It’s a Monday morning at a small train station on a mainline. It’s bustling as business travellers head to London for their week’s business. The air is cool, with people blowing little clouds of steam as they head into the station from their taxis and cars.
Mr Hock, a late-middle aged man with a red face and bumpy nose caused by years of excessive alcohol and rich food approaches the ticket office. Miss Nowak, a young Polish woman living in the UK for five years now, is behind the glass, and looks up as Mr Hock sets down his briefcase.
Miss Nowak (neutrally): Good morning. How can I help you?
Mr Hock (confidently): I’d like an open return ticket to London Euston please.
Miss Nowak: That will be £193 please. Are you paying by card?
Mr Hock (with irritation): £193? I’m not travelling first class then, how much for standard class?
Miss Nowak: That *is* standard class. If you need to pay less you can travel out of peak hours. Would you like that?
Mr Hock (exasperated): That’s outrageous! How can it cost so much? I used to travel this way a lot in the eighties and it only cost £20!
Miss Nowak looks down for a moment, then regards the queue of people behind Mr Hock.
Miss Nowak: I guess things have changed. Do you want a ticket or not?
Mr Hock, squinting one eye: Why are you bullying me?
Miss Nowak (confused): What? I… no, this is just how the prices work. Do you want a ticket or not?
Mr Hock (his face reddening): Well can’t you give me a special price?! I’m a very important person you know! People in shops often negotiate you know!
Miss Nowak: I can’t do that, and look, there are other peo….
Mr Hock (interrupting): I will pay £80! Not a penny more! And it must be first class, on the next train to London as I have a very important meeting at ten o’clock and will miss out on getting a very important job if I don’t get there on time!
Miss Nowak: I’m sorry, but rules are rules and I’m not allowed to give you a discount. If you want to go to London you’ll have to try a different way. Now please pay, or go, there’s a queue.
Mr Hock, now furious, grabs his briefcase and storms away to the exit of the station. Looking at his watch, he realises that if he misses the next train he’ll be late for his meeting, and then it dawns on him! A brilliant idea! He grabs his phone and scrolls through his contacts, looking for his friend John.
Mr Hock: John? Hi John! Yes… can you hear me OK it’s a bit… yes, good… OK, remember when we used to watch Scrapheap Challenge? Great wasn’t it? Shows how easy it is to make a vehicle! I need to get to London for 10am. It’s far too long to drive, and the train company is bullying me for £193! But if we can just knock up a home made train in an hour I can make my meeting and…
John interrupted, his voice is a little distorted over a poor mobile connection: Roger? What are you on about? We can’t build a train in an hour… Scrapheap Challenge is just a show and…
Mr Hock: Poppycock! The show only ever lasted an hour and they built all sorts of wonderful machines in that time!
John: No, it doesn’t work like that. These things are carefully orchestrated to make entertainment, and in real life making a train in an hour is impossible.
Mr Hock pulls his phone away from his head and stares at it, shaking with fury, before bringing it back to his ear.
Mr Hock: I see. Well if I fail to get to the meeting, it’s YOUR fault! I’m fed up of people with a can’t do attitude! What happened to plucky English spirit eh? EH? We need to stop letting train firms bully us with their inflexibility, high costs and hatred of people like us! I am proud! I fought in two world wars and won! Well not me personally, no, John… but people like me! And we didn’t make bouncing bombs in two hour…
[muffled voice on phone]
Mr Hock: Yes I know I saw it in a film, and it lasted two hours, it was amazing. Plucky English heroes!
John: You’ve gone mad, Roger. What are you on about? You don’t know anything about bombs or trains. It’s simply impossible. And even if you do make it, National Rail won’t just let you put it on the railway… and… why am I even bothering with this?
Mr Hock: Well it’s people like you that hold people like me back! This should be easy! John… John?
Mr Hock looks at his phone and realises John has hung up. He looks around, sees a taxi, and raises his arm. He gets in. The screen fades.
The taxi pulls up outside a scrapyard, and Mr Hock looks, optimistically, at all the materials there that he can use for his project. A large man in greasy overalls, dismantling an old car, eyes him up as he gets out of the taxi and approaches.
Mr Hock: Good morning!
Large man: Alright. What d’ya want?
Mr Hock: I’d like to make a train! I have one hour. Well, fifty minutes.
The large man stares at Mr Hock, up and down, slowly, without answering. Mr Hock starts to feel uneasy.
Mr Hock: Well?
