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The nature of political discourse suffers when everything turns into an acute crisis
There’s little doubt that many find the nature of political discourse in the UK entirely contrived. Politicians, with few noteworthy exceptions, can look as if they’re not taking issues seriously, mouthing words from a script given to them, and appear utterly self-serving.
The King’s Fund have given their view on what might happen in the general election of 2015, with an increasing number of people interested in the NHS. But the fundamental issue remains that many people do not feel as if they voted in any sense for the policy changes in the NHS just coming to an end. Various campaigners, including these two, have tried their best to articulate a general unease amongst various voters, but it seems as if Ed Miliband is much more keen to mention repeatedly ‘the cost of living crisis’, rather than refer to what is happening to the NHS.
It wasn’t that long ago since we heard there were ’24 hours to save the NHS’, in a charge that ended up taking on a rather cartoonish character some non-Labour supporters allege.
By definition, all crises must come to an end. Labour’s difficulty with the current ‘cost of living crisis’ is that many feel that the causes of the ‘crisis’ have been a slow burn for ages, including changes in the energy market under a previous Labour administration. So Labour can attempt an argument that ‘not the right people are benefiting from the recovery’, in much the same way there’s been the wrong type of snow on some train lines. But the massive problem with this argument is that the people who might be benefiting from the economic recovery might be exactly the same people whom Labour tried to woo in the Blair-Brown years.
Yes, that’s right.
These are the same people Lord Mandelson has been ‘intensely relaxed’ about. Labour over its dead body would not like to bring in a whopping property tax to clobber very wealthy people. Polly Toynbee in a Guardian podcast recently remarked that it was possible that a person could see an increase in the price of his own house more than the net profit of going out to work (deducting presumably transport) expenses. And yet this is the sort of stuff which Piketty is interested in, and which Labour would rather not touch with a bargepole. So one has to enquire casually does Labour actually know what a crisis is?
“I don’t think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos” were in fact the precise words of the then Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan.
Some have mooted that the three words, “Crisis – what crisis?” helped bring down the last Labour government in 1979, even though the man generally thought to have uttered them – Jim Callaghan – did not in fact do so. And yet the Sun journalist who fashioned that headline caught the popular impression of a government unaware of a very serious state of affairs which had sneaked up on it. Indeed, much politics is about image – and certainly Labour want to implant in people’s minds an impression of an out-of-touch incompetent administration not ‘fit for purpose’.
Crises in medicine are though interesting and precisely defined. An “Addisonian crisis” or “adrenal crisis” is a constellation of symptoms that indicates severe adrenal insufficiency. This may be the result of either previously undiagnosed Addison’s disease, a disease process suddenly affecting adrenal function (such as adrenal haemorrhage), or an intercurrent problem (e.g. infection, trauma) in someone known to have Addison’s disease (the latter is therefore ‘acute on chronic’). It is a medical emergency and potentially life-threatening situation requiring immediate emergency treatment. Characteristic symptoms can include a sudden penetrating pain in the legs, lower back or abdomen, severe vomiting and diarrhea, resulting in dehydration, a low blood pressure, a reduced level of blood glucose, and confusion.
Ed Miliband also feels his crisis is very real, if not as such ‘life threatening’. Miliband has previously promised to rescue Britain’s struggling middle classes by boosting their living standards as he warns that the “cost-of-living crisis” will last for at least another five years. He that living standards are “the greatest challenge of our age” and will be at the heart of his party’s general election campaign next year. He has rejected calls from within his own party for him to change his strategy because the economy is improving.
