These may be expected given the stature of the woman and the fact that there isn’t anything else massively dominating the news agenda today. But is it really necessary for David Cameron to return back from his European tour? What exactly is he going to do when he arrives back in the UK?

Then there is the Labour Party, who haven’t helped their critics who say they have become too much like the Tories in recent years. No one would expect them to say anything other than that they are sad; it should be possible that they don’t say anything at all. The fact that they have also decided not to continue to campaign for the local elections in May will do nothing to appeal to the people who they seek to represent, especially as much of this campaigning would have been in the communities that still bare many of the scars of the Thatcher years.

I’ll end with the words of Tony Benn, one of Thatcher’s fiercest critics during the 1980s and unafraid to speak his mind on all occasions. Refusing to jump on the bandwagon of the love-in this afternoon, Benn said that he “couldn’t think of one thing she did which he agreed with.” He did mention, in as close to a tribute as he would ever be likely to get, that “she did what she said she would do given the chance, always said what she meant and meant what she said” and perhaps that is the best way that she could be remembered. She might not be the last conviction politicians, but most of those who have followed appear to be following her own convictions.

How does David Cameron overcome UKIP?

David Cameron has got a problem. It’s a problem nearly every post-war prime minister has had, and not many of them have found a satisfactory way of dealing with. What do you do when your party becomes unpopular in Government and voters start to drift towards alternatives?

Most people knew that by this point in Parliament the Government would be unpopular. Cutting public spending at rates not seen for decades and restricting benefits for those most in need was never going to lead to cabinet members being paraded through the streets on the shoulders of grateful electors. But not many people predicted the way that voters would go, and the effect this seems to be having on political debate in this country.

Governments are always unpopular half way through their term, and they very rarely gain seats at by-elections. What usually unites them is the ability to brush it off and say “None of this matters, we’ll still win the next general election.” Blair successfully did it for seven years, and Gordon Brown continued it for the next two, just with slightly less eventual success.

The problem that David Cameron and the Tories have is that they can’t just brush off their unpopularity. They can’t say “We’ll win again next time” because they didn’t win last time. They haven’t won an overall majority for a generation, something many Tory MP and lots more of the wider membership continually remind Cameron of.

Another thing that makes it harder for Cameron to shrug off his unpopularity is, unlike the last Labour Government, there is a refuge for those traditional right-wing Tory voters. Some former Labour voters flirted with the Lib Dems, but they tended to be those who were only attracted to the New Labour project. When the hard-core of the Labour membership fell out of love with Blair over Iraq, top-up fees, foundation hospitals or being too close to business, they largely drifted away from party politics. Cameron’s deserters are drifting to UKIP, and it’s changing the political debate of the country.

UKIP might have come a long way since it was founded in the early nineties, and the leadership of the party has undoubtedly worked hard to promote it as much more than a single issue party available for protest votes at unimportant elections. Despite all this work though, UKIP still mainly focuses on withdrawal from the EU and the subsequent control the UK would regain of domestic policy, especially immigration.

It’s no secret that the Tories are split on the issue of Europe. In fact every political party is. I know Labour MPs who despise the way the EU has imbedded capitalism and halted the evolution of European Socialism. I know Tory MPs who hate the EU because it has restricted capitalism through its forced implementation of European Socialism. In fact about the only party that stands united on Europe is UKIP. And the public like it when political parties are united.

So David Cameron has decided to tackle the issue head-on. He’s not going to hope that the arguments on immigration and Europe will disappear and that the Tory faithful will forgive him everything else by 2015. He’s made two speeches this year in a bid to meet the UKIP threat head-on. On both occasions they have been spectacular failures.

The first speech in Europe came in January, with the Prime Minister promising a renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU *if* the Conservatives win a majority at the next general election followed by a referendum with an in/out option *if* those renegotiations are successful. Critics immediately spotted that Cameron would be going into the process wanting to stay in the EU anyway, hardly the best starting point for talks and without a clear idea of what powers he wanted to bring back from Brussels. UKIP immediately came out and said it was all too little too late and they would withdraw immediately, no questions asked.

Then last week there was the speech on immigration, and the way that immigrants were able to access benefits in the UK immediately upon arrival. As with many politicians discussing issues of immigration (not all on the right either) the speech strayed dangerously close to what some would call ‘incitement’ and others may label even more strongly. The thrust of the speech was to severely restrict access to benefits for those who came to the UK as immigrants, with the cost on the NHS the main focus. Cameron said in the morning that the cost was tens of millions per year, only to be trumped by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt not two hours later saying the cost was hundreds of millions. The truth is probably that nobody knows.

The right-wing press seemed to like the speech, the comments section on the Daily Mail website was approving. But then out come UKIP to say not only would they stop immigration completely, but they would also severely restrict benefits to those already in the UK. All benefits, that is, except those being paid to UKIPs core vote (state pension, winter fuel allowance, free TV licence, bus pass). Once again Cameron’s rhetoric is lost in the tub-thumping of the mainstream extreme right.

The beauty of all this for UKIP is of course they have absolutely no chance of ever being asked to put any of it into action. We all thought that about the Lib Dems before the last election, presuming that’s why they were offering to abolish tuition fees. UKIP starts from an even lower base, and with the added advantage of everything they say being recorded because the main governing party is terrified of them and they continue to do well in the opinion polls.

Not all Cameron’s efforts have been in vain though. He has managed to somehow draw Labour and the Lib Dems into this Dutch auction on benefits and treatment of migrants, having previously done so with the EU issue. We now face the prospect that all three parties will spend the next two years telling us how they are going to ensure that the most vulnerable in society deserve to be treated badly. The next leadership debates will feature Ed, Nick and Dave scrambling to outdo each other in how tough they will make it for sick people to get treatment and for the working and non-working poor to survive.

It may well be the only thing we remember about David Cameron in 20 years’ time.