Large man: Is this a gag or summat?
Mr Hock: I’m deadly serious.
The large man starts to laugh.
Mr Hock: What? Are you one of them? Are you in cahoots with the train company? Is this a conspiracy to take away my freedom on trains?
The large man, between laughs: Fuck off!
Mr Hock turns, and gets his phone out of his pocket. He dials a number and puts it to his head.
Mr Hock: Yes, hello, is that Stephen Barclay? Well, it looks like I can’t get to London for today after all. Yes, I know I wanted the job of chief negotiator in your department… yes… I appreciate that, it’s just I have some minor things to sort out, all fixable with technology of course, and then I’ll be there… Stephen? Stephen? Hello?
Yet many a time, their anger today doesn’t reflect how they really felt back then. If you look at the Iraq War, and the UK’s involvement in it, most people supported the action. For sure, an awful lot of people today don’t think it was right to be involved in Iraq. And if you suggest they did, they react angrily and deny it vehemently.
Not really. It’s more that most people’s memories are far more plastic than people realise. Hindsight bias is one type of problem with perception.
So if you support Labour right now, it’s very easy to throw everything that happened in the Blair years under the bus. To disassociate yourself from the man who was involved in starting an illegal war in Iraq. It was obviously illegal at the time. That’s why you cut up your Labour membership card and joined the Liberal Democrats. Right?
It was already pretty much half what it was. In other words. The plummet started… when Blair got into power.
Membership up in opposition when an attractive leader turns up. Down when he or she deals with the tricky nitty gritty of life in power.
Never mind.
At least councillors, being local and well known figures in their communities, won’t be punished by the parliamentary party shenanigans, right?
Party membership chart over time, showing its decline overall. Source: House of Commons Library
Dammit. No. Whilst Labour were in power, their councillors dropped off. Whilst Lib Dems were in power… their councillors dropped off. Whilst Labour were in opposition, councillors went up.
So in the Lib Dems, a traditionally localist party, we can look back and see that being in government was terrible for the party. But it turns out, that being in government is terrible for all parties.
Why?
Because, it’s hard. Being in government is tough on a party. It means making difficult decisions and trade offs that can’t possibly satisfy everyone. And they can express that dissatisfaction and will hold onto it for a cyclical period.
Which leads to a question. What’s missing in politics? Why does the party in power always suffer loss of members (although Conservatives have been failing to gain members whilst out of power, which is a problem for them) and councillors and never please the majority of their actual supporters?
Is it a case of becoming complacent? Like a decent but lazy football team that gets 2-0 up and then coasts to a 2-3 defeat?
I’ll posit another reason.
No party politicians ever manage to engage with a majority, because they never address all the issues
So here we go… turnouts for the last twenty years have always been below 70%. And not above 80% for over fifty years. That’s in spite of it being ever easier to use postal votes.
Voter turnout in UK general elections 1918-2019. Source: House of commons library
And the number of votes for the winning party has hardly ever been over 50%.
Source – Wikipedia
Look at that. Since 1930, no single party has offered a view to satisfy the majority of voters, let alone the majority of the population. So when a party gets into power, it’s in an unenviable position – most people don’t want them there.
Only twice have there been governments that are technically approved by a majority – the WW II coalition, and the 2010 Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition.
Both weren’t rewarded by their voters.
If we keep repeating the same mistakes, all parties keep losing by winning
One of the best ways to avoid losing your hard fought members is to not win. UKIP have almost entirely fallen apart recently… because they ‘won’ at Brexit. Boom! Job done! Party wiped out. Their purpose over, and the public scrutiny of the Brexit process rapidly revealing them as little more than political arsonists of little substance. Everything they said turned out to be bluster. It’s not the fault of the immigrants, and it’s not the fault of the EU that people’s salaries have been stagnant. It’s more to do with a greedy class of company boards and underperforming pension funds coupled with a financial crisis. The reasons for all that I’ll go into another day.
Now, given that avoiding losing members and popularity by avoiding winning in parliament sounds like a silly idea for a political party, we have to think a little more deeply about what anyone, in any political party, can do to actually get some stability back into the country.
I have a few ideas, and I’m using my marketing and business experience here…
1. Work for everyone, but especially the people who have been left stagnant
The economy has been stagnant for a lot of people, for a long time. Not the very poorest, who are generally in a better situation than ever before.
Not the very richest, because they’re actually quite well off and much more so than for a long time.