But there may be trouble ahead for Miliband. The “cost of living crisis” is about to turn around, according to a forecast from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). In its so-called green budget, the IFS predicted that wages will start to rise faster than inflation in just a few months’ time, but it also warned that public spending cuts would continue to hit consumers. In particular, it said spending on the NHS was due to fall by 9% per person over an eight-year period. However, it did forecast that consumers would see their real wages – which allow for inflation – increase for the first time in five years. Likewise, ahead of the Eastleigh by-election, Iain Duncan Smith reported Britain faces a “crisis” of increased immigration from Romania and Bulgaria, as all three major parties consider their response to the UKIP Eastleigh surge. Called to the Commons to explain how the government plans to deal with new immigrants from within the European Union once existing restrictions are lifted next year, the work and pensions secretary said he was working to “tighten up” what benefits were payable to new arrivals.
“There is somewhat of a crisis over this,” he said. “Some people want to come here solely to claim benefits.”
Twitter is incredibly democratising for political parties, liberating them in getting their message across. David Axelrod, Labour’s newly appointed senior strategist and Barack Obama’s closest long-term political adviser, will apparently make mobilisation of Labour’s grassroots central to the election campaign. Axelrod himself has stressed that he could not help Labour succeed at the next election without the mobilisation of local communities, adding – in his first effort to energise Labour members – that the world would be watching the outcome of the 2015 vote. The Guardian has revealed that Axelrod was joining the Labour campaign team as a senior strategist. And Miliband has been talking about creating a ‘social movement’ for ages, perhaps inspired by his brother’s interest in ‘Movement for change’. But also the great thing about Twitter is that one can easily out the postcode lottery of pledges made by the main political parties – what a LibDem says in Cumbria might turn out to be very different to what a LibDem says in Oxford, say on the NHS.
“Lucky Generals” are the ad agency that produced the broadcast for Labour. Apparently the controversial Party Election Broadcast, known as “The Un-credible Shrinking Man” has not just been produced as a brief comedy experiment. They have been paid good money to obey instructions from their client – the Labour Party, to deliver strategically against what they have been told are the Labour Party’s goals. That’s “the 35 per cent strategy”. As the political arithmetic under the constituency boundaries means Labour only needs to poll the 35 per cent it currently polls to win a majority (as opposed to 42 per cent for the Tories), Labour appears to have decided to hold on to what it’s got. That PEB is designed to do two things to the Lib Dems. It tells disaffected voters from 2010 who have defected to Labour why they should stick with them. And it signals to the Liberal Democrats now, they can forget to aspire any repetition of Matthew d’Ancona’s “In it together” with Miliband’s Labour.
In a way, the persistent pathology in the National Health Service has lasted for decades. Factors include a chipping away in real terms in overall budget, poor budget allocation, PFI loan repayments, the need for efficiency savings, nurses not getting pay increases, delays in A&E, delays in seeing a GP, and so on. But there is concern that such a ‘lean’ large entity will simply be unable to bear any small shock to the system. Astra Zeneca and Pfizer are much in the news headlines these days. They are both powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies which have much in common with film companies. They will both produce their fair share of bananas and donkeys, but they only need one huge blockbuster to survive. Similarly, the Labour Party, if it found its blockbuster policy, might find itself with a consistent poll lead of a few percentage points in the run up to the General Election to be held on May 7th, 2015. The reason the ’35 perent’ strategy might be sensible for Labour is that the risks of a blockbuster going wrong for Labour are huge. This is Labour’s election to lose, given the massive unpopularity of the current Con-Dem coalition for a number of diverse reasons.
A ‘blockbuster’ might indeed come in the form of the Labour Party producing a political signal to bring all the PFI hospitals immediately into state control – but many of these contracts are due to run out in 2017-9 anyway; or might be to ‘renationalise the NHS’ , building on the left populist strength of the desire to renationalise the railways. The latter, a sort of ‘reverse clause 4’ moment for Ed Miliband, could be boom or bust for Miliband, but no-one would really know until the move is executed. Miliband would almost certainly for the chop if Labour lost the general election in 2015. But how he lost it, if indeed he does, can only be a matter of speculation now. It is widely predicted that UKIP will ‘win’ the European elections, with the Labour Party coming second. But what happens in third place is of considerable significance – might the Green Party manage to capture a lot of disaffected voters themselves, throwing the Liberal Democrats into 4th place?
