Jeremy Corbyn

The road ahead for Sturgeon is fraught with danger

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For the second year in a row the prize for most spectacular self-inflicted political wound must surely go to the Prime Minister of the day. Despite having piled on support for the Conservative Party, Mrs. May severely underestimated her opponent (as, I am happy to admit, did I), who piled on more votes and so deprived the Prime Minister of her majority, and her authority.

However, Mrs. May is not the only politician who until recently was walking on water to have had a disastrous night on Thursday. In relative terms the biggest vote loser was the SNP, as well as the biggest seat loser in absolute terms. While it is certainly true that the SNP’s starting point was astonishingly high, in only two seats did the SNP start with a majority of less than 3,000. The average SNP majority was 9,966. Save for a handful of seats the SNP’s grip on Scotland looked solid for a generation.

While the expectation for Thursday’s election was that Labour would be squeezed from both sides; it was the SNP, in fact, who lost votes to both left and right. After Thursday’s mauling, the SNP have been deprived of 21 seats. In Angus, and Coatbridge, the Conservatives and Labour, respectively, overturned SNP majorities in excess of 11,000. The SNP’s overall vote share declined by more than 13 percentage points, with the Conservatives, in particular, but also Labour, adding hefty chunks of the vote to their respective piles. The average majority in SNP-held seats now stands at a mere 2,292.

The SNP’s impressive coalition of support in 2015 can broadly be broken down into three categories. The first is voters who aren’t nationalists, but voted SNP either because they had a decent local candidate and/or believed a vote for the Nats did not equate to supporting independence. The second is voters who are nationalists because they believed that Scottish independence was the most credible route to a more left-wing government. The third is existential nationalists, who support independence for Scotland above all else.

Having spectacularly misjudged the public mood in calling for a second independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon drove support in that first category away from her party and towards the Conservatives in the magnitude of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. However, provided that this was the only direction in which the SNP were losing support, their grip on Scotland looked safe enough.

Explaining the increase in the Labour vote is somewhat more difficult. In what were once Labour heartlands there was a palpable shift in anti-SNP Labour supporters towards the Tories, believing Ruth Davidson to be the most doughty opponent of a second independence referendum. In many working-class seats across Scotland the Tories more than tripled their vote, and a sizeable chunk of that was from voters who stuck with Labour even in 2015.

At the same time, having spent much of the past two months canvassing there is at least some anecdotal evidence of disquiet about the SNP’s record in government. Kenny Farquharson also posits that among the younger and more radical voters many now no longer see independence as the only road to a more just society. In any event, it appears that the SNP has begun to lose voters within that second category too, which goes some way towards explaining Labour’s increase in support despite discernible losses to the Tories.

Which is why the road ahead for Nicola Sturgeon is more dangerous than ever.

No fewer than 30 of the SNP’s 35 seats require a swing of less than 5% to fall to another party. The vast majority of these seats face towards Labour.

Nicola Sturgeon’s next step is critical. The expectation is that the First Minister does as many of her proxies have been hinting and takes a second independence referendum off the table in an effort to win back some support within the first category of voter. However, in doing so, she runs the risk that working class unionists no longer feel it necessary to lend their support to the Tories and shift their allegiance back to Labour. If even half of the 2017 increase (note, not the total, just the increase) in Tory votes in largely working class seats found its way into Labour’s pile then Labour could expect to pick up a further 11 seats from the SNP.

However, such a strategy also risks alienating those voters whose support for the SNP is motivated by a belief that independence is the most viable route towards a more socialist Scotland. Why on earth would such voters support a party who have just closed off that path to a more socialist Scotland when another, increasingly viable, alternative exists in Jeremy Corbyn?

Furthermore, such a U-turn by the First Minister may also risk losing support to the nationalist fringes. After all, if you can’t rely upon the SNP to push for independence then what’s the point of their very existence? Expect Tommy Sheridan to be licking his lying lips at that one.

It may well be that after a decade in power and with little to offer but a single issue the safest route for the SNP is to press on with the strategy that has cost them almost a third of their support and almost half of their parliamentary seats in two years. Either way, expect the next set of Holyrood elections to be very interesting…

The EU won’t change: whatever the result of the #EUref, the left has more to fear than the right

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imageThe EU referendum campaign has been the weirdest in living memory. One day, David Cameron argues that we should stay in the EU as we “just don’t know” what will happen in the years ahead; the next, George Osborne confidently makes projections 25 years into the future. Lifelong Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn now embraces his inner Europhile in an effort to placate his MPs. Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, and Boris Johnson now, apparently, want to throw cash at public services. Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon is making the argument that staying in the Union is better for jobs, trade, and investment – seemingly without a hint of irony. But perhaps it’s Alex Salmond, the most famous supporter of Scottish independence since William Wallace, making the argument that we should remain in the EU because otherwise Scotland will become independent, that takes the prize for utter ridiculousness.

