general election ponderings

[ajva]

I posted this on Facebook, but expect it'll get more attention here. :o)



OK. Only fair to start with a disclosure: I'm generally a floating voter with a slight built-in centre-left bias. Quite left on social issues, a bit to the right on the economic/financial side. It all seems to come out as centre-left in the wash.

Now, I've witnessed elections that were generally quite exciting, because there was a real mood for change of one sort or another. This time, though, there doesn't seem to be such a thing happening in the sense of, say, 1997, when the Conservatives had been in power a little too long, probably, and had got a bit too nasty and hypocritical ('back to basics', anyone?) in terms of their social policies for most people to cope with. (Section 28 was a big issue for me.) And, on the other side, I dare say, had I been around in 1979, I may very well have voted for Thatcher too, given the shocking economic state of the country back then - despite my natural left-wing bias - also because I can well imagine I would have liked the idea of having a woman as prime minister to break the mould and act as an important precedent for the rest of society. But of course, I wasn't round then (well I was, but I was 5 years old), so I can't be sure.

It seems to me that this time round, most people in the country know that we are financially fucked as a nation. And I don't think anyone really knows for sure what the right thing is to do about it. So I don't think most people think there will be that much difference between the Labour and Conservative positions in terms of sorting that particular problem out. So people will be voting on other issues that feel more close to their own lives. The idea that our deficit could cause sterling to ultimately get crucified on the bond markets, leading to sky-high interest rates and the ignominy and severe physical ramifications of devaluation seems somehow far away. A bad thing that could never actually be all that bad (and, after all, say many - wouldn't devaluation help exports?) and is somewhat abstract. And anyhow: higher taxes to call the bluff of the Laffer Curve? Lower taxes to stimulate the economy? Greater or lesser public spending? Who knows? The fact is, no-one can be certain what would be best, really. It all depends on how it's done in practical terms, and in what circumstances it unfolds. It's not for nothing that they still call economics "the dismal science" (even if it's not quite what Carlyle meant at the time of coining the phrase).

I was concerned a few months back that a hung parliament might scare the bond markets, but now I think that the odds on it actually happening have been so short for such a long time that the markets will have had a chance to get used to it. Remember that the financial markets don't tend to work on what's happened, but on what they expect to happen, so if it's accepted that there may not be a clear mandate for any one particular party, then their reaction to a hung parliament could very well surprise on the upside. In other words: they might not react as badly as I feared a while back.

So I'll set out my stall. I can't vote Conservative because I'm afraid I still think that far too many of them are homophobes in a friendly mask, and I'm not at all certain that their economic policies are as sound as they'd have me think. I also don't like the promise to incentivise marriage in the tax system; in my view, government has no place in telling us how to run our personal lives. Cameron's somewhat nebulous promise to encourage marriage seems grounded more in emotion than reason, and reveals him to espouse what I would call "nanny-state Conservatism", as opposed to the more libertarian Conservatism that I find more instinctively appealing. But I can't vote for Labour because they, frankly, spend too much money. I'm no great fan of Thatcher, as everyone knows, but one of her most incisive remarks was this: "They [socialists] always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them." And I think that's true. It's the fundamental flaw in the philosophy. And although the recent economic crisis of which we've been part was global rather than UK-based, we could have been better off today as a nation if, for example, the public sector hadn't been so hugely expanded over the past 12 years.

So I'm retreating to the party I voted for in 1997: the Lib Dems. In the hope of a hung parliament. We've not had one in the UK since 1974, when it proved to be totally unstable and we needed another election to get rid of it and form a clear mandate for one party. I think things might be different now. We are a more globally-focused country and the idea of coalition government I think might come more naturally in a time when we are more educated about continental European politics, and when there is, I think, more of an appetite for discussion and compromise at the heart of government.

After all, if it's not quite clear what path we should take, maybe we shouldn't put it into one party's hands; maybe we should talk about it as we go along.

But don't think I'm trying to convince you; I'm just telling you what I think. Democracy - it could be argued - depends on you doing exactly what you damn well please.

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Do you have figures since 2004? I ask as I'm highly aware of the extensive purges which have been going on over the last few years. My employers had long-unfilled empty posts when I arrived there in 2007, like all LAs - so they might have officially had x 'positions', but a significant number of them had no employees in them and nobody was getting paid extra to do that work (it was just shared between existing employees). And those were the good times. They had a substantial reorganisation 2007-8 where they removed PRP and cut loads of benefits. They have since made quite a lot of people redundant and are set to get rid of more - the work, of course, has not reduced. Additionally, since the figures observe the huge fall prior to 1998, one fairly obvious conclusion (which seems borne out from my experience) is that the Major government gutted the public sector (which it did), and a lot of the 'rise' was simply replacing workers who'd been lost. The work still needs to be done somehow, and there's a finite amount which can be farmed out to the remaining workers before they end off on long-term sick leave because of the stress.

I take it you missed last year's story about the (Tory, obv) borough who wanted to privatise the entire council?

