Saturday, June 02, 2012

Budget shambles bodes ill for Tories' election prospects

It was of course New Labour, in the shape of former North Tyneside MP Stephen Byers' erstwhile spin doctor Jo Moore, who gave the phrase 'burying bad news' to the English language with her infamous email on the afternoon of 9/11.

But to be fair, it was neither her nor even her party which first invented the concept.  Her mistake was simply to be too brutally explicit about a practice that all modern governments have to a greater or lesser extent engaged in.

This current one is no exception, although its methods of news management at times lack the subtlety that, Ms Moore aside, was often the hallmark of New Labour’s.

This week it appeared to decide that the best such method would be to get as much bad news as possible out of the way before the Jubilee weekend, perhaps in the hope that four days of patriotic partying will mean it is all forgotten by Wednesday.

In this sense it reminded me of one of the standard news management techniques employed by governments of right and left throughout my time reporting on Westminster.

Each year, without fail, the last afternoon before the start of the summer recess would see hundreds of parliamentary answers covering all manner of embarrassing subjects dumped in the Press Gallery - just as most of us were preparing to toast the end of the political year over a few jars.

Then again, if you are going to be forced into the embarrassment of conducting no fewer than three U-turns over measures announced in the Budget, you may as well get them out there in the course of the same 48-hour period.

And if in so doing you can also manage to distract attention from the fact that your Culture Secretary sent James Murdoch a congratulatory message on the progress of his takeover bid for BSkyB on the day the said minister was given responsibility for deciding the outcome of it, then so much the better.

Cynical?  Well, it sort of goes with the territory.  But the point is, so is much of the general population when it comes to politics these days, leaving a question mark over whether such obvious news management techniques actually work any more.

Whether it was Chancellor George Osborne who was trying to take the heat off Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt or perhaps even vice-versa, both men have ended the week looking somewhat diminished.

Mr Hunt’s position remains the most precarious of the two.  Although Prime Minister David Cameron continues to insist he has done nothing wrong, Labour is to force a Commons vote on whether he has breached the ministerial code.

He may survive that ordeal, but he surely cannot survive too many more embarrassing revelations about his links with the Murdoch Empire and his obvious cheerleading of the BskyB bid.

But while Mr Hunt’s recent travails have probably put an end to his hopes of one day succeeding Mr Cameron, Mr Osborne’s has undoubtedly been the greater fall from grace.

Okay, so his job is not under any immediate threat, but his reputation as the Tories’ strategic genius - even his opponent Ed Balls once called him the best politician in the Tory Party – is probably damaged beyond repair.

Did no-one tell him it was not such a great idea for a seriously wealthy, Old Etonian Chancellor to slap a tax increase on a product which, rightly or wrongly, is largely associated with the ‘working man?’

Did no-one tell him that cutting off a key source of funding to charities at a time when the Tories are trying to build a ‘Big Society’ was not exactly joined-up government?

For all the sound and fury surrounding phone hacking and the Leveson Inquiry, the Conservatives will not ultimately win or lose the next election over the question of whether Mr Cameron got too close to Mr Murdoch and his lieutenants.

They will win or lose it on Mr Osborne’s handling of the economy, and specifically on whether he has managed to tackle the deficit and get UK plc growing again.

With the current Parliament now approaching its half-way point, this year’s Budget needed to be a success, providing a springboard for the recovery the Tories hope will see them through to victory in 2015.

The fact that it has now turned into a shambles of the highest order does not augur well for the government’s prospects.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Clegg fires welcome warning shot over regional pay

When the history of David Cameron’s government comes to be written, the Budget delivered by Chancellor George Osborne on 21 March may well be seen as a decisive turning point in its fortunes

Whether it was the pasty tax, the granny tax, the tax on charitable giving or the abolition of the 50p rate, those looking for something to criticise in the Chancellor’s package found plenty of things to choose from.

But of all the measures announced by Mr Osborne two months ago, surely the most pernicious as far as the North-East is concerned was the proposal to introduce regional pay rates – paying teachers and other public sector staff in Newcastle less than people doing the same jobs in London.

