Resheath your pens, denizens of the Fourth Estate. This isn’t a tale of shadow cabinet ministers cracking down on free expression by humble bag-carriers.

Over the New Year holiday, the forces of Twitter were unleashed on the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions. He knew they would be. He wanted them to be. Otherwise he wouldn’t have pre-briefed the Daily Mail in advance of his not-massively-controversial-when-taken-on-its-own Guardian piece on welfare reform. Not being a paper that puts many coins in the nuance meter, the Mail duly obliged with a piece heavy on the rhetoric of ‘scroungers’, ‘cheats’ and ‘evils’.

The Mail article predicted a fight with ‘the left’, a prediction that even Old Mother Shipton could probably have managed to get right. Though when the fight immediately came, those ranged against the ‘new line’ on welfare included large sections of the Labour centre and right as well. Again, Byrne won’t mind. Some have said he’s a Blairite who still sees getting into a scrap with both the intra-  and extra-Labour ‘left’ (however defined) as a vote winner. Being increasingly disinterested in such labeling, I’ll simply describe him as a politician doing what a certain breed of politician has always done – seeking identity through conflict. It’s a tactic as old as the hills and generally about as useful for gaining votes as said hills.

Twitter, like the Daily Mail, isn’t a great place for nuance. It provided very little over those days. A lot of the condemnation that Byrne received, particularly over the Mail piece, was more than justified. Sure, there’s those who can’t see the words ‘welfare’ and ‘reform’ together on a page and not immediately label the writer as a Thatcherite lickspittle. But there were many who pointed out precisely where the language of ‘the scrounger’ leads us. To the demonisation of the vast majority of genuine benefit claimants, to finger-pointing, to misplaced blame. To the steadily growing instances of hate crimes against the disabled, to the suicides, to the stigma and to the political space it gives to the forces of reaction in the two governing parties to chip away still further at the welfare settlement.

These, by themselves, are more than good enough reasons not to engage in such easy, throw-away rhetoric, even if the words that appear under your actual byline are far more measured. But there is a further reason: by doing so, you in fact close down the debate on welfare reform and make genuine reform all but impossible. You condemn the British welfare state – the Beveridgian inheritance Byrne proclaims himself to be an heir of – to another decade of managed decline.

Let me be honest – I don’t think the British welfare state works. That doesn’t mean I want to throw every recipient of benefits on the breadline. For probably somewhere in the region of 99% of claimants, I would be happy to die (metaphorically at least) in the last political ditch to ensure a continued guarantee of those benefits. But I’m not necessarily prepared to offer even so useless a sacrifice for the system that calculates and writes that cheque. The Welfare State is a post-war creature, predicated on full employment, jobs for life, stay-at-home mothers, the nuclear family and predictable cycles of boom and recession. Like a vast, gothic cathedral, it is a magnificent edifice. The very scale and noble purpose of it can make the most secular heart sing. But we’ve tried patching it up to make it more suitable for the modern age. It’s worked in places – the tax credit system is doing a passable job of keeping the rain from leaking through the sacristy roof, for example – but there’s only so far this can go.

The British welfare state is inflexible, complex, user-unfriendly, faceless and unpersonalised. When I make those criticisms, that doesn’t mean I want a replacement which is less generous or more austere to those in need. In fact, I want to see a system which doesn’t lead to billions in benefits going unclaimed – as many have pointed out, that, in terms of scale,  is the true scandal, not the relatively limited benefit fraud.

But I also know that one of the key pillars of the post-war welfare settlement is legitimacy in the eyes of the public. I’ve canvassed enough Labour heartlands (and non-Labour heartlands) to know that this is eroding. A lot of that is due to misreporting and misplaced rhetoric, based on a very limited number of genuine case of welfare state failure. But tell me that the average Labour voter doesn’t like the language of ‘scroungers’ and ‘cheats’ and I will laugh in your face.