However, aside from the somewhat strange positions adopted by politicians, there is a bizarre ideological contradiction at the core of both the “Leave” and “Remain” campaigns. That contradiction, quite simply, is that the politicians whose views are most in-line with the ideological underpinnings of the European Union are campaigning to leave, while those whose views are totally at odds with the EU’s direction of travel are campaigning to remain.

When considering an organisation like the European Union, there are essentially two orders of complaint.

The first order complaint is fairly ideologically neutral: that the European Union deprives the citizens of Member States of any direct say over matters that would usually be the subject of political discourse and division. Invariably, the main proponents of this argument appear to be drawn from the right. Complaints about the surrender of sovereignty can frequently be heard from the Conservative benches of the House of Commons, but seldom heard from the Labour benches.

The second order complaint is distinctly partisan, and from a left-wing perspective more worrisome: that having been deprived of any direct say over matters that would usually be the subject of political discourse and division, we have had imposed upon us a free-market ideology from which we are not at liberty to depart.
Though the preference for free-market ideology has been evident, in particular in judgements of the ECJ, since the early days of the EEC, the abandonment of the façade of ideological neutrality came during the 1980s. During this period we saw the entrenchment of a consensus that arose in the 1980s, when almost every Minister in the Council was drawn from the centre right. This consensus led to both the Single European Act and the Treaty of Maastricht.

In recent years, this ideological preference has become more overt. For example, in two recent cases before the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the Court ruled on a conflict between the rights of workers to withhold their labour and companies’ rights of free movement. Normally in cases such as these where two competing rights are in conflict the Court will grant a wide margin of appreciation to the Member State. However, in Viking and Laval, the Court ruled that the rights of workers were subject to the the rights of corporations, and not balanced by them. In doing so, the Court ruled that workers are only allowed to strike where it’s not too inconvenient for their employers. And there I thought the whole point of a strike was for it to be inconvenient.

The court further ruled in Viking that it was lawful for companies to discriminate between domestic and imported labour, thereby creating an incentive for companies to import workers from other Member States in order to undercut wages.

Of course, the most high-profile recent example of the EU’s ideological preferences can be seen in the treatment meted out to Member States who found themselves in fiscal trouble during the Eurozone crisis – in particular Greece. Having knowingly created artificially low interest rates in the so-called “PIGS” states, the EU institutions turned their backs on these states, insisting that “there is no alternative” to harsh austerity measures. Of course, there was an alternative – but one which would involve unpicking the ideological preferences of the EU.

The left consoles itself with the socialist scraps thrown from the EU’s capitalist table – such as directives on working time, maternity pay, and roaming charges. However, the left ignores the fundamental entrenchment of neoliberalism that the EU mandates.

Thanks to the EU, the most basic instruments of left-wing governments have been neutralised, with the exception of tax and spending (although the Commission’s coming for that next). States are no longer at liberty to nationalise, regulate, or subsidise as they see fit. A left-wing government wouldn’t blink at rescuing Port Talbot steel works – but even if Jeremy Corbyn was Prime Minister there’s absolutely no chance his government would get Commission authorisation for supporting the steel industry. In recent years, too, we’ve seen the Commission clamp-down on airport subsidies, of crucial importance to many in Scotland.

Unlike in domestic politics, this ideological preference cannot be undone by a majority, even a relatively sizable one. A similar uniformity of ideology as was evident in the 1980s would be necessary before a reversal of this ideological choice became possible, let alone likely. Such uniformity becomes less and less likely as more and more states are represented at the Council.

It is surprising, therefore, that so many on the Conservative benches are so antagonistic towards the European Union, relative to those on the Labour benches. If Conservatives don’t like that their political autonomy over the ideological direction of the country has been stripped away, they can at least console themselves with the fact that the levers of power of which they have been deprived are nonetheless being pulled in a manner that is, for the most part, to their pleasing. For example, John Major’s government actually quite liked the EU’s deficit-limitation rules because they represented the entrenchment of “good conservative values”.

