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

[lovingboth]

Some quick thoughts...

The last bit of hands on politics I did was doing the computer stuff for the LibDems at the Newbury by-election in 1993, I think. That was the first by-election after 'Black Wednesday' meant the Tories lost all credibility for their claim to be the only ones who could run the economy. It was a safe Tory seat, but the LibDems won it with a majority of 24k or so (leading to the classic exchange when leader Paddy Ashdown was called with the news, 'Don't tell me the vote, tell me the majority.' 'That is the majority!') In retrospect, that should have made the 1997 result obvious: most people would now vote for whoever could beat the Tory.

I don't see Labour as being as unpopular now as the Tories were then, even when the Tories had a big lead in the polls. But if I am wrong, the LibDem is the one who will win here, so it's a reason to get a postal vote (I am away on polling day).

Mrs Thatcher wasn't afraid of spending other people's money: without the oil revenues funding unemployment, she'd have gone bust.

I am also not convinced Feb74 produced a 'totally unstable' result. The LibLab Pact gave stability after Labour lost their majority midway through the Parliament that followed the Oct74 election, so there were deals that could have been done after February. The main cause of what instability there was has more or less gone, thanks to Thatcher's trades union laws, ending of the UK mining industry and industrial wastelanding.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I find it odd to suggest that the public sector has 'hugely expanded' over the last 12 years. The workload has increased, certainly, but ever-increasing parts of it have been handed over to private contractors, who have been no more efficient (in many cases, far less), and have been far less accountable when things fucked.

For numerous reasons, of which this is just one, the idea that the Labour party is fundamentally socialist just provokes in me a hollow, bitter laugh.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Yes, I remember Newbury; that was a great result, and I'd certainly agree the Tories blew their economic reputation on Black Wednesday. I don't think the 1997 result was obvious until Blair took over as leader of Labour, though; he may be damnably unpopular now, but back then he was very popular indeed, and appealed to Middle England in a way that even the wonderful John Smith, for all his reform of the Labour party (vis a vis OMOV, for example), didn't quite. I well remember the wellspring of support that suddenly arose for Labour after Blair's ascension to the throne.

I agree also that Labour are nowhere near as unpopular now as the Tories were in 1997. I very much hope you're right that the LibDem will win where you are. Postal votes - as I believe the acronym is these days - FTW.

I think we can say, though, that the oil revenues, while a huge boon to the Tory budget in the 80s, were a bit unusual: a one-off bonanza that any government of any hue would have taken advantage of, and quite understandably so. I don't think it's quite what was classically meant in that quote about spending "other people's money", which was, I think, much more about "excessive" (whatever that means) taxation and its effects on the economy.

1974: yes, sounds like a fair analysis of what was happening on the ground. Apologies for simplifying it (but I did feel my little article was probably quite long enough already). And I suppose my main point is that the country was in a much more complex turmoil then, and a minority government much less likely to survive than now.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

No, they're obviously not Socialist in the proper, classical, sense, but economically they've tended towards it in terms of trying to find money to fund worthy projects (many of which I've found really worthwhile, I might add - it's just that after a while, the money can sometimes start to run out).

So: expansion of the public sector? Well, let's source an article as an example. It's the Independent from March 2005. Not a terribly Tory paper, I'd have thought. It's quoting figures from the Office for National Statistics. And this was five years ago.

"According to the analysis by the Office for National Statistics, public sector employment rose by 583,000 between 1998 and the first quarter of 2004. In the preceding seven-year period, it fell by 815,000. The ONS added that in the latest 12-month period alone a further 146,000 civil service jobs were created compared with 119,000 in the private sector."

It's not just the salaries, remember; it's things like guaranteed pension rights and so on. It has increased gradually, and it all costs.

[boxcat.livejournal.com]

Given how important queer issues are to you, I'm curious as to why you wouldn't see yourself as a fairly natural Lib Dem?

Especially after this Government has faltered so badly in its support for queer rights (opt-outs from human rights legislation for religious organisations? Deportation of homosexuals back to countries where they will face state-sponsored violence and/or death? etc etc) in recent years.

[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.

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I'd agree with this, except for one issue which may or may not make a difference, depending on personal taste. The Lib Dems have had an embarassing rate of same-sex sex scandals amongst their leading members, and they haven't handled them in a consistent or positive fashion. I'm not sure what conclusion, if any, to draw from that, but it makes me slightly uneasy about regarding them as unequivocally committed to queer issues.

[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.

[lovingboth]

Hmm. I would say that the position was made crystal clear as far back as the 1980s, if not earlier. When Labour was sticking any debates on the issue at their conference in the 'Playschool slot' when there was no live TV coverage, the Liberals were happy to have this on TV.

I can think of two 'scandals': Mark Oaten and Simon Hughes, both from the time of the leadership election. Did I miss others?

The former was a bigger surprise, but I think he's made it clear that he wasn't pushed to resign as a front bench spokesperson, and if he had wanted to go 'yeah, so what' - and apologised for some previous comments about prostitution - rather than beat himself up about his sexuality, I suspect he'd be standing this time.

(Much the same with Paddy Ashdown's affairs: that he was having them simply was not an issue for the party membership. If they had known he was hypocritically destroying the political careers of at least one and very probably two of the women, that would have been the end of him. Fortunately for him, they didn't want to go public. I went to the party's chief exec, told him I knew, I knew he knew, that it stanked and quit.)

Everyone with even a fraction of a clue knew Simon isn't straight, but he was still elected President of the party (more than once, from memory).

Looking on their website to check the spelling of someone's name, I see the spokesperson on health in the Lords is someone who came out as lesbian in the 80s and was elected (the party picks its peers by a vote) to the Lords in 1999. Doubtless there are more.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

I do often find myself aligned with the Lib Dems; I just prefer not to identify myself definitively with one party - in order to force myself to consider specific policies and the likelihood of them being implemented freshly each time. It's probably not of huge importance, really, in terms of practical difference, but it works for me all the same.

In various different elections down the years I've voted Libdem, Labour, Green, SNP and Independent, depending on circumstances. I've never yet voted Tory, but I wouldn't rule it out in principle.

[jhg.livejournal.com]

Ah, the Lib Dems, the party of choice for those who wish to completely abrogate responsibility.

Voting for them is like slipping into a particularly comfortable old cardigan, putting your feet up and having a nice cup of tea and a hob-nob.

(Me too by the way, as will surprise absolutely no-one.)

[louis_mallow]

I dunno what to do. All you said is how I feel, but I also know that my vote doesn't genuinely count around here.

Basically I'm either going to spoil my vote or find a party that will promise me electoral reform* and scrapping the i.d card scheme.

(Labour lied about this in 97. And in any event they want a policeman in every home.)

[jhg.livejournal.com]

I'm going to vote for the Lib Dems. As ever, their policies accord closest with my own views, also they were the only major party to properly represent the will of the public and oppose the Iraq war. Plus Cleggy gave, in my
view, a storming performance against Paxo last night.

This time round I'm I Mitcham and Morden, an incredibly sage Labour seat at, in 2005, 56% of the vote.

This will not affect how I vote, nor should it, nor has it wherever I've been in all the elctions I've been eligible to vote in.