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Data-driven policy has its problems, but single issues are alive and well
Michael Green is not just the ‘alter ego’ of Grant Shapps, whose personal image continues on its ‘slow burn’ after a mass of ridiculous stories concerning his business activities. Michael Green is the name of a top Carlton Communications figure, known to be a personal friend of David Cameron, like Andrew Cooper, the founder and strategic director of the Populus voting initiative.
There are many problems with polling as a way to make policy. Not least, it can produce results which are at odds with domestic and European law, such as repeal of the Human Rights Act, encouraging a swop for fundamental employment right in share ownership, or ‘bash a burglar’. The further problem is that the results themselves can be intrinsically unreliable on public policy grounds; such as the vast majority of survey respondents in the Sun who believe that the death penalty should be re-introduced. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged that in politics the whole is more than the sum of its constituent parts; therefore the ‘gestalt’ of the policy must overall make sense. However, data-driven policy is attractive from an ‘efficiency’ aspect of the operations management of politics; money can be spent in producing data, which can be number-crunched, to act as the input for a speech-writer. The impact of the delivery of the speech written by Clare Foges and colleagues can then be ascertained through further polling, in a ‘feedforward’ mechanism of feedback control.
The idea of ‘strivers’, as Isabel Oakeshott points out, sounds like the product of a computer cluster analysis of polling data (though she did not phrase it in such statistical words.) The concept of strivers does not make sense if you consider that members of the Conservative Party also wish to cut non-employment benefits, the economy has been imploding under the direction of George Osborne since May 2010, parts of the government wishes to take away basic legal rights (such as human rights or employment) which would protect and enhance the wellbeing of a ‘striver’. Oh – that’s another aspect of data-driven policy which doesn’t make sense; how can you pursue an agenda of happiness and wellbeing, when you wish to impose austerity and swingeing cuts that is doing much short-term damage to the economy and much long-term damage to society?
It has been interesting to watch how the mainstream and blogosphere have responded to ‘single issue’ politics. It is perhaps true that general polling data do not give a helpful picture of the value of disability issues to non-disability voters, but Sonia Poulton’s articles have had a genuine captive audience. On welfare, Kaliya Franklin was even shortlisted for this year’s coveted Orwell Prize, and her friend and fellow campaigner for disability issues, Sue Marsh, has had a remarkable impact in breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ of this topic which previously had barely been addressed. Likewise, Dr Eoin Clarke, in the blogosphere, has been addressing with considerable bravery previously taboo issues of potential conflicts of interest and the implementation of the NHS Act, which would be felt by most reasonable people to be issues of public interest. Mainstream media may of course be frightened to tackle the complex issues of the Health and Social Care Act, or simply do not understand them, but it is noteworthy that the Daily Mail has recently, and successfully, embarked on a campaign against A&E closures.
That Hunt has decided to frame the argument as ‘modernisation’ of the NHS, which Andy Burnham MP, had started is indeed interesting. David Cameron hardly mentioned the NHS in his speech, which perhaps does reflect the polling data. Recent estimates have provided that the Labour Party is indeed around 30% ahead on the NHS, ‘can be trusted with the NHS’ and so forth. On the other hand, there has always been ambivalence about Labour’s record in public spending, despite the fact that this double-dip recession was directly caused by the policy of the Conservatives, and that George Osborne MP in opposition had promised to meet the spending commitments of Labour, a fact which has conveniently forgotten with his Liberal Democrat accomplices.
Danny Finkelstein has previously warned that the Conservatives should not put all their eggs in the austerity basket. The austerity plan has of course been utterly discredited, with the economy going into reverse under the Conservative-led government, and the Financial Times recently warned that due to the ongoing problems austerity would have to continue until 2018 at least. The austerity agenda could be another ‘single issue’ which might cause pain for Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, if members of the public sector continue to ‘feel the pain’ in the relative absence of a Labour government wishing to tax heavily the top 1% of earners.
Voters are likely to produce a decision on a combination of factors, and certainly predicting this less than three years ahead of a general election is not easy. Whilst ‘Bigotgate’ probably did not lose Gordon Brown the 2010 election, though it might have been representative of a confusion on Labour’s part in understanding the aspiration of voters in an immigration context, certain issues can seem to prove fatal. It is perhaps significant that the poll tax debacle was necessary and sufficient in toppling Thatcher, but it is also significant perhaps that the Conservatives went on to win the 1992 general election. That was the last election they actually won, as many members of Labour will remind you.
Out of the BBC or Daily Mail, please give me the Daily Mail any day!
Graphic from the Max Farquhar blog.
I’m surrounded by lefties – I’d say virtually all of my 3000 friends on Facebook are Labour voters, and possibly the vast majority of my nearly 6000 followers on Twitter are Labour voters too. Therefore, I am well aware how everyone has loved to mock the Daily Mail, as almost a ‘rite of passage’ for my party. However, I must say I really like the Daily Mail. I certainly feel that it now offers a more interesting and open discussion of policy matters than the BBC. There is no doubt that the BBC abuses its dominant position in subtle ways – it has a dominant presence on the internet, and in TV and radio; and it has such enormous reputation that it gets away with a lot. It gets away with rampant imbalance and bias against the Labour Party, and often makes basic accuracy mistakes.
