Robert Hazell
In early February David Cameron launched “fixing broken politics,” with big promises to strengthen parliament while also returning power to people and communities. The three flagship policies he outlined to do this all look attractive at a glance, but begin to look more politically perilous the closer you examine them. And all may come back to haunt him.
The first is to reduce the size of the House of Commons by 10 per cent before the end of the first Tory term, which means removing 65 MPs. This will require a review of all constituency boundaries, as well as streamlining and accelerating the usual slow pace of such reviews, risking accusations of gerrymandering. Whether Cameron can persuade 65 of his fellow MPs that they must do themselves out of a job is another matter. Two thirds of the cuts could be made to fall in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where MPs have reduced workloads post devolution, justifying a “devolution discount.” Such a ploy would lose Cameron very few Conservative MPs. But he is also a staunch defender of the Union, and such a strategy could boost separatism. So it is most likely that the cuts will fall evenly across Britain. If so, 53 of the 65 seats would be in England, and most will be Tory ones. That will not endear him to his own backbenchers.
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Sam Knight
It is 8.30am in Bedford. Patrick Hall, the town’s Labour MP, is talking to half a dozen parents outside a nursery. Everyone is shifting on their feet because of the cold. Above their heads sag the black lines of electricity pylons against the grey sky. Up there birds hop too, feeling for a warmer wire, while below children go on their way buttoned up against the cold. “I make no promises,” Hall is saying to the parents, who nod. “Other than that I will do my best.”
Then Hall, a slender 58 year old with a Blairish tuft of brown hair, goes and sits in his car. He has a few minutes before his next appointment, a tour of the school, begins. Hall was Bedford’s town centre manager before he was elected MP in 1997. In an unbroken line of parliamentary representatives stretching back more than 700 years, he is the town’s third Labour MP. This might go some way to explaining why, when he talks about the upcoming election, Hall does not sound confident about defending his majority of 3,383. “Mr Patrick is a very nice man,” my taxi driver told me on the way from the station. “But this year he has no chance.”
Hall is more optimistic, talking up the role of Liberal Democrat voters, who have held together Bedford’s anti-Tory majority for three elections. He also perceives a lack of excitement about David Cameron, whose face peers down from billboards around the town. “People are fed up,” says Hall, before moving his shoulders up and down, doing an impression of a complaining voter. “But there is also a feeling that they don’t trust smoothy boy Cameron: that it’s a bit thin, the substance doesn’t seem to be there.” Then he peters out; it is time for him to begin his tour. The pavement is empty now. “It’s very difficult,” he admits. “I’m not denying the polls.”
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David Goodhart
Since Labour’s 1997 election victory 1.6m people have been granted permanent right of residence in Britain, mainly from developing countries. And in 2008 24 per cent of all births in England and Wales were to foreign-born mothers, rising to nearly 50 per cent in London. Strikingly, however, at no point in the last 12 years does there seem to have been a strategic discussion in cabinet about the purpose of much higher levels of immigration.
In the course of making an Analysis programme for BBC Radio 4 on New Labour and mass immigration, I discovered that the final decision to open Britain’s labour market to—as it turned out—more than 1m eastern Europeans was taken by a small group of officials and special advisers before an EU council of ministers meeting in Brussels.
An accumulation of small decisions, all of them perfectly rational and sensible in their own right, has led to a mighty big—and pretty unpopular—outcome. So why did it happen? There were two big background factors: much cheaper mass transit and Britain as a “magnet” both economically and culturally. Our fast growing economy—at least for most of the last 12 years—plus a deregulated labour market meant jobs galore at all skill levels. Then there is the pull of the English language and the “London effect”—a city with communities from all around the world.
But the magnet effect needed some political decisions from government to open the door—and between 1997 and 2003 there were four significant ones. First, there was the abolition of the so-called primary purpose rule, which had the effect of significantly raising the immigration of foreign spouses.
Second, the introduction of the Human Rights Act made it harder to clamp down on the asylum wave which began to rise sharply in 1999 to over 70,000 a year. Third was a liberalisation of student visas and work permits, both of which more than doubled after 1997. Finally, and most significant of all for the fabric of British life, was a decision to open the British labour market to the new eastern European and Baltic EU states, seven years before any other big EU state. As is now well known more than 1m people came after 2004.
