General Election 2017 - Liberal Democrat Manifesto: Practical pitch to rebuild trust

Change Britain's Future is a practical pitch to rebuild trust - but that's a difficult task to accomplish.

Unsurprisingly, the Liberal Democrat promise of a second referendum on the final deal for leaving Europe has dominated their manifesto launch. It's in the manifesto's leading pages, at the head of Tim Farron's speech and all over the news.

However, at the front and centre of their election pitch the Liberal Democrats have put a collection of policies aimed at young people. Rent-to-Own, where rent buys a stake in a home that becomes outright owned over thirty years.

The restoring of young people's housing benefit. A new young person's bus pass. Universal free school meals at primaries. More money for the pupil premium. More investment in schools and colleges. Reinstatement of maintenance grants. More apprenticeships. Even votes at sixteen.

These policies are very much about practical things that can be done today to help build towards the future. In all areas, this manifesto has the same focus - what measured step can be taken now that prepares us for what's ahead?

But for the Lib Dems, the central aim at this election can only be to regain trust and recover ground. Tim Farron admitted as much at the Royal College of Nurses as he explained his party's spending plans for healthcare.

The Lib Dems have reached back into the vault and dusted off their Penny in the Pound plans, from the days when Charles Kennedy was the party leader. At that time, it was for education funding - and was proposed for such by Willie Rennie in Scotland.

For the UK, Tim Farron has called for this extra penny to be used to fund healthcare. It's a progressive tax, that will raise far more from those at the top than the bottom and would raise £6 billion a year, a significant addition to NHS funding.

But what is particularly important about the pitch is that Farron connected this policy with the need to be and honest about what it takes to fund the things the public wants.

That concern runs through the Lib Dem manifesto. The pitch to young people is full of practical affordable measures. Proposals that would be uncontroversial to deliver, but which could have profoundly positive effects.

On the NHS, the Lib Dems spell out exactly what it will cost people to support public healthcare as it presently stands. That includes levelling with working class people that they'll pay on average £30 more in tax each year.

The money raised would to go to restoring the NHS budget, to repairing ailing social care and supporting mental health care. These funds would accompany a review of how to better integrate these elements - and create parity for mental and physical health.

On the economy, the Lib Dems call for more investment to end the reliance upon a finance sector feeding on a bloated housing sector and dangerous levels of private debt. And that means being prepared to spend money in government.

While the party commits to balancing the government's Current account, they also call for £100 billion in Capital spending over the long term - on projects like broadband roll out, expanding and modernising schools and hospitals, along with roads and rails and coordinating with private investment in renewable energy.

And that extends into housing. The party promises to achieve the rate of 300,000 new homes built a year, for sale and rent. End the sell of Housing Association homes, let local authorities borrow to build and enable them to levy a 200% Council Tax penalty on second homeowners or landlords who leave homes empty.

On work, there are commitments to an independent review of the Living Wage and how to make it work, to stamping out the abuse of Zero Hours Contracts and encourage more employee share-ownership.

This is joined by reforms to welfare. Giving parents more earning leeway on Universal Credit, end the benefit freeze, reverse cuts to Employment Support Allowance, scrap the Bedroom Tax and Work Capability Assessment and more paid paternity leave.

There is also a direct stab at the Conservatives in a pledge to reverse tax cuts and remove loopholes to get the wealthiest "paying their fair share". These include reversing the Corporation Tax cut, that lowered it from 20% to 17%, and ending a series of tax 'relief' policies given to the rich.

The whole manifesto reads as a practical pitch to rebuild trust.

What it is not, though - to be realistic - is a manifesto that will see action in government. Tim Farron has ruled out entering a coalition after the election and it would take perhaps the biggest electoral upset in British history to get the party in government.

That makes it important to consider the Liberal Democrat pitch as part of a broader opposition picture and ask: are there grounds for cooperation with other progressive parties?

Both Labour and the Lib Dems have called for a major programme of capital investment. They both want significant increases in house building. Their is a willingness in both parties to raise taxes, weighted more on the rich, to fund essential services.

If the progressive alliance is going to work, voters need to feel that their tactical vote is going to support a set of broad values regardless of which party is strongest in their locality. So it is important that there is a lot of common ground to be found in these areas across the progressive opposition.

Despite the determination to present Labour under Corbyn as a party of the hard left, progressive parties are standing in much the same space - and that space is Keynesian. Investing for the future and practical spending to address the issues of today.

The big question, in the longer term, for the Liberal Democrats themselves is whether this June they can begin to rebuild trust. Whether they can succeed won't just depend on getting bums in seats on 8th June, but in standing by these pledges in opposition after the dust settles.

