It hasn't been a good few weeks for Gordon Brown. In the space of a mere two months, Labour has suffered a sharp reversal of fortune in the opinion polls, and now lags behind the Tories by a significant distance, while Brown's personal ratings have plummeted. OK, such volatile swings could very well be an indicator of 'soft' public opinion - ie, many voters may not really have very well defined views on their party preferences or on Brown as PM and could be easily susceptible to the effect of sensationalist media coverage of short-term 'crises'. But I'm not so sure these recent developments can be dismissed this lightly.
For some time now voting behaviour theorists have argued that electoral outcomes depend critically on 'valence' issues - on voter judgements of the relative competence of rival parties and leaders to govern well - rather than on ideological conflicts. In this sense, September 1992 was a hugely significant turning point in British politics, since the currency crisis of 'Black Wednesday' at that time destroyed the Conservative Party's longstanding reputation for competence in managing the economy. Almost immediately, Labour overtook them in the polls, especially in terms of competence assessments, and has retained the advantage pretty well ever since. So is Gordon's bleak autumn New Labour's own equivalent of Black Wednesday? The Northern Rock crisis, the lost HMRC data discs, the allegations of sleazy party funding (how on earth could the relevant party officials have thought what they were doing conformed with the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000?) - and above all, perhaps, the impression of having run away from an election that the party would most probably have won, have all served to damage Labour's standing with the electorate. Vaccilating, bungling and possibly even corrupt: if these impressions stick, the future is likely to be very tough for Labour. Add to that the prospect of the most significant downturn in the global economy for 15 or more years, and the next couple of years don't look too rosy.
Anthony King (Essex University) sets out the trends in public opinion in a nutshell here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/30/npoll230.xml
Matthew Parris has gone so far as to suggest that Gordon Brown might not last the next two and a half years as PM. What do you think?
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As a postscript to the previous post, I've just been sent this interesting article which gives a view from the other side of the Atlantic.
Not Your Father's Tories
The Cameron conservatives look like winners.
by Reihan Salam
Weekly Standard
12/03/2007, Volume 013, Issue 12
British conservatives have spent a decade clawing their way back to respectability, and they finally look like a government-in-waiting. This is thanks to their leader, David Cameron, a baby-faced Old Etonian who listens to indie rock, occasionally rides a bicycle to work, and loves windmills so much he affixed one to his house. But while Cameron may come across as a bobo caricature, charmingly self-effacing yet troublingly eager to seem cool, in the last two years he has gone from shallow naïf to sure-footed statesman. He has worked tirelessly at "indigenizing" the Tories, bringing them back in step with a country that had grown more socially liberal, more ethnic, more frankly emotional, and more anti-American.
Without fully taking up the mantle of a Michael Moore Conservative--as the latest version of the anti-American Tory "Little Englanders" were dubbed in these pages in May 2004--Cameron took great pains to make it clear that unlike Tony Blair he'd never be George Bush's poodle and that his brand of conservatism was the kindest and gentlest yet. Diehard Thatcherites resented Cameron's efforts to "decontaminate" the conservative brand, but there was no denying that decontamination was necessary. Poll after poll found that popular stances on crime and immigration became less popular when they were adopted by the Tories.
Cameron's initial aim was a conservative party pitched directly to London's media elite: strong on civil liberties, socially liberal, and highly compassionate (i.e., eager to feel your pain). By presenting himself as the true heir to Blair, a friend of the middle class who wouldn't dare touch New Labour's mightily expanded state, Cameron sought to project that the Tories were innocuous. Hey--we love babies, too! And the environment! Cameron's big tent was big enough to include antiglobalization heartthrob and playboy Zac Goldsmith, the kind of green who thinks we have a lot to learn from Paleolithic man.