Labour has systematically failed people who are not unionised and who work. Try being a cleaner on £8 an hour, looking after two kids, and dealing with school holidays and child care in a constructive and nurturing way. Go on. It’s almost impossible.
And the Conservatives have been cutting finite resources, such as social housing (and Labour, when in power, didn’t grow social housing either, so they can’t get too smug here) and then both have become surprised when populist anger has risen, blaming immigrants, globalisation and bankers. Yet without more immigrants we are not going to be able to care for our elderly, or deal with our NHS… we will go bankrupt. If we allow the populists to leverage the anger of the people who have lost out from economic growth, then we will have huge problems in the future.
This graph charts the distribution of income across earners, with 50% of people getting only 20% of the income and the top 10% most recently getting 35.7% of the income – so 3.5x as much as the rest.
On the upside, it’s way better than it was at the turn of the 20th century. But the lowest half haven’t increased income that much, and the top have reduced income, so it suggests that people the top 50% to 90% range, the middle classes, have done best of all and must have seen their incomes do quite well in that period – probably largely due to the emergence of a new technical class.
Source: ONS Chancel and Piketty (2021), in the World Inequality Report 2022
2. Stop looking at averages
Don’t look at averages, but look at curves like the above. Those poor performing people, those losers, are the working class and lower middle classes of Western economies.
We need to look and listen to the stories of people and stop looking at averages. Average income going up is no use if you’re in the group of people where average income is not going up. But we need to find convincing stories to bring back to them. We can’t say “Hey, we’re cutting back all the welfare for you and spending on your schools, but we can spend it on bringing in a load of immigrants!” Now, we are 100% correct that we need lots of immigrants here, but we have to explain why – if our economy is based on the amount of workers and the amount of capital in the system and we’re not replacing our population then populists will do the stupid thing. They will say “No to immigrants! More welfare and money!” But that can’t work. It’s pathetic.
But it’s imaginary and easy and short term. So when Farage says this they’re just trying to take advantage of a situation that the rest of us leave lying around.
3. Politics has to stop ignoring the voters
All parties are doing this. They pretend people are better off because they can afford smartphones and big TVs, but if going to university leaves you with a massive debt (rather than leaving it on the shared government balance sheet) and you feel you can’t afford a house like your parents had, then you don’t feel better off than your parents did… you feel annoyed and angry.
But listening to the voters doesn’t mean doing what the voters tell you to do. It means showing thought leadership. Explaining, patiently, why you can offer more than the previous status quo. The constituency I live in has voted Labour since its creation. But it hasn’t become better off even when Labour were in power. Why not? Why did house prices still rocket up?
4. Create these policies
Because I’m intolerably lazy, I’ve broadly nicked these 5 changes from an expert on all this. A chap called Mark Blyth. He’s an expert. I know we’ve had enough of them, and I know why we’ve had enough of them. But Mark Blyth is genuinely sharp on this. Look him up. He’s not right on everything, nobody is. But that doesn’t mean these points aren’t valid:
Make university tuition free again. Because it takes a stress away. Yes, the system in the UK is very well structured and very fair, but it doesn’t feel it. And that matters.
Provide much more subsidised childcare over a broader. Including during school holidays. Because it discourages women from fully contributing when the cost of childcare for two children is more than a salary. And because it helps single parents to function properly and give the nurturing care their children need.
Resist and prevent the NHS being dismantled or turned into a multi-payer US style system. Simple, that one. The NHS is hyper-critical.
Corporate reform of how shareholder value is distributed. I know this will scare the capitalists, but it shouldn’t. Because trust me, an angry and inward looking economy looks like North Korea or Venezuela. And that’s even worse for you. You’ll still be rich if you can keep our economies open. Trust me.
Break up or open up digital monopolies. They have too much power and too many rewards for too few people, with returns of over 60%. That’s just not sustainable. So you have Google blocking YouTube from certain platforms and Facebook downgrading your pages’ natural viewings if you don’t have a healthy advertising budget.
If you notice, none of this says “Punish the rich.” Don’t do that. They feel unfairness as much as anybody, and there’s no point making them angry as well. Just fix the structural issues and things should balance out fine. You don’t need to simply turn up and take their money off them with a massive tax application. Just make sure their money has to be invested, rather than spent on impressive schemes like rocket ships that don’t address the problems that many people actually face.
Enough already
That’s my thoughts for now. About 1800 words of them, which is enough. These are the under-considered problems of the past generation, that are structural and required for a political party to prosper. And, if they get it right, perhaps they can even get a majority of people on-side.
