Old habits die hard
Can I draw your attention to four unnecessary words in a quote from a generally very perceptive article?
Andrew Rawnsley, a very shrewd centre-left journalist, wrote a few days ago, that Jeremy Corbyn's argument
"– that Labour lost because it was not left wing enough for the electorate – is going essentially unchallenged. This is, of course, what hard leftists always say after a Labour defeat.
They said it after 1979. They said it again when Labour adopted most of their prospectus and then went down to an even worse defeat in 1983. They said it after 2010. They are singing the same old anthem now about 2015. If we had promised higher taxes, more welfare, more borrowing and mass nationalisation, Ed Miliband would be in Number 10.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, serious people are investigating the true reasons why Labour came 98 seats behind the Conservatives in England and Wales, and secured 2 million fewer votes than the Tories."
(The full article is here.)
Can you spot the four words which add nothing?
It's the words "in England and Wales" in the final sentence I quoted. The Conservatives and Labour now hold one seat each in Scotland, so "98 seats behind" applies equally to England and Wales and in the UK as a whole.
The interesting thing is why those words are there. Andrew Rawnsley was making the point about how far Labour came behind the Conservatives in large parts of the UK. In every General Election between 1959 and 2010 in which the Conservatives obtained more seats than Labour the best way to make the point about Labour having fewer seats had been to quote the figures for England, or for England and Wales.
Following the SNP "Tartan-wash" in 2015 this is no longer true, but I presume old habits die hard.
There is a point to this. It is incredibly easy to stick to old modes of thought after change has made them irrelevant.
Andrew Rawnsley is by no means the first commentator or politician to use an obsolete figure of speech or thought which was perfectly appropriate before the 2015 election but is no longer helpful now. Nor by any means the worst offender, and nor will he be the last.
I'll give you another example. From 1992 to 2010 the UK electoral system appeared to be significantly more favourable to Labour than to the Conservatives.
This anti-Tory bias in the election system peaked in 2001, when the Conservatives got more votes than Labour in England but about a hundred fewer seats. In the 2010 election the bias in the electoral system was worth about 50 seats to Labour.
Everyone thought that on the unreformed electoral boundaries the same thing would happen again in 2015, with the Conservatives needing a bigger margin to win than Labour. It was expected that the electoral system's bias towards Labour might make it possible for them to get an overall majority on less than 35% of the vote.
But that is not what happened. The pro-Labour bias of the electoral system did not just evaporate, it actually reversed as you can read here.
The reasons for this include an ultra-ruthless focus on marginal seats by the Conservative high command - a ruthlessness which was if anything overdone, but you can't dispute that overall the strategy was successful - and the impact on Labour of the SNP and UKIP.
The Conservatives knew all along we had to watch the flank facing UKIP and made a point of emphasising that we were the only major party promising a referendum on British membership of the EU, a promise which will be honoured by the end of 2017.
By contrast, Labour assumed that UKIP was only a threat to the Conservatives, indeed one which would help put Ed Miliband into Downing Street: they only realised that UKIP was taking Labour votes too after the 2014 European elections and they then developed headless chicken syndrome in trying to work out a coherent response.
In the event Labour's response was probably the worst possible. What they probably should have done is match our promise to support a referendum, thereby depriving the Conservatives of the USP of being the one party which both could and would deliver that referendum. What they did instead was to copy past Conservative slogans on tougher immigration. Unfortunately for Labour the only people who believed them were the ones who didn't like that line at all, and they probably lost more votes to the Greens and SNP, or which they failed to gain from the Lib/Dems, than they prevented from going to UKIP.
The most astonishing thing about the reversal of Britain's electoral bias, however, is how few people have noticed. There was a thread on Political Betting about it, and there have been mentions on one or two other political or academic blogs such as the one I linked to above. If it has been mentioned at all in the MSM, I missed it.
There are two equal and opposite mistakes political strategists could make about this. One would be to fail to even notice the issue and assume that the electoral system is still biased to Labour. The other would be to assume that the 2015 bias to the Conservatives is as nailed on as the previous bias to Labour proved not to be.
The Conservative win was not inevitable: neither was the reversal of the bias in the electoral system. As I suggested above, if Labour had tried a different approach - such as promising an EU referendum instead of a crackdown on immigration - it is at least possible that there would have been a different pattern to the results.
“All those things we were saying about how it was a hard election for us to lose were true,” a rueful Miliband adviser was quoted as saying in the Guardian yesterday. “We just still managed to lose it.”
Quite. And in 2020, the people who are least likely to find themselves lamenting that they had thrown away an election which might yet be up for grabs will be those who have noticed how the world has changed, and will have changed again by then, and do not stick to old habits of thought.