There was a certain logic to this approach, as much of the erosion in conservative support had happened among upper-middle-class suburbanites in the south, traditionally the Tory heartland. Like the Rockefeller Republicans who've flocked to the Democrats since Bill Clinton, these voters were particularly turned off by the conservatives' "nasty party" image, and it was crucial to win them back from Labour. During Blair's waning days, the approach seemed to work. The conservatives regularly trumped New Labour in the polls. But Tony Blair was even more personally unpopular in Britain than President Bush was in the United States, and the conservatives were outpolling Blair far more than they were beating Labour. It was inevitable that Blair's successor and longtime rival, Gordon Brown--a dour ex-socialist Scot who spends his spare time reading Gertrude Himmelfarb on the Victorians--would enjoy some kind of honeymoon when he took over in late June.
The early months of Brown's tenure looked like a slow-motion disaster for Cameron. It seemed as though Brown could finally and utterly obliterate the conservatives. By handling a series of botched terror attacks with calm authority, Brown represented everything Blair was not--there was no high-flown rhetoric about the threat to civilization. Instead, there was an understated moral seriousness. And in relations with the widely despised Bush, Brown managed to maintain a respectful distance and inch away from the British commitment to Iraq without causing a public rupture. Brown also borrowed deftly from the conservatives, by calling for patriotic education and a border police force to stem the tide of illegal migrants. Brown proved so politically successful that plans were put in place for a snap election. Writing in the Daily Mail in late July, the conservative columnist Peter Oborne painted a particularly bleak picture: After a fourth consecutive general election defeat, conservatives would likely split into the unreconstructed right-wing Euroskeptics and a frightened faction of centrist pragmatists, many of whom would defect to the parties of the left.
Brown had outflanked the Cameron conservatives from the right, mostly by playing the role of a serious adult to perfection. Cameron decided that the only viable strategy was to make a renewed and vigorous case for, well, conservatism. Stranger still is that it worked, resonating with a broad middle class that had abandoned the conservatives a decade ago. Indeed, a handful of polls now show the conservatives with enough of an edge over Labour to win a minuscule majority. While the Cameron conservatives are by no means zealous supply-siders, the call for (responsible and measured) tax cuts proved potent. In early October, Cameron gave a startlingly confident speech that essentially dared Brown to call an immediate election. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the energized conservatives could, at the very least, extract a pound of flesh from Labour, reducing their majority--even possibly jeopardizing it--and anything short of an expanded majority would have made Brown look like a loser next to his predecessor--a man with a preternatural sense for the mood of Middle England. And so, as the polls shifted sharply against Labour, the cautious Brown made the decision not to tempt fate. Ever since, the very lucky conservatives have made great hay out of Brown's cowardice.
Commentators like Michael Barone and John O'Sullivan have called this a vindication of the traditional approach: Tax cuts sell! But it is rather more complicated. It took time for the Tory party to rebuild its credibility. Without a serious process of reinvention, it's likely that
the latest promise of tax cuts would have fallen on deaf ears. Moreover, Labour's failures to reform the public services despite massive infusions of cash have made the public increasingly skeptical about the promises of statism and thus increasingly receptive to some aspects of the traditional conservative message.
Conservatives have made most of their gains in the prosperous southeast of England, the British region that is least dependent on government largesse. The Blair boom in financial services has transformed London into a magnet for foreign billionaires and plucky Polish plumbers. But this same prosperity has brought new anxieties. Thanks to strict environmental regulations, favored by many Tory traditionalists who put great stock in preserving the English landscape, housing prices have skyrocketed, and so have traffic congestion and the cost of living. Just as in the sprawling suburbs of America's biggest cities, the terrain of politics has shifted to these quality-of-life questions. Railing against government simply doesn't have the resonance it once did.