Who knows eh? Maybe somebody can do it, and can convince enough people to do so. I don’t really care whether it’s Labour, the Conservatives, or my own favoured party, the Liberal Democrats. But somebody has to do it before the populists get another chance at polling booth. We don’t want them. At all.
Ever noticed that there’s a group of people who don’t vote? Good people, by and large… but they don’t vote. Eventually, I think I worked it out.
Ever noticed that there’s a group of people who don’t vote? Good people, by and large… but they don’t vote.
I noticed this during post-referendum chats with our office cleaners. Almost all of them said they didn’t vote. One said she voted for who her dad told her to vote for. I was a bit taken aback.
“But surely if you don’t vote, your interests won’t get looked after?” I asked.
One looked at me and snorted, “Like that happens! Doesn’t matter who gets in, they’re all the same!”
Sounds like a stereotype.
At the time, I wasn’t politically active. Now I am. The time before June 2016 is simply stated as “before the referendum” around here and with most people I know. As referendums go, it dwarfed all others. The Referendum, it should be. Because at that moment, a lot of things changed.
And, unusually, a lot of people voted. They voted for a change, and they were told it would make the NHS better and leave the country with more money.
I was deeply upset. I kept arguing with the hardcore Leavers, and then, in private, a friend sent me this message:
I’ve read a lot of what you have shared about the referendum, and as I leave voter I now fear I have made the wrong decision. I didn’t envisage the racial attacks that have since occurred, and did not vote out on the basis of immigration. I come across some of these people in work, and you then realise these are just normal and friendly people on the whole. I don’t have a great knowledge of politics and this is dangerous, as we all have the option to vote. I almost never voted, as had no strong bias to either side. I guess I’m trying to say your passion for remain has made me sit back and look at things from other people’s views. I can see you want the best for people. I wish I realised sooner, although it wouldn’t have changed the result.
Thing is, a lot of people realising sooner would have changed the result.
But people like me… we voted. But we didn’t try, did we? I know I didn’t protest, or man a stand in the streets. Had it too easy, you see. I thought others were doing it all anyway. Different people.
Let’s go back to our cleaner. Why didn’t she vote? Because she didn’t feel like she made a difference. Like she was going to get the shitty, difficult end of the stick either way. Not only that, but politics felt unreachable to her.
The Referendum got more people engaged, largely because a simple promise was made. £350m more for the NHS.
And people, even in post-Brexit Halton are still worried about the NHS. Here’s a local survey I did about concerns – sample size not massive at 67, but it’s enough to be a reasonable representation for the Halton area.
NHS is important. People worry about it. Because ultimately, we all get some sort of health problem at some point in our lives. Or our kids do. And we hear the stories of bankruptcies faced by US citizens due to their harsh private healthcare system.
Then Brexit and UK stability came in highly. And education. These are people’s primary concerns. I was actually surprised how few were worried about the benefits system, but then unlike the popular image of the North, most people aren’t substantially dependent on benefits. At least not in Widnes and Runcorn. So it’s not their biggest priority.
But let’s get back to our cleaner. Why doesn’t she* vote?
Unfortunately she couldn’t articulate it.
So I decided to remember what it was like when I was young, skint and facing homelessness. At no point did it occur to me to contact a councillor or my MP to see what could be done. They were distant people. Different people. Like teachers. I remember the shock and surprise when I learned that teachers had to go to the toilet! Yes really – they too need a wee sometimes. Amazeballs.
When you’re relatively naive, you don’t see the world all that clearly. Business-people are different. Asian people are different. People from the next town along… are different. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t know people, they’re different.
And most people don’t really know their local political parties. In the thirty years during which I’ve been able to vote, I’ve only heard from politicians during elections. I have never ever spoken to one on the doorstep. Except for one short period when I lived in Garston and my MP was David Alton. Now, David Alton has some peculiar views that I disagree with, but he’s a Liberal Democrat, now a Lord, and his councillors would drop in these weird Focus newsletters to the house. And I’d read them! I learned about what was going on in the area. They even had contact details so I could get in touch! They reached out… to me! Weird. But I realised, all politicians should try to do this. Push out their messages.
Then I moved back to Widnes.
And never, ever heard from a politician. Except during elections.
