British elections may never be the same again

And so the beast was slain, the News of the World, dead.

The Labour Party is rejoicing, and rightly so, in many ways this is their best week since the election last year. Ed Miliband killed at PMQs this week, their MPs Chris Bryant and Tom Watson have led on this since the start, and Cameron is reeling. A Survation poll in association with Channel 4 News shows that only 9% think David Cameron is handling the controversy ‘well’, and the Liberal Democrats, despite the party’s general hatred for News Corp have been largely absent from the debate due to being tied into the coalition. Labour have an opportunity to lead, and they have taken it.

This is good for Labour. For the first time in years they are able to paint themselves out as the champions of morality against a corrupt elite, they can launch a moral crusade, what’s more it is one that binds the whole party together and which reaches right across the political spectrum. Almost no one, of any political persuasion, would disagree that the allegations surrounding News of the World activities are horrifying. New Labour made it clear it was comfortable with elites and they proliferated around the party and its leadership, but Ed Miliband has nothing to lose, only the Mirror backed Labour in the last election and the media environment has got barely friendlier since then. He has nothing to lose by attacking them. I do not believe that the Labour Party can win an election on this but it has, temporarily at least, given them a sense of unity and purpose, a mission all of their own, and something to whack the government with.

What’s more this story has the potential to run and run. The News of the World may be deceased but Rebekah Brooks, who has achieved almost pantomime level of villainy in all this, remains at News International, and in any case, these revelations from the News of the World may be just the tip of the iceberg. Other newspapers are noticeably quiet, which suggests that they may have something to hide, and the timing is also bad for the News of the World. It is summer, Parliament will soon be on recess, and there will be almost no news. Here there are parallels to the expenses crisis, as an apparently corrupt elite has its crimes drawn out before the general public. That happened over a summer too, and one of the reasons it lasted so long as there were always new revelations to reveal, the full scale only became apparent in drips and drabs.

If this indeed proves to be the case it will be a deeply uncomfortable summer for David Cameron, who has worked hard to establish close links with News International. To be fair, he is not alone. Every Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher has made it a priority to woo Rupert Murdoch. You can see why; he owns a massive amount of the news media and his tabloids, at least, are not newspapers which mess around when they want something. He has the appearance of power, and his newspapers have always gloried in that appearance. The headline from the day after the 1992 election is the famous cliché: ‘It was the Sun wot won it’.

Such claims of media power are overblown. Academic research does not support the claim that newspapers define political preferences; rather they are more closely affected by things like the views of your friends. Newspapers, it seems, do tend to affect what political issues you think are most important, but not your actual view on them. Now there are those who read papers and believe everything they say, but those are mostly a sort of feedback situation. People who already believe something, may read a choice of newspaper which simply backs up their own views. Nor do readers necessarily appreciate the political slant of the newspapers they read. Chris Patten, former Tory party Chair, reveals in his book Not Quite the Diplomat that research by the Conservative Research Department after the 1992 election showed that most Sun readers thought it was a left-leaning paper.

Rupert Murdoch does not define who wins elections. Rather he uses his deft political nous to predict who will win elections and then back them. In conjunction with this he uses the myth of his own power and standing to strike deals with politicians who either believe the myth is true or don’t want to test the theory that it is false. What does Murdoch want in return?

Murdoch is very right-wing, no one denies this, but he is, first and foremost, a businessman before all else. I would highly recommend Nick Davies revealing book Flat Earth News to anyone interested in these issues. It is an investigation by Davies which has been throwing up these revelations and Flat Earth News covered phone hacking and other ‘dark arts’ years before they entered mainstream consciousness. It is not a perfect book, I think it sells journalists too short, Davies’ left-wing biases are made quite clear and it can get ranty but it is well worth a read, especially now.

One thing Davies covers is the business practices of Murdoch, and a clear pattern emerges. Over and over again Murdoch has made deals with politicians in exchange for changes in laws and rules to benefit his businesses. There is an excerpt from the book here.

