How the Election Was Won
Democracy is a messy and unpredictable business. The response to the British general election may well be to shrug one’s shoulders – and perhaps to enjoy the discomfort of all those pollsters and pundits who got it wrong. Perhaps the popular will is harder to read than we thought.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps what we have seen is a demonstration that the popular sentiment on political issues can be manipulated; after all, we have now seen a series of election results around the globe – in Australia, New Zealand and the UK – which have produced similar results following the use of similar techniques.
Those results have meant the election – and in some cases re-election – of right-wing governments which have used remarkably similar strategies. The pattern is now well established.
The first technique is a relentlessly sustained assault on left-of-centre rivals, focusing not just on their supposed disunity and incompetence, but even more specifically on the ground that they are extremist, left-wing (now used exclusively as a term of abuse) and financially irresponsible.
So, in New Zealand, a Labour party that in government produced eight successive surpluses is compared unfavourably in terms of economic competence to right-wing successors who have presided over six successive deficits.
In the UK, a Labour government that had to pick up the pieces following a Global Financial Crisis created by “free market” excesses and irresponsible banks is blamed for the unemployment, falling living standards and increasing poverty brought about by the austerity policies pursued by their Tory successors.
The second technique is to talk up, with equal relentlessness and disregard for the facts, the supposed successes of incumbent right-wing governments. So, a New Zealand economy that suffers a sustained trade deficit, a dangerous dependence on a single commodity price, an unsustainable bubble in its most important housing market and an overvalued dollar that destroys jobs, profits and investment in the productive sector is regularly described as a “rockstar”.
Similarly, a UK economy whose supposed recovery is based shakily on asset inflation and an unsustainable consumer boom that has still not ended the longest and deepest fall in living standards in modern times is celebrated as a triumph for the policies of a Tory government that remains intent on piling more misery on the most vulnerable.
These techniques, depending as they do on the simple and repeated assertion that black is white, cannot succeed of course without the willing connivance of large parts of the media and the business community. That connivance is regularly forthcoming and allows right-wing parties to avoid what would normally be expected in a properly functioning democracy to be a proper level of scrutiny.
So far, so expected. But there is another aspect of the ease with which the right wing establishes its version of events in the public mind that may be less expected and that certainly attracts little attention. That aspect is the supine attitude of left-of-centre parties in responding to the assaults made on them by their rivals.
So, in both the UK and New Zealand, Labour parties have made little effort to defend the economic record of Labour governments. They have on the whole preferred to remain silent on such issues, as if doubting their own ability to mount the obvious counter-arguments and as if resigned to an inability to win an economic argument.
Indeed, they have gone further in allowing their opponents to set the economic agenda. So cowed have they been by the attacks on their economic competence that they have hastened to assure the voters that they will be just as tough as the Tories in cutting public spending and deficits and just as heartless in sheeting home to the beneficiaries and the unemployed the responsibility for restoring balance in the public finances.
These attitudes have been made quite specific. In both the UK and New Zealand, Labour parties have gone out of their way to proclaim their over-riding commitment to cutting the deficit, thereby validating in the eyes of the public the improbable Tory proposition that this must be the prime goal of policy. It was at that point that the election was lost.
It was this eagerness to embrace Tory doctrine that made it impossible for Labour oppositions in either country to argue convincingly that, accepting as they did the same policy framework, they could be expected to produce different and better outcomes. Little wonder that the voters opted for the devil they knew.
The siren voices are at it again. Instead of learning the obvious lesson – that Labour wins only when it is seen to offer what the British people most crave, something fresh and full of hope and ambition – the Blairs and Mandelsons urge that Labour should become even more like the Tories. At a time when even the central banks and the IMF have abandoned their support for retrenchment and austerity, and neo-liberal orthodoxy is seen as a busted flush, Labour is advised to show no interest in a brave new world but to cower in a craven old one.
Lynton Crosby may have a lot to answer for. But at least he knew what he was doing and achieved what he wanted. Even so, he may not have succeeded if Labour had not been running scared.
Bryan Gould
11 May 2015
It’s The Economy, Stupid
As with most elections, the Clinton dictum that “it’s the economy, stupid,” has held good in the general election of 2015 – with special emphasis this time on “stupid”.
