Political preview of 2010

Sometimes, the political year is hard to predict. Back in January 2007, we could all be reasonably sure that Gordon Brown was going to become Prime Minister later that year – but what no-one foresaw was what a balls-up he would make on the question of whether to then hold a snap election.

Likewise 12 months ago, few pundits or politicians saw the MPs expenses scandal coming, although as I have pointed out in this column before, it should have been spotted down the tracks from a fair way off.

The year 2010, though, should be easier. There will be a general election, and barring a most extraordinary reversal of political fortune, the long period of New Labour hegemony will come to an end.

Indeed, the main debate among political crystal-ball-gazers has not been so much over whether Labour will lose, as over whether the Tories will win by enough to be able to form a government in their own right.

Several factors are running in their favour. Mr Brown has never managed to ‘connect’ with the British public, and has had to shoulder at least part of the blame for a recession that has revived all those old question marks against Labour’s economic competence.

Tory leader David Cameron, who has never been behind in the opinion polls since he took on the job, will be able to argue fairly persuasively that the only way to get rid of the Prime Minister is to vote Conservative.

Against that, there is the considerable obstacle of Britain’s skewed electoral system which means that the Tories will have to be 10-11 percentage points ahead of Labour in the national share of the vote to be sure of an absolute Commons majority.

And - perhaps the biggest hurdle of all for Mr Cameron – the fact that Labour’s unpopularity has still not been matched by any great surge of public enthusiasm for the Tories.

So, cards on the table time, what is my election prediction? Well, as ever, the historical precedents provide what I would see as the most meaningful clues.

Labour is hoping that this election might turn out to be a bit like 1992 – the year John Major won in the teeth of a recession because he was ultimately more trusted to deal with the economy than his opponent.

For my part, I think the mood in the country feels much more like 1979 – an election in which the public’s primary concern was to get rid of Labour rather than to elect the relatively untried and untested Margaret Thatcher.

What that points to is not a Conservative landslide, but a Commons majority of the kind of order of that achieved by the Iron Lady against Jim Callaghan – 43 seats.

Is there anything the Prime Minister can do to change the game? Well, I suppose the obvious thing would be to resign, and there is a small window of opportunity over the next few weeks in which it could yet happen.

I have always been among those who believed that, if Mr Brown felt he was damaging the party’s chances by staying, he would call it a day – but it has to be said that he has thus far shown no evidence of any desire to quit.

Nevertheless, I am still keeping perhaps 10pc of my mind open to the possibility that he will stand down, in a bid to give a younger successor a fighting chance of winning that elusive Labour fourth term.

And if that were to happen, then clearly all the many predictions that have been made about the political year 2010 would need to be very swiftly revised.

Review of the Year 2009

With the possible exception of 2001 and 9/11, seldom has any political year in recent history been dominated by a single story to the extent that the MPs expenses scandal dominated this one.

Most people have a fairly cynical view of politicians, casually and sometimes wrongly assuming them to be in it for what they can get.

Few taxpayers however imagined that they might be footing the bill for the cost of cleaning MPs’ moats, mowing their paddocks, and doing up their second homes to enable them to make a killing on the property market.

The scandal that broke over the summer will, quite literally, change Parliament – and the nature of the relationship between the public and their elected representatives – for ever.

The sad thing is, it could all have been averted, with a little foresight and some courageous leadership on the part of the Prime Minister and his fellow party leaders.

If Gordon Brown really was the strategic political genius his admirers have always claimed him to be, he would have seen it coming a mile off and pre-empted it by introducing measures to clean up the place.

Okay, so MPs would probably have voted him down – but that would have left him in an even stronger position when the storm finally broke.

As it was, Gordon’s inability to regain the political initiative was another of the themes of a political year that seems likely to be Labour’s last full 12 months in office for some time.

At one point, it looked as though Mr Brown’s handling of the continuing economic crisis, and in particular his role in brokering the global recovery plan, was winning over the public.

But his difficulty is that when it comes to the economy, too many voters see him as part of the problem rather than part of the solution – thanks largely to his hubristic claims to have “abolished boom and bust.”

