Floating Voters
Janan Ganesh writing in The Financial Times doubts the ability of the Labour Party to govern the UK effectively and that if elected, the leadership would simply collapse under the strain of having to balance the nation's spending books.
I suspect he's right you know and it will be interesting to see how many voters come around to the same opinion between now and polling day on 7th May 2015.
Austerity will break any Labour government
By Janan Ganesh - The Financial Times
Party’s votes are already floating to leftwing alternatives, and this is before Ed Miliband has made a single cut
©PAA
And now they have it. For five years British leftwingers awaited a popular reaction against austerity, one that moved beyond protest to something with governing potential. Their dream was a homegrown revolution but, as ever, the British masses were a terrible disappointment to them.
So they looked to the continent. Los Indignados seemed to peter out in Spain. Then the election of François Hollande as president of France excited them to a degree they prefer not to recall: he has ended up governing as a deficit-cutter. And Matteo Renzi’s premiership of Italy is ambiguous, with its mandate for letting up on austerity but also for structural reform.
Greece has finally thrown up something to which leftwing hopes can be fastened. Strictly speaking, the parallels between the two countries are almost nil. Without a currency of its own, Greece has endured a vicious internal devaluation. Britain has not. Neither the UK’s economic context nor our voting system would allow a party like Syriza to get very far. Only a zealot would see its election victory on Sunday as auguring anything over here.
There are plenty of those about. The left see a chance to build a “real” Labour party. The newspaper columns are flowing. There are trade union murmurs. On Monday, 15 Labour MPs signed a statement calling for “an alternative to the continuation of austerity and spending cuts till 2019-20”.
These are mere traces of what is to come if Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition, becomes prime minister in May. His party is not ready to govern without money. No recent Labour administration has cut spending by as much and for as long as he intends, and the nearest precedents are baleful. In the 1950s, Labour levied prescription charges to ease financial problems in the National Health Service. This brought cabinet resignations and ultimately the end of the government. In 1976, a Labour prime minister told his activists: “You cannot spend your way out of recession.” What they did spend was the next decade at war with each other.
Now imagine the dissent during five years of fiscal tightening. With each departmental cut and public-sector pay freeze, anger that currently broils at the wilder edges of the extra-parliamentary left will creep into the party proper. Serious MPs, prominent ministers, normally biddable union bosses — all will feel their skin crawl as they see their leader do the opposite of what he and they came into politics for. Every vexed MP will matter, for Mr Miliband is unlikely to win a comfortable parliamentary majority, if he wins one at all.
His central achievement has been the unity of his party, elusive in previous spells in opposition. But look closely and this unity is the stupor of mutual reassurance. Labour has not been told much it does not want to hear. This ploy will work until the day a Miliband government has to give a budget, perhaps as soon as this summer, at which point reality will impose itself on people who have been allowed to daydream for five years. The anti-austerity Podemos party might by then be on its way to “doing a Syriza” in Spain, offering Labour radicals another totem to convene around.
The confounding thing is that the agitators will have a point, politically if not intellectually. It is becoming unhealthy to be a party of the moderate left, at least in countries with budgets to fix. Go along with cuts, and angry voters start to look elsewhere. If multi-party television debates take place before the election, Mr Miliband could share a stage with three parties who outstrip him on the left: the Greens, the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru of Wales. The increasingly statist UK Independence party might qualify as a fourth. Labour votes are already floating away to these alternatives, and this is before Mr Miliband has made a solitary cut. If the fragmentation continues, an electoral case for crude left populism will gather. Labour used to have a thick wall of grown-ups — the Old Labour right — that screened the party from the excesses of the wider left. The wall is thinning.
It has become trite, and no less true for that, to say the Conservatives are on course to fall apart over Europe as badly as they split over free trade in the Victorian age. Less well-worn are predictions of a Labour rupture, but the circumstances seem to make one plausible if the party loses in May, and inevitable if it wins.
