SHAUN LAWSON - The forecasts were wrong. Ed Miliband was nowhere near becoming Prime Minister
... the nature of Britain’s electoral system has made it
impossible for any party standing on anything resembling a truly radical,
progressive agenda to get anywhere near winning an election since 1979 (in
fact, since 1974): with the early 1980s split on the left meaning that, in
effect, the entire voting system was dragged ever further to the right, a
self-perpetuating process which is still ongoing and shows no signs of slowing
down. And above all, on by far the most important indicator of any party’s
readiness for government – economic competence – the Tories had remained well
ahead of Labour ever since the crash; considerably because of the latter’s
extraordinary failure to challenge a narrative about ‘austerity’ which isn’t
only misleading – but is fallacious and increasingly
dangerous to Britain’s medium and long term future.
This narrative, parroted relentlessly by the increasingly
hysterical Tory press, the BBC, and both the Tories and Lib Dems, meant that
when Miliband said perfectly reasonably that no, Labour had not
over-spent before the crash, most viewers were horrified. How could they
trust someone so irresponsible, not even prepared to apologise; who’d been part
of a government which, so everyone insisted, had ‘run out of money’?
Never mind that no country in charge of its own money supply
can ever run out of money (it simply prints more); never mind that Britain
wasn’t even remotely imperilled in the manner of southern European countries trapped
in the euro zone and crucially, without control of their money supply
or economic policy; never mind that the effect of coalition-imposed austerity
was simply to remove huge amounts of liquidity from the system, grind the
economy to a dead halt, and it only began to recover when those policies were
significantly ameliorated; never mind that almost all macro-economists around
the world (notably the Nobel Prize Winner, Paul
Krugman; the Merton College, Oxford Professor, Simon
Wren-Lewis; and even the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) itself) had rejected austerity as a busted flush;
never mind that not Labour, but the coalition, had doubled
the national debt, and left it massively more exposed to an increasingly
possible second crash; never mind that the economy had beengrowing rapidly when
Gordon Brown was forced out of office; never mind that borrowing costs are
historically low, and inflation is at zero; never mind that the welfare state
itself had been built by the postwar Labour government at a time the country
was technically bankrupt (so it simply borrowed instead, investing in
infrastructure and setting a course for the Keynesian consensus); never mind
that the now immortalised Liam Byrne note was a playful aside to his successor
in the manner of long
established Treasury traditions; never mind that, mindbogglingly, the
Tories were proposing a more
extreme version of the very policy which had failed so completely in
the first place… none of this mattered.
If a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth.
Thus both coalition partners asserted that Labour’s much more balanced approach
to deficit reduction would “pass our debts on to our children and
grandchildren”, even when Tory policy will, by preventing growth or
re-balancing, actually do that very thing; both continued to espouse the
risible nonsense that Britain’s debt (which remember, they had doubled) was
somehow comparable to a credit card debt, or that running a country is akin to
running a household budget.
The press, run by barons who benefit enormously from the
continuous upward funneling of wealth to the super-rich, and who would be
personally impacted by a mansion tax, the return of the 50p tax rate, and
especially the removal of the absurd protection of non-doms, hammered the
message home again and again: Labour would endanger everything. A shockingly economically
illiterate public(so illiterate that this itself poses an increasing threat
to public policy, and certainly to the UK’s fiscal health) would inevitably
acquiesce: despite policies which do most of them ongoing financial and social
harm. And once the ‘danger’ posed by a party with the brass neck to have huge
numbers of MPs democratically elected by Scottish voters was thrown into a
wholly disingenuous, toxic mix, the die was cast: with public minds panicked
into nonsensical comparisons with the 1970s, told that Nicola Sturgeon would
‘drag’ Miliband to the left… despite the SNP actually standing for slower,
more drawn out austerity than Labour.
But throughout the last five years, Labour themselves have
been horribly culpable: for failing to challenge a false narrative, or set out
their own plans in any convincing way. When Miliband defended the Brown
government’s record during
the televised debates, he needed to assert why
it hadn’t over-spent – but in keeping with serious communication
issues which dogged him throughout his leadership, he couldn’t. Instead, like a
rabbit in the headlights, hoist by the petard of his own foolish commitment to
austerity, he froze – and his failure to ‘take responsibility’ will undoubtedly
have hung particularly heavy in undecided voters’ hearts in the polling booths
yesterday.
That the public have continued to blame Labour for hardship
caused by the coalition is a huge part of the reason why Miliband’s results at
local, European and by-elections were so poor; and those results, as we shall
see, represented an enormous, critical warning: not only to Miliband, but the
pollsters. Both ignored them (in the latter case, incomprehensibly so); both
will have plenty of time to reflect and repent on this now.
To recap: miles behind Cameron on approval ratings, public
credibility, and especially economic competence; lacking in authority or
leadership skills; leading a party with a toxic image (and with a Shadow
Chancellor who embodied this in public minds more than anyone else); standing
on a progressive platform the like of which hadn’t succeeded at any general
election in 40 years; overseeing continually poor electoral fortunes despite
mid-term ballots almost always providing a huge boost to any modern day
opposition (and for that matter, failing to pull into anything like the kind of
mid-term lead which any opposition needs in order to win the big one); and up
against a government regarded by most as perfectly competent, how could anyone
possibly have believed that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party stood the remotest
chance of being returned yesterday?...