That, however, is not an excuse to perpetrate it. By doing so, we simply enter an arms race with the Tories which we cannot win.

A political party cannot ignore public opinion; nor should it believe it cannot play a part in shaping it. The counsel of despair which is governance by the top-line findings of opinion pollsters leads to a non-courageous style of government which would never, for example, have seen Labour Home Secretaries abolish the death penalty or lower the age of consent. Rather than demonising the old welfare settlement, and particularly not those who depend on it, you address the concerns through a new settlement in which the majority can have confidence.

Soaring unemployment is creating a new influx of welfare state users, from a wide range of social backgrounds, including large numbers of graduates and professionals. Not only does this render a shift to generally abusing welfare recipients as politically short-sighted, it also misses that opportunity to build a new, legitimated, welfare settlement. The ‘new unemployed’ will quickly discover the shortcomings of the current system – the petty bureaucracy,  the low payments, the unwelcoming JobCentrePluses, advisers who, whilst committed, are going to struggle with this influx. They will demand change, improvement. And they have the political clout to do so.

This new unemployment is a personal and economic tragedy, yet it is also a political opportunity to forge a new consensus. A welfare state that is based around work where possible, and a comfortable existence where it isn’t; that personalises its offering for each client; that provides genuine training and (properly) paid work opportunities; that doesn’t stigmatise or dehumanise the long-term claimant. And yes, maybe Byrne is right to suggest a greater role for the contributory principle – I am not going to attack him for wishing to emulate parts of the often highly successful welfare systems of much of northern Europe.

So, I should be excited by the opportunities for welfare reform, and for my party to be spearheading them. But I’m not. Because instead, Liam Byrne has catapulted us into a pointless, degrading and actually rather childish debate about  linguistics. Rather than a victory for those who want to debate welfare reform, even if we don’t agree with every dot and comma of Byrne’s stance, he has handed a victory on a plate to the conservatives (lower case ‘c’ intentional) on both left and right who will countenance no reform. He has removed the option of nuance and made it harder for genuine welfare radicals to put their heads above the parapet. And by failing to link in policies on job creation to the narrative on welfare reform, he has left many people shaking their heads as to the disconnect with the most pressing economic debate.

I disagree with Liam Byrne on a lot, but I don’t think he’s an evil benefit-snatcher. I’m not, as Owen Jones puts it, ‘ashamed to share a party card with him’. I joined a broad church party, and by doing so happily accepted that I’d be sharing a card with Byrne. But I thought the leadership had learnt some lessons on the linguistics of welfare reform. To my mind, Ed Miliband’s biggest mistake since taking over the leadership was the line in his Coin Street speech in which he appeared to qualify himself to judge a man on incapacity benefits’ ability to work. This soured an otherwise thoughtful and intelligent speech on responsibility ‘at top and bottom’, and rightly caused anger. At party conference, Miliband seemed genuinely contrite and understanding about why that had been an error. I don’t think he, personally, will make it again. But he has allowed Byrne off the leash to make that mistake on his part, and by doing so has damaged the prospects of a new welfare settlement being at the heart of Labour’s next manifesto, where it belongs.

Many of the other proposals looked equally ill-thought through, so I stuck in a Freedom of Information Act request to TfL, asking for their evidence base in choosing the pedestrian crossings earmarked for removal. Specifically I asked for what, to me, seemed a sensible data set that ought to be part of any judgement as to the continued need for a pedestrian crossing – and which would not be particularly onerous to collect:

- the number of times each crossing was used by pedestrians on an average day;

- the distance from the nearest alternative pedestrian crossing;

- average traffic speeds at the crossing location;

- data relating to traffic congestion caused by existence of the crossing.

After it took two months for TfL to respond, I was expecting a pretty hefty evidence base. Alas no.

“I can confirm that we do not hold the information you require.”

So, what were the selections based on?

“These signals were selected following a review of traffic flows and historical accident data and, where the sites include pedestrian facilities, observed pedestrian demand levels.”