Cameron's new conservatism is tailor--made for these new times. In October, he gave a speech about managing "population growth." Now, at its heart this speech was about immigration, a traditional preoccupation of Tories. Though most of the British public favors curbs on immigration, they've rejected conservative rhetoric on the issue for years. Cameron was careful to talk about immigration--or rather "net migration"--in a broader context of environmental impact. He was thus also able to talk about family breakdown, which also drives the relentless demand for new housing units, which also leads to further encroachments on pristine rural land. There was nothing that could be characterized as racist about the speech--a charge that has often followed Tory initiatives on immigration--indeed, Cameron spent much of the speech praising immigrants and their economic impact, and he has taken a significant role in recruiting ethnic minority candidates for the party. Rather, the speech spoke to the anxieties of an affluent yet crowded country that is experiencing the downsides of robust economic growth.
So what exactly is distinctively "conservative" about all this? Isn't Cameron's just a glorified form of pothole politics? Danny Kruger, one of Cameron's key advisers, offered an answer in a brilliant pamphlet titled On Fraternity. He argues that Blair's New Labour project aimed to use the redistributive apparatus of the state to emancipate the individual from burdensome ties of family and neighborhood. Its radical project was to replace them with freely chosen ones defined by shared interests and tastes. For Kruger, conservatism must aim to restore the health of families and neighborhoods that have been badly undermined by statist excess. This can't be done by simply abolishing the state institutions. They must be remade in the image of the neighborhoods they serve by, for example, putting parents in charge of schools and local voters in charge of the police. Over time, the habits of self-government--as opposed to the habits of dependency--can be restored. Cameron's fuzzy talk about choice and civil society, which sounds so suspiciously Blairite, means something else entirely: It is about getting citizens to stand on their own two feet.
Having recognized that Brown has a solid reputation for economic competence (a reputation that, to the delight of the Tories, has taken a severe beating of late), Cameron and his advisers have focused on the ways in which economic life shapes family life, and vice versa. To fight poverty, Cameron is arguing that the state needs to strengthen families, not weaken them, even if that means special tax treatment and other forms of affirmative support. Indeed, there's been much talk of importing Wisconsin-style welfare reform, one of the great (if expensive) triumphs of American conservatism. Cameron's managed to suggest this without sounding divisive or in any way "nasty." The so-called "Cameroonians" are in a sense the true heirs to the American neoconservatives of the 1970s. They are sensitive to the role culture plays in perpetuating poverty. They are cautious about the power of the state and yet not allergic to using the state to meliorist ends. Perhaps most important, they enthusiastically embrace modern Britain and not Britain as it was in 1950.
Reihan Salam is an associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly
In terms of the voters who are change their preference is Gordon Brown likely to appeal? Is that really the question?
Can he recover from the past few months - yes - probably if he hangs in there and makes sweeping changes - and possibly - does like Major (in sacking Lamont)- sacks his friend - Darling would have to go to give back any possibilty of recovery. It is never a question of actual responsibility it is a question of seemed responsibility. If the details of every male worker in the UK had been lost - would we be being advised to do nothing - I think we would be being advised to change our bank accounts - or the banks would be changing our bank account numbers - it is mainly women that receive Child Benefit (that is who it is paid to unless you specify otherwise) If the bank details of the top 100 CEO's in the country had been lost - how loud would the shouting be? (Bear in mind this is - I think - the only NON MEANS TESTED benefit therefore just about everyone with children gets it.)
Can Brown win the next election - there he has a bigger problem - is he attractive enough? (It matters - he has to look like a nice friendly man - he comes across as dated and gruff). Where are the women ("Blair's babes" was an appalling name - but with the absence of as many high profile women what is noticed is their absence in comparision with the Blair premiership) Can he see the big picture - he seems to be interested in the detail - And do people beleive he is Prime Minister (this week when referring to the Prime Minister the presenters on TODAY referred to Blair - telling isn't it). Brown was believable as a chancellor - he should be able to make the change.
Leadership has changed in the last 20 years - the leaders need to embrace that - I am not entirely sure Brown has.
I'm not certain a lot of this isn't media and Westminster hype. We were out today campaiging to keep post offices open and not a single person mentioned the crises. That said, if the media keeps saying it's like the Major years I guess people will begin to gain that perception.