Tsipras' repeat use of popular votes raises questions about radical democracy and his approach of 'pragmatic radicalism'

Alexis Tsipras' radical united social front faces a challenge as breakaways found Popular Unity party ahead of September election. Photograph: Ο ΣΥΡΙΖΑ-ΕΚΜ για την παραγωγική ανασυγκρότηση της Θράκης by Joanna (License) (Cropped)

Alexis Tsipras, Prime Minister of Greece, has resigned. Having succeeded in steering a new bailout agreement through the Eurozone and then through the Greek Parliament, Tsipras has taken the decision to resign and submit his work to the electorate for their judgement (Henley, 2015).

The decision has been seen as either a canny political gamble (Smith, 2015), albeit one with good odds of paying off, or as the latest in a line of dangerous political games that exploit the system (Patrikarakos, 2015). There is, however, an alternative explanation.

From very early on, Alexis Tsipras has been clear as to what he thought was meant by being 'radical' (from Horvat, 2013).

"I believe that today 'radical' is to try to be able to take responsibility for the people, to not be afraid of that, and at the same time to maintain in the democratic road, in the democratic way. To take the power for the people and to give it back to the people."

By that barometer, what Tsipras has done is entirely consistent. His radical democratic vision is a difference of method. Compete at elections and win power, of course. But to then reform and change that power, or through the party give access to that power, to the wider public - rather than allowing them to be alienated from it by their own representatives (Gourgouris, 2013).

Radical democracy of this kind requires action. It requires a radical to engage with political games and try to win. To that end, Tsipras and Syriza did something quite remarkable: they brought together in a single party - at first a coalition, an electoral alliance - for however short a time, a broad progressive group that included communists, socialists, radicals, social democrats and even centrists.

While for many, radicalism has been epitomised best by Yanis Varoufakis' symbolic opposition to austerity and the European austerian establishment order, Tsipras' radicalism is not about the particular policies that come out of the process. The Syriza leader's version is a radicalism of methods not necessarily of ends - an assessment that has led to the unsurprising detachment of Syriza's Left-wing in advance of the autumn elections (Henley et al, 2015).

This has been particularly obvious in how Tsipras and Syriza has often had to be pragmatic about the kind of changes they can actually make (White, 2015) and begrudging, even defiant, in their compliance when forced to accept the implementation of policies with which they do not agree (Gourgouris, 2015).

The idea of radical leaders who take moderate positions and try to reform from within the system, accepting to an extent its challenges and constraints, is not a unique situation (Frankel, 2015) - Lula in Brazil, Mitterand in France, and others, have all made such attempts. But Tsipras' version brings the people along as an active participant.

In that light, Tsipras' surprise use of a referendum during bailout negotiations (Traynor, 2015), maybe should not have been so surprising. Its seemingly confusing message might then be seen as asking the people for a judgement on him and for their endorsement of his approach: a show of dissent in the act of compliance. With this coming election, Tsipras again turns to the people according to his method of keeping them engaged with the business of government.

Tsipras' version of radical democracy could in fact be called 'pragmatic radicalism'. It aims to end the alienation of the people from the business of government, not just to achieve this or that policy. Doing so requires pragmatic leaders, willing to wade into public affairs on behalf of the people, who can be realistic and accept the practical limitations of what can be achieved in that sphere - relying instead on what might be achieved in the future by having the people as an active and vigilant partner.

This alternative viewpoint comes, however, with a few words of caution.

A leader falling prey to their own popularity, or of seeing the opportunity to exploit it, is always a risk. Yanis Varoufakis, Tsipras' former right-hand, has already suggested that Tsipras is turning into a figure like France's former President Mitterand (Anthony, 2015), who led Parti Socialiste to power on a Left-wing Keynesian platform, only to, ultimately, conform to the pressures of the European economic order (Birch, 2015). There is also a fine line in democratic politics between involving the people in the form of popular rule, and in using their support, ostensibly for a personality, to strong arm the political system.

Understanding the difference will have become a crucial issue by the time Yanis Varoufakis and Pablo Iglesias, leader of Podemos, meet for a conversation hosted by The Guardian in October. By then, Tsipras will have presumably won a resounding endorsement for Syriza from the people of Greece, Jeremy Corbyn will have been elected to the Labour party leadership, and Iglesias will be on the verge of leading Podemos into December's Spanish general election.

A new Left-wing politics will be taking its first steps into the sun. When it does, it needs to be in possession of positive lessons derived from serious critique of popular radical democracy. That means understanding what keeps people engaged with the decision making that affects their lives, and, how radical parties can reform the system to empower these people in their day to day lives. But it also means being aware of the danger of potentially falling into simplistic, even personal, popularity contests.

Elizabeth May is right - the real possibility of seeing their ideals represented can bring back disaffected voters

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, at the StopC51 'Day of Action' at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto. Photograph: Elizabeth May at #StopC51 'Day of Action' by Alex Guibord (License) (Cropped)

During Thursday night's Canada leaders debate, Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, stressed that her party did not need to take votes away from the three major parties (Wells, 2015). May said, as she has said before (May, 2015), that her party could instead focus on bringing disaffected voters back into the political fold.