Oddly, this last point sounds remarkably like what I asked for, but never mind. You have to question how useful historic accident data is – in many cases the crossings will have been in place for decades and the nature/levels of pedestrian or traffic uses will have been completely altered in that timescale. Nor does it appear that there was any quantitative approach to considering which crossings actually had any serious effect on traffic flows. The lack of an evidence base certainly increases the perception that these crossings have been picked almost at random, hence examples outside schools or tourist attractions being amongst their number. Evidence-less policy making towards an evidence-less policy.

One small bit of good news, however. Apparently, further analysis

“may include the collection of some of the data you have requested.”

Good. But who knows if a completely different – and somewhat more sensible – list of traffic lights for removal would have been drawn up if some of that data had been used in the first place?

Yes, you did read that correctly. Because as the party fell to defeat in parliamentary seats across the country, it swept to power in London borough after London borough. Before the elections, of 32 London boroughs, Labour had majority control of just 7, running a further one in a coalition and one more as a result of having the elected mayor. By the evening of Friday 7th May, Labour had overall control of 17 boroughs, running one more as a minority administration. In 9 of the remaining 14 boroughs, Labour increased its number of seats. Eighteen months before the elections, I suggested that if the general and local elections were to coincide, this might prove to be to Labour’s benefit. So it turned out, but the results were far beyond what I predicted in that post. There is something more than just an increased turnout behind these very good results; and I believe that it has a direct bearing on how Labour councils in London, both newly-elected and returned, should conduct themselves over the next four years.

The easy answer to ‘Why did Labour do so well in London’ is that the party’s core vote turned out. But the core vote cannot deliver 18 boroughs – in reality (as was tested in 2006), it can be guaranteed to deliver about 5 boroughs. What turned out across London on May 6th was what I will describe as the ‘Core+’, a coalition of broadly progressive forces more akin to that which delivered two Livingstone victories than to that behind the 1997 landslide. With a Conservative victory nationally seen as certain, voters with personal or political reasons to fear the onset of Osbornomics (the radical, ideology-driven downsizing of the state using deficit reduction as a pretext) turned out, only partially in hope of preventing this, but equally to try to ensure that savage cuts would be opposed at a local level. For better or worse, this coalition of forces overwhelmingly saw Labour as the party best placed to deliver that opposition. 

Labour did not win 18 boroughs because of 18 incredible borough manifestos. True, some included radical and transformative policies. But many – particularly in some of the boroughs that haven’t been won since 1998 – were little more than a few core values scribbled on badly risographed flimsy paper. They won because the Core+ want to see cuts fought and opposed, not simply managed.

Herein lies my concern. Labour local authorities are faced with a powerful central government, with a large Commons majority, the ideological bit in its teeth and the most pliant human shield they could hope for in Clegg’s Lib Dems. Councils know what is coming in terms of cuts to funding, both this week and in September: last week, in-year cuts of up to 2% were foisted on local authorities. Senior officers are wasting no time in scaring new portfolio holders with doomsday scenarios of service closures. And the reality is, that 90%, maybe 95% of cuts enforced by central government are going to happen, whatever local authorities do. But this must not lead to a retreat to technocracy and a quiet acceptance of managed decline, which would both be a betrayal of Labour’s voters and politicaly disastrous.

As a clear example of the path I fear, I’d urge you to read this interview by Hangbitch with Lewisham’s Labour Mayor Sir Steve Bullock. Whilst not written from a particularly Labour-friendly perspective, it sums up the concerns I have. Yes, Labour local authorities need to be planning for how they limit the effect of cuts on the most vulnerable, when they come. But, starting yesterday, they need to be their borough’s cheerleaders in opposing the disastrous policies of central government. It was reported to me that a senior Labour operator in one inner London borough didn’t want their council to react too vocally to this week’s budget because this might earn them the sobriquet of ‘the loony left’.