If that materialises, what happens to the Liberal Democrat and Green vote between 2014 and 2015 is of massive significance. The problem that Ed Miliband has is that the cost of living crisis may not be a sustainable crisis. But an opportunity for Ed Miliband is that the performance of the NHS continues to decline, such that there is a genuine acute-on-chronic crisis in the NHS. Campaigners on the NHS have done a terrific job so far, but the best is yet to come (or ‘the worst’ depending on your perspective).
For flood victims, the State is not a dirty word. So why should it be for patients of the NHS?
Ironically, just as Ed Miliband gave his Hugo Young 2014 lecture on “an unresponsive State”, many people in the SW England saw their sandbags being delivered to a different location.
The floods have revealed what many of us have suspected all along.
The response to the floods has revealed a painful fault line in our narrative of ‘The State’.
There’s no COBRA meeting when fourteen Trusts run into difficulties with patient safety, because of the common thread that they don’t have a safe minimum level of safe staffing.
The acute general medical take for many health professionals is a ‘firefighting experience’, with the aspiration of lean management to mean there’s actually insufficient capacity in the system to cope with increased demand.
It is now being reported that some British insurers are unwilling to take on the risks of certain flood areas, feeling that the market is somehow rigged towards only benefitting “cherrypickers”.
It makes us wonder who the postman will be, now that Royal Mail is privatised benefitting hardworking hedgies.
And yet this is precisely the criticism that anti-privatisation campaigners on the NHS have been saying since initial discussions of the Health and Social Care Bill (2011) commenced.
The market is unable to guarantee complete coverage for all scenarios. In the case of private insurance and health, rarer ‘unprofitable’ diseases will just become out of scope. Like Owen Paterson’s ‘badgers’, the location of the goalposts will be redefined so that some NHS interventions are no longer ‘necessary’.
David Cameron’s response curiously has not been to resuscitate his flagship turkey.
You would have thought, if you believed any of Steve Hilton’s hype, that people would fight them in the dinghies as a “Big Society” response.
Or somehow the market could be “nudged” into action, where the market could be realigned with financial incentives to make us want to give a shit about our fellow man or woman now underwater.
Instead, David Cameron has been trying to fatten up the impoverished State.
If you think that the current debate about the actual fall in NHS spending is going nowhere, that’s clearly small change compared to what may or may not been happening to Lord Smith’s Environmental Agency.
For flood victims, the State is not a dirty word (save for those victims who feel profoundly let down by the lack of response by the State). So why should it be for NHS patients?
It’s well known that the current Government considered implementing an insurance-based system but eventually went against it. The implementation of personal budgets has been progressing over the few years, with rather little discussion.
And yet, personal budgets could become a major plank of Labour’s “whole person care”. Somewhat reminiscent of ‘expert commentators’ who were slow on the uptake when it came to uptake on competition in section 75, they appear equally sleepy on the significance of unified budgets for health and social care.
From one perspective, they ‘empower’ persons, and give them ‘choice’. But from another perspective, they actually disempower persons when the State runs out of money, and you have to top up your budgets from some other means.
It’s this two tier nature which causes the most alarm. Already, there’s been much finger pointing about ‘personal responsibility’ of people building homes knowingly on flood plains. The shift of potential blame as well as shift in personal responsibility is a deliberate change of emphasis in policy, and one which Labour must have an open discussion about if it wishes to retain any vestiges of trust.
The whole basis of trust of the public has for some time taken a knocking, with implementation of the private finance initiatives (PFI) and discussion of caredata.
While budget sheets are in the hock of paying off loan repayments, rather than paying for much needed staff to take the level of staffing beyond ‘skeleton’ or ‘extra lean’, the talk about a ‘more responsive State’ is all fluff.
