On behalf of Barack Obama - a thank you to Gordon Brown

In his speech today in Westminster Hall, Barack Obama gave a superb example of the inferred but ommitted. There was a part of his speech when he was describing the times in history when the United States and the United Kingdom had worked together for the benefit of mankind. At one point in the speech, you just know that he wanted to mention the role that the UK had played in stabilising the world's financial system in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse. It was a rare unacknowledged moment in history when the knowledge and expertise of a UK politician came to the rescue of a US President and the wider world. But, out of respect for the current encumbent and the political niceties of the day, he said nothing to Gordon Brown about the importance of his actions and his leadership in those days. When the world financial system might well have collapsed in a spiral of financial chaos.

So on behalf of Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and all of the other leaders of the worlds market led economies, who owe a huge debt of gratitude to Gordon Brown, I'd like to say thank you for being the right man in the right place at the right time. 

David Cameron and the Politics of Spite

Its symptomatic of government that when they have difficult decisions to make and hard policies to sell, they invariably do their best to convince you that its somebody else's fault. We've all heard the Tory chant about the situation that they inherited, the massive amounts of debt that they suddenly had to deal with when they came into office. We've all heard the Lib-Dem attempts to justify their change in position on the cuts with cries of the situation is much worse than we thought. Well that's politics, you can either agree with it or not and you can make your political judgements on that basis.

But sometimes governments stray into a different kind of politics, one that is not based on fair debate and discussion. Over recent weeks a trend in the Conservative Party's communication strategy has become apparent that is indicative of a different kind of political strategy, one that is based, not on the rough and tumble of political disagreement, but rather on the political ideology of spite.

The ground work for the current strategy was laid down by Cameron's speech on immigration, in which he presented us with the notion, that the reason the long term unemployed are unemployed is because immigrants come in and do the work that should be done by British workers. He was of course not the first to do this and we only need to think back to Gordon Brown's British Jobs for British Workers Campaign to see it in an earlier guise. But Gordon Brown's commitment to this kind of politics has always been half hearted and whilst he raised the issue of how immigration may affect competition for jobs, he failed to show the finesse of Cameron in directly linking immigration to welfare dependency.

So in Cameron's mind getting the long term unemployed back into work, can only be achieved by reducing the number of immigrants who are able to come into the country; less people coming in, less people competing for jobs, more unemployed people working. A simple enough rationale for people who like their social theory simple. What is perhaps less straightforward is the way in which these reductionist approaches to complex social phenomena have been applied across a range of social phenomena to develop an attractively simplistic strategy .  

The next element of the conservative approach to minority groups has been the use of stereotyping. Most recently in their portrayal of disabled people. Potentially cutting services to disabled people could have been a difficult issue for the conservatives. But in order to justify cutting benefits and support to some of the most vulnerable within our society, the government has simply reduced the community of disabled people to two categories.  Those who are genuinely disabled or those who can be described as alcoholics and drug addicts. Whilst the former are deemed to be deserving of state support, the latter are descibed as malingering and undeserving. Again the complex social world of disability and addiction have been reduced to an overly simplistic representation of good disabled people and bad disabled people. As a result of this approach Ministers can confidently argue that what they are doing will receive public support.

These simplistic conceptions of minority groups represents a powerful ideological tool for Cameron's Tory right and the press that supports him. Each is targetted for cuts and any resistance is divided and represented as undeserving.  It is simple and effective and it is this strategy that lies behind the Conservatives good showing in the recent elections. Whilst most people have sought to explain that success as an outcome of the Lib Dem demise, what has received less attention is the relatively poor showing of UKIP and the BNP. The brutal and frightening reality is that the Conservative success owes much to the way in which they were able to appropriate the language of  the BNP without people realising that this is what they had done.

David Cameron's Conservative Party are champions of a new political ideology  -The Politics of Spite-





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Identity in political strategy- the future of the Liberal Democrats

Identity is everything in politics.The Liberal Democrats were, up until a year ago, a progressive party of the centre left. They were perceived as a party of principle, that could be relied upon to adopt policies and positions based upon the values that are central to the society that we live in. This was exemplified the other day when in the light of the bin Laden execution, Paddy Ashdown provided an outstanding defence of the importance of due process in dealing with terrorists, in the face of the moral cowardice on the issue shown by the Labour and Conservative Party's. Paddy's defence of justice will have surprised no-one, it was an act that sits comfortably with our ideas about what it is to be a liberal. This principled condemnation of the bin Laden execution was not in the Lib Dem Manifesto, yet as an act it is easily identifiable as liberal , it has a political identity or connotation.

Another type of action that has a political identity is compromise. Compromise is a form of political action that is integral to Nick Clegg's vision of a new kind of politics. It was integral to his success in the television debates and it was his apparent willingness to compromise that set him apart from the apparent tribal absolutism of Brown and Cameron. Yet as we are seeing compromise can be a dangerous thing, for politicians in general and for Nick Clegg and Liberal Democracy in particular. The line between compromise and a perception of political betrayal is an extremely fine one, especially where that compromise involves policies and commitments that are integral to an organisation's political identity. No where is this more powerfully illustrated than in the issue of student fees.

Prior to the election, the Liberal Democrats had successfully positioned themselves as a genuine party of young people and students. The now infamous pledge "to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative." which had been widely adopted across the party had been integral to the Party's success in this area. However, it was a powerful commitment not only because it tapped into a significant political constituency, but because it did so in a way that re-enforced other elements of the Liberal Democratic identity, such as social mobility, equality of opportunity and the role that access to education can play in promoting these. The decision to renege on that pledge, was a profound strategic mistake. In doing so, the Lib Dems were effectively attacking their newest and in the longer term, their most important constituency.  They were seen to be betraying a profound commitment, and setting aside the principles of equality, opportunity and access to education, that are integral to the Lib Dem political identity and their conceptions of social justice.

The justification has been the need to compromise for the social good and to deal with the deficit: all well and good, but its a bit like expecting the Labour Party to impose wage cuts with trade union support, or asking the Conservatives to put an 80% tax on big business. They wouldn't do it because they know that they would be losing a cornerstone of their political identity and constituency. In imposing the massive rises in student fees, the Liberal Democrat leadership allowed themselves to compromise on an issue that should have been written in stone. The price for that compromise has not only been the loss of a constituency but also a loss of public faith in their ability to defend the key elements of their political identity.

A party's political identity, is more important than the success or even the existence of a coalition.