We can see this behaviour now. Murdoch was reticent to back Cameron for a long time, despite lobbying from Cameron’s friend Brooks. He eventually relented in late 2009, and News International began to back the Conservatives strongly. When the debates happened and the Clegg bounce occurred his papers visibly panicked. On the one hand there was a risk of a government including Lib Dem figures who owed him no favours, but perhaps even more dangerously the myth would have been blown. In short, Murdoch’s power would have gone and he would not have been able to secure the political favours he wants to expand his business, first and foremost is to take total control of BSkyB.

Fortunately for Murdoch the Conservatives came close enough to a majority that they could have said to have won.

Yet what politician will cosy up to Murdoch now? The dangers of the historic closeness between media and political elites have now been exposed in a visceral and extremely visible way. Ultimately this could be a true shift in the way elections are fought in this country. No politician will want to get as close to someone like Rebekah Brooks every again for fear of getting burned as a result.

What IF the Labour Party loses its Ed?

The last couple of weeks has been filled with speculation about the future of Ed Miliband, who, let’s face it, has not been performing brilliantly. He has his defenders, and they may yet be proved right, but as time goes on his position seems more and more untenable, but will Ed go?

I think the answer, quite simply, is no. The problem, as I see it, is that most of the people in Labour who want Ed Miliband gone are former Blairites. They have their first issue: there is no obvious Blairite successor to Ed Miliband. David Miliband could come back, but it is far from certain that he would, rumours persist that his wife wants him out of politics.

David comes with his own downsides too, it is worth remembering that. If David Miliband had been 100% certain to win the next election he would have won the leadership. The fact is that David Miliband comes with some of the same issues as Ed: he is not a particularly inspiring speaker, and he has a bit of a nerdy image. Some may laugh at this but Ed Miliband’s supporters in the leadership contest used to say he was the one who ‘spoke human’. If David doesn’t run then the Blairites have another issue on their hands: who is the obvious Blairite? There simply isn’t one.

The other issue is Ed Balls, and his small, but highly loyal faction. As Brown’s most loyal lieutenant Balls always appears to me to harbour a deep dislike, maybe even hatred, of Blairites that he has inherited from Brown. If an opposition political party wants to change leader mid-term then generally the desire is to it as quickly and easily as possible. For the main opposition party this pretty much necessitates a coronation, a leadership election takes too much time, too much resources that need to be spent on opposing the government. They are also divisive affairs, and unseating a leader is automatically divisive in the first place. The appearance of division is itself a turn-off to the electorate, ultimately politicians know this and that is why, for example, Gordon Brown was never gotten rid of, the potential cost was just too high. The danger is that if Ed Miliband goes the party is plunged into a leadership contest it can ill-afford between Blairites on the one hand and the Balls faction on the other, either in the form of an Ed Balls leadership campaign, or in the form of his wife, Yvette Cooper, running for the leadership.

Running a party after taking over leadership mid-term is hard enough as it is. Ask Michael Howard, who could only pick up the pieces and stabilise the Conservatives after IDS, he never had the ability to truly move his party forward. He had neither the time, nor the political capital inside his party. He had become leader not because of his vision, but to hold his party together.

It is hard to see who in the Labour Party could both gain cross-party consensus for an uncontested coronation and who could then go on to win an election. It is an almost impossible task.

The other alternative is some kind of gentleman’s agreement, a Blairite leader for an Ed Balls Chancellorship, but for those of you with longer memories this probably immediately rings huge alarm bells regarding another agreement between two Labour politicians which eventually soured extraordinarily badly. It also risks ceding economics policy to Balls, the area where he most strongly differs from Blairites in tactics, values and emphasis.

In a strange sense then, Ed Miliband, without really meaning to, appears to have become a sort of unity leader in a divided party. On the deficit, in particular, he holds a mid-ground between Balls and the Blairites. So yes, ultimately I think Ed Miliband will still be leader of the Labour Party at the next election, because I think the potential risks of getting rid of him outweigh the risks of keeping him.

What’s in a name, ‘coalition’ or ‘Conservative-led government’?

So some controversy has been brewing over the name of our government. The government prefers the simple ‘coalition’, but the Labour Party prefers ‘Conservative-led government’.