While the NHS complaints system remains unfit for purpose, it’s all fluff.
It may be the fluff which keeps Alan Milburn and Tony Blair happy, but, despite the three general election victories, it has been a policy issue which Labour must revisit.
Proper levels of funding of the NHS and social care have long been popular and populist policies for Labour, and so has effective State planning.
It remains thus all the more strange that the only State that the Labour Party in fact cares about is the Square Mile.
The Autumn Statement graphically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working
It’s the cost of living, stupid. The Autumn Statement graphically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working.
George Osborne is expected to provide good news as usual for millionaire pals, while the statement does nothing for a worsening cost-of-living crisis. Any benefits for disability allowances will be more than offset by disabled citizens being clobbered by the ‘bedroom tax’, annihilating the slogan of the Liberal Democrats of ‘a fair society, stronger economy’. Any recovery at all three years into this parliament is of course to be welcomed, especially since Labour had actually handed over the keys to government in May 2010 with an economy in growth. That’s right – the economy had been recovering in May 2010.
There is now a maximum number of people in employment with terrible employment rights. Zero-hour contracts have become an unsightly blot on the landscape of the Liberal Democrat’s fair society. The deficit rose due to throwing money at the banks in the last parliament as an emergency last-resort. Barack Obama had even thanked Gordon Brown personally for his leadership in the global fiscal crisis. Since then, come tomorrow, we are expecting another sharp cut of £1 bn in budgets. But this is a Government which is addicted to austerity for simply ideological fetish.
However, the intellectually bereft Coalition will churn out yet again that Labour has no ideas, and sticking to their spend their way out of trouble, in dreary sad repetition. This is clearly laughable as the government has just unveiled its infrastructure spending plan for the next two decades, describing it as “a blueprint for Britain”. About £375bn of investment in energy, transport, communications, and water projects is planned, although no new money will be forthcoming. So that claim about Labour being the only one with the cheque book is an obscene joke. Most of this Government’s borrowing has been to make up for the disasters of their economic policy. Labour had wanted infrastructure spending a long time ago, to give the economy the desperate boost it needed. That boost came eventually, but it was too little too late. The Autumn Statement graphically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working: infrastructure spending was an after thought.
And this is a Government which has lost any freedom. It is in the pockets of the corporates. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is deepening, and the recovery is not guaranteed. If the recovery is founded on a flaky London-based “property bubble”, and exports don’t pick up, this recovery might not be sustained after all. But will most ‘normal people’ feel any prosperity? Real wages have fallen significantly, and most people will feel poorer than 2008. This is because the economy is fundamentally is in a shoddy state, benefiting the rich but not the less well off. The Autumn Statement graphically will demonstrate ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working. The economy has been fundamentally moribund since Thatcher took over. Labour looked after the super rich, as Mandelson explained in a moment of being intensely relaxed.
And what about the claims to be “the greenest government” ever? This has been the most incompetent government ever, quite simply. The Government has already announced that it will loosen the ‘green’ obligations faced by energy providers, subject to approval. Those providers have promised to pass on any benefits, thought to be around £50 per dual fuel bill, to the general public. Of course they won’t. They will threaten us with blackouts instead. Pensioners are having to decide between food and fuel.
The Coalition also is sending out rather odd messages consistent with social engineering through the tax system. They are giving the impression of discrimination against unmarried couples. One expected measure tomorrow is designed to make couples better off by £200 when it is introduced in 2015. But even the private bank Coutts has argued that given the value of the proposed tax break and the number of individuals who would be eligible, this historic pledge might ultimately have little impact on people’s living standards.