It worries me greatly that Labour members are still modulating their behaviour in reaction to a right-wing strawman from three decades ago. Outside Liverpool, the ‘loony left’ – by which we mean an entryist, anti-democratic, anti-Labour force – barely existed. The Tory media had some success in pushing it as an idea largely because the Labour right connived with it to damage moderate-left local authorities. We cannot live in the shadow of that smear. Nor can we forget that the policy basis on which those councils operated is now, for the most part, mainstream political thinking: anti-racism, gay and lesbian rights, high-quality subsidised public transport, environmentalism, locally-controlled local government finance, housing investment. The first Labour council of the era of New Politics to be called ‘loony left’ should make it the official council motto: they are almost certainly setting the agenda of the next decade.

Let me provide an example of what isn’t happening, but should be. On Thursday last week, the Con-Lib coalition announced the ending of funding for Labour’s free swimming for the under-16s and over-65s, along with the capital swimming pools refurbishment funding pot which sat with it. This was an enabling state policy, which allowed thousands of people each year who would otherwise be priced out, to take part in a physical and social activity. It formed a key part of the Olympic legacy.

With six weeks notice to local authorities, this ended, with funding being withdrawn on the first day of the school summer holidays. A few squeaks has been the only reaction to this from local politicians, yet this unjust, unfair and unneccessary cut should be a rallying point. Over the weekend, there should not have been a leisure centre in a Labour-controlled London borough which didn’t have a Labour councillor standing outside with a petition against this cut. By Monday morning, there would probably have been ten thousand signatures from across those 18 boroughs. On Monday afternoon, it would have been announced that the leaders of the Labour-run boroughs would, in a week’s time, be handing in those signatures (plus another weekend’s worth) at the DCMS. They would be inviting with them community groups, voluntary organisations, pool user’s groups and trade unions. They would also issue an invitation to the leaders of the Lib Dem and Conservative run boroughs – will you join us, with your own signed petitions? From two weekends’ work, you have laid the ground work for a genuine community-rooted opposition to cuts, created a political dividing line and signalled to the government that their measures will not go unopposed.

Cuts to free swimming will be long forgotten by the end of this four-year council term. There will be far greater battles to fight, most of which will be lost. Labour councils will have to cut services, raise charges, cut jobs. But even if one cut is reversed, the fight will have been worth it. Firstly, because of the lives improved because of it; secondly, because Labour in London will hold onto that Core+ vote. If Labour councils are not seen at the fore-front of that fight, those extra voters will stay at home come 2014 (where there will probably be no general election to help) and the steady salami-slicing of Labour’s gains will begin. If Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers are not fulminating against the ‘extremist tactics’ of Labour authorities by 2014, London Labour will have failed; if The Sun has not attached the sobriquet ‘Red’ to at least one council leader’s name, London Labour will have failed; if the newly Labour-run London Councils has not been shut down by government because it has become a GLC-like focus of opposition to Osbornomics, London Labour will have failed. That opposition will be what wins Labour the Mayoralty back in 2012 and what will increase the trawl of Labour-run boroughs still further in 2014.

Learning that Oona King was indeed running for the Labour nomination for the London mayoralty is rather like getting confirmation that Lord Lucan is dead: something that most people have accepted for some time. This meant I had a partially formed opinion already of what I felt about her candidacy, but the past week has crystallised that for me. I am now more convinced than ever that if the Labour electoral college was to nominate King, then Boris Johnson might as well start writing his speech for the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.

 Over the past 5 days, there has been a concerted effort in sections of the Labour-leaning blogosphere and Twit-osphere to convince nay-sayers such as myself that King has ‘changed’; that to attach too much credence to her past as a committed Blairite is in some way unfair. Now, I’ll accept that people change. I even accept that some politicians change, although that list is mainly limited to Napoleon Bonaparte and Tony Benn.