Andrew Rawnsley, a very shrewd centre-left journalist, wrote a few days ago, that Jeremy Corbyn's argument
"– that Labour lost because it was not left wing enough for the electorate – is going essentially unchallenged. This is, of course, what hard leftists always say after a Labour defeat.
They said it after 1979. They said it again when Labour adopted most of their prospectus and then went down to an even worse defeat in 1983. They said it after 2010. They are singing the same old anthem now about 2015. If we had promised higher taxes, more welfare, more borrowing and mass nationalisation, Ed Miliband would be in Number 10.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, serious people are investigating the true reasons why Labour came 98 seats behind the Conservatives in England and Wales, and secured 2 million fewer votes than the Tories."
(The full article is here.)
Can you spot the four words which add nothing?
It's the words "in England and Wales" in the final sentence I quoted. The Conservatives and Labour now hold one seat each in Scotland, so "98 seats behind" applies equally to England and Wales and in the UK as a whole.
The interesting thing is why those words are there. Andrew Rawnsley was making the point about how far Labour came behind the Conservatives in large parts of the UK. In every General Election between 1959 and 2010 in which the Conservatives obtained more seats than Labour the best way to make the point about Labour having fewer seats had been to quote the figures for England, or for England and Wales.
Following the SNP "Tartan-wash" in 2015 this is no longer true, but I presume old habits die hard.
There is a point to this. It is incredibly easy to stick to old modes of thought after change has made them irrelevant.
Andrew Rawnsley is by no means the first commentator or politician to use an obsolete figure of speech or thought which was perfectly appropriate before the 2015 election but is no longer helpful now. Nor by any means the worst offender, and nor will he be the last.
I'll give you another example. From 1992 to 2010 the UK electoral system appeared to be significantly more favourable to Labour than to the Conservatives.
This anti-Tory bias in the election system peaked in 2001, when the Conservatives got more votes than Labour in England but about a hundred fewer seats. In the 2010 election the bias in the electoral system was worth about 50 seats to Labour.
Everyone thought that on the unreformed electoral boundaries the same thing would happen again in 2015, with the Conservatives needing a bigger margin to win than Labour. It was expected that the electoral system's bias towards Labour might make it possible for them to get an overall majority on less than 35% of the vote.
But that is not what happened. The pro-Labour bias of the electoral system did not just evaporate, it actually reversed as you can read here.
The reasons for this include an ultra-ruthless focus on marginal seats by the Conservative high command - a ruthlessness which was if anything overdone, but you can't dispute that overall the strategy was successful - and the impact on Labour of the SNP and UKIP.
The Conservatives knew all along we had to watch the flank facing UKIP and made a point of emphasising that we were the only major party promising a referendum on British membership of the EU, a promise which will be honoured by the end of 2017.
By contrast, Labour assumed that UKIP was only a threat to the Conservatives, indeed one which would help put Ed Miliband into Downing Street: they only realised that UKIP was taking Labour votes too after the 2014 European elections and they then developed headless chicken syndrome in trying to work out a coherent response.
In the event Labour's response was probably the worst possible. What they probably should have done is match our promise to support a referendum, thereby depriving the Conservatives of the USP of being the one party which both could and would deliver that referendum. What they did instead was to copy past Conservative slogans on tougher immigration. Unfortunately for Labour the only people who believed them were the ones who didn't like that line at all, and they probably lost more votes to the Greens and SNP, or which they failed to gain from the Lib/Dems, than they prevented from going to UKIP.
The most astonishing thing about the reversal of Britain's electoral bias, however, is how few people have noticed. There was a thread on Political Betting about it, and there have been mentions on one or two other political or academic blogs such as the one I linked to above. If it has been mentioned at all in the MSM, I missed it.
There are two equal and opposite mistakes political strategists could make about this. One would be to fail to even notice the issue and assume that the electoral system is still biased to Labour. The other would be to assume that the 2015 bias to the Conservatives is as nailed on as the previous bias to Labour proved not to be.
The Conservative win was not inevitable: neither was the reversal of the bias in the electoral system. As I suggested above, if Labour had tried a different approach - such as promising an EU referendum instead of a crackdown on immigration - it is at least possible that there would have been a different pattern to the results.
“All those things we were saying about how it was a hard election for us to lose were true,” a rueful Miliband adviser was quoted as saying in the Guardian yesterday. “We just still managed to lose it.”
Quite. And in 2020, the people who are least likely to find themselves lamenting that they had thrown away an election which might yet be up for grabs will be those who have noticed how the world has changed, and will have changed again by then, and do not stick to old habits of thought.
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