With Jeremy Corbyn's leadership bid, there are few subjects more sensitive for the UK Labour Party than the matter of who they should be looking to for support. May's comments touch on a sore point for the Labour establishment, who seem to have set out, with determination, to put Corbyn down and discredit his supporters (Watt, 2015).

What the mainstream of the Labour Party demands, instead, is a focus on wooing just enough of the two-thirds of Britain who regularly turnout to vote. To gain their support, the party wants policy pitches to be based on opinion poll data of the most popular, currently held, views on a range of issues (Wintour, 2015) - from the economy to immigration.

Between May and Corbyn on one side, and the Labour establishment on the other, there are two very different mindsets at work.

At the leaders debate, Elizabeth May's statement was made in response to accusations that her party would split the, already fractured, anti-Harper vote. Stephen Harper and his Conservatives have led Canada since 2006, first as a minority and then as a majority, through one controversy after another, against an opposition split between the historically dominant Liberals and the New Democrats.

What the leader of Canada's Green Party makes clear is that people will turn out to vote if they believe that their ideals will be represented (May, 2015). Yet, where voters can be split into two distinct groups, progressives and conservatives, by a one-member one-constituency system, there remain obstacles to representation. Despite May's optimism, even if you can bring back the voters who have turned away, you would still risk dividing up the support of progressives between several parties in a manner that allows conservatives to triumph (Lucas, 2015).

In most countries with a one-member one-constituency system, a solution of some sort tends to develop that addresses vote splitting. The solutions vary, ranging from a two party system to the acknowledgement of formal electoral alliances.

For Caroline Lucas, the sole Green Party MP at Westminster, the solution is a one time electoral pact amongst the UK's Left parties, with the aim of reforming the electoral system into a more proportionally representative form (Lucas, 2015). With one more pragmatic vote, cast for an alliance of progressives, pragmatic votes could be a thing of the past.

However, Labour, the biggest party of the UK Left - at least historically - has remained determined to pursue its approach of forcing everyone on the Left to align within one big tent. For the Left, this is a huge disadvantage. The Left is vibrant and diverse. From Liberals to Socialists, to Environmentalists and Feminists, they all have their own priorities - which can be mangled or suppressed by a big tent party with its focus solely upon achieving victory by collecting the 51% of votes.

Labour, in pursuit of that goal, remains focussed on, and talks a lot about, 'the Centre': home to the broadest group of voters. For them, the Centre describes a particular consensus. It is an approach that has led the party steadily to the Right, as they try to suppress the fractiousness of the Left and, under the first past the post voting system, force voters to check their ideals at the polling station door - all in the name of anti-conservative unity.

Yet the Centre can also describe a place of compromise, where you seek to create a balance between the ideals and priorities of the different ideologies. If the aim of Centrism is to be broadly inclusive, then its cause would, surely, be better served, in finding both consensus and balance, by voters being able to choose representatives that actually fit with their priorities.

In Canada and the UK, the Green Party is making the case that people will turn out to vote if they can vote for their ideals - with some legitimate hope that their vote could actually turn a significant, and proportional, percentage of those nominated into representatives. In that task, one-member/one constituency, first-past-the-post type, voting systems are inadequate.

If people are to see their vote count, and have the chance of seeing their ideals turned into policy and put into action, proportional representation and coalition government present the best means. But first come the pragmatic choices.

The parties of the Left have to be willing to stand up for the ideals that make them distinct, while showing solidarity with other progressive parties in the general cause of opposing conservatism and reforming the establishment. If they can respect and nurture their supporters idealism and are willing to support reform that lets it flourish, the voters will return.

The Future of the Left begins today: If the Centre-Left parties get the foundations right, then the momentum is all in their favour

No sooner had David Cameron returned to Downing Street as a second term Prime Minister, than London was already playing host to anti-austerity, anti-Tory marches and protests (Tapper, 2015). In London, and in Cardiff as well, with chants declaring that 75% of the people did not vote for this Conservative government, there was a sneak preview of things to come - mass activism from the Left.

In the face of these protesting oppositions, the Conservatives are striving to show themselves to be the representatives of continuity and consistency (Watt, 2015). The Left, by comparison, has no real political continuity to speak of. However, that might not be a bad thing.

For both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the two biggest UK-wide parties of the Centre-Left, the spectacularly bad night they endured over 7th and 8th May was a pretty definitive rejection. But in that rejection, wherein both parties where very clearly broken by the result, there lies an opportunity. This is the threshold of a brand new day.

The key at this moment are the right foundations.

One of the big criticisms aimed at their parliamentary leadership by the Liberal Democrats' membership was that the approach to coalition was wrong from the beginning. Too eager and too easy. The damage done, by being seen as the party of coalition and complicit in Neo-Thatcherite austerity, the party could not recover.

