Tag: politicians | David Coveney

Why political parties lose support by winning.

People do like to look back angrily, don’t they?

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.

A Yougov poll and survey suggests that what’s happened isn’t the same as what people say happened.

Are people lying?

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?

Labour membership did plummet just afterwards.

Oh.

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%.

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.

Photo by H E N G S T R E A M on Unsplash

This article was updated with new charts and some copy changes on the 28th of May 2024.

Our office cleaner doesn’t vote. I think I know why.

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.

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!

Feature Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash

The Liverpool Riots Do Not Indicate That Our Society Is Broken

Ok, the riots matter. Especially if you’re unlucky enough to have had to face rioters in your district, near your home, or near your business. In fact, the riots and disturbances are full of tragedy, deaths and ruined lives. They are, frankly, horrible.

And strong action is needed to stop it turning into a joyfull rampage for our criminal underclass.

But what they aren’t is some kind of protest. They’re a laugh. If I didn’t have much to lose I suspect I might even find the thrill of a riot quite an attraction. And in areas where there’s possibly not much to do if you’ve got very little money then I can quite understand the fun, the empowerment of feeling that police won’t stop you when they usually do. Thing is, what nobody seems to be saying is that the number of people involved is tiny.

200/816216 = 0.0245%

Here’s a thing – the number of people kicking off in the Liverpool area has been reported as approximately 200. In reality that means anywhere between 50 and 500. But let’s assume that 200 is correct for now. That’s a whole 0.0245% of the population. Another way of looking at is that that 99.975% of the population in Liverpool didn’t feel compelled to smash anything up or set fire to cars. I daresay the proportions around London are similar.

So actually, society functions well for almost everybody in it. In fact, given that 45,000 18-20 year olds are indicted of a criminal offence in a year (sample from 1999) you can see that even the vast majority of young convicted criminals aren’t interested in rioting. The numbers are so small that you can’t say that this is a problem with a consumerist society, a problem with poverty, or a problem with our culture – the sample size is too small. It’s probably just some yobs getting the upper hand on the police and having some fun.

It’s a Policing Thing, Stupid

You can stop almost all riots. All you need are an awful lot of police who aren’t scared to intimidate and bully their way through trouble. It works. Riots are rare in police states, for example.

So we need to ask if we really want brutal police officers? What about when they’re not dealing with a riot? They’re going to be the ones your son deals with when he gives a bit of cheek to an officer after being told off for cycling on the pavement. They’re going to be the ones potentially wading in too early during an otherwise peaceful protest.

We must come to accept that these occasional moments of unrest are, unless repeated again and again with significant economic damage, a relatively small cost of living in a relatively free society. Just as we mustn’t allow the few terrorists with religious agendas to change how we live, we mustn’t allow the few thugs out there to change the way we deal with protest and the way we run our cities.

Of course, the cost mustn’t be borne by the individuals and businesses affected – if our society is to accept this, it must also ensure that nobody is left harmed or significantly out of pocket by this either. We need to be humane and adult about it all.

What we certainly don’t need is to start pressuring our politicians into making some dumb, knee-jerk changes that will take away our hard won freedoms. Let’s take stock, let’s maybe ask for police to be a little smarter in apprehending the rioters, but let’s not give up and change too much.

Boo to MPs! Boo to Presenters!

MPs are getting it in the neck as a result of some of their more wild expenses claims. Lord Foulkes got very uppity.

Seriously, both of them are as bad as each other. Lord Foulkes for failing to understand the difference between expenses and salary, and the presenter for being rude.

Kudos to Carrie Gracie for answering the question though – she could have given a typical politician’s answer and fudged the response.

But you know, MPs (or anybody else for that matter) – when you make an expenses claim that could, potentially, come under public scrutiny at some point you have to think about how it could look. And if you’re not paid enough, then sort out the pay. But given that each constituency manages to have lots of applicants for the job I suspect that the job is seen as a rather attractive one. I would be quite happy to receive an MP’s income along with money to pay for an office and staff. Lucky them.

So here’s a gentle nudge to MPs to have a think about how you look to the public you serve, and the public who pay your salary. And yes, I do appreciate that many MPs are decent and hardworking – but they need to be open so we can see this.