All of these, with the exception of the primary purpose rule, had persuasive non-immigration rationales too. Foreign students helped to pay for an expanded higher education system. More nurses and doctors from abroad were vital for the NHS when public spending began to rise in 1999. Business lobbied very effectively for liberalisation, Whitehall was mainly in favour, and there was a network of NGOs and legal campaigners who also pushed to keep the door as wide as possible.
There is one more significant factor in all this: the pro-immigration, pro-diversity, assumption not just of the Cool Britannia left-of-centre but of a large part of the metropolitan middle class, who were not only comfortable with an increasingly multi-racial Britain, but also benefited economically from the cheap labour that flowed in. Meanwhile much of the political and administrative class believed that large inward flows were simply a fact of modern life.
A distinctively New Labour combination of economic and cultural liberalism was the backdrop to Britain’s great opening of the late 1990s. But notwithstanding the careless manner in which historic decisions have been taken, it would be wrong to say that things were completely made up on the hoof. There have been six major acts of Parliament relating to asylum and immigration since 1997—and Tony Blair spent a huge amount of time on asylum when popular anxiety was at its peak. There have also been anguished national debates about immigration and integration in the light of the 2001 race riots in the north of England and, of course, the 7/7 bombings. But Labour policy has been an odd mix of restriction and frenetic intervention on asylum for example, combined with benign neglect on the broader national purpose of mass immigration.
Belatedly, in the past couple of years the government has put in place a more coherent system of immigration control. There is now a points based system which should restrict work-related immigration to those people the country really needs, and electronic biometric-based border controls will soon count people in and out.
Moreover, aware of the popularity of the Tory plan for an annual immigration cap, the government is preparing to retreat from its laissez-faire approach to overall population growth. Labour has been jolted by the success of anti-mass-immigration lobby groups like Migration Watch and is now prepared to accept that overall numbers do matter. Expect to hear more on this from Alan Johnson or Gordon Brown.
But when historians come to look back on this period in 100 years time they will surely conclude that, as John Seeley said of the expansion of the British empire, we acquired a whole new population in a “fit of absence of mind.”
Analysis: Foreigner Policy is on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 8th February at 8.30pm
Hear David Goodhart discuss national identity at Bath Literature Festival: “Can you still be proud to be British?” takes place on Saturday 27 Feb, 1pm – 2pm. Further details: www.bathlitfest.org.uk/prospectbritain
David Goodhart
Labour complains that the Tories want a nightwatchman state; the Tories respond by saying Labour wants the state to run everything—such are the moronic exchanges we will wake up to each morning during the forthcoming election. But beneath such dreary accusations a more interesting argument about the nature of the modern state has developed in recent years. Labour’s “enabling state” is pitted against the Tories’ “post-bureaucratic state.” Both accept that in a modern liberal democracy, where the goal of politics is to maximise the welfare of the average citizen, the state will remain quite large. They also both acknowledge that the state often fails. Our cover story—on Tim Berners-Lee’s mission to release as much public data as possible—describes a new front in this more subtle dialogue about how to make states function better in complex societies, with more demanding citizens. In fact it even holds the promise of a new form of political interaction between citizens and the state, mediated by a class of internet whizz-kids who take that raw data and reveal to us how resources are used and power is exercised, at least in the public sector. It won’t abolish conflicts of interest or poverty or greed, and is less concerned with the private sector. But just as the old era of mass politics is running out of puff, a new computer-based forum is emerging, especially for the educated, numerate members of the generation that has grown up with the internet.
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Dan Hancox
Tomorrow’s leaders: the Conservative Future Christmas party back in 2007
“What annoys me,” says a toff, “is your perception that the Conservative party is full of toffs. I mean, do I look like a toff?” he asks, apparently rhetorically. He looks like a toff.
This isn’t how I normally spend my Saturday nights: deep in the trenches of class war, spilled champagne underfoot, the bloody theatre of conflict that is Piccadilly Circus raging heedlessly outside. In a fit of misguided journalistic curiosity, I went undercover to the Conservative Future Christmas party in early December. I wanted to see the next generation of Tory leaders do their pre-emptive general election victory dance. And I got to see it. Be careful what you wish for.