Sure, sometimes they’d say something in the local papers. But nothing relevant to me. Nothing that would fix my problem of living in a shitty shared house. Nothing that would make it easier for me to get a decent home. My parents had been able to get a council house, but it was denied to me. And I couldn’t save enough for a deposit on a house. It didn’t help that I wasn’t great with money either (credit card advertising has a lot to answer for!). But just being a young man, trying to run a car to get to work, renting a room, feeding myself, clothing myself and so on was sometimes tough. And nothing I ever saw from a politician made much impact on me.
Then I got older. And richer. Slowly but surely I made more money. I became a freelancer and discovered a piece of legislation might affect me – IR35. It wasn’t a massive issue, but it affected me. When politics affects you, you get to know stuff.
But working people are looked after by Labour, right?
I used to think that. Many people I knew voted Labour. Always voted Labour. Unquestioningly. I didn’t get it until I learned more about how unions work. Then I realised that unions and Labour are tied at the hip. Which is fine. The Labour Movement was what Labour was about, and it was massively important to the working man. Did a brilliant job.
Sadly, some unions got a bit giddy on power and decided to have battles to get more power. Which is a shame. They’d succeeded at getting working wages and privileges to a good point. They couldn’t see that some of those privileges were unaffordable in the long term. They simply had to keep them. At all cost.
That led to an interesting thing happening. Large organisations such as public sector, NHS and corporates started to outsource more and more functions. Our cleaners are employed by a company employed by our landlords. In many ways that can work. But truth is, that a cleaner at ICI or any other old large corporate like BA would have been exposed to unions, but our cleaners today are not. And even they were, many work for small companies disinterested in trade unions and employing fewer than 21 people. Others may not wish to join trade unions because they don’t like that they fund a political party.
So they’re not represented, really, by Labour. Labour mostly cares about people in trade unions and people who vote for them. People in unions are, for the most part, not the poorest part of society. In fact, I don’t think I know anyone in a union who earns less than about £30k a year once they’ve got five years experience in. That’s one reason why Labour are surprisingly reticent about taxing people in the OK to Quite Well Off groupings.
Nicked from the IFS website.
You could ask why the Lib Dems aren’t harder on the top 2%, but having worked with a lot of that range of people I can tell you that tax on income starts becoming optional at that level. If tax is too high they either put it into various perfectly legal vehicles (pensions and ISAs work well up to a limit) or they start looking keenly at moving cash offshore if possible. And taxing people too much can feel very unfair to those people. Get a £30k bonus and see £20k go to the government. They may not be right to feel like that, but that’s not the point. They feel unfairly treated and so get motivated to look for alternatives. As the IFS study reveals, the Lib Dems would almost certainly raise a lot more money with their tax changes than Labour would.
Labour is the party of the middle classes.
It’s true. Student fees position? Well, the current regime of student fee repayments introduced by the coalition means your repayments are lower if you earn under £35k than under the earlier top up fees system introduced by Labour.
Pensions position? Most of the people affected are people with good pension incomes. They are not poor people. Poor pensioners are considered in a secondary way, because they do at least vote. But most of the policies continue to leave wealthy pensioners paying far less in tax than young people on equivalent incomes.
The unions? Most union members earn good money. According to a study by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, trade union members were paid an average of £14.45-per-hour, 5p more than in 2012 (£28k/yr, equivalent to over £30k/yr today) – source
So who does represent the best interests of our cleaners?
I say the Liberal Democrats. A party I finally got involved with in 2016, after The Referendum. You’ve seen the chart above, and in the early years of coalition, before the Conservatives neutered them, they did a great job of taking low earners out of the tax system entirely. The UK’s Gini Coefficient improved for once!
For more information, see https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed
But here’s the problem for the Liberal Democrats. Nobody really knows this. But our doorstep action, whilst being great on a local level, needs to talk about the bigger issues. Potholes and poorly kept parks are important, but these things rarely keep the bulk of people awake worrying. But the NHS does worry people. Brexit does worry people. Not being able to feed the kids does worry people. These issues need addressing. Loudly and proudly.
If you’re campaigning in the 2018 local elections, it’s important to share a little bit about what the Lib Dems mean for everybody. Not just campaign in the middle class areas and get squeezed, but in the poorer working class areas where we can make a big difference. Our policies are better for them. They just don’t know it. Not to tell them this is a disservice to them and to the Liberal Democrats. The working poor need us to help them. And if we reach out to them, maybe they’ll reach out to us. And our cleaners and their friends – they’re essential people, and once they get going they are awesome!