The debate about who has done or will do best in managing the economy has been even more confused and irrational than usual this time. It is often the case that “the economy” means something quite different to the voters than it does to those contesting for power. For the voters, it simply means whether they have jobs, or feel better off today than they did yesterday. Arguments over the interpretation of longer-term economic trends leave them largely unmoved. And the more bitter and divergent those arguments, and the more they depend on either side on disputed facts, the less willing and able the voters are to get involved.
Ten years from now, however, it is a safe bet that much of the confusion will have cleared. We will be sufficiently distant from the hurly-burly, less engaged in partisan dispute, and better able to agree on what recent history really tells us. A consensus of informed and objective opinion as to what really happened and why will have emerged.
We already know the shape of that consensus. We know because we have been here before. It took a Keynesian revolution and a Second World War before we could see clearly what had caused the Great Depression but that understanding did emerge. The ideological prejudices of those who had insisted on retrenchment as the cure for recession simply could not survive the clear light cast by unchallengeable facts.
By 2025, we will have reached a similar clarity of view and analysis as to what caused the Global Financial Crisis and the consequent recession. Those who were major players – and therefore major culprits and protagonists – will have departed the scene. We will know that the GFC was the inevitable outcome of mistaken and irresponsible excesses, and of an irrational belief that markets are infallible and self-correcting.
We will know that the response to the recession that inevitably followed – as the banking system teetered on the brink – made it the longest and deepest recession of modern times. We will know that British living standards fell more sharply and recovered more slowly than they need have done and were still in 2015 lower than they had been in 2007, and that austerity was a deliberate and bone-headed denial of all we had thought we had learned.
So, why do we have to wait till that point when it is already clear what has happened? How can the assertion of partisan positions, unsupported by the facts, nevertheless muddy the waters to the extent that the voters of 2015 are left confused and uncertain?
The answer is partly and importantly a consequence of Labour’s inexplicable failure to defend itself and its economic record and to develop a coherent argument as to what really happened and what can now be done. Labour surrendered any ability to argue an alternative economic case when it accepted that the reduction of the government’s deficit is the most important single goal of economic policy and one that it would carry into government if it were elected. That ensured that no real challenge could be offered to the Tory analysis and policy prescriptions, however mistaken and destructive they may be.
It is also, however, a reflection of the Tory ability to dominate the debate agenda and to flood the news media and information sources with misleading and sustained misinformation. How else to explain that it is Labour that has to defend itself against the charge of responsibility for the Global Financial Crisis and the consequent recession – surely the definitive judgment on the errors and excesses of “free-market” economics? How else to explain that continued austerity is accepted as the only game in town? Or that George Osborne can claim to have produced “success” and “recovery”?
It may be expected – even accepted – that politicians, with their reputation for cynicism, will bend the facts and tell it like it isn’t. But what to say of the role of the massed ranks of media and the establishment that urge them on in their deceptions? Are they so dedicated to their partisan interests that they are happy to see the country languish in a continued failure that looks increasingly unavoidable, as long as “their side” retains power?
It does no service to the voters or to the country they live in that they should cast their votes on Thursday in deliberately engineered ignorance of the true state of affairs. Those who seek to mislead them in this way are taking huge risks with democracy as a form of government and with our future as a country.
Bryan Gould
4 May 2015
Call To Action – A New Book
I am delighted to report that a new book, co-authored by my long-time colleague, John Mills, and myself was published in London last week by W H Allen. The book is called “Call To Action” and comprises a powerful argument for addressing the major problems that have now held back the British economy for decades. Those problems include a damaging loss of competitiveness, a policy blind spot on the importance of the exchange rate, a perennial and debilitating foreign payments deficit, the perilous decline of manufacturing, and the futile focus on the government deficit as the prime goal of policy. The book provides a carefully researched case for taking action now before it is too late and could offer the way to better outcomes following the May election.
Call to Action by John Mills and Bryan Gould
Published by WH Allen, part of Ebury Publishing
£10.00
Buy now
This book is also available as an ebook.
Economic Policies for an Incoming Labour Government – Part 9
Economic Policies for an Incoming Labour Government
By Bryan Gould and George Tait Edwards
Part 9 Further Proposals and a Conclusion
The Wage and Salaries Increases Act
One of the main, and perhaps – to western eyes – most surprising features of
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s re-introduction of Shimomuran
economics is his attempt to ensure that there is a rise in Japanese wages.