The toff in question wears a thick blond mane, an open-necked striped shirt and a ruddy burn-tan straight off the slopes. He is addressing his incredulity not to me, but a cheery young Asian guy—normally a Lib Dem, he said—who had joined the hooray of aspirant Conservative MPs smoking outside The Warwick to talk politics.
The group proceed to argue about whether Michael Howard or William Hague was the more tragic loss to the party leadership; both massively underrated, they say. “But don’t you like David Cameron as leader?” the rogue Lib Dem asks. “Don’t get me wrong, Cameron is… necessary. But George Osborne: now he’s the bloody man,” one of them replies, supported by a cascade of floppy-haired nods.
When I arrive at The Warwick at 11pm the party is already dense with shirts tucked high at the waist, and the bar’s low-lit basement a sea of tilted wine glasses. Louis from Bristol stumbles towards me, clinging on to an empty bottle of red wine like his life depends on it. He doesn’t look a day over 18, but he knows he’s had more than enough of Labour, he splutters, exasperated. “If we don’t win this time!” he barks in my ear, “if Kingswood doesn’t go blue! Well…” he’s too horrified to finish the thought, and instead pulls out his Blackberry and types “IT’S TIME TO GO BLUE” for me in capitals.
The conversation stalls as the crowded dancefloor expands, annexing our little corner. A rugby-necked ranine steps up to the raised seating area above the rabble, having apparently decided his role is to lead them in party-political prayer. Beers and arms are held aloft. Two girls stranded somewhere in this sea of white men in blazers chant “New leader!” for what feels like an eternity over a pop soundtrack, and everyone puts their beers in, musketeer style. This devolves into a refrain of “Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi!”—which may not be a specific Tory policy initiative, but is delivered no less enthusiastically. This is all leading up to the sermon’s main event: a piece of hip-hop style call-and-response:
“I say ‘Conservative,’ you say ‘win’… Conservative!” “Win!” “Conservative!” “Win!”
Arms are round shoulders now, the couple trying to tango to Lady Gaga realise the hopelessness of their task and give up, and the chanting continues. It’s time for a break. Outside, David from Kensington and Chelsea, a calm, cerebral young turk in grey polo-neck, jeans and hiking trainers, is explaining the difference between Italian corruption and British sleaze to two Italian tourists, Luca and Joe. “So you’re all about to get elected in May then?” asks Luca.
“Well, not yet, but it’s called Conservative Future for a reason: we’re going to be in power in ten years!” says David, letting himself get momentarily carried away. “We don’t always say what the leadership wants us to, but that’s why we’re technically a separate organisation. We’re not personally going to be in power just yet. But give it ten years…”
Meanwhile, to my left, one young Conservative is explaining his scepticism about joining the party to two CF members. “I vote Tory—you know I vote Tory. I’m just not a Tory member. I don’t like parties.” He pauses. “Well, I like these kinds of parties obviously! God… can you imagine what a Labour version of this would be like?”
“Well,” his friend replies, “there’d be a lot more ethnic minorities for one thing.” “Oh really?” the other replies. “I thought the Labour party was trying to make itself seem more respectable!” They laugh awkwardly, seemingly aware that even as casual racism, it doesn’t really work.
I boggle slightly and head back inside. It’s 2am, and the surly Russian bouncer has stopped checking whether people have tickets for the CF party, meaning some civilians from the bar upstairs have filtered down to join watch the young Tories at play. A group of lads in Hoxton fins and sportswear stand to one side of the dancefloor and marvel, pint glass in one hand, the other defensively pocketed, as rotund young men strapped in by leather belts dance like their fathers to “Hey Ya.” Their hips swivel arrhythmically, fingers determinedly pointing at indeterminate parts of the ceiling.
For a political party that professes itself horrified that the pre-election debate is being framed in class terms, the young Tories seem remarkably fixated on the issue. “Sorry, did you just say I was a commoner? Fuck off and die!”—is the punch-line to one bit of drunken joshing between friends.
As I shape to leave, I hover for one last cigarette. Three new acquaintances are making idle smalltalk. “Tim is such a common name…” one of the smokers is saying. He checks himself, not wanting to offend the Tim in question: “sorry, not, you know, common… I mean ‘popular’.”
“Yah but your surname is Jenkins,” his friend says through a mouthful of teeth. “That’s such a butler’s name!”