This narrative is at least honest – it accepts that Old Oona, the undissenting New Labour MP simply does not fit the settled London view of what its Mayor should be like – basically, it wants independent-minded mavericks. It also accepts that the Old Oona, unbending in her support for a morally questionable invasion of Iraq, who achieved the unthinkable of losing a super-safe inner London seat on a swing of 26%, does not have the kind of electoral record that would appeal to the party and affiliate members who will select the candidate.

But the narrative has one key stumbling block: the lack of any evidence base for that change. Since the 2005 defeat, King has been pretty much absent from frontline public life – this is no criticism, it is understandable and is her prerogative.

But in that case, by what can we judge her? I’ll come onto King’s utterances from this week in a moment, but let us also consider her past judgement calls, as these are vitally important in deciding whether someone is fit for high office. We all know about Iraq – and yes, the failure to get that call right would disastrously haunt any King Mayoral campaign – but what of specifically London issues? A good example of where an independent voice for London demonstrates itself would have been in relation to the Public Private Partnership for London Underground, a scheme that can probably be ranked as Gordon Brown’s biggest mistake. The last Mayor opposed it in court; the current Mayor commendably brought down the curtain. Oona King sat in Parliament throughout the passage of the legislation that enabled it. Her response? Not, so far as I can tell after some lengthy searches, a squeak. A London MP whose constituency is heavily reliant on the Underground makes no interventions whatsoever on the most radical changes to its funding arrangements since nationalisation. I think we can take this as being tacit consent. Not a great record to be defending when you are seeking to be a doughty champion of Londoners. And no, this is not all about (in King’s words) ‘refighting the battles of the past’. It is about using history as a good guide to the future.

Nor do King’s more recent utterances fill me with any great comfort. Her pre-campaign launch interview with LabourList is, not to be deliberately unkind, toe-curlingly awful. Well meaning in terms of sentiment, yes, but composed almost entirely of the sort of wonk-speak from Generation SPAD that threatens to make the party leadership contest so dull. Talk about ‘new mutualism’ and street parties all you want, but this is to massively misunderstand the nature of the Mayoralty – a mixture of strategic oversight and nuts-and-bolts big spending. If you want to spend your time with grass-roots level community groups and youth mayors, run to be a councillor: in terms of subsidiarity that is where those agendas are rightfully set. Call me a stick-in-the-mud advocate of ‘the old politics’ if you like, but people vote for the mayor based on their policies on transport, policing, housing, planning and climate change – the big ticket spending and strategy-setting in the Mayor’s gift. Not one of these gets any mention in Oona’s interview. Am I a cynic when I think that parts of the Labour right use the Obama-stardust of ‘community organisation’ to destract from their dislike of an activist state? Probably, but it doesn’t stop niggling somewhere at the back of my mind.

Adam Bienkov reports that King’s campaign launch figured knife crime as its key theme – a serious issue, but how does she differentiate herself from Johnson, who majored on that issue in 2008? Then we have Dave Hill’s report of his interview with her in which he managed to broach some transport issues. It is, apparently, ‘her instinct’ to support congestion charging. This sounds worryingly luke-warm support for one of the greatest achievements of the last mayoralty. King then declines to provide a firm opinion on the Western extension of the congestion charge, a key issue in the months ahead as the consultation on its removal takes place. For a contender for Mayor to have no thought-through position on such a major environmental, transport and financial issue is deeply worrying to say the least. Indeed, King’s only transport policy seems to be ‘a radical overhaul of transport use’. Uh-huh?

Taking on Boris Johnson in 2012 is going to be a real challenge for Labour. The party cannot rely on mid-term government unpopularity to unseat him – Boris will distance himself almost as successfully as Livingstone did from the unpopularity of Blair and Brown. I can understand a degree of reluctance to let Livingstone run again – and I certainly don’t believe he should be unchallenged (bad for him, bad for the Party, bad for London), but if the calibre of the alternatives to Livingstone is that of King, then this ought to be a foregone conclusion. Labour needs a forensic mind, steeped in the intricacies of London politics, who can identify and drill down on the many and complex failures of the Boris mayoralty and who can stand proudly by their own record. I see nothing in King’s words or actions to date that suggest she has those abilities.