In marked contrast to Coalition government’s determination to drive down
wages here, he well understands that higher wages are an important way of
raising demand in an economy which is intent on stimulating economic
activity – hence his implication that the advantage of relatively cheap
investment finance will be made available only to those firms that already
pay, or are willing to undertake to pay in the future, a proper level of
wages to their workforce.
An incoming Labour government should take a similar stance, with positive
policies for a greater share of national income by working people. In
particular, there should be an immediate rise in the minimum wage rate to
£8 an hour and an annual incomes and salaries growth target equal to the
estimated rate of inflation plus the estimated rate of growth plus 2% for the
first five years of the Labour Government. This, in the context of the other
policies here proposed, will spread effective purchasing power throughout
the economy and move all families out of poverty within the lifetime of this
government. Zero-hours contracts should be made illegal in the UK. The
disability and unemployment benefits system will so far as possible be uprated
to the levels which would have obtained if the Coalition Government
had never existed.
A second part of wage legislation will be enacted to provide that future
wage and salary increases will be divided, with the increases due to the
estimated annual rate of inflation paid weekly or monthly and the
estimated growth component paid as a lump sum every 1st November. This
measure will ensure the growth of real wages and limit inflation, and
provide earners with lump sum funds, which research has shown are more
likely to be saved, which in turn will increase the emergency funds of
families for holidays or to meet unexpected expenses.
It will also usefully increase the saving of British families, and will, in our restructured financial
system, increase bank funds for industry. That measure has proved very
effective in Japan, where it may have been another policy initiative
originating from the Japanese master economist Osamu Shimomura, and we
think it will be as effective in the UK as it was in Japan.
Improvements in The Machinery of Government
A review of the dominant and self-interested role played in the British
economy by the major banks leaves little room for surprise at the fact that
the various initiatives to support a British economic revival have all failed.
George Brown’s National Enterprise Board, the Industrial Re-Organisation
Corporation, and the more recent suggestion of a National Investment Bank,
all had and have one factor in common – they were inevitably small,
central, initiatives depending upon the co-operation and goodwill of the
Clearing Banks to allow them to work. Not surprisingly, over the last
century and a half, the British Clearing Banks have never had any interest in
permitting the survival of any organisation that could grow to challenge
their virtual monopoly and have ensured that such experiments did not
survive.1
The proposals above for the reform of the banking system will go a
long way towards remedying this situation and allowing genuine reforms to
take effect. If, for any reason, the banks succeed again in frustrating the
flow of lending for investment purposes to industry, it would certainly be
worth looking again at a National Investment Bank which would ensure that
such an objective was met, with that national bank having direct links to
the Local Community Interest Banks.
Finally, there is one additional change
in the machinery of Government that should be put into place.
The Economic Planning Agency
An Economic Planning Agency (EPA) will be set up in the Office of the Prime
Minister to fulfil the following goals:
– to provide competent, timely and accurate advice to the government on
how best to achieve the developing government objectives of increasing
______________________________________________________________
economic growth, managing inflation, and making due provision for the
impact of environmental changes on UK resources
– to report upon the locality and potential of British businesses, particularly
with regard to the development of the UK as a green economy
– to identify and recommend potential and emerging innovations and the
location of key knowledge-based growth hubs in the economy
– to provide a monthly report upon the outcomes of the regional, national
and local investments
– to calculate and comment on, as it may see fit, the capital-output ratios
and other key factors in the economic development of the country
– to identify blockages in the free flow of investment funding for national
and other viable projects, particularly with regard to national sea
defences and the investments required to accelerate the movement into a
greener economy
– to provide an Annual Economic Survey of Britain, summarising the
economic state of the nation and acting to improve the practical
economic understanding of key industries, and
– to report as regularly as it sees fit upon the results of various Government
initiatives and projects, particularly with regard to
– Green energy generation
– The safeguarding of national resources against rising sea levels and
extreme weather events
– The improvement of national education and research and
development facilities and
– Other emerging issues which the EPA wish to bring to the
Government’s attention.