Let’s get one thing straight: ‘conservative-led government’ is standard usage in politics. For example the current German coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats is known as the ‘Christian Democrat-led government’ from time to time, the Danish government is ‘liberal-led’, and in Britain the coalition of Labour and the Liberal Democrats which ruled Scotland from 1999 until 2007 was often known as the ‘Scottish Labour Party-led executive’. None of these coalitions differ in any substantial way from ours.

Clearly, however, the opposition would not be lobbying for its use, if it did not see a partisan gain to it. I am reminded of the Democratic Party. At some point the Republicans discovered that people naturally responded better to the word ‘Democratic’ than ‘Republican’, but that they did not respond as well to ‘Democrats’. Therefore they resolved to refer to the party as the ‘Democrats’ on every available opportunity, to the point where this is now so seared into the national consciousness of Americans that the party is the ‘Democrats’ even to its own supporters. This is not its name, but it is a comparatively small change to it. Nonetheless research suggests that this subtle change has some effect on people’s perceptions. The Republicans have subsequently lost some of this subtlety. They are currently trying to repeal Obama’s healthcare bill. In doing so they renamed it the ‘Jobs-killing Healthcare Bill’. With the recent shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, and the new spirit of cooperation I was informed by my American step-mother last night that the Republicans had changed the name to ‘Jobs-destroying Healthcare Bill’.

Words have power, we need only think of the difference between ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’ for an obvious example. I have seen several complaints from Lib Dems in particular regarding the name- that it suggests that the Lib Dems are irrelevant, that they take orders from the Conservatives and that no coalition is truly ‘led’. These are valid arguments. I would also suggest that the use of the term by Labour represents an attempt to concentrate fire on the Conservatives. Labour’s early opposition concentrated far too much on the Liberal Democrats. There is an irony in one of Labour’s criticisms – that the Lib Dems are ‘human body shields’ for Conservative policies. If the Liberal Democrats are human body shields I would suggest that Labour has fallen for it. The use of the term thus appears to me an attempt to change the debate back into the old two-party certainties of Labour vs. Conservatives, largely ignoring the Lib Dems. There is, frankly, not a huge amount of point in attacking a party which is polling in the single figures and appears to be down to its core vote anyway.

Yet it should be remembered that while ‘conservative-led government’ is value-laden so is the term coalition. As Krisnan Guru Murphy says on his blog “I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way the media have dubbed the new government “The Coalition”. Removing the party identities removes the focus of praise and blame, making them a new political entity before they have become one merged party and for many people the word “coalition” is laden with positive values.” Murphy eventually concludes against the use of ‘Conservative-led’ for himself, but states he finds it an acceptable term. The term ‘coalition’ is indeed a positive term; it brings to mind cooperation between equals. When the US government decided to invade Iraq they chose to call their alliance of states the ‘Coalition of the willing’. They did not call it the ‘American-led invasion force’.

Perhaps, I feel, the best path is to adopt names for our coalition types, like the Dutch and the Germans. Certainly a strict ‘Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition’ is rather unwieldy whereas the term does not shorten easily. The Conservatives are wary of being abbreviated as ‘Con’ whereas the common abbreviation of ‘ConDem’ marks out anyone who uses it as a left-wing troll. The current Dutch government is a rather dull ‘right-wing coalition’, but the last government of centrist Christian Democrats, Dutch Labour and the highly religious Christian Union was known as the ‘Christian centre-left’ coalition. An attempt after the most recent election to bring together ‘red’ Labour and the ‘blue’ Liberals with a couple of other parties was known as ‘Purple Plus’. A historic coalition of Catholics and Labour is known as the ‘Roman Red’ coalition. A theoretical combination of the three largest parties is the ‘forbidden coalition’, and so on. The Germans have a love of colours. The current coalition of ‘black’ Christian Democrats and ‘yellow’ Free Democrats is the ‘Black-Yellow’ coalition. The government of 1997-2005 of ‘red’ Social Democrats and the Greens was the ‘Red-Green’ coalition. A combination of the Red-Green parties and the Free Democrats is the ‘traffic light coalition’ whereas a combination of the ‘Black-Yellow’ parties and the Greens is the ‘Jamaica coalition’ because these are the colours of the Jamaican flag. German politics is not a friendly place to the colour-blind.

