Why the next manifesto will be boring

The Liberal Democrats have already begun the process of drafting their manifesto for the 2015 general election. Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell reminds us of something fundamental the party risks forgetting:

The major political parties are worried that the voters will blame them for the state of the economy at the next election. But with opinion polls showing that voters share the blame between the last Labour government, the current coalition and the problems of the world economy, there is little to be gained for any party in trying to revisit the past and apportion blame to their opponents. Why?

Voters tend not to be interested in the past (if they even know about it). They are more interested in who can offer the best future. There are plenty of examples of voters ignoring the past (good or bad) and voting for what they believe will be the best option for the future.

This truth presents the Liberal Democrats with a practical problem. If you want to entice voters with “the best option for the future”, you need a vision, and for that you need values.

Liberals have no shortage of values, so why should creating a vision be a problem?

First, Nick Clegg is promoting the idea that he is a non-ideological pragmatist following the only possible course of action. Because he thinks his preferences are both obvious and inevitable, he will brook no argument. Left to his own devices, we will get a manifesto featuring a vague promise of ‘fairness’, an indistinguishable appeal to the mythical ‘centre ground’, patronising lectures about an endless need for austerity, inflated claims about the crumbs the party has picked up from the coalition table, and a tedious blame game (“the mess left by Labour”). What we won’t get is any vision of how society could be radically different. How can we, when above all Clegg will want to avoid saying anything that is implicitly critical of coalition government policy or that makes it more difficult to renew the coalition with the Tories?

Then there is the problem of David Laws, who Clegg has appointed to chair the working group that is drafting the manifesto. Laws has a strong ideological attachment to the failed economic orthodoxy of the past three decades. Left to his own devices, we won’t get a vision for the future but the promise of a better yesterday.

Ah, you may say, but what about the party’s Federal Policy Committee? The FPC is supervising the manifesto drafting process. Surely it will ensure the necessary vision and values? If only we could be so sure.

In 2011, the FPC produced a ‘policy development agenda’, a sort of pre-manifesto called Facing the Future. It was a depressingly timid, unimaginative and lacklustre document, which signally failed to face the future. That is why David Boyle and I wrote an alternative called Really Facing the Future, which suggested a bolder direction for the party.

As long as the Liberal Democrat leadership is reluctant to face the future but prefers to look to the past and cling to a clapped out orthodoxy, the party will fail to offer “the best option for the future” and will suffer the consequences at the 2015 election.

How ‘sticky’ are Liberal Democrat MPs?

Liberal Democrat MPs are ‘sticky’ – and that’s official.

It has long been known that, once they are dug in, Liberal Democrat MPs are more difficult to dislodge. Newly-published academic research of general elections between 1983 and 2010 has now quantified this phenomenon.

The research, reported by PoliticalBetting.com, shows that Liberal Democrat MPs enjoy a large incumbency factor worth between 5% and 15% of the vote. Labour and Conservative MPs, by contrast, have incumbency advantages of only about 2% and 1% respectively. This Liberal Democrat ‘stickiness’ has changed the outcome in up to 25 seats at each general election, and probably prevented the Conservatives winning an overall majority in 2010.

Now that the Liberal Democrats are in a coalition government, we don’t know how strong the incumbency factor will be at the next general election. But the party’s performance since 2010 in local elections in Liberal Democrat-held constituencies suggests that our MPs have not lost their stickiness entirely.

It’s the turnout, stupid

In all the current debate about the proposed parliamentary boundary changes (which David Cameron still intends to push in the Commons, despite his defeat yesterday in the Lords), hardly anyone mentions the real reason for the supposed pro-Labour bias in the electoral system: turnout.

As Mike Smithson helpfully points out today on PoliticalBetting.com, while there is a small difference in the size of electorate between Conservative-held and Labour-held seats, there is a much bigger difference in the average turnout:

The average level in CON seats was 68.4% while in LAB seats it was 61.1%. It is this gap which is behind much of the distortion.

In Labour’s heartlands, where the outcome is not in doubt, far fewer people bother to vote. This is not something you can change with legislation.

Unless there’s a drastic change in voting patterns, which I very much doubt, there will still be a much higher vote threshold for the Tories to win an overall majority than Labour however much you bring average seat sizes into line.

A higher turnout (or even compulsory voting) wouldn’t solve this problem either. All it would do is pile up bigger majorities for Labour in its safe seats.

If Cameron wants to redress the balance, his only hope is proportional representation – and we already know what he thinks about that.

Just when you thought it was safe to choose a PPC...

The corpse of Tory plans to revise parliamentary boundaries has sprung back to life.

The Telegraph reports that David Cameron plans to bring back his proposals for constituency boundary changes later this month, despite the refusal of the Liberal Democrats to support these changes in retaliation for the defeat of Lords reform. He will press ahead irrespective of the outcome of the vote in the House of Lords on Monday.

To overcome combined Labour and Liberal Democrat votes, the Tories will need the support of SNP and DUP MPs, and the Tories are reported to be negotiating with both parties.

Presumably Cameron thinks this gamble is worth the risk because his chances of winning the 2015 general election are otherwise very slim. It is more likely he will damage relationships with the Liberal Democrats without achieving his objective.

Laws scrapes home

The Liberal Democrats’ Federal Policy Committee (FPC) last night voted by 14 to 8 to accept Nick Clegg’s nomination of David Laws to chair the working group that will draft the next general election manifesto. (See this blog’s previous reports here and here).

This decision was not a ringing endorsement. Clegg and Laws won the vote but lost the argument, with some of the 14 who voted for Laws nevertheless openly critical of his nomination. They reluctantly accepted Laws only after it was made clear that the working group would remain subordinate to the FPC.