“Jenkiiiiiiins!!” They all boom happily at once, summoning an imaginary servant and the ghost of Conservative past at the same time. The declamation falls away into the West End night, nullified by the bright lights of nearby Piccadilly Circus.
“Where’s Bollinger?” someone wonders, idly.
“Bollie? She’s left I think.”
David Goodhart
Prospect's editor, David Goodhart
Twenty years on from 1989, few people still believe that goodwill and dollars alone can solve the world’s problems. But perhaps the last vestige of post-1989 utopianism has survived among the new media apostles who argue that authoritarian states can be brought low by the internet. Evgeny Morozov’s cover essay is a vivid rebuttal of that idea—best summed up by the American comedian Jon Stewart’s retort to those who think the web is freeing Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?”
David Cameron’s Tories are not so naive as to believe that Twitter will bring down tyrants, but they maintain an attractive optimism about new technologies and politics in general. Optimism is easier in opposition, but in early November Cameron’s Hugo Young lecture, on the theme “big society, rather than big state,” re-established a coherent liberal message after his rather dotty party conference speech, which almost advocated abolishing the state altogether. Listening to his lecture, it was possible to believe again that the Tories have put the Major, Hague, IDS and Howard years behind them and might combine the best of New Labour with a keener appreciation of the unintended consequences of state action. But there are reasons for scepticism too. First, it is easy to express concern about poverty and inequality to a Guardian audience.
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John Lloyd
September saw the results of the Plain Speaking Personality prize, a public poll carried out by a brandy company. X-Factor judge Simon Cowell came runner-up, and Jeremy Paxman and Sharon Osbourne joint third. The winner was a figure pre-eminent in the public’s consciousness as the Man Who Speaks His Mind, alone in a desert of political correctness and cowardice masked as tolerance: Jeremy Clarkson.
Clarkson’s celebrity is based on journalism; geeky, scruffy, oily car journalism. But he has turned that unlikely beginning into a platform for fame. His hugely popular vehicle Top Gear started its 14th series in mid-November. But zany and dramatic as the programme can be, it was only a launch pad. For Clarkson now represents a larger constituency: the seriously pissed-off-with-Labour part of England which has not spoken yet, but will in the next election. It is a world where the walking-on-eggshells demeanour of many public figures is mocked, and ministers are steamrollered for hypocrisy, weasel words and corruption with a collective retch of theatrical disgust. A friend of Clarkson’s, who spoke anonymously, said that in his right-leaning suburb “everybody loves his fight against the euphemisms, the correct-speak. I went into a pub, and overheard a conversation in which three blokes were saying: we wouldn’t have anyone else for prime minister.” Last year a petition on the Downing Street website to give him the top job attracted around 50,000 signatures, while in a 2009 YouGov poll Londoners demanded Clarkson (or Alan Sugar) as their mayor.
The popularity of Clarkson’s political views stands in marked contrast to his own attitude to politicians. At a press conference in Australia in February, he called Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot.” Then, after a break of some five months, he followed up by saying “Gordon Brown is a cunt” during a recording of Top Gear. BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow then “had a conversation” with Clarkson, but the official statement—as opaque as any diplomatic communiqué—said only that “she holds both the programme and Jeremy in high regard. After the recording she and Jeremy had a discussion about the programme as controllers and presenters often do.”
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Elizabeth Kirkwood
Cameron: "let's return powers the EU shouldn't have"
They are the political equivalent of road rage, according to YouGov’s Peter Kellner, and potentially just as destructive to a healthy democracy. It is perhaps this perception that has encouraged the pundits and journalist to push David Cameron this week, and last, with that irksome little R word: referendum. If the Lisbon treaty fails to be ratified, they want to know, will Cameron really call a referendum on Lisbon?
There is mounting Eurosceptic pressure on Cameron from within the party, and last weekend’s ‘Yes’ vote in Ireland has only upped its intensity. Of course, the question of whether he’ll call a referendum or not is, strictly speaking, a hypothetical hypothetical. If the Tories are elected. If Lisbon fails to be ratified by all 27 members of the EU.
Cameron, as you would expect at such an important hour, is choosing his words carefully. In his keynote conference speech today he maintained, implicitly at least, his commitment to a referendum on Europe: “Let’s return to democratic and accountable politics the powers the EU shouldn’t have.” But he’s using the hypothetical to his advantage: if Lisbon fails to be ratified, then he’ll push for referendum. But only if. Europe was the undoing of the premierships of both Thatcher and Major. Cameron knows he is not immune from Europe’s divisive and disastrous potential.
