Doing my bit to save the union

I've been thinking for some time about starting blogging again.  When I put the blog on hold last October, I said that the level of interaction no longer  justified the effort, and to be honest I don't expect that to change in a hurry.  But I have missed having an outlet for my thoughts on the political scene, and the current state of play in the Scottish independence debate, with the United Kingdom facing a real threat of break-up, means it's all hands to the pump as far as I am concerned.  And while I am not expecting the traffic on this blog to reach the levels it achieved eight years ago when political blogging was all the rage, if just one person - just one - reads anything I've got to say over the next eight days and votes no as a result of it, then it will have been worthwhile.

Why do I care about this? Well, fundamentally because I consider myself to be British.  Indeed, with Highland Scots ancestry on my father's side and Jersey ancestry on my mother's, I think my antecedents can claim a fairly wide geographical spread of Britishness!   But it's also because I believe in the idea of Britain - not just as a geographical entity but as a political union.  And as a man of the centre left, I believe the Scots - as well as the Northern English - bring something to the UK politically - not just Labour MPs, but a belief in the value of collective effort that helps to balance out the more individualistic culture prevalent in London and the South.

It is the juxtaposition of these essentially contradictory values that makes Britain what it is, but the problem is that those on the right of politics have by and large failed to appreciate this for the past 35 years. What we are seeing with the way the referendum debate is playing out is the outworking of the abandonment of the post-war political consensus after 1979 - the imposition of free market ideology by the Tories with no thought for how this would be perceived in Scotland, Wales and the North and seemingly no regard for how it would affect the fabric and essential political unity of the UK

I gave an example of this on my Facebook page today in a link to David Cameron's otherwise welcome defence of the union in today's Daily Mail. I wrote:

Welcome from Cameron, but if he really wants to save the union, he should announce the immediate repeal of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act which potentially paves the way for the future privatisation of the NHS and make clear that a future Conservative-led government would never do this. It is clear  to me that it is fears about the future of the NHS - particularly among traditional Labour voters - which is driving the Yes campaign and has brought this country to brink of disintegration.

I don't really expect Cameron to do this of course, but the point is that he should have realised that the NHS is part of the glue that holds this country together, and that embarking on a road which seems likely in the end to turn it into no more than a brand operated by multifarious private providers was always likely to weaken those bonds.

I will develop some of these thoughts this weekend in my column in The Journal - still going strong after 17 years but still only available in the paper's print edition - and this will also be posted here.

Bye for now

Thanks for visiting the Paul Linford blog. This blog is now on hold for the time being for reasons I explain below.

1. The blog was originally spawned in a somewhat transitional period of my career between stepping down as political editor of The Journal, Newcastle, in August 2004 and becoming editor of HoldtheFrontPage in June 2008. During this period I was learning a lot about the internet but doing very little actual journalism, and I found the blog a useful outlet for my creative energies. Nowadays, all of these quite rightly go into my day job.

2. As I always suspected would happen, political blogging has fragmented into a small number of mega-blogs which have effectively become part of the mainstream media, and a much larger number of small blogs which receive very little traffic, interaction or attention from the political establishment. This is often no reflection on their quality, but it does have a fairly dispiriting effect as other political bloggers besides me have found.

The blog will remain online as an archive and - who knows? - may yet be resurrected in the future. But for now, it's goodbye.

Paul

Logic says he's bound to be the next PM - but there'll be no complacency from Ed

There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought about what the Labour Party needs to do to win the next general election.

One is that it has to do relatively little to get back into government other than rely on the growing unpopularity of the Tories, while the other is that that it won’t regain the trust of the people unless it demonstrates that it has radically changed

The two points of view roughly correspond to the positions adopted in the period after 1992 when the “one more heave” approach personified by John Smith contended with the “modernising” tendency represented by Tony Blair.

Mr Smith’s sudden death and Mr Blair’s subsequent elevation to the leadership settled that one, but, two decades on and with the party once more seeking a way back into power, the issue has recurred.

The first point of view was forcefully expressed in a Daily Telegraph article this week by Stefan Stern, a management writer and visiting professor at Cass Business School, who exhorted readers to “do the maths.”

“Labour won 258 seats at the last general election with 29pc of the vote, which was their second worst result in 70 years. They should do better next time. Governing parties, on the other hand, rarely get more votes at the election following a term (or terms) of office,” he wrote.

“So here’s the thing: it is actually going to be quite hard for Labour not to be the largest party after the next election.

“If Labour is the largest party after the election, perhaps comfortably so, we can expect the Lib Dems to enter coalition talks with them. That was the principle that lay behind the Lib Dems’ approach three years ago. “

Stern’s logic seems impeccable. But the opposing point of view was just as cogently expressed by the YouGov pollster Peter Kellner in a recent article in Prospect magazine.

“Labour’s real challenge is to reassemble the Blairite coalition that swept the party to power in 1997. That coalition included people from across Britain’s economic and social spectrum. The party reached parts of the electorate that had seemed out of bounds,” he wrote.

“To reassemble an election-winning coalition of voters next time, these are the people Labour must win back. This means rejecting the language of ideology, class and social division, and reviving the appeal of national purpose.”

As I noted in this column following May’s local election results, Labour has by no means succeeded in doing this, with the South in particular remaining stubbornly resistant to the party’s message.

It is partly for this reason, I suspect, that within Labour leader Ed Miliband’s inner circle, Mr Kellner’s point of view currently holds more sway than that of Mr Stern.

As has been fairly clear from the recent carefully co-ordinated statements by Mr Miliband and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, the party leadership is well aware of the fact that it has a credibility problem with certain types of voters, and is working hard to persuade them it has genuinely changed.

Mr Balls’ announcement earlier this month that Labour would keep within George Osborne’s spending limits for its first year in office if it wins in 2015 echoed a similar pledge made by Mr Blair ahead of the 1997 election.

And Mr Miliband’s subsequent speech signalling new limits on longer-term welfare payments was designed to show the party is prepared to get tough on benefit claimants.

Will it work in persuading the public that the Labour of 2013 is essentially a different party from the one which, in many voters’ estimations, allowed public spending to get out of control in the Blair-Brown years?

Well, it’s a start, but Mr Miliband knows there is still much to do, and won’t be hoodwinked by Daily Telegraph columns telling him he is almost certain to be the next Prime Minister, however impeccable their logic.

In the run-up to polling day in 1997, Mr Blair continually warned his party against complacency, even when the whole world could see he was heading for a landslide.

In that respect, at least, Mr Miliband will be no different.