I’m pleased to see such a wide range of Labour support coming out for a Livingstone candidacy in the Guardian’s letters pages today. Someone is going to have to come up with a better answer to the question “Who, if not Ken?” than “Oona King” to stop me, anonymously, joining their ranks.

This is a joint post by Political Animal and Lost Lucan

The brave new world has dawned, and in the hard cold morning following the battle we can survey the wreckage: the promise of retrenchment with a nasty twist. Cuts, and a re-pointing of the welfare state to the benefit of the better off, with a hike in VAT rather than employer’s National Insurance being used to fill the Treasury’s coffers. From amidst the dust and rubble we rise, clutching the few belongings remaining to us, to start again down the road to government.

And so who will lead us down the twisting path ahead? In some respects it matters not: the hats already thrown into the ring, and those promised to follow adorn the heads of a talented bunch, all of whom could make a decent stab at the task. We are fortunate in having an acting leader who is more than capable of setting the tone for the months and years ahead. No, what matters more is what policies we choose to pursue, around what principles we rally.

The government we face will be nasty, brutish and, sadly, not quite so short. In these times, it is imperative that we offer our new members and the electorate a distinct and decent platform, that we provide a strong voice for employees, the less well off and everyone else who does not fit into the Cameron mould and who would otherwise comprise the great ignored.  To that end, we believe that a successful Labour leader must pursue a progressive set of policies which promote not just equality of opportunity but equality of outcome, with an acceptance that the structural causes of poverty outweigh any impacts of so-called agency in preventing social mobility.

The Whigs had four policy areas to all but sacrifice upon the altar of ambition. We also propose four areas which, in our view, a successful candidate for the Labour leadership should  pursue. They are by no means the only important ones, but they strike at our core values, values which should not be offered up for any price.

Education: No Selection Under a Labour Government

David Blunkett famously said Labour had kissed school selection goodbye, using the phrase ‘read my lips’ to push home the point. This sentiment is perfectly justifiable;  one of the more brutal by-products of the quasi-market is the rationality of cream skimming, with schools eager to maximise their league table positions, and consequently secure their consumer base and with it their access to per capita funding. Theoretically, this is fine; the better schools should continue to expand whilst less successful ones close their doors, but in reality this does not happen. Schools hit capacity, cannot take any more, and those pupils unable to enter the better providers are consigned to those which are under-performing.

Labour did not introduce the quasi-market to education (thank you Kenneth Baker) and has done much to curb its biggest excesses, with the introduction of fair funding to provide additional resources to schools taking more disadvantaged intakes and modifications to the law to promote a social dimension to school admissions policies, prioritising the choices made on behalf of children in care for example. However, selection is still firmly on the agenda, in fact it has increased since 1997. Only two grammar schools (both in Bristol) have taken on a comprehensive mantel, leaving 164 still operating in England, whilst specialist schools have been given the right to select up to 10% of their intake based on ‘aptitude’ in a particular subject area. The ability to perform well on a musical instrument, produce a favourable reference from a sporting coach or pass the 11+ exam is predicated on the economic and social capital of the child’s parents. Coaching can be purchased like any other commodity, and selection on the basis of its results secures the places at the highest performing and most oversubscribed schools for the most affluent to the detriment of the community and to social mobility. Similarly, the intakes of faith schools must also be addressed; both in terms of community cohesion and social mobility, having homogenous and privileged intakes is problematic.