Far from seeing the prosperity gap between richer and poorer regions as an evil which needs to be addressed, the idea of regional pay takes such inequality as an incontrovertible fact of life and then threatens to institutionalise it throughout the entire British economy.

Despite the efforts of some North-East MPs and union leaders, the proposal has received little national attention up until now, demonstrating once again the London-centricity of our national media.

But that may be about to change.  For the question of regional pay now appears to be playing into the much wider political narrative concerning the longer-term future of the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition.

In what can only be seen as a shot across Mr Osborne’s bows, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg warned this week that his party could not sign up to a policy that would exacerbate the North-South divide.

It seems that regional pay has now joined the growing list of issues, alongside Europe, House of Lords reform and Rupert Murdoch, where the two parts of the Coalition are singing from increasingly varying hymn sheets.

Speaking to the National Education Trust in London Mr Clegg said: “Nothing has been decided and I feel very, very strongly as an MP in South Yorkshire, with a lot of people in public services, we are not going to be able simply willy-nilly to exacerbate a North-South divide.

“I think people should be reassured we are not going to rush headlong in imposing a system from above which if it was done in the way sometimes described would be totally unjust because it would penalise some of the people working in some of the most difficult areas.”

Perhaps the most heartening aspect of Monday’s speech was simply hearing a senior minister – the Deputy Prime Minister no less – talking about the North-South divide again.

It became practically a banned subject under Tony Blair, who first attempted to dismiss it as a "myth,” then tried to con the region into thinking something was being done about it by inventing a spurious target to narrow the gap between the three richest regions and the six poorest.

In one sense, Mr Clegg’s intervention is not unexpected given his own status as a South Yorkshire MP in what is a genuinely three-way marginal constituency.

Mr Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell has stated that Mr Clegg's only hope of retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat at the next election is to join the Conservative Party, and even making allowances for Alastair’s obvious partisanship, I’ve a sneaking suspicion he may be right,

But in the meantime, it is clearly in the Lib Dem leader's interests to try to put some clear yellow water between himself and the Tories on issues with a particular relevance to the Northern regions.

In view of the Lib Dems’ dismal performance in local elections in the North since the party joined the Coalition in 2010, it is surely not a moment too soon.

Mr Blair’s indifference to the whole issue of regional disparities was partly responsible for the Lib Dems’ dramatic surge in support in the region between 1999 and 2007, with Labour-held seats like Newcastle Central, Blaydon and Durham City briefly becoming realistic targets.

Meanwhile at local government level, the party took control of Newcastle from Labour, and actually managed to hang on to it for seven years before being swept away in the post-Coalition backwash of May 2011.

It will be a long way back for the party to reach those giddy heights again, still further if it is to mount a serious challenge for additional parliamentary seats in the region.

This week, however, Mr Clegg might just have taken the first step along the road.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

A renewal of vows? Pull the other one

There is a school of thought that says that once a government gets itself into a position where it needs a relaunch, the brand is probably already so badly tarnished as to render the whole exercise pointless.

To be fair, the Coalition is probably not at that point yet. It is only two years into its existence, and governments of a far older vintage have come back strongly from similar periods of mid-term blues before now.

But the largely negative reaction to this week’s relaunch, with Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech at its centrepiece, does suggest that the government’s current difficulties go deeper than merely a run of bad headlines.

Coming in the wake of a disastrous Budget, a dismal set of local election results, and the continuing slow drip of damaging revelations from the Leveson Inquiry, it seems the Coalition is currently suffering from a bad case of the political Reverse Midas Touch.

Three major criticisms have been made of the legislative package announced by Her Majesty in what, for her, was surely the least eagerly-awaited public engagement of this her Diamond Jubilee year.

The first was that, with only 16 Bills, it was ‘too thin,’ but for my part, I wonder whether this was not in fact a point in its favour.

Over the past two decades, we have been subjected to an increasing deluge of legislation, for instance the 21 criminal justice bills spewed out by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s administrations over the course of 13 years.

A Conservative-led government, committed to reducing the burden of regulation and shrinking the size of the state, should perhaps have made more of a virtue of this year’s relative paucity.

The second most oft-heard criticism this week was that there was little or nothing in the programme specifically directed towards tackling the country’s current economic difficulties or producing a programme for growth.