And are the Coalition actually competent at running the economy? It’s been leaked that the Department for Education even complained that the extra money could require ministers to raid its basic needs budget, the fund used to deal with the rise in the number of primary schoolchildren caused by a baby boom. However, instead it was agreed that unspent money from the Department of Education’s maintenance budget would have to be deployed. It’s widely reported that the LibDems had to concede on environmental issues. Will the Coalition admit the truth of this ‘in the national interest’? Even a Department for Education source has said: “There is no spare money in either the basic needs or maintenance budget to pay for Clegg’s kitchens.” It’s simply a gimmick. Gimmicks don’t constitute a long term plan.
And as usual the Conservatives are desperate to look after their chums. In it together. It of course isn’t ‘in it together’. That would show true solidarity – or even socialism. Senior tax advisers have called for the Government to reduce stamp duty on homes worth between £250,000 and £300,000 – a move that would cost the Treasury about £150m.
But this is Tory Britain, where to pay for this you have to clobber the disabled. This is a significant moment in welfare policy affecting millions of people, as previously benefits had increased in line with the rising cost of living. Some of us are still having to pay for three lost years in the Government’s economic policy. It’s expected that many benefits will rise by 1% in April 2014 include income support, jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefit. But top CEOs or bankers are doing just fine with sky-rocketing bonuses.
The cap for the ISA will be falling for those not quite as rich. This means you can’t mend your roof as much even if the sun is shining, despite the Tories’ only claim to Keynesian economics. And the multibillionaires will still be able to avoid tax. Yes, it really is Tory business as usual.
However, benefits for disabled people and carers will increase in line with the rising cost of living as measured by CPI inflation in September, which was 2.7%. This might seem like ‘good news’ except they are being clobbered by the Bedroom Tax. The Labour Party is the only party which has promised to repeal this dangerously unfair Act of parliament in the next government. The Government have admitted that they know there are not enough smaller properties in the Bedroom Tax scheme to enable people to downsize. Despite fierce lobbying by all interested organisations for an exemption from the benefit cut for people in receipt of Employment and Support Allowance and/or DLA, the only current exemption is for a minority of tenants who can prove they require constant overnight care. For everyone else the ‘tax’ (benefit cut) takes immediate effect on 1 April 2013.
This is a tired Government, desperately out-of-touch.
Lynton Crosby wants to clear out some ‘barnacles’.
But this new autumn statement will do nothing to sort out the real ‘cost of living crisis’.
And will protect its friends and donors as usual.
The Autumn Statement graphically and tragically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working.
Is a banking crisis or an A&E crisis more important to English voters?
(c) Steve Bell 2008
link here
Comparing a banking crisis and an A&E crisis is comparing chalk and cheese. Likewise, potential English voters will have personal reasons for why they might think one crisis is more significant than the other.
It is said that James Carville, campaign strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run, posted a sign at campaign headquarters that succinctly set out the key messages: “Change versus more of the same; the economy, stupid; and don’t forget health care.” English voters in all probability do not do a direct comparison of economic performance and performance in the NHS, but it is easy for a right-wing dominated press to forget the impact of the NHS. Whilst the raison d’être of the current Coalition has always been to ‘sort out the mess’ from 2010, the facts are that a series of catastrophic mistakes by George Osborne has left the economy in a dire state when it had been recovering when David Cameron was bequeathed the keys to Downing Street even having not won the General Election. Not voting Labour, furthermore, has been seen as a punishment for “fiscal incontinence”, or “reckless spending” of the Labour Party whilst in Government 1997-2010. The issue there is that the Conservatives promised to match, at least, the spending commitments of the Labour administration last time around, and there is no conceivable argument for blaming public sector nurses or teachers on a global economic crisis.