The attributes a successful candidate must possess are therefore:

Essential

• A commitment to preventing selection in schools, with a gradual conversion of all schools which currently use selective criteria based on ability or aptitude such as grammar and specialist schools into comprehensive institutions.
• Religious schools to have balanced intakes in terms of the religious adherence of its pupils, with a proportion of places reserved for children of different faiths to that of the school, including atheists.
• The allocation of pupils to schools to be undertaken by local authorities on the basis of oversubscription criteria which promote a socially and academically balanced intake to all schools, such as controlled choice, fair banding or lottery systems.
• An absolute opposition to any further expansion to the Academies programme, and a commitment to bring all academies for which sponsors have not paid their deposit in full into the comprehensive sector.
• A commitment that any ‘free schools’ established in accordance with the Conservative Party manifesto not take any funding away from the state maintained sector.
• A strong commitment to promoting the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs into mainstream schools insofar as is possible, recognising that this will not be appropriate for every child but that it will bring strong benefits to both children with and without SEN where it can be achieved. Additional resources should be made available to further this objective.

Desirable

• A commitment to bringing all private schools, which select according to economic resources and/or academic ability, into the state maintained sector.
• A commitment to working with religious groups to identify ‘objective’ means by which prospective pupils can prove their faith, which do not rely on references from religious leaders or personal statements written by parents.
• A commitment to a national curriculum which includes both ‘traditional’ and ‘vocational’ subjects, guaranteeing that all pupils will have access to tuition in the same subjects as those at other schools regardless of school resources or teacher assessments (thank you Kenneth Baker).

Employment: Rebuilding Labour’s core purpose

It is unfortunate, yet telling, that the end of Labour’s time in office has coincided with one of the most bitter and seemingly intractable labour disputes of the past twenty years. The dispute at British Airways, which has seen the adoption of management practices that might have seemed excessive even in the 1980s, demonstrates clearly how much work there still is to do to re-level the playing fields between management and the managed. There have been major advances to Labour’s credit in this field: the right to trade union recognition, a minimum wage, the opting in to Social Chapter rights. But too many of these steps forward, radical in their way, have been watered down or cancelled out by an over-zealous attachment to the freedom of markets and an over-attachment to myths about a union-created nightmare that never really happened.

A new Labour government should shed its hang-ups in regards to advocating the importance of organised labour. This does not mean that trade unions as they currently stand are perfect, but their return to relevance can go hand-in-hand with the return to relevance of the party they founded. There is no reason why the UK cannot aspire to a 70% union membership rate (it was 28.4% at the end of December 2006 according to the ONS), such as is achieved in Norway: Labour should champion reformed trade unions as social partners, and should never be shy of saying that its core purpose as a party is to protect and enhance the working conditions and pay of workers in every sector.

Essential

• A firm and non-negotiable commitment to full employment, to be achieved through investment in state infrastructure. This is particularly important during times of economic decline such as those we currently face.
• A commitment to a root-and-branch review of the UK’s employment relation laws, with a view to preventing a reoccurrence of the attacks on union rights that have occurred during the British Airways dispute.
• A commitment to working towards the up rating of the minimum wage to a living wage, with the public sector leading the way.
• A commitment to ending the existence of a two-tier workforce, in which those on temporary, agency or part time contracts enjoy fewer rights than permanent workers.
• Legal requirements for transparent pay audits in all but the smallest of companies to tackle gender, ‘race’ and disability pay gaps.
• A commitment to a policy of industrial activism that will diversify and re-focus the British economy, particularly towards high-skill, low-carbon technology.
• If a multiplier to determine a maximum wage is introduced, this must take account of the salaries of all workers for the organisation, including temporary contract and agency workers such as cleaning staff. It is not enough to include just the relatively advantaged full-time permanent members of staff when determining the maximum wage.
• A commitment to investment in labour activation policies such as the New Deals, but an equally strong commitment to the principle of decommodification, with the promise that no time limit will be imposed on benefit receipt as it is in the US.

Desirable

• A commitment to reclaiming the principle of solidarity, by reviewing legislation on issues such as sympathy strike action.
• A commitment to fiscal or other incentives for private sector organisations that adopt co-operative, employee-owned or similar forms of operation.
• Committing to working with political and labour movement partners across Europe to bring about greater EU-level action on workers’ rights and to produce fundamental changes to Community law that move away from the presumption of unregulated markets.
• Where pay gaps on the basis of ‘race’, gender or ethnicity are identified, it should not be the task of the individual to seek justice; the state should pursue justice on behalf of all employees in the organisation and become the principle prosecuting party in the case.