The biggest problem for the Labour Party is that it has lost the moral high ground over tackling the Ashcroft money.
Still, whilst things are generally ok in the economy and areas that impact on people's day to day lives, the electorate and the party aren't going to risk change. Brown needs to behave sensibly though and not pursue an extension to 28 days without trial or the PLP will erupt and Miliband has been playing a clever game.
Its a shame "new" Labour is sliding and Gordons tenure as PM seems to be in jeopardy. As the usual process in British politics a lot of people are already calling for his resignation. Perharps, Brown shouldnt have been so hasty about moving into number 10 and allowed Tony Blair to finish off his pranks leaving him with a fresher government.After more than 150 days of the Brown government, the term "NEW LABOUR" is anonoymous to disaster, in the last four weeks we have seen our tax information go missing, complaints about defence, more water pollution, a treaacheous election panic and incompetent brown trustees. At least with Blair these situations did arise but they were manageable and not disastrous.So for those that couldnt wait to see th back of Tony Blair, the Brown government is faring no better than the conservatives were in the eearly new labour days. By the way what ever happened to the NEW LABOUR buzz word? did it die with Blairs departure or when it replaced with a more calculated but less efficient "Brown's Vision for Britain" ...
It’s a shame "new" Labour is sliding and Gordons tenure as PM seems to be in jeopardy. As the usual process in British politics a lot of people are already calling for his resignation. Perharps, Brown shouldn’t have been so hasty about moving into number 10 and allowed Tony Blair to finish off his pranks leaving him with a fresher government. After more than 150 days of the Brown government, labour party is synonymous to disaster; in the last four weeks we have seen our tax information go missing, complaints about defence, more water pollution, a treacherous election panic and incompetent brown trustees. At least with Blair these situations did arise but they were manageable and not disastrous. So for those who couldn’t wait to see the back of Blair, the Brown government is faring no better than the conservatives were in the early new labour days. By the way what ever happened to the NEW LABOUR buzz word? Did it die with Blair’s departure or was it replaced with a more calculated but less efficient "Brown's Vision for Britain" ...
Couldn't agree more. I called today for him to be fired
The potential problem facing Labour is set out even more starkly by looking at polling trends since 1992:
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/trends/voting-all-trends.shtml
The traditional view is that governments suffer mid term dips in popularity but then recover as they ride the up-slope of the economic cycle.
That pattern no longer works. Between the April 92 election and September 92 the Tories polled in the low 40s. They fell to the mid 30s after Black Wednesday and crashed through the floor to the high 20s from the spring of 93. They recovered to the low thirties but were then basically stuck there for more than a decade - right up to the moment GB bottled the election.
I suspect this is something to do with partisan dealignment and the way voters see the role of the state diminishing in their lives. Essentially, they will tolerate a government of whatever shade as long as it doesnt mess up the finances (or as someone once said, it's the economy, stupid).
If the image of incompetence sticks to Labour then it could take them years to recover - as long as the Tories have repaired their damaged brand.
I'm not convinced the high politics of Reihan Salam's piece has much relevance beyond a small step in the process - convincing the opinion formers that the party has a credible narrative.
A more basic problem for the Tories is getting to the point where the majority of middle england doesnt either laugh or grimmace at a sentence containing the phrase "Conservative government"...
The Tories have another problem. The electoral balance is stacked against them. Not because of in-built bias in the allocation of HoC constituencies. Rather because of an unfortunate pincer. Organisationally the Tories are dead from the Wash upwards which makes it very difficult for them to win back votes in what ought to be key Northern battlegrounds against Labour. And in the South (South West in particular), the Lib Dem successes of 1997 and 2001 have left a wodge of seats that the Tories ought to be able to take for granted but which are now out of sight - Lib Dem incumbents are notoriously difficult to dislodge.
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