It all threatened to come to a head in May when the sequential resignations of Hazel Blears and James Purnell seemed to herald the start of a Blairite counter-revolution against his leadership.

Had South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary David Miliband followed them out of the door, it would have been – but Lord Mandelson saved the day for Gordon by talking him out of it.

Mr Brown’s troubles were by no means over though. Another long-running story that caused big problems for the government over the summer was its alleged failure properly to equip British troops in Afghanistan.

It coincided with a terrible spate of British casualties as soldiers embarked on a perilous mission to drive back the Taliban in order to allow elections to take place.

And the year ended with startling revelations about another war – the 2003 Iraq conflict which is now the subject of a wide-ranging inquiry under Sir John Chilcot.

The disclosure that former Prime Minister Tony Blair knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ten days before the invasion seems likely to further sully his already tarnished reputation.

But to return to MPs’ expenses…one consequence of the saga is that it adds an extra element of unpredictability to the election which must now be held this spring.

More fringe party candidates are certain to be elected. The incumbency factor which traditionally favours sitting MPs may go into reverse. And the turnout may well be lower, leading to more volatility in outcomes.

Some believe that the scandal will ultimately lead to a better, more diverse House of Commons, a political culture in which MPs genuinely see themselves as the servants of the people rather than their masters.

Others, and I have to say I am one of them, take a more jaundiced view: that it’s an ill wind that blows no good.

The message of the star

At first there was a vaccum where creation came to be,
Singing 'save me, save me.'
Were we abandoned in the ether or did someone set us free?
Love me, love me.

Earth, Earth, the story so far

There was a baby in a stable, some say it was the Lord.
Singing 'save me, save me.'
Why if it's no more than a fable should it strike so deep a chord?
Love me, love me.

Earth, Earth, the story so far

Science broke the news the only absolute is light.
Save me, save me.
Wasn't that the message of the star on Christmas night?
Love me, love me.

Earth, Earth, the story so far

Paddy McAloon


A very happy Christmas to all readers of this blog

A lost Christmas classic

The world of music is full of records that would have made great Christmas Number Ones. My own personal favourite is a track called Walk Out To Winter by Aztec Camera, which I am still convinced would have hit the top spot in December 1983 if the record company hadn't gone and released it in...September.

Here's another song that might have been a big Christmas hit had it come out in 1993 as its composer, Paddy McAloon, originally planned.

Blair's candour is six years too late

So Tony Blair has finally confirmed what we have all suspected for years - that he was determined to go to war in Iraq irrespective of whether or not there were any weapons of mass destruction there. Would that he had been so disarmingly honest with MPs and the public back in March 2003. Here's today's Journal column.

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Over the past week, the world’s politicians have been focused on the future, specifically on how to combat the threat of climate change that promises some very uncertain futures for tens of millions of their people.

As I write, world leaders seem no nearer a deal, although such is the nature of these things that this may well have changed by the time today’s Journal arrives on your doormat.

By all accounts, our own Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been working hard behind the scenes to secure some kind of agreement - in between paying tribute to Sir Terry Wogan, of course.

So often all at sea in the domestic political arena, international politics seem to bring out the best in Mr Brown, as she showed earlier this year in the talks over the global economic recovery plan.

But even if there is a deal or sorts, and the Prime Minister is seen to have played a part in brokering it, the impact of Copenhagen on the political battle back home will be minimal.

So I make no apologies this week for focusing once again on an issue where, far from working to achieve global consensus, a British Prime Minister fairly comprehensively ruptured it.

I refer of course to the Iraq War, and specifically to Tony Blair’s startling admission last weekend that he would have taken us into it come what may.

Asked by interviewer Fern Britton whether he would have still sought to remove Saddam Hussein had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction, he replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him.”

Now the first thing to say about this is that it was actually the wrong question by Britton, a mistake which an experienced political interviewer like Nick Robinson would surely not have made.

Because thanks to Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry, we now know that the government did indeed have cause to realise there were no WMDs before the conflict even began.

Foreign Office official Sir William Erhman told the inquiry last month that, ten days before the invasion, intelligence was received that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons has been dismantled.