The BBC has been implicit in furthering the lie that the Labour Party increased the deficit due to rampant recklessness. The fact is that a major cash injection had to be produced in 2009 to resuscitate a dying economy due to the global financial crash; without this injection virtually all senior economists concede that the UK economy would have entered a deep depression. As it was, the Conservatives, with the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg, withdrew investment and embarked on a policy of austerity, thus guaranteeing the slide into depression of the UK economy earlier this year. Sir Mervyn King does not like to emphasise this, which is odd given that he is supposed to be independent. Nick Clegg even this morning used his Andrew Marr to further the lie that Labour had ‘made a mistake’ akin to his fraudulent lie of making a pledge which the Liberal Democrats could not afford. Even Danny Alexander, according to James Forsyth’s article in the Spectator this morning, conceded that he warned against making this promise which the Liberal Democrats could not afford on The Sunday Politics show.
Apart from live interviews which the BBC uses to maintain balance, the reporting of the BBC of domestic news has been staggeringly misleading, either innocently, negligently or fraudulently. There has been no coverage of the welfare benefit reforms to the point that the public understands what is going on, the public have little comprehension that the NHS has been privatised and this had not been the policy prior to the 2010 general election, and the public do not know that many sectors have been taken out of scope in legal aid and that many law centres have shut down. This is in sharp contrast to the Daily Mail, curiously enough. For example, the Daily Mail “broke” the story last week that doctors are to be offered cash ‘bribes’ to slash the number of patients they send to hospital.
“GPs have been promised financial incentives of up to £26,000 for their surgery if they take certain measures to reduce referrals. Every time a doctor sends a patient to hospital for a scan, consultation or operation, the local NHS trust is charged for the cost of their treatment.”
The Daily Mail has also led through the journalism of Sonia Poulton on the trauma experienced by disabled citizens like me through this coalition government. Sonia recently reported on the Paralympics thus:
“This year, despite widespread revulsion and opposition, David Cameron’s Coalition has forced through some of the most punishing and harsh measures – via the Welfare Reform Bill – that disabled people have experienced in my lifetime. Financial life-lines have been severed and state-assistance stripped back, and in some cases completely withdrawn, as disabled people are forced into a system that will lessen personal independence and increase state dependence. This will almost certainly result in ‘disabled homes’ up and down the country.”
Sonia has even written to Ed Miliband about the disaster of the injustice of the work capability assessments, reproduced in this article:
“Dear Mr. Miliband,
I am prompted to write to you having just watched these two programmes on the subject of ‘fit to work’ testing for sick and disabled people: Channel 4?s Dispatches (‘Britain On The Sick’) and BBC2?s Panorama (‘Disabled or Faking it?’).
This year, as a writer, I have been made painfully aware of how distressing, unreliable and costly – both physically and emotionally – the Work Capability Assessment is for those undertaking it. The financial cost to the country is another concern altogether.”
It is worth looking at this quite carefully. Only this week, Michael Gove heaped praise on the Daily Mail in arguing the case for the E-Bacc in replacing the GCSE examination. The Conservatives are therefore very mindful of what the Daily Mail writes for its reasons, much more than it cares about the Labour Party Press Office says (stating the blindingly obvious). The BBC is playing an altogether deceitful game in furthering the political agenda of the Conservative Party, and knows that it has a massive outreach. However, it has a guaranteed source of income through the licence fee. Many people I know resent that the licence fee is being used to give such a distorted view of political thinking on BBC domestic news. However, the Daily Mail really does a golden market opportunity here. Whilst the death of newspapers has perhaps been somewhat exaggerated, the circulation of the Daily Mail remains good. It will benefit from a greater number of people who wish to read its papers, and it is very likely that the declining popularity of the Sun has been for a fundamental mistrust by the majority of reasonable voters in its output, accelerated by Kelvin Mackenzie and the propagation of smears over Hillsborough. The Daily Mail instead has a golden opportunity to make a lot of money, if many disenfranchised voters, who do not particularly like any of the political parties, wish to engage with resentment of the incompetence of ATOS in delivering assessments or the resentment of the privatisation of the NHS which they did not vote for.
I believe that Labour members, like me, should not underestimate the enormous value that the Daily Mail has been in recent times in discussing real issues involving domestic policies in a way that the BBC never would. This is an important thing for Labour to realise, and to get more people in the general public to engage with these important issues. I personally believe that, whilst much prominence has been given to the ‘it’s the economy stupid’ school of thinking, both main parties are in fact mistrusted on economic incompetence, and there is a new model army of armchair protestors against NHS privatisation and the way this government has treated disabled citizens.