But this, surely, is a category error.  Budgets, not Queen’s Speeches, are where you set out your economic policy, and Labour leader Ed Miliband should perhaps have known better than to make the main focus of his attack.

The third main criticism of the Speech – and the biggest one as far as most Tory backbenchers are concerned – was that it concentrated too much on Lib Dem hobby-horses such as House of Lords reform and not enough on issues that mat

Again, this depends on your point of view.  A second chamber elected by proportional representation from region-wide constituencies could well provide a stronger voice for regions such as the North-East – but I can well understand why the Tories, in particular, would not want that.

For me, the most fundamental flaw in Wednesday’s speech was not that it was too thin, too lacking in economic content or too Liberal Democrat, but that it lacked a unifying narrative which would give people a reason to support the government.

Say what you like about Mr Blair, his Queen’s Speeches never suffered from this deficiency, even if, as time went on, they tended to be more about protecting people from nightmares than giving them dreams of a better future.

Perhaps the reason it lacked a unifying theme because it was less the product of one man’s over-arching vision and more the product of compromise between the government’s two constituent parties.

In this respect, the most interesting political story of the week was not the Speech, but Prime Minister David Cameron’s interview with the Daily Mail in which he bemoaned his lack of freedom of action to do the things he really wanted.

What was especially notable about this is that, while Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg loudly and often complains about the Conservatives, Mr Cameron very rarely does the same about the Lib Dems.

Yet here was the Prime Minister saying:  “There is a growing list of things that I want to do but can’t…..there is a list of things that I am looking forward to doing if I can win an election and run a Conservative-only government.”

This week’s relaunch had been billed in advance by some cynics as the Coalition’s “renewal of vows,” but Mr Cameron’s interview shows this to be well wide of the mark.

In truth, it seems to be heading all the more rapidly for the divorce courts.

Saturday, May 05, 2012

Johnson the real winner once again

You can look at yesterday's local election results purely in terms of the 400 or so council seats lost by the Conservatives and the 800-plus gained by Labour.

You can look at them in terms of national share of the vote, with Labour opening up a seven-point lead over the Tories that if repeated in a general election would put Ed Miliband comfortably in Number 10.

You can look at them in terms of the almost wholesale rejection of the government's plans for a network of powerfully elected mayors in our major cities, not least in Newcastle where the idea was rejected by a majority of almost 2-1.

But whichever way you choose to look at them, it's already pretty clear that Thursday was a very bad night for the Coalition.

It was always likely that the Tories would try to get us to look at the results through the prism of their star performer Boris Johnson's ultimately successful re-election campaign for the London Mayoralty.

But this really won't wash.  Johnson is a political one-off, and so, in a different sense, is his Labour opponent Ken Livingstone, who found himself deserted in this election by a significant element within his own party.

Although in the short-term Mr Johnson's narrow win provides the Conservatives with a convenient fig-leaf for their wider failure up and down the land, in the longer-term his victory is a disaster for David Cameron.

Once again, Boris has proved that he is the proven winner in the Tory ranks, in marked contrast to a leader who couldn't even score an outright election win against the exhausted volcano that was Gordon Brown in 2010.

In one sense yesterday's results were entirely predictable given the catalogue of disasters that the government has visited upon itself lately.

Mr Cameron will hope he can draw a line under it all in time-honoured fashion, with a relaunch of the Coalition - or as some are calling it, a renewal of vows – likely to come as early as the next fortnight.

This will be followed by a wide-ranging summer reshuffle that could see Ken Clarke and Andrew Lansley thanked for their service and replaced by younger, more media-savvy operators such as Grant Shapps and Chris Grayling.

But even this poses difficulties for Mr Cameron, with the long-planned promotion of Jeremy Hunt having to be put on hold pending his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.

For my part, I wonder whether something deeper than mere mid-term blues is at work here - whether a public that was initially disposed to give the Coalition the benefit of the doubt has now started to do the opposite.

It is surely significant that, while 12 months ago the Tory vote held up as the Lib Dems bore the brunt of voters' anger over the austerity measures, this time round they were both punished equally.

Equally ominous for the Conservatives is the rise and rise of the UK Independence Party, which took 13pc of the national vote in a set of elections where it traditionally makes little impact.