This is not a good start to the manifesto drafting process. Laws does not have the full confidence of the FPC and, given his habit of making provocative statements, the working relationship is likely to deteriorate.

There is also a more fundamental problem. Leadership is about keeping the party together, not fracturing it still further. When you consider Clegg’s nomination of Laws together with his refusal to budge over the issue of secret courts, it seems that our leader thinks he has nothing to lose by arrogantly driving through his own agenda.

This hubris will be Clegg’s undoing. In British politics, leaders are never bigger than their party – as even Margaret Thatcher found to her cost.

POSTSCRIPT: A post on Liberal Democrat Voice disputes this version of events:

A motion from Gareth Epps saying the Manifesto Working Group shouldn’t be approved until a full process and remit was agreed was defeated 14-8. However, David’s position as chair was unanimously approved, 22-0.

We have checked with our sources. What Gareth Epps’s motion actually proposed was to decline to endorse all of the nominations for the working group, not just David Laws. It called for a hearing session with the chair of the working group to ensure that he accepted the primacy of mainstream thinking in the party. It also called for terms of engagement, and most of the debate at the FPC meeting was about that. This motion was rejected by 14 votes to 8. Separately, there was also a vote to add Lord John Shipley to the working group. There was no unanimous 22-0 vote to approve Laws’s position as chair.

More about David Laws and the manifesto

Yesterday, this blog reported the rumour that David Laws was to be put in charge of drafting the Liberal Democrats’ 2015 general election manifesto.

We can now confirm this story. Nick Clegg has nominated a manifesto working group and Laws is the proposed chair. Clegg’s nominations will be discussed by the party’s Federal Policy Committee (FPC) tomorrow (Monday) evening.

The other proposed members of the group are the leader himself, the party president (Tim Farron MP), the four officers of the FPC (chair Duncan Hames MP and vice-chairs Duncan Brack, Julian Huppert MP and Julie Smith), Baroness Sal Brinton, Jo Swinson MP (representing Scotland), Jenny Willott MP (representing Wales) and Sharon Bowles MEP. Only two of these nominees (Duncan Brack and Julie Smith) are not parliamentarians.

On the face of it, there appears to be no particular ideological imbalance. The significant thing about the majority of these nominees is not their ideology but their loyalty to Clegg.

The controversy centres on the nomination of Laws as chair. There would have been little or no objection to Laws as one member of a balanced team, but putting him in charge of drafting the manifesto is a highly provocative act – and Clegg knows it. Indeed, several members of the FPC have told Liberator that they see this appointment as a “declaration of war” and Monday evening’s discussion is likely to be a full and frank exchange.

In case anyone wonders why Laws is such a controversial choice, the 2010 expenses scandal is the least of people’s concerns. The problems are Laws’s ideological views on economics (which are well to the right of most of the party) and his general contempt for party policy. And Laws is only too ready to broadcast his contempt:

• The shared responsibility for the laughable slogan ‘Alarm Clock Britain’, revealed in the Daily Telegraph (11 January 2011) – “Alarm Clock Britain: David Laws to lead policy team”.
• The smearing as ‘grumpy’ of any Liberal Democrat not expressing unalloyed joy about the coalition, reported in the Sun (16 September 2011) – “Lib Dem David Laws in ‘grumpy’ warning to party”.
• The astonishing statement “George Osborne is proving to be a very strong chancellor who gets the big decisions right,” in an article in the Guardian (21 February 2012).
• A call for further and permanent spending cuts (via the market fundamentalist think tank IEA), reported on Conservative Home (25 June 2012) – “David Laws battles for classical liberalism in the Lib Dems”.
• A declaration that “All Lib Dems have ‘collective responsibility’ for breaking tuition fee promise,” reported in the Daily Telegraph (20 September 2012).

One enduring mystery is why Clegg repeatedly goes so far out on a limb to promote Laws. When Laws was brought back into government in last year’s ministerial reshuffle, David Cameron extracted a heavy price from Clegg (including the sacking of Nick Harvey from the Ministry of Defence). Laws may be intelligent and able, but no individual – no matter how talented – justifies Clegg’s continuing (and reckless) expenditure of political capital.

POSTSCRIPT: An update reporting the decision of the FPC is here.

Laws to write manifesto?

“Sources in Westminster” (as they say in the proper newspapers) have informed Liberator of a strong rumour that David Laws is about to be given the job of writing the Liberal Democrats’ 2015 general election manifesto.

Is this what Nick Clegg means by getting his message across? The symbolism of appointing Laws would not be lost on Clegg, given Laws’s notoriety for holding views on economics well to the right of most party members.

The party’s 2011 policy document Facing the Future suggested that the next manifesto was likely to be a rather timid affair (which is why David Boyle and I wrote a more robust alternative). That prospect now seems attractive compared with a document written by Laws.

Meanwhile, it seems that the party is trying to take the credit for Liberator’s leak of the ‘message script’. In today’s edition of the ‘Letter from the Leader’ e-mailed to party members, Nick Clegg writes “We also got a bit of attention after the party’s central message for spokespeople was featured on the BBC.” Is this what they mean by ‘damage limitation’?

Clegg goes on to argue:

There’s nothing unusual about political parties wanting to ensure they get their message across, and our key argument – that the Liberal Democrats are building a stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life – is one that I hope some of you are already starting to recognise.

A good test for the validity of any argument is to ask whether anyone would seriously propose the opposite: “We are building a weaker economy in an unfairer society, preventing every person from getting on in life.” I don’t think so.

POSTSCRIPT: Update here.