Yet the government decided to conceal this game-changer from MPs and the public in the full knowledge that it would drive an Exocet through its case for war.

Let us for a moment imagine a counterfactual history based on the premise that Mr Blair was indeed “a pretty straight kind of guy” and as such had been more honest with the public about his reasons for going to war.

Let us suppose that he had come to the House of Commons on the day of that dramatic debate in March 2003 and said: “There are no WMDs, but we’re still going in because I promised George Bush that we would a year ago.”

Would he still have been Prime Minister by the end of that evening? Of course not.

We wouldn’t have just have been talking about Robin Cook and Clare Short resigning. Most of the Cabinet, including, I suspect, Mr Brown himself, would have followed them out of the door.

Mr Cook said that night: “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.”

Well, thanks to Chilcot, we now know there was no “probably” about it.

The idea that Mr Blair could ever have secured a Commons majority for a war based on regime change is utterly fanciful.

And the more of these grubby revelations emerge, the harder it will be for his unfortunate successor to retain his own majority next Spring.

The politics and the economics are inextricably intertwined

Opposition criticisms of the Pre-Budget Report as "electioneering" are fatuous and naive. Government denials that it is such are evn more so. Here's today's Journal column.

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Over the past couple of years, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable has proved himself to be one of the most prescient, as well as one of the most popular politicians in the country.

It was he who first predicted the banking crisis, he who first advocated the nationalisation of Northern Rock – and he who told Gordon Brown he had gone “from Stalin to Mr Bean.”

Yet for all his undoubted expertise in economic matters, his criticisms of the pre-Budget Report unveiled by Chancellor Alistair Darling on Wednesday came over as rather naive and facile.

He charged Mr Darling with the grave offence of having unveiled “an election manifesto” rather than a national economic plan – scarcely surprising given that there is, er, an election happening in six months’ time.

Much of the debate over the PBR has thus far revolved around this point, with claims that Mr Brown overruled Treasury plans for faster action to reduce the country’s £178bn budget deficit.

The central accusation against the Prime Minister here is that he is allowing the politics of the situation to dictate the economics – and in so doing, putting the future economic health of the country at risk.

But although governments of both colour have certainly been guilty of that in relation to pre-election budgets in the past, I am not sure the two can so easily be disentangled in this instance.

To my mind, the differences between the parties are as much about the fact that Mr Brown has a genuinely different view from his opponents over how to tackle the recession, as they are about electoral politics.

For several months now, the main point at issue between the two main parties has been not whether spending cuts need to be made, but whether they should be made in 2010 or 2011.

In this sense, the PBR changed absolutely nothing. It merely made these already well-established dividing lines a little clearer.

Neither are those dividing lines in themselves anything new, being merely a modern-day re-run of the economic debates that have recurred since the original Great Depression of the 1930s.

There will always be those like Mr Brown who believe that increasing spending is the best way out of a recession, and those like Tory leader David Cameron who believe that simply makes a bad situation worse.

Hence, if the Prime Minister has his way, the cuts will come only once the economy has started growing again – as it is projected to do by 1.5pc next year and by 3.5pc in 2011.

As well as spending cuts, the fiscal tightening from 2011 onwards will also see a 1pc rise in National Insurance and a 1pc cap on public sector pay settlements.

This was reasonably smart politics by Mr Darling as it means an incoming Tory government is now committed either to carrying out a tax increase, or having to explain why they are making even deeper cuts.

He also scrapped his earlier proposal to increase inheritance tax thresholds, thereby challenging the Tories to axe their own controversial plan to raise it to £1m.

But if Mr Cable’s accusation of electioneering against the Chancellor was somewhat fatuous, Mr Darling’s denial of the charge was possibly even more so.

Indeed, it was about as disingenuous as Mr Brown’s claim to have cancelled the autumn 2007 election in order to “set out his vision” rather than because of a couple of adverse opinion polls.

The truth is, this PBR was designed to convey a very blunt message to the voters: “Things are bad, but they would be a damned sight worse with the other lot in charge.”

It may not be the most inspiring of election pitches, but as Labour discovered to its cost in 1992, it’s one that has often proved successful.