What happened was that a £0.8 trillion cash injection was pumped into the “banking crisis”, for which Labour has never been given any widespread credit (and only blame for increasing the deficit.) As such, it did not receive much credit either for the highest level of public satisfaction recorded by the King’s Fund. And yet, even daily, Conservative supporters remind potential voters about ‘the lack of regulation’ in the financial sector, even though it was the Conservatives who felt the City of London was over-regulated compared to its competitors abroad. The Conservatives have tried through innuendo to pin the Mid Staffs blame tail on the Labour donkey, and latterly tried to the pin the A&E tail on the Labour donkey. What happened in Mid Staffs, certainly in terms of substandard clinical care (whether or not you agree on the precise mortality statistics), has never resulted in an electoral backlash against the Labour Party. In fact, the “NHS brand” of Labour has been very resilient, as demonstrated in the recent poll findings from Lord Ashcroft:
And yet there is barely a ‘cigarette paper’ between Labour and the Conservatives on an ability “to steer the country through tough times”. It could be, simply, that there is a ‘time lag’ – for example, Tony Blair supporters have often argued that Labour won a General Election, in spite of the dubious (allegedly) reasons for the UK to go to war against Iraq. Likewise, people may not instantaneously (or ever at all) blame the Labour Party for failings at NHS Trusts, or the current Coalition for the A&E crisis. Yet, the reasons for these failings matter immensely, and all parties are aware of the massive importance of finding reasons for these failings with a view to ensuring that these disasters do not happen again. There is concern about whether ‘the Mid Staffs experience’ was replicated elsewhere, hence the genuine organic support for ‘Cure the NHS’ led by the inspiring Julie Bailey. The Labour Party argue that the ‘banking crisis’ could have become a real crisis felt by members of the public, with people being seconds away from being unable to take money out of cash machines.
It is possible that the best days of the ‘National Health Action Party’ are yet to come, but it is likely that the Labour Party has more of a chance to getting into government than the National Health Action Party. That of course does not stop either Party from standing up for what is right. People generally have more affection for their hospitals than banks, and this could be one of a number of reasons why there was never felt to be a need for the ‘National Banking Action Party’. Without banking, as per without hospitals, England would collapse, except the fundamental problem for the Conservatives is that hospitals as yet do not “create wealth”. It is easy to measure the success of a director in generating profit for his shareholder, as he is legally obliged to do under the Companies Act, with regard to his environment, but it is very hard to quantify degrees of bad care. ‘Success’ in the financial sense, creating a profit, in the voters’ eyes may not be paralled by ‘success’ in quality-of-care, and certainly there have been reports of people having been reported to have been given very generous pay-offs despite poor clinical care in institutions with which they were connected.
The media’s obsession with Labour’s blame for the global financial crisis is indeed staggering, and its inability to cover accurately issues such as the Health and Social Care Act (2012) has been a scandal in its own right. Parts of the media have been trying to ‘rubbish’ the NHS brand, but have latterly discovered that private healthcare providers using the NHS brand, which has a lot of goodwill, can be very profitable. An argument which the media could have argued, which they did not, either due to stupidity or incompetence, is that the NHS overall was under-regulated, in the same way the financial industry allegedly was. There has been a notion that private companies are restrained from making profit by ‘legal red tape’, but it is worth noting that much of this legal regulation is there to ensure safe standards for workers. One only has to look at reports of corporates making profit out of collapsing factories in Bangladesh to understand the importance of corporate social responsibility, and it has been an on-running theme in healthcare that employee relations when bad in hospitals or in social enterprises can be very much to the detriment of the organisation.
It would be therefore be very convenient had the Health and Social Care Act (2012) addressed any of the issues which led Mid Staffs to be unsafe clinically. It did not. That is why even in their wildest dreams parts of the news media cannot argue that the £3 bn reorganisation which nobody voted for will do anything to prevent another Mid Staffs. If anything, even with a more fragmented market, regulation of healthcare providers will be harder. Much focus has been put into ‘breaking up the monopoly’ of the NHS, rather than defending the need for a comprehensive, universal service free-at-the-point-of-use (as far as is feasibly possible, of course). Labour does have a ‘head start’ in that it has a loyal following regarding the NHS, despite ‘controversies’ in policy, such as PFI or the introduction of NHS Foundation Trusts. Labour seems desperate to restore its ‘economic credibility’, even though it still has never won the argument, and is likely to do so in the near future. Labour politicians are lining up to establish their ‘pragmatism’ in managing the UK’s finances properly, but even the response to last week’s announcements of means-testing benefits has either been welcomed by those who would never vote Labour or derided by Labour ‘core voters’ for bringing Labour ever closer to the Conservatives.