If UKIP can start taking as many votes off the Conservatives in a general election, it might even one day force them to embrace the merits of proportional representation

Mr Miliband, though, will refuse to get carried away by any of this.

Six months ago I thought the public had by and large made up its mind about him, but maybe they are taking another look and liking what they see.

The biggest encouragement for the Labour leader is the fact that the party appears to be on the march beyond its traditional strongholds.

Not only is it winning back bellweather Midlands cities like Derby and Birmingham that will be crucial to its general election chances, but also more southerly councils such as Harlow, Plymouth and Great Yarmouth.

As for the North-East, having rejected regional government in 2004 it has now rejected the nearest thing to it, a Newcastle city region led by a powerful, Boris-style elected mayor.

While I am no great fan of presidential-style politics, it is hard to see how the region can compete effectively for its share of the national cake without such powerful advocates.

Fear of change, the desire to stick to the devil you know, remains a powerful factor in determining political outcomes, and Thursday’s mayoral referendum was no exception.

And if there is a crumb of comfort anywhere for Mr Cameron in yesterday’s results, it may well be in that.
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Saturday, April 28, 2012

The end of the beginning

Honeymoon period is doubtless an overworked term in politics – but all governments to some extent or other tend to enjoy a period of time in which the prevailing public attitude towards them is one of general goodwill.

Tony Blair was lucky enough that his lasted nearly five years, though that was in part down to the general uselessness of the Tory opposition of the time and the benign economic climate which he had inherited.

The public enthusiasm generated by the formation the Coalition government in 2010 was never quite on the scale of that which greeted Mr Blair’s arrival in 1997, and hence was never likely to last quite as long.

Nevertheless until relatively recently, the government was still widely seen as competent, and though its economic policies may have polarised opinion in some quarters, the press and public were still tending to give it the benefit of the doubt.

All that started to change with the Budget. The granny tax, the pasty tax and the row over tax relief on charitable giving combined to make this the biggest PR disaster to come out of the Treasury since Gordon Brown’s 75p pension increase.

There followed the woeful mishandling of the prospect of an Easter fuel strike, leading to what turned out to be a quite unnecessary spate of panic buying.

The government’s difficulties continued with the fiasco over the attempted deportation of Abu Qatada after the Jordanian terror suspect’s lawyers ran rings round Home Secretary Theresa May.

And by the end of last week, the run of mishaps had even acquired a name: omnishambles.

Things got no better at the start of this week as outspoken Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries tore into Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, branding them “arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk.”

Then Jeremy Hunt, one of David Cameron's closest Cabinet allies and a potential future Tory leader, found himself accused of operating a ‘back channel’ of communication with the media mogul Rupert Murdoch during his bid for BskyB.

His special adviser took the rap and resigned, but this failed to quell opposition demands for Mr Hunt himself to fall on his sword.

It brought forth the wounding jibe from Labour’s Dennis Skinner: “When posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants.”

But all of this really pales into insignificance besides the news that was delivered by the Office for National Statistics on Wednesday morning: that the government had, after all, led us into the dreaded double-dip recession.

Months of Labour warnings that the government was cutting too far, too fast were suddenly and dramatically vindicated.

It is too early to say whether it will prove to be a political game changer on the scale of, say the 1992 ERM debacle or Mr Brown’s election-that-never-was in 2007.

But it does, almost certainly, mean the end of a period in which the government’s claims about the economy have generally been given greater credibility than the opposition’s.

The politician whose personal fortunes have most closely mirrored those of the government over the past six weeks is Mr Osborne.

He has gone from being seen as the strategic genius of the Tory benches to being widely blamed for many of the government’s current difficulties.

The corresponding beneficiaries are Boris Johnson – Mr Osborne’s main rival for the future Tory leadership – and of course the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls.

As the former Labour special adviser Dan Hodges put it in the Daily Telegraph: “Ed Balls has won the right to be listened to now. That doesn’t mean people will automatically agree with what he says. But they will listen.”

In the light of the ONS figures though, perhaps the most damaging attack on the government last week came not from Mr Balls or even Mr Skinner, but from Ms Dorries.

