On 'being ready' for government

Popular wisdom has it that all it takes to win a general election is to have better answers to the problems a country faces than your opponents. A coherent vision and narrative may help too, plus a consistent message articulated on the door steps when canvassing the great British public.

A recently published study in the academic journal however questions this view (Hartwig Pautz, The Thinktanks behind Cameronism'. It argues that opposition parties that are successful at general elections undergo a period of intense debate about ideological renewal, often leading to political re-orientation. The arena for this debate are often think tanks that are more or less associated with the political party in question. Labour underwent such a period before it emerged as New Labour under Tony Blair. The hallmark of such a renewal, and measure of success in readying the party for government, may be the extent to which new policy ideas are being generated, debated, rejected or endorsed. Idea generation, in essence, is an indicator of how effectively a political party functions as a powerhouse for policy formulation necessary to formulate future government programmes. 

The Conservative Party experienced a similar period of internal debate and renewal under David Cameron before the general election in 2010. The jury is still out whether or not it was sufficient to make the Tories a genuinely modern party, but hardly anybody denies that the party has undergone fundamental changes with modernisers, such as George Osborne, in key positions. 

Squeezing through - Ed Miliband - Man without policies?

The picture is different for Labour under Ed Miliband. After five years of relative discipline and few internal squabbles, the party emerges almost empty handed to face the electorate in less than 2 months. Whilst Miliband himself tried to provide an overarching narrative in the 'cost of living' argument (a debate that is vanishing fast with wage rises gathering pace), the party is casting frantically around for policy ideas even at his late stage (note the recent speech of Shadow Education Secretary Tristam Hunt on 'innovation' in the classroom). Whatever Labour wants to be (a force for good in society) and who it wants to represent (the long suffering middle classes or people on zero hour contracts?) it lacks the wealth of ideas and the history of constructive policy debate that characterised New Labour in 1997. 

If it squeakes into government on 8th May, it will resemble the government of Miliband's political mentor: Gordon Brown. Having exhausted his energies and political capital in the fight against his own party and the Blair camp, Brown, when he finally moved into Number 10, had nothing to say and no policies to implement. If it hadn't been for the economic crisis, Brown's government would have quickly been revealed as one without purpose or direction. With Britain on the path to economic recovery, Miliband wont be so 'lucky'. The lack of ideas will come to haunt him as he steps into Number 10. If he gets that far. 

The end of Blairism

David Miliband, the poster boy of the moderate wing of the Labour party and former foreign secretary, will resign his parliamentary seat tomorrow, the Daily Mirror reports. David Miliband is the older brother of Ed, the current leader of the Labour Party, who pipped him to the job in 2010. David M actually won the vote amongst the party faithful and the MPs of the party, but Ed was elected on the narrowest of margins with the help of the block votes of the trade unions.

Stepping down - David Miliband

David Miliband's resignation will certainly be a harsh blow to the moderate wing of the party, and undoubtedly, his brother Ed is now free to complete the move to the left which he has planned over the last two years. With David M leaving politics, all Blairites have either been sidelined or pushed out of politics by his brother's team.

The fraternal dissonance between the brothers pretty accurately mirrored the strife between the two party camps, one surrounding Tony Blair, the other around Gordon Brown. The irony is lost on no one that those who coalesced around the most successful Labour Prime Minister in history, Tony Blair, have now lost control over the party, whereas the group around Gordon Brown who failed to win a single general election is now fully in charge.

Separated at birth? Wallace and Ed Miliband

At the time of the leadership election, observers were aghast at the viciousness with which Ed Miliband attacked his older brother and maneuvred himself into a leadership position with the support of the unions. David Miliband's resignation will close the chapter of New Labour and finally confirm that the middle ground in British politics is being vacated. It leaves the Labour Party with a largely unelectable leader who has been (unfavourably) compared to the plasticine character of Wallace. It is now up to David Cameron to convince his party that the middle ground is up for grabs to win the next general election in 2015.

What to do about pensions?

As the public debate is gathering pace about who may win the election in 2015, academics are starting to look back to the events leading up to the last election in 2010. The distance to events may afford them some objectivity and a collection of papers in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations gives a good snapshot of several takes on the matter.

One of the most interesting contributions is by Matthew Watson. Essentially, he argues that New Labour instituted a welfare to work policy that was informed by the principle of individual responsibility. Whilst the electorate was largely supportive of this, Blair and Brown then transplanted this approach to other parts of the welfare state, in particular to pensions. Individual responsibility in the field of pension provision however did not quite match the largely simple equation that could be applied to work readiness schemes for two reasons.

First, saving for pensions is a more complex behaviour with multiple incentives. Second, the shift to individual pension investments meant that pension provision moved from state funded welfare to the financial markets. Critically, those were outside of governmental control, so that when the financial markets collapsed, Brown's government had to underwrite private market institutions with massive state funding (supplying the banks with cheap credit) which ultimately increased state expenditure more than any pension increase would have done. In essence, by favouring individual pension schemes, the government gave up control over an instrument of welfare policy, and gained a disaster in return.

Watson calls this the 'paradox of responsibility', indicating the conflict between the original motive of New Labour to introduce individual responsibility into welfare provision, and ending up (irresponsibly) propping up unpredictable financial markets.

There is much to be said for this argument it seems to me. However, the main question remains largely unanswered. Could New Labour have plausibly resisted the shift from universal state funded benefit provision to more individual responsibility in welfare? This has been a global rather than an isolated national change. The German government under Gerhard Schroeder introduced the 'Riester' pension scheme, essentially a state backed pension fund that invested the payments in the stock market. So, New Labour's reform of the pension system was by no means unique.

The loss of governmental control over welfare policies is also one that is mirrored in other areas. National governments' ability to 'steer' behaviour is not just squeezed by ill-fated attempts to outsource pensions to financial market investment products. Welfare provision as a simple re-distributive exercise had long become unsustainable due to the demographic changes in all Western countries.

So the search for a better solution continues. At the moment, neither the current government nor the opposition has developed viable proposals to deal with welfare expenditure (especially pension and social care costs) in the long term.