“We know it, we just don’t talk about it,” says one insider about this gruesome fate. Tories deal with the prospect of their own fracture in the same way. Suggest that this is an election worth losing, and both parties gamely insist there is no such thing in politics. We’ll see.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
And now they have it. For five years British leftwingers awaited a popular reaction against austerity, one that moved beyond protest to something with governing potential. Their dream was a homegrown revolution but, as ever, the British masses were a terrible disappointment to them.
So they looked to the continent. Los Indignados seemed to peter out in Spain. Then the election of François Hollande as president of France excited them to a degree they prefer not to recall: he has ended up governing as a deficit-cutter. And Matteo Renzi’s premiership of Italy is ambiguous, with its mandate for letting up on austerity but also for structural reform.
Greece has finally thrown up something to which leftwing hopes can be fastened. Strictly speaking, the parallels between the two countries are almost nil. Without a currency of its own, Greece has endured a vicious internal devaluation. Britain has not. Neither the UK’s economic context nor our voting system would allow a party like Syriza to get very far. Only a zealot would see its election victory on Sunday as auguring anything over here.
There are plenty of those about. The left see a chance to build a “real” Labour party. The newspaper columns are flowing. There are trade union murmurs. On Monday, 15 Labour MPs signed a statement calling for “an alternative to the continuation of austerity and spending cuts till 2019-20”.
These are mere traces of what is to come if Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition, becomes prime minister in May. His party is not ready to govern without money. No recent Labour administration has cut spending by as much and for as long as he intends, and the nearest precedents are baleful. In the 1950s, Labour levied prescription charges to ease financial problems in the National Health Service. This brought cabinet resignations and ultimately the end of the government. In 1976, a Labour prime minister told his activists: “You cannot spend your way out of recession.” What they did spend was the next decade at war with each other.
Now imagine the dissent during five years of fiscal tightening. With each departmental cut and public-sector pay freeze, anger that currently broils at the wilder edges of the extra-parliamentary left will creep into the party proper. Serious MPs, prominent ministers, normally biddable union bosses — all will feel their skin crawl as they see their leader do the opposite of what he and they came into politics for. Every vexed MP will matter, for Mr Miliband is unlikely to win a comfortable parliamentary majority, if he wins one at all.
His central achievement has been the unity of his party, elusive in previous spells in opposition. But look closely and this unity is the stupor of mutual reassurance. Labour has not been told much it does not want to hear. This ploy will work until the day a Miliband government has to give a budget, perhaps as soon as this summer, at which point reality will impose itself on people who have been allowed to daydream for five years. The anti-austerity Podemos party might by then be on its way to “doing a Syriza” in Spain, offering Labour radicals another totem to convene around.
The confounding thing is that the agitators will have a point, politically if not intellectually. It is becoming unhealthy to be a party of the moderate left, at least in countries with budgets to fix. Go along with cuts, and angry voters start to look elsewhere. If multi-party television debates take place before the election, Mr Miliband could share a stage with three parties who outstrip him on the left: the Greens, the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru of Wales. The increasingly statist UK Independence party might qualify as a fourth. Labour votes are already floating away to these alternatives, and this is before Mr Miliband has made a solitary cut. If the fragmentation continues, an electoral case for crude left populism will gather. Labour used to have a thick wall of grown-ups — the Old Labour right — that screened the party from the excesses of the wider left. The wall is thinning.
It has become trite, and no less true for that, to say the Conservatives are on course to fall apart over Europe as badly as they split over free trade in the Victorian age. Less well-worn are predictions of a Labour rupture, but the circumstances seem to make one plausible if the party loses in May, and inevitable if it wins.
“We know it, we just don’t talk about it,” says one insider about this gruesome fate. Tories deal with the prospect of their own fracture in the same way. Suggest that this is an election worth losing, and both parties gamely insist there is no such thing in politics. We’ll see.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