The particularly lethal nature of her comments is that they play into a growing preconception about Messrs Cameron and Osborne that is being heightened by the worsening economic conditions.

A Prime Minster can get away with being a posh boy so long as he is competent on the one hand, and empathetic to the plight of those worse off than himself on the other.

On both of those scores, Mr Cameron is currently being found wanting.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Labour must share blame for region's plight

Over the past few weeks, the domestic political agenda has been dominated by the continuing fallout from what has by now surely become of the most controversial, even reviled Budgets of recent years.

It started within a few minutes of the Chancellor sitting down on 21 March with the revelation that he had performed a stealth tax raid on pensioners' incomes by freezing their personal allowances - the so-called 'granny tax.'

It continued with the belated realisation that, in pursuing the entirely laudable objective of limiting the amount of tax relief that can be claimed by the super-rich, the government had also made life much, much harder for the charitable sector.

And throughout it all there has been the ongoing row over the so-called pasty tax, coupled with increasingly laughable attempts by Old Etonian ministers to get with the workers by claiming to be fans of the hot snacks.

But until this week, no serious consideration had been given to the particular impact of George Osborne's proposals on the North-East.

So first off, congratulations are due to Gateshead MP Ian Mearns, always a doughty campaigner on behalf of the region, for securing a 90-minute debate on that very subject in Westminster Hall on Tuesday.

Having spent quite a lot of my career covering such debates, it would be easy for me to write them off as so much hot air, but that would be an overly-cynical view even for me.

They may not change anything, at least in the very short term, and the ministerial replies may be invariably formulaic. But where they do succeed is in raising consciousness of an issue to the point where it becomes harder to ignore, and that sense they are vital.

It was clear from the start that this was a Budget that was particularly pernicious in its potential impact on the region.

Quite apart from the impact on Tyneside-based pasty-maker Greggs, one of its central recommendations was the introduction of regional pay rates, which would institutionalise regional income disparities in the public sector for no better reason than the fact that they already exist in the private sector.

Mr Mearns chose not to dwell on that particularly in his opening speech to Tuesday's debate, however, choosing to highlight some damning statistics about the effect of Mr Osborne's higher-rate tax cut and the government's spending priorities.

He revealed that, while in London, the South-East and East Anglia, nearly 195,000 taxpayers will reap the benefit of the tax giveaway, in the North-East the figure will be fewer than 5,000.

On transport spending, the disparities are even more alarming. Mr Mearns revealed that more than 160 times as much is being spent on transport infrastructure projects in London than in the North-East.

"Once more, the people of the North East are paying the price for an economic strategy made in and for the wealthier south," he said.

He didn't, as it happens, mention the proposed HS2 high-speed link, but although it has its supporters, my own view is that it is not necessarily the panacea that some say it is.

For one thing, it won't arrive here until 2032 at the earliest. For another, any economic benefits to the wider North are likely to migrate towards Leeds and Manchester, which will be getting the link a good half decade earlier.

But the most fundamental question that has to be asked of any Labour politician when raising the issue of the North-South divide is why the party did not do more to address it during its 13 years in power from 1997.

Ian Mearns at least can point to a consistent track record on that score. As a leading figure in North-East local government during the Tony Blair years, he was one of those who regularly highlighted that administration's failure to address the issue, while the likes of Nick Brown and David Clelland also argued strenuously behind the scenes for a better deal for the region.

But the party as a whole allowed Mr Blair to get away with two particular claims that, taken together, served fatally to undermine the case for a more proactive regional policy.

The first was that the differences within regions were as great as the differences between them. The second was that any attempt to rebalance the economy risked harming the Southern regions which were the main driver for the economy as a whole.

Whatever the merit of these arguments, they became, over time, an excuse for simply doing nothing.

In the words of its response to a 2003 report on the issue: "The government does not accept the proposition that increased public funding to the less prosperous regions is a necessary condition to improve their prosperity."

The sad truth of the matter is that New Labour had an historic opportunity to do something about regional economic disparities at a time when it had a fair political wind behind it and, crucially, public spending as a whole was rising.

For the Coalition to try to tackle the gap in the current economic environment is a much harder task.

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