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Ed Howker
Cameron: ready or not, here I come
I have a political theory. It perhaps runs contrary to the thinking of the majority of serious pundits and scientists of this most inexact of sciences. And it is this: the core message of the party leadership can be defined by one thing—not what the leader says or what the spinners enchant later but, quite simply, from the refrain of the elevator music played after big speeches.
I make no guarantee as to the unfailing accuracy of this guide, but I think you’ll find it surprisingly effective. Here are a few, admittedly random, examples:
Conservative Party Conference 2004 and Michael Howard, party leader, following a bloodless coup, raises his hands anticipating applause. The music fires up, encompassing the message chosen to reflect the leadership’s determination to unite a fragmented party riven by debates about tax cuts and spending plans, Europe and the middle east. And, not least, the leadership question which dogged Iain Duncan-Smith’s years and dominated grassroots debate. Naturally, the song chosen is “A little less conversation” by Elvis Vs. DJ JXL, with that refrain: “a little less conversation, a little more action.” Very pointed.
Skip forward one year to the Labour Party Conference of 2005: Tony Blair faces “his toughest conference yet”—the commentators said—after dividing his party over Iraq and losing what was left of his reputation for honesty with an electorate who felt their prime minister was a very different man from the one elected in 1997. The song which followed his barn-storming address to the disaffected party faithful? Eric Prydz’s “Call on me”—the cover of the Steve Winwood track “Valerie,” with that ever so subtle refrain: “I’m the same boy I used to be.”
And yesterday, following David Cameron’s “aperitif” address to the Tory conference, we got to the beating heart of what the party leadership want to do this week: reach out to floating voters. Playing as Mr Cameron left the stage, therefore, was “Ready or not” by The Delfonics, a track memorably covered by The Fugees in 1996. And that core message? According to the Delfonics: “Ready or not, here I come. You can’t hide. Gonna find you, and make you want me.”
That’s as fair an approximation of Eric Pickles’s “love-bombing” strategy as any pop song will give, no?
David Goodhart
Prospect's new issue: what do the Tories really really want?
Amid the din of the party conference season it is easy to forget the dirty little secret of British politics: that the underlying differences in philosophy and even policy between the three main parties remain narrower than at any time in the modern age. All parties, reflecting majority public opinion, want a regulated market economy flanked by decent, tax-funded public services (with the state spending 40 to 45 per cent of GDP, once normal economic service is resumed), and all parties—following the Tories’ leftward shift—lay claim to the term “progressive,” aiming to improve the life chances of those at the bottom and even narrow the gap between rich and poor.
After Labour embraced the 1980s (the turn to the free market) the Tories have recently made their peace with the 1960s (race and gender equality, environmentalism and so on). The Tories talk grandly about transforming the British state (see Julian Glover’s cover story), but any party needs an election-time myth, and in reality their plans amount to a few small adjustments to the New Labour settlement. There is little that David Cameron would disagree with in Gordon Brown’s testament of belief published in this issue. If Labour loses the election, as most people expect, it will not be because the electorate have tired of its centrist politics but because they got bored with the people implementing them. And the idea that the recession, or the retrenchment in state spending that it calls for, is opening a new divide in British politics is also false—is it such a big deal if we halve the deficit in three years rather than five?
This is no cause for regret. An intelligent, unideological, technocratic politics is what is required to solve the many serious problems facing Britain and the world. One of those problems—what to do about Britain’s overmighty finance sector—earned Prospect a deluge of publicity last month when Adair Turner, our leading technocratic public intellectual, confronted high finance with some uncomfortable truths in these pages. The big idea this month seems to be Amartya Sen’s 20-year-old notion of “capabilities”—a more subtle version of the old left-wing idea of positive liberty. Several writers, including the prime minister, cite it as a guiding light for rethinking the centre-left. Nothing wrong with using new words to describe perennial themes, but the idea of capabilities is too easily bent to very different agendas. Most of these writers also agree that Labour has failed to renew British democracy. But perhaps in a post-political age the problem lies less with the apathetic masses and more with the unrealistic expectations and hyperbolic language of the political class.
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