These new institutions will mirror the more competent SME funding
arrangements and other existing industrial funding arrangements in
Germany. These new banks will be guaranteed by government, as in fact all
banks are in the last resort. There can be no foreign objection to the British
Government taking steps to ensure that British domestic industry has access
to financial facilities, similar to those that have existed, and which
continue to exist, to fund foreign industry abroad. Given access to
equivalent funding sources, we are confident that British invention will flow
through to factory floor innovation and British industry will no longer lose
its place in the world and will flourish through the fresh opportunities made
available to it.
Conclusion
It is that fresh economic understanding that should enable an incoming
Labour Government to reshape and reform the future of Britain. The
objective of that Government’s economic policy should be the restoration
of a civilised and progressive Britain where all of its people are free from
want, excellently educated, and achieving their full potential within a
much more prosperous and fairer society. Britain’s place in the world as an
innovative, highly developed manufacturing economy operating at the
leading edge of invention and innovation must be re-built. The fruits of that
success should be more equitably distributed, not only as a matter of social
justice and to secure a more integrated, happier and healthier society, but
also as a stimulus and contributor to continuing economic success.
1 For some of the methods used, see the Henley School of Management
Paper by Peter Scott and Lucy Newton “Jealous monopolists? British banks
and responses to the Macmillan Gap during the 1930s” which is at http://
www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/management/036.pdf
© Bryan Gould and George Tait Edwards 2015
Economic Policies for an Incoming Labour Government – Part 8
Economic Policies for an Incoming Labour Government
By Bryan Gould and George Tait Edwards
Part 8: The Re-Establishment of British Banks Along Four Main Functional
Lines
As previously remarked, the continuation of the existing banking
arrangements, in which the merchant bank gambling function is integrated
within the rest of the banking business, is – as Mervyn King has regularly warned
– not a safe way for the British economy to proceed. A major re-structuring
of the British Banking sector is required, so that each bank is required to decide
whether its primary function is that of a retail bank, a mortgage and
consumer credit bank, a merchant bank or a local community investment
credit bank.
Retail banks will collect local savings and provide a banking service to local
people and industry, providing the money-handling service which enables
wages and salaries to be paid and all other transactions between buyer and
seller to be carried out. Retail banks will be encouraged, if they wish, to
develop close relationships with local industry (as is the norm in Germany)
and to develop an informed view of the prospects of their local enterprises.
Retail banks with many local branches will be invited to consider becoming
local SME investment credit loan banks as they wish. Local authorities will
be invited to consider setting up Local Authority Banks to help support their
economic development. Government guarantees will be available for the
savings and credit deposits in retail banks of up to £200,000 per individual,
but it is very unlikely such guarantees would ever be required.
Investment credit banks will have the primary purpose of extending long –
term loans at an interest rate of 4% pa over terms of between ten and
twenty years to British-based SMEs. These banks will have the ability to rediscount
their business loans up to the official re-discount limits set under
the “window guidance” at the Bank of England. Such banks will be
completely backed by government. SMEs and other companies taking out
loans and the personnel employed by these companies will be expected to
change their bank so that the loans granted, the wealth created in company
accounts and the wages paid will all initially, and perhaps ultimately, be in
the loan-providing bank. Savings kept in investment credit banks will have a
structured rate of interest so that short-term one-year savings will have an
interest rate of 1% and savings over five years will be offered an interest
rate of inflation plus 1% and thus effectively would be better than inflation-proofed.
Mortgage and consumer credit banks would have the major function of
providing mortgages or consumer credit at relatively low rates of interest.
The mortgage section and consumer credit section of any bank should be
legally operated as a distinct entity within any bank which provides any
other functions. Government guarantees will be available for the savings
and credit deposits in mortgage and retail banks of up to £100,000 per
individual, but again it is very unlikely such guarantees would ever be
required.
Merchant banks will exist as entirely separate free-standing institutions not
associated with any other bank and may attract such savings as may be
commensurate with their level of risk. The risks of complete loss of savings
must be clearly explained to merchant bank savers, and no government
guarantee for any savings placed in a merchant bank will be available.
Merchant banks will be obliged to keep reserves, probably in the range of
10%-20% of total bank assets, commensurate with the gambling risks they
undertake, as determined by the Financial Services Authority.
These measures would go a long way towards constructing a banking system
that provides proper security and guarantees to savers, that truly serves
the public interest and that in particular provides much-needed investment
finance to Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises.
© Bryan Gould and George Tait Edwards 2015