By contrast, the left is usually quite at peace with not pulling the levers of power themselves provided that they are being pulled in a manner of their pleasing (the internationalisation of human rights is a good example of this). But in EU Member States control over the levers of power has been surrendered and that power is being exercised in a decidedly right-wing manner. It is astonishing, therefore, that the Labour Party should be the strident defenders of the European Union, while it is the Conservatives who are amongst its harshest critics. The Labour Party has convinced itself that the European Union can be a vehicle for left-wing ideology when sixty years of evidence has shown that the opposite is, in fact, the case.

Normally the place for debating substantive matters should be the internal democratic processes of the organisation – that is to say, European Parliament elections. The fact that these questions have dominated the referendum debate, and not the more relevant question of what power (if any) the EU should exercise is testament to just what a democratic failure the EU really is. Despite the seismic political shifts that have taken place in Member States in the past 30 years – the fall of Thatcher and Kohl, the rise of New Labour and France’s Socialist revival, the end of sixty years of Fianna Fáil hegemony in Ireland, and the annihilation of PASOK by Syriza, to name but a few – the political direction of the EU has never changed. If anything, recent evidence has shown that despite rising disquiet amongst voters, the determination of the EU’s leaders to pursue a right-wing, neo-liberal, free-market agenda has become more trenchant, not less.

So the right should console itself with the fact that they’ll almost certainly be getting their way whatever the result. If we leave there’ll be a Tory government in Westminster unfettered by the interfering busybodies in Brussels and Luxembourg. If we remain the EU institutions will be vindicated, and the free-market ideology will become even more entrenched. For the left, it’s difficult to find a silver-lining in either scenario.

This blog is adapted from an article I wrote for Grapevine – available now. 

In defence of polling and why Labour really is doing terribly

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chris leslie cat smith

Critic: “Labour’s doing terribly in the polls, isn’t it?”

Corbynista: “Look how badly wrong the polls got the last election – you can’t rely on polls.”

This is the stock reply of the loyal Jeremy Corbyn follower whenever someone points out that Labour is doing abysmally in the polls. This week’s Daily Politics saw one of Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest critics – Chris Leslie – square off with one of Corbyn’s true believers – Cat Smith – who used the exact defence above.

The fact that polling companies did not accurately predict the outcome of the 2015 election is now being used by Corbynistas to justify burying their heads in the sand. It’s true that polling companies weren’t entirely accurate – they never are. They are, however, a good deal better than political instinct, “what I’m hearing on the doorstep”, or “a feeling in my water”. Polls may not be perfect, but they’re not nothing – and they’re better than any other measure of political success, save for actual votes.

Polls can usually identify when one party has a commanding lead over another. Labour’s political dominance in the years following the 1992 election therefore made predicting the winner of an election a fairly easy exercise. In the run up to 2015 the narrative that the two main parties were neck-and-neck was borne out by the polls – with the polling average for both parties from the start of April through to election day being exactly the same: 33.6%. As it transpired, the polls were doing what they almost always do and overstating Labour and understating the Conservatives.

So the Corbyistas are right – the polls are probably wrong. The trouble for Labour is that the polls are very seldom wrong against Labour. Since 1959, Labour has only ever been understated in election polls twice: in February 1974 by 0.7%; and in 2010 by 1.6% (which could, in part, be explained by the ‘Cleggmania’ phenomenon).

elections polls

From 1992-2010, the average error (that is to say, the average difference between Labour and the Conservatives election-polling average and the actual result) is 2.6%. In 2015, that error was 3.3% – above average, but still lower than the 3.6% error in 2001 or the 4.7% error in 1992. Excluding the 2010 election, the average error is 3.1% ­– which places the 2015 polls well within the range of normal. In the past six general elections, election polls have, on average, understated the Conservatives by 2.1% and overstated Labour by 3.1%. The standard deviation in both the Conservative and Labour figures (the error in the error, if you like) is 1.8% and 2.7% respectively – which is quite low. In other words, though the polls are usually wrong, they’re usually quite consistently wrong. Save for 2010 – where the polls understated Labour by 1.6% ­– the polls in the run up to all other elections polls have overstated Labour by at least 2%.

So Cat Smith is right – the polls probably are wrong. But what she and the Corbynistas seem to forget is that they’re far more likely to be overstating Labour than understating. Labour’s 7.5% polling deficit in the polls probably isn’t right – but the true deficit is a lot more likely to be 12.5% than 2.5%.

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