However, the scale of the Lib Dems' defeat has, at least, served them by drawing a line under the last five years. They veered off from the expected script and they have been punished severely. That defeat presents the Lib Dems with the opportunity to rediscover their radicalism - their passionate campaigning, for political reform, for civil liberties and civil rights (Boyle, 2015).

David Steel, former leader of the old Liberal Party, placed the blame for the Lib Dems' poor result upon that apparent eagerness for a centre-right coalition. He argued that going into such s coalition meant abandoning 'radical progressivism' in favour of the pragmatic centre (Cowburn & Boffey, 2015).

Recovering the party's radicalism will require the election a convincingly left-liberal leader from amongst their rump. The current favourite is Tim Farron, as other possible candidates like Norman Lamb may have been too close to Clegg to be seen as representing enough of a shift to a towards distinctly liberal, rather than a Coalition, position (BBC, 2015).

If the party can find the right leader - and they can apply and embed the lessons of the last five years - there is optimism that the Lib Dems could recover (Wintour, 2015). There is even talk of the party reclaiming their position as the alternative opposition to Labour, able to work with them and others on the left.

Following the lead of the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas (Cowburn & Boffey, 2015), there is talk of co-operation between the parties of the progressive Left: first in the form of a pro-EU alliance and then maybe as some sort of electoral pact, along the lines of the old Lib-Lab pacts, by 2020 (Black, 2015).

Achieving those kinds of agreements will, however, require Labour to greatly reduce their aggressively jealous and belligerent attitude towards the other parties on the Left, that leads them to fight vindictive battles rather than fight the Conservatives.

At this election, that attitude led the party into a fight on three fronts: trying to stop the flood of voters leaving them in Scotland for the SNP - seen to be more conventionally Left-wing; trying to take back voters from the Lib Dems who were being punished for not being Left-leaning enough; and trying to fight the Conservatives head-on-head, on Tory-defined issues with Tory-style policies.

The Labour response was to put out a mix of messages and policies that left quite a puzzle as to what the party's values actually were - all over the place across Left, Centre and Right. It certainly wouldn't have helped that Labour tried to mimic so closely the Conservatives' own rhetoric, raising the question for voters: if you say Tories are right about all the main issues, why should anyone vote for you instead of them?

The debate has begun again - a particular long term internal struggle for the party - as to whether the party was too Left-wing or too Right-wing to be electable in 2015. According to an analysis of the election result, Labour did well in seats that were 'young, ethnically diverse, highly educated, socially liberal' and had a 'large public sector' (Ford, 2015) - probably helped by the lack of competition from the weakened Lib Dems. The trouble is that they bled voters in every other direction.

They lost white working class voters to UKIP, which the Blue Labour movement had warned would happen if the party did not cater to working class conservatism. They lost voters in Scotland on socialist issues, like the 'NHS, public services and redistribution'. They cannot even count on squeezing social liberal voters from the Lib Dems at every election. However they also lost out, particularly notably, amongst the wealthy, ambitious middle Englanders.

Former leader Tony Blair has staked out the New Labour case, claiming that the Centre-ground is the place for the Labour Party (Helm, 2015). Blair argued that if the party wants to achieve equality, its needs to do so without being seen to punish the ambitious - it needs to present a comprehensive vision of a society inclusive of those at the top as well as those at the bottom. Chuka Umunna, a potential Labour leadership candidate, is amongst the most Blairite of the new crop of hopefuls. Umunna's vision matches Blair's - a big tent Labour Party, able to house the poorest and the richest, which can take voters away from the Conservatives directly in those middle England constituencies (Umunna, 2015).

While there is always going to be some thinkers looking back to Blair for evidence that Labour can be broadly electable when positioned at the Centre, a task made all the more easy by the probable slight shift of the Lib Dems towards emphasising their Centre-Left credentials, that isn't the only thing the party needs.

One thing missing, or at the very least lacking in clarity, is the Labour Party's purpose. The search for a new leader can only do so much (Williams, 2015). What the party needs as much as anything else may well be the heart that the Lib Dems said they'd bring to the Tories. They need some sort of coherent vision that connects the party's soul (its values) with its head (the practical way in which those values are turned into policies suited to the times).

The decision ahead for Labour, between being part of the Left or the main party of the Centre, will have ramifications for voters and parties elsewhere. The performance of the Greens and the SNP show that Left-wing politics remains popular - taking 9% of the vote and seats between them, which is a strong showing even when you consider that many Left-wing voters will still have clung to Labour. Yet trying to reclaim their Left-wing voters will mean some stiff competition - and in the process giving up the Centre-ground contest.