This is pretty typical. I should point out that public sector pensions have been progressively whittled away quite a lot over the last 10 years too. A. is incredibly lucky to have got in on the classic civil service pension scheme, shortly before it was withdrawn, and nobody gets that deal anymore. Mine is OK, but there is considerable uncertainty about what's going to happen to it in the future, to the extent that the employees who can afford to are frequently paying into private pension schemes, just in case.

Really, what I want to know is more details on the ONS figures. Are people on long-term contracts counted for these purposes? Because they're always the first to go, and the shift towards more contracted workers has not been good for the public sector at all.

But of course, I don't necessarily regard a large public sector as a bad thing at all. I don't respond to the dog whistle of "public sector spending increase=bad", because, despite thinking there are plenty of problems with the large state system, there are also plenty of positives to it, which can provide benefits to private sector workers too. For example, the tendency of public sector workers to be highly unionised (something a lot of the recent changes to the public sector have been designed to undermine), and the expectation of improved conditions & related benefits also affects the expectations private sector workers have from their jobs, and so on. I could bang on a bit in this vein but I suspect it would get OT quite quickly, so I won't. I do recommend having a read of the chapter "Government, The Hard Taskmaster" in Madeleine Bunting's excellent book 'Willing Slaves' - it came out about the same time as the report in question as well, so while slightly out of date, it gives perhaps a more detailed perspective of that particular period.

You're right, the Indie isn't a Tory paper - that would be far too left-wing for them! While they (mysteriously) retain some great columnists, I wouldn't automatically trust the Indie further than I could throw a rolled-up copy. At any rate, their political position is highly variable (which isn't necessarily a bad thing; I often agree with them), so I wouldn't take it as a given on any one point.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

You can use Google as well as I can, presumably? In 1997, public sector employment was 5.175 million (here, which was presumably the source for the Independent). In the fourth quarter of 2009, it was 6.098 million (here). (Although that does include some 250,000 employees of Lloyds and RBS, whom you might want to exclude.) If you want to question the ONS's methodolgy, I leave it to you to investigate.

In 1996, total government expenditure was 39.5% of GDP. For the current year, it is estimated (by the Treasury) to be 45.6%. (This disguises the fact that government expenditure fell to 34.8% of GDP in 2000, and then steadily increased.) (ETA: source for these figures is here.)

Whether that's a huge expansion, I don't know, but the public sector clearly has got bigger under Labour.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Hm, thank you, but that doesn't really answer the questions I had about what those figures really mean. Short of getting access to the raw data- which I have neither the time nor the interest to do - I'm not sure how to resolve that. I agree that the Lloyds/RBS employees are an anomaly, and not exactly reflective. But I'd really like to know where the large number of privately contracted firms providing government services fall here; their workers do not get government pension schemes or other related benefits, most of the time.

There's no need to be snarky. I don't know whether I'm as good at using Google as you are (presumably not, since online research isn't part of my day job).

The wider issue for me, of course, is what, if anything, to take away from a list of figures. I'm no statistician, so my understanding of how to correlate employee numbers (which, as I said, I'm not clear about how the final figures are calculated, who's in and who's out) with expenditure is at best rudimentary. I can't see whether government expenditure correlates to increased employee numbers (if we agree that to be the case which, as I said, I'm not wholly convinced about) or reflects increased expenditure on expensive projects, such as the fucking Olympics. And even if I agreed with the suggestion that "under Labour, the public sector has expanded and public expenditure has increased" (which I don't anyway regard as necessarily a bad thing; it's a thing, how good or bad it is depends on specific circumstances IMHO), I'm still not sure *that* can inevitably be correlated to specific Labour policies - the RBS thing was unforeseen, expenditure on railway infrastructure was at least in large parts the result of a policy decision made under the Tory government, etc etc.

So obviously, this in itself wouldn't be a make-or-break voting issue for me. And I remain unconvinced by this as a means to determine whether or not the Labour government are 'bad with other people's money'. I'm no fan of Labour, and I think they've overseen the introduction of some massively, flagrantly wasteful projects (I go past one of them pretty much every day!). But Mrs. Thatcher's truism seems to me to be fundamentally flawed, especially when one looks outside the UK. Of course, she may only have meant Labour, but in that case, the critique of socialism as a whole is weak. I don't trust a Tory government to be any better with public money; they just have a slightly different set of public projects to indulge. So, for me, if the primary reason to vote Tory is financial self-interest, that would be no reason at all. Obviously, I'm biased, since a Tory government would be looking for ways to make me redundant (though my particular job is in fact reasonably popular with our actual Tory councillors; it's the poor social workers and housing officers and care providers who are more likely to be in the firing line), but then, if enlightened self-interest is the order of the day, that makes perfect sense. I actually *don't* vote in 'my own interests', on the whole, and I don't really have a lot of sympathy with it as a method for increasing social good, but even if I did, voting Tory would still be a pretty dumb idea for me.