England in my view will never learn to love Labour over its running of the economy, although it is probably fair to say that if Labour is considered economically incompetent it is unlikely to win a General Election. However, it does have an opportunity to lead on its running of the NHS. This takes real leadership from all involved in the NHS, and needs a very clear vision of what sort of society we wish to live in. This might include, for example, making Doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, and other NHS staff feel valued, rather legally ensuring primacy of the shareholder. The A&E crisis is unlikely to get as many column inches as the banking crisis, and as such the A&E crisis hasn’t brought the country to its knees, but the thing is: in a non-financial sense, it has every potential to.
What will a Miliband-Thatcher brand achieve?
Characterising the leadership of Margaret Thatcher is difficult. The problem is that, despite the perceived ‘successes’ of her tenure of government, her administration is generally accepted to have been very socially divisive. For many, she is the complete opposite of ‘inspirational’, and yet listening to current Conservative MPs talk there is a genuine nostalgia and affection for her period of government.
What can Ed Miliband possibly hope to emulate from the leadership style of Margaret Thatcher? Thatcher’s early leadership can definitely be characterised as a ‘crisis’ one, in that full bin liners were not being collected from the streets, there were power blackouts, Britain was going to the IMF to seek a loan, for example. However, the crisis now is one which does not have such visible effects. Miliband can hope to point to falling living standards, or increasing prices due to privatised industries making a profit through collusive pricing, but this is an altogether more subtle argument. A key difference is that people can only blame the business models of the privatised industries, not government directly. Whether this will also be the case as an increasing proportion of NHS gets done by private providers is yet to be seen.
It is perhaps more likely that Thatcher’s leadership, in the early stages at least, migth be described as “charismatic”, involving both charisma and vision. Conger and Karungo famously described five behavioural attributes of charismatic leadership. They are: vision and articulation, sensitivity to the environment, sensitivity to member needs, personal risk taking, and performing unconventional behaviour. In a weird way, Thatcher in her period of government can claim to have provided examples of many of these, but it is the period of social destruction at the time of closure of coal mines which will cause doubt on sensitivity to the environment. While ‘Basildon man’ and ‘Ford mondeo’ man might have been looked after, apparently, ‘Easington man’ was clearly not. A ‘One Nation’ philosophy promoting one economy and one society might not be a trite construct for this, after all. The problem is that ‘Basildon man’ has himself moved on; the ‘right to buy’ is the flagship Tory policy epitomising independence, aspiration and choice for the modern Tory, as resumed by Robert Halfon, but there is ultimately a problem if Basildon man is not able to maintain mortgage payments, or there is a general dearth of social housing.
In a way, looking at the failures of Thatcher’s leadership style is a bit academic now, but still highly relevant in reminding Miliband that his ‘political class’ cannot be aloof from the voters. It is a testament to the huge ‘brand loyalty’ of the Thatcher brand that there are so many eulogies, and one enduring hagimony from the BBC, to Thatcher. Jay Conger provides a way of understanding how charismatic leadership is to be maintained, and the “Poll Tax” is symptomatic of Thatcher’s failure of these aspects. Conger identifies continual assessment of the environment, and an ability to build trust and commitment not through coercion. Miliband likewise needs to be mindful of his immediate environment too: his stance on Workfare disappointed many members of Labour, causing even 41 of his own MPs to rebel against the recent vote, and upset many disabled citizens who are members of Labour. What happens when charismatic leadership goes wrong can be identified clearly in the latter years of the Thatcher administration. These include relatively unchallenged leadership, a tendency to gather “yes men”, and a tendency to narcissism and losing touch with reality. I still remember now (and I am nearly 39), the classic, “We have become a grandmother” and that awful Mansion House spectacle when Mrs Thatcher proclaimed that ‘the batting had been tough of late’ whilst maintaining a quasi-regal ambience.