Social Care – The New Moral Crusade

No-one in the Labour Party needs to be told that it is the party of the NHS. For the incoming post-war Labour government, demographic and economic change, combined with mass political demand made the creation of a radical system of health provision possible and necessary. There is a good chance that the next incoming Labour government will face a similar series of challenges, but in relation to the issue of adult, and most particularly elder social care. Like nearly every other difficult issue, the coalition government has farmed social care out to a commission, and no wonder, given that the Tory rhetoric on ‘death taxes’ during the election effectively closed off the most sensible and effective forms of funding. However, if flagship Tory borough Barnet provides the present government with inspiration, we will see the gulf between those who can and cannot afford to support themselves in old age widen. Labour’s alternative, the worthy manifesto commitment to a National Care Service, lacked detail. The new leader will need to remedy this, and open up social care funding as a flank on which to attack the government. How political parties respond to the growing challenge of social care will be the true test of commitment to social justice over the next decade.

Essential

• Support for the concept of a National Care Service, including retention of the pledge to a specific number of years of free residential care.
• Commitment to all forms of basic care, including at a residential level, being free at the point of delivery.
• Absolute opposition to any form of up-front payment care insurance system, as proposed by the Conservative manifesto.
• A strong commitment to resisting any introduction of quasi-market principles (choice and competition) to social care.
• A commitment to safeguard the training bursaries which enable the supply and recruitment of highly-skilled social workers.
• A commitment to increase recruitment to the sector to prevent individual social workers from being allocated more cases than recommended by professional guidelines.

Desirable

• Commitment to limiting and if possible avoiding any form of means-testing under a National Care Service.
• Financing of the National Care Service via a progressive inheritance levy.

Housing – Back to the Future

In the final year or so in office, the Labour government began a trajectory on housing that it should have adopted ten years earlier. As it became evident that the private market and a variety of social housing providers were not between them going to solve the growing housing crisis, Labour started to relax its seeming ideological opposition to rebuilding the nation’s stock of council housing, decimated by the right-to-buy policies of the previous administration. Not only did this mean a decade was effectively wasted in terms of increasing housing output, it also has the political consequence of meaning that the reforms to the financing of local authority housing are not sufficiently bedded in to make them safe from reversal by the new administration.

Many of the contenders for the Labour crown have seemed very keen to talk about immigration as an issue from the doorstep, yet few have made the key link: that the majority of popular concern about immigration do not arise from bigotry, but rather from the search for scapegoats on issues of employment and housing. There can be no denying the scale of the housing crisis: very little of this arises from inward migration, far more from demographic and economic change. Nevertheless, a key route to tackling concerns over immigration would include investment in a sizeable programme of social and affordable housing construction. Beyond this, the links between housing conditions and health levels and educational attainment are clear; there is no need for Labour to ‘build the Tories out of London’ (or anywhere else), but it should commit to building Britain out of housing poverty.

Essential

• A commitment to the ‘fourth option’ which permits councils to retain council housing stock as part of investment programmes.
• Reforms to local government financing to permit the majority of housing rental revenue to be retained by councils for the purposes of building or refurbishing council housing stock.
• A rhetorical shift away from the promotion of home ownership as the only acceptable aspiration in terms of property; practically, this should include a commitment to a direct replacement of any council home sold through the right to buy, and no significant extension of the right to buy to other social housing sectors.
• Commitment to retaining high targets for affordable and social housing in new developments.
• Creating an investment fund similar to ‘Building Schools for the Future’ to support councils which wish to build new units to replace their depleted stock.

Desirable

• Establishing a new and more ambitious decent homes standard for existing council homes, funded through a land value tax.
• Legislation