If Labour sticks to the centre, they will have the potential to appeal to voters without stepping on the toes of either the Greens or the Lib Dems. But doing so means accepting the continued decline of its own Left-wing which will ultimately begin to believe that their are other options out there. The key for a Labour Party at the centre is to understand that you can be there with your values intact - you can accommodate a place for everyone within your vision of society without sacrificing ideals and principles.

For both Labour and the Lib Dems, the policy priority now seems to be returning to devolution and decentralisation, of both government and the economy, and comprehensive political, electoral and constitutional reform. The pursuit of that task will be helped by a positive thought: the immediate electoral future of both Labour and the Lib Dems looks bright... if they can resolve their issues and develop their visions.

As Cameron - digging up his One Nation Toryism (Nelson, 2015) and appearing magnanimous in victory, with praise for his opponents and appeals to the whole of the UK as one nation (White, 2015) - stood in front of Number 10, the old establishment found itself unexpectedly propped up, if only for a little while. But Cameron's grace in victory covers the fundamental weakness of his and the Conservatives' position. Cameron, the Conservatives and the Westminster establishment have on their side continuity and momentary stability. But that is all constructed around toxic attitudes towards welfare and the poor for which they no longer have the Liberal Democrats to hide behind.

The Left is not able to claim any sort of continuity. But what it has instead is time to construct, with care from the ground up, the ideas around which to build a new consensus. Combined with the spirit of political co-operation, best represented by the Green Party's Caroline Lucas, the Left now has all of the momentum. That momentum is leading to the completion of that which the advent of coalition government began - the comprehensive progressive reform of the British politics.

Election 2015: Your vote is your chance to speak out, even if you only do so tactically

With the UK's voting system being less than great when it comes to representation, it isn't surprising that there are many people out there who are seriously considering a tactical vote.

With a 'largest minority takes all' system, greatly in need of reform into something more representative, too many people are casting ballots without a hope of seeing themselves represented in their constituency. This is not a new issue - John Cleese had plenty to say about it thirty years ago. But its what we have for now.

As a result, many have cast, and many are again considering casting, their vote for the best of the worst - or at least, the most likely of the rest to stop the candidate they most despise from being the one who represents them. There are arguments for and against tactical voting which have validity - mostly divided between the idealism of voting for what you believe in, and the practicality of stopping what runs counter to your beliefs.

Various sources have published guides to where and how a tactical vote can count the most. Liberal blogger Stephen Tall gives a run down of where to vote tactically if you want to oppose UKIP. The Guardian and The Independent have both published guides to tactical voting in favour of any party, and voteswap.org is offering a  pledge system that allow you to vote tactically for Labour or the Greens in co-ordination with others around the UK.

It is to be hoped that this might be the last time a tactical vote is needed. The case for reform is growing irresistible. Sadly not everyone thinks the best move would be towards a more European style, more proportional system. Some would rather move towards another form of two-party system in the American style.

Regardless of how you intend to vote, even if you only spoil your ballot paper with a silly picture or a meaningful slogan, please do vote. Don't let the establishment think that your disgust, displeasure or disillusionment is to do with you being apathetic or uninterested. Make your voice heard, even if only to reject all of the options and demand better.

Labour warns against splitting the Left, but there could a greater danger in not taking a risk for a better future

With the 2015 UK general election looming, the Labour Party has begun its attempt to shore up support amongst its fringe voters. With polls suggesting that it will be a close run thing, the fragmentation of support across the Left is a threat to the Labour methodology.

Labour's approach has long been about claiming control of the establishment and propping up it up, in order to use its power in support of their goals. Those electoral aims, of propping-up and shielding, are fundamentally contradictory. They leave no room for external compromise or co-operation that might challenge the establishment they hope to use and so requires, and demands, comprehensive majority support. As David Marquand (Bogdanor, 1983) put it about Labour theorist Anthony Crosland:

"Crosland took the traditional structure of the British state for granted, and failed to see that the centralist, elitist logic underlying it was incompatible with his own libertarian and egalitarian values."

Yet, even as it demands monolithic solidarity from voters, the party continues to be blatant in its hypocrisy by remaining as twisted by internal intrigue as ever. Former Brownites, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, struggle amongst themselves, with former Blairites, and also with the more socially conservative voices in the party (McElvoy, 2015). They argue as to which populist policy to throw out next, in an attempt to shore up its wavering support (Ratcliffe, 2015), and they argue over what socialist economics really ought to look like:

"In truth, Balls and Miliband do have different visions of what a progressive economy should look like. Miliband has a fundamentally less approving view of the way markets work than many in the Labour centre ground (a whiff of the idealism of an American east coast seminar room is never far off). Balls takes a more pragmatic view that the best way to advance progressive goals is to allow the markets free reign and cream off revenues to use for social gain." (McElvoy, 2015)

In 2010, Labour warned of the risks of a split vote, caused by those who thought of leaving the party to look for brighter alternatives elsewhere. In the run-up to that election, the Liberal Democrats had appeared like a fresh voice, which spoke of an active and hopeful step forward. Labour, in turn, offered only a stable conservation, centred on the establishment - and they lost a lot of voters, though fear succeeded, at least temporarily, in quelling the tide before it became a flood.