I personally disagree with the notion that elections are won from the ‘centre ground’, particularly because I conceptually do not find the classification of ‘left’ and ‘right’ helpful (especially if you, like me, wish to embrace “One Nation Labour” with genuine goodwill). To use the market analogy, I think it’s like making an offering which looks and functions like an iPod, but which has some of the features missing; you might as well buy the real thing. A more sensible strategy for a competitor to the incumbent is to offer something really disruptive; in other words, something which offers some of the good qualities of the current market leaders, but which adds useful value. Ironically, enough time has passed since the airbrushing of socialism from the mainstream UK political system occurred with the advent of New Labour for Ed Miliband to give this another go. You can argue until the cows come home, and many mere mortals who are management theorists have given it a go, about whether charismatic leadership needs both charisma and vision. Despite Denis Healey’s famous doubts about whether Ed Miliband has charisma, it seems that Fraser Nelson has latterly judged Ed Miliband to be quite personable. Certainly, Ed Miliband to come close to becoming a charismatic leader himself needs to have an extremely clear vision. He may have to “think the unthinkable”, and make an unrealistic promises such as a NHS which is ‘comprehensive, and free-at-the-point-of-use’ (still miraculously, though, in the current NHS constitution). However, to borrow George Osborne’s phrase, “there is a debate to be had”, about whether the deregulation of markets under the Conservatives and New Labour did lead to a climate which encouraged the global financial crash to spread to the London markets. There is also a debate to be had about the ‘market failures’ of privatised industries. Sure, nobody is wishing ‘Thomas Cook’ to become a state-owned travel agent, or you to wait a month to have a phone line fitted by the State. But this is to present outdated, prejudiced, ‘Aunt Sally’ arguments. There is a debate to be had instead about whether we wish certain national services, like utilities or railways, to be fragmented, at relatively high prices, and where there is clearly a substantial benefit to shareholders and corporate directors but little benefit to consumers. Nobody wants to see the Unions ‘holding the country to ransom’, but it is a triumphant failure of Tony Blair and New Labour that this demonising malicious memes have been allowed to remain alive almost forty years on. Nearly all people, instead, firmly believe in the idea of democratic representation, and this has now become vital in abuse of the workforce by certain employers. We hear stories all-the-time of powerful corporates using ‘zero hour contracts’, and it is this Government which has seen the dilution of employment rights of workers and employees (reduced eligibility for unfair dismissal claims, and a lower quantum of award.) And, finally, there is a debate to be had about what exactly underlies the ‘maximum number of people in employment’ claim; is it for example an increased number of part-time, flexible workers who are under-employed, or is it an artefact of migrant workers from Eastern Europe who are doing temporary jobs in the UK?
Ed Miliband has often many times remarked about his thoughts have been ‘shaped’ by Margaret Thatcher, despite the fact he is very clear he disagreed with many of the views of Thatcher. We need, however, a frank discussion of where Britain goes from here. Frankly, a pig with a rosette could have won certain Labour seats in Scotland, but those days are over. Labour’s membership started to go into decline from around 2002/3, long predating the fall in membership after the Iraqi war. The ‘paying of respects’ to the late Baroness Thatcher has allowed some Tory ideology to go unchallenged, such as the importance of the Unions in society, or the failure of privatised industries. However, what Ed Miliband can hope to emulate is a precise articulation of a vision. Miliband has to prove that he is the right person for the right times (2014/5), like Blair, Thatcher and Cameron/Clegg might have been. If Labour is to be given the honour of a mandate in 2015, it needs to have an extremely clear idea of what it hopes to achieve, and for whom.