Posing this question on twitter, one Binny_UK suggested that ‘blue-yellow’ would be the ‘Kazakhstan coalition’. I rather like that personally, but if anyone has any better suggestions I’d love to hear them.

'Red Ed' and the Labour Party

Well after a leadership race often derided as ‘boring’ the Labour Party contest came to an extremely startling result as Ed Miliband beat his older brother by a hair’s breadth. Ed now needs to turn the Labour Party into an election winning machine. Can he do it?

On paper Ed Miliband has certain advantages over a generic opposition leader. Firstly his party holds 259 seats in a hung parliament. Compare this to the Conservatives in 1997 held a paltry 168 seats and stood opposed to a 179 seat Labour Party minority. To have won the 2001 election the Conservative Party would have had to double their number of seats, and to become the largest party they would have had to have taken 127 seats from Labour. Labour on the other hand only needs to take 25 seats from the Conservatives to be the largest party, and only 67 to win a majority. Both these figures are within a reasonable shooting distance. At the same time Labour is the only major opposition party, at least in England. With its two main competitors locked in coalition anyone who takes against the government has only one major alternative – Labour. On the other hand the cuts will be extremely unpopular in a couple of years as we get used to a barrage of stories about things like police officer redundancies.

That said he has several disadvantages too. Firstly the Labour Party’s finances are not in a great state. This may make him dependent on Trade Unions. A way of avoiding this would be to broker a deal on party finance reform with the Coalition that capped Union donations in exchange for caps on big money donations from businesses and wealthy individuals. The Lib Dems, in particular, would be likely to jump at this and the Conservatives would likely have to be dragged along by the mood on political reform. Other issues are that while Labour has a healthy number of seats this masks a low popular vote – 29%, one of Labour’s worst ever scores. In a sense, Labour’s ‘good’ performance is due to the poor performance of everybody.

Other issues are exaggerated. I have encountered much speculation, particularly from activists of other parties about internal factional infighting or even possible splits. Such wrangling relies on an exaggerated view of the policy differences between Milibands and wings of the Labour Party. For example David Miliband’s ‘mini-manifesto’ featured policies such as:

· Making the public sector pay a ‘living wage’

· Giving employees a say on pay committees in order to check excessive pay at the top

· A ‘mansion tax’ on the top two million homes

All of which are positions that have been used to tar his brother as ‘Red’. In reality Ed and David’s major differences were due to attempts to appeal to different sections of the party’s electoral college – Ed aiming for Trade Unionists, David for MPs and MEPs. While the leadership contest got a bit divisive at times it was also nothing on the Labour leadership contests of the past. If you want to see a divisive contest I recommend Benn vs. Healey, compared to THAT contest this was a walk in the park. I see no real sign of the kind of factional rift required for such apocalyptic predictions.

The other issue the Labour Party is it must not look backwards. Yes, it needs to recognise its mistakes but moving back to an ‘old’ Labour approach or a 1997-esque Blairite platform will both fail. Both are, more or less, out of date. ‘Old Labour’ cannot win, but neither can a simple attachment to Blairite doctrines, which are seen as too controlling by today’s modern liberals, and which is aimed at an aspirational middle class when the middle class has not seen its financial situation improve since 2003 and who are mostly in a situation of insecurity. Rather than being upwardly mobile, most centrists are now afraid of becoming downwardly mobile. They are afraid; afraid of the costs of sending their children to increasingly expensive universities, afraid of the lack of jobs and whether their children will be able to get jobs, of a coming pensions crisis and finding themselves not getting richer or even getting poorer.

The Labour Party needs to find fresh answers to these issues from the social democratic tradition, and rather than Blairism Labour needs to find a new ‘Milibandite’ voice. Throwing of the party’s image as nannying and controlling is essential to winning over liberal centrists though at the same time the party needs to recognise fears of crime and immigration amongst more socially conservative members of the working class. It needs to perform a careful balancing act between groups. It needs to be conservative enough on immigration to appeal to the working class, but not so conservative as to frighten away middle class liberals and ethnic minorities. At the same time populist rants against bankers will find much sympathy amongst the middle classes in a way in which they wouldn’t have done until recently.

There is potentially fertile ground for a Labour comeback in 2015, but Labour needs to tread carefully, intelligently, and most of all change.