Those warnings from the party and from commentators, in the face of a fragmenting political order, have now turned against the Greens. Former Labour minister Peter Hain has called for the party to come up with policy proposals that will allow the party to cover any potential threat to the solidarity of its support that the more radical Green Party might pose (Wintour, 2015).

In the light of the pressures being placed on the Greens, it is unsurprising that a lot has been made of the apparent announcement that its support for a Citizen's Income will not be in its 2015 election manifesto (Riley-Smith, 2015). In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Green MP Caroline Lucas said that:

"The Citizen's Income is not going to be in the 2015 general election manifesto as something to be introduced on May 8th. It is a longer term aspiration; we are still working on it... The Citizen's Income, as I've explained, is not going to be a red line."

Its apparent absence from the Green Party's campaign was revealed over a series of interviews where the policy was heavily criticised with regards to its cost (Findlay, 2015). While Lucas attempted to play down the party's intentions regarding Citizen's Income, other senior Green Party members have reaffirmed their commitment to putting the policy into the 2015 manifesto (Cowburn, 2015).

However, some of those among the Greens, such as MP Caroline Lucas, seem to be responding to the party's election possibilities with pragmatism. They are looking for the party to gain enough seats to take part in a left-wing coalition, and are setting out, ahead of time, where they draw the line for coalition talks (BBC, 2015).

"What we are going to do is to put forward some radical and visionary ideas which this political system needs so badly. What we are also going to do, with a handful of MPs, is to push Labour in particular to be far more progressive."

That means leading with their more modest aims, to give them the best chance of achieving an agreement. It also means learning from Liberal Democrat mistakes and not committing to things ahead of time, which they may not be able to achieve come May.

However, while the Green Party are making compromises to be a progressive force alongside, and not necessarily instead of or opposed to, the Labour Party, Labour continue to be pushed towards their standard, monolithic, pragmatic response: give us your vote unswervingly and we will save people from cuts and inequality.

The SNP too is now on the receiving end of whispered warnings (Rawnsley, 2015). The rise of Scottish separatism, and of the SNP as a left-of-centre alternative, has Labour scrambling to find a response that allows them to protect the establishment they deem so precious to their goals, while wooing back their disaffected supporters.

Labour remain clinging to their hopes of power in a dead system. They hang on to their two-party, us and them, polarised dynamics, and try to squeeze out the rest of the Left, with negative tactics on the one hand, and populist appeals on the other, and warnings of a need to act practically in response to the system's iniquities, even as they fail to press for reform of those same iniquities.

They encourage a resistance to radicalism within the Left, feeding the fear of loss; the fear of losing the ground claimed inch-by-clawed-inch, year-by-painful-year. Those tactics have motivated continued support for Labour, even as they have failed to secure those hard fought victories with constitutional or economic reforms.

Voters continue to point to the dangers of stepping outside of the safe routine for fear that the selfish other might sneak in and conquer. But there is a longer term danger of failing to reach, than in reaching and falling short. While the Left has hidden away in its Labour bastion, it has been suffering a slow creeping loss. The Left allowed the momentum, the initiative, to be taken by conservative and reactionary forces. The Left, in their fear, have succumbed to a slow shifting, slipping, seeping surrender to an agenda set by the Right.

The question is, after 2010 brought a fresh voice against Labour's stable conservatism, will people fall back into Labour's drudging march, or will they keep looking for new hope with the Liberal Democrats, or with the Greens, or the SNP? Or, can Labour finally turn over a new leaf after one hundred years where each radical step has been accompanied by a conservative one: civil liberties with authoritarian policing, public health with privatisation, devolution with centralised control, popular power turned into an obsession with establishment power?

If Labour is truly committed to the best interests of the Left, it has to learn to co-operate. The support for the Greens, SNP and Lib Dems, as left-wing alternatives, represents various kinds of idealist hopes for the future, all of which have been strangled within a political system that the Labour Party has persistently used against these left-wing oppositions to its own agenda.

Labour need to overcome that bad habit and get behind political reform, to reshape politics so that the Left, in all of its wonderful and diversely fragmented forms, can work side by side.

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References:
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+ David Marquand, in Vernon Bogdanor's 'Multi-party politics and the Constitution'; Cambridge University Press, 1983. [Buy Now]

+ Anne McElvoy's 'The clash of two Eds raises the ghost of Labour past'; in The Guardian; 22 February 2015.
+ Rebecca Ratcliffe's 'Would £6,000 tuition fees be a vote winner for Labour?'; in The Guardian; 16 February 2015.

+ Patrick Wintour's 'Labour needs to be more radical to counter Green threat, says Peter Hain'; in The Guardian; 22 January 2015.

+ Ben Riley-Smith's 'Greens ditch citizens' income from election manifesto'; in The Telegraph; 2 February 2015.

+ Joseph Finlay's 'What Natalie Should Have Said - How to Fund the Green Party's Citizen's Income Policy'; in The Huffington Post UK; 1 February 2015.

+ Ashley Cowburn's 'Green deputy leaders contradict Caroline Lucas: Citizens’ Income will be in the manifesto'; in The New Statesman; 9 February 2015.

+ 'Green leader Natalie Bennett backtracks on terror groups'; on the BBC; 3 February 2015.

+ Andrew Rawnsley's 'Voting SNP is more likely to hand power to Cameron than to Miliband'; in The Guardian; 22 February 2015.

Syriza can learn from the Lib Dems that strange political alliances send an inconsistent message

Following Syriza's victory in the Greek elections, where they fell just short of a majority, they were forced to find a coalition partner in order to govern. Their choice of partner was a right-wing anti-EU party.

For a radically left-wing party like Syriza, that choice of partner is drastically inconsistent with their ideology. Inconsistencies, such as these, in the way political parties present themselves can have dire consequences.

That was a lesson learnt only too well by the Liberal Democrats in the aftermath of their decision to go into government with the Conservatives, and to drop their opposition to tuition fee increases. Now, in Greece, Syriza face that same dangerous path as they agree to receive the support necessary to govern from the right-wing national conservative ANEL party (AKA Independent Greece).

The parties, that sit at completely opposite ends of the political spectrum, with entirely incompatible social politics, are going into government together on the basis of their mutual antipathy towards the European Union and austerity.

In the UK, the Lib Dems and Tories put aside their differences in ideology in the name of pursuing a response to the economic crisis with a shared vision of a smaller state. The controversy was not so much in their actions, or their reasons for doing so, but rather instead a matter of how the Lib Dems had presented themselves beforehand.

Having campaigned as a left-wing alternative party, many people felt that their reasons for voting for the party had been betrayed when they went into coalition with the right-wing Conservative Party.

In Greece, Syriza are walking a similar tightrope. In opposition to conservative economic austerity, and the EU establishment that is supporting it, the party is crossing the ideological divide to work with the ANEL right-wing group.

The fact that there is something that they mutually oppose enough to work together to stop it, says a lot about the confusion over political ideology. For all the emphasis that is put on ideology, allegiance and other forms of social structuring in party politics, groups are reaching across the divides in the name of particular issues.

In reality they are parties with very different reasons and motivations to oppose the EU, with very different alternatives preferred - which makes it a tenuous alliance at best. It is a pragmatic marriage of convenience, an inconsistency that, if Syriza isn't careful, could permanently damage their standing as a party of left-wing ideals.

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References:
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+ Gregory T Papanikos' 'With Greece backing the euro but Syriza in government, another election may beckon'; in New Statesman; 27 January 2015.

+ Sunder Katwala's 'Did Nick Clegg betray 2.7 million voters?'; on The Next Left - A Fabian Society Blog; 26 July 2010.

Arts of Leadership: Part 1 - Shifting the Focus

Redirecting the focus of public anger is a big part of Public Relations. Here are just a few examples of this technique:

'Full marks to the Andy Coulson media operation [for timing announcements about child benefit cuts]... The Tory conference carries one message; the nation must pull together to get us out of the trouble Labour put us in.'
            (Pascoe-Watson, 2010)

'At first I was annoyed by the pope's disgraceful attack on atheists and secularists, but then I saw it as reassuring. It suggests that we have rattled them so much that they have to resort to insulting us, in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the child abuse scandal.'
            (Dawkins, 2010)

In his 'historic' speech in Britain last year, the Pope made studious use of this tactic in the face of overwhelming public outcry against the institutionalised abuse being admitted by Catholic leaders around the world (Traynor, 2010).

'Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society... In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate.'
            (Benedict XVI, in Jones et al, 2010)

While in itself an admission of guilt, this technique is utilised to take advantage of the human love of all things comparative (an example here in comic form from XKCD).

A recent example is the Iranian Government's anger at being singled out for its sentence of death for a convicted woman. They deflected accusations by pointing to an American 'Double Standard' (Dehghan, 2010), as the United States at the time held a woman awaiting death for an arranged murder, who allegedly suffered mental health problems.

This case as the others above, leaves me astounded at the 'moral' positions our leaders adopt. We find ourselves in a system of morality justified by ranking your sins on a sliding scale, where it isn't so bad if everyone is doing it. This leads me to think:

+ How can we, in a rational world, allow leaders to so blatantly seek to sucker us with cheap vaudevillian misdirections? What can we do to hold these leaders to account?

+ Further, should it not be considered an honour by the church to be held to a higher standard? As with other nations and organisations that are singled out over issues, is it not a high compliment indeed to have better expected of you?

In the following few weeks, this blog is going to cover some more of the common misdirections, confuscations and slights-of-hand used by people in power to keep you distracted. It's one thing to demand that people always remain vigilant. It's a more practical one to give them some of the right tools.

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References:
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+ James Cowling's ''Full marks' to Tories' Andy Coulson for timing of child benefit announcement';

+ Richard Dawkins's 'Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity';

+ Ian Traynor's 'Belgian child abuse report exposes Catholic clergy';

+ Sam Jones, John Hooper & Tom Kington's 'Pope Benedict XVI goes to war with 'atheist extremism'';

+ Saeed Kamali Dehghan's 'Iran accuses US of double standards over woman's execution'

- For more reports from the Papal visit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/20/papal-visit-religious-pope
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11317441

The Choice Between Two Lefts

In the forthcoming Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election, the decision for voters of the left is still between two parties. For those of you who feel the Liberal Democrats have sold out their place on the left, let me explain how I reach this conclusion.

Whoever stands in place of Woolas as Labour's candidate, and whoever stands as a Liberal Democrat; will have to face the fact that between them they still represent the anti-Tory vote in the UK. However, in a mid-term election such as this, especially during a fixed five-year term; they represent different kinds of anti-Tory votes.

A seat for the Liberal Democrats in Oldham represents a practical opposition to Tory plans. Regardless of the line that Lib Dem Ministers feel they have to toe (or want to?), the backbenchers are the ones who will suffer most from their decisions at the next general election. So it is they who are most feeling the protesters and unhappy voters breathing down their neck.

However they also have a small ace up their sleeve, in the form of a number of former party leaders. Sir Menzies Campbell & Mr Charles Kennedy represent a more 'Left' element to the party. This backbench element, with sufficient numbers, can represent a very big stumbling block to the balance of power between the coalition partners.

Both Mr Campbell and Mr Kennedy have both been making nuisances of themselves so far during this term (Kennedy, 2010; Campbell, 2010) and both were amongst the 21 Liberal Democrats to vote against a tuition fee rise, who along with the 8 abstainers, outnumber the Lib Dems who voted for the rise (Duffett, 2010).

A seat for Labour is useful to the opposition for different reasons. The seats in parliament currently sit at Coalition 363 to Labour 255. Practically speaking, one more Labour seat will make no difference to the voting in the commons at this juncture. However a vote for Labour has the potential to be a bit of a publicity coup for anti-Tory voters.

While in purely practical terms, that seat would not be able to make much parliamentary difference for Labour, it can certainly send a very clear and public message to the coalition government. At this stage a strong media campaign, capitalising on recent events, could be a very effective tool for opposing Tory policy wishes.

Both options, of course, do present concerns for left (or anti-right) voters.

The major concern for voters considering the Liberal Democrats is their stance towards tuition fees. While those who make up a part of the Coalition, the Cleggs, Alexanders & Cables, feel compelled to do what they see as the responsible thing, the 'Principled' thing, that is what is best for the treasury when the country is flat broke; the party as a whole seems intent upon a different path.

Their path is defiance. More in line with pre-election pledges, they set themselves to go against even the Coalition Agreement's get out clause for unhappy Liberal Democrats (abstaining from the vote), to go the whole way and vote against their own party leaders who sit in government. A Lib Dem seat in Oldham means another backbencher, another seat and a stronger position from which to wrangle their own leaders away from potentially destructive policies.

For a Labour voter the concerns are traditional ones. Will my vote count for anything? For those voters that fear can be assuaged. For once it is a choice between which party will best effect left ideas. The choice will be between voting for Labour's potential ally (the Lib Dem backbench) or to vote for a Labour Candidate and sending a less practical but a very public message to the Conservative Ministers.

In the end this seat should be decided by votes cast, I think, pragmatically. It is a choice between which party would most weaken, and there-in rein in, the Conservative Government and its potential excesses.

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References:
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+ The Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election will be held on 13 January;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12003985

+ Charles Kennedy opposing Tuition Fees in Parliament, 14th October 2010:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVJ-_T6C_zU
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/14/kennedy-against-tuition-fee-rise

+ Sir Menzies Campbell tells BBC he opposes Tuition Fees, 13th October 2010:
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11531247
 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1320338/Ming-Campbell-challenges-coalition-joins-Lib-Dem-tuition-fee-rebels.html
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/13/menzies-cambell-joins-lib-dem-revolt-tuition-fees

+ Helen Duffett's 'Tuition fees: How Liberal Democrat MPs voted'; 9th December 2010;

+ Laura Kuenssberg's 'How Lib Dems are manoeuvring ahead of tuition fees vote';
 [Features a list of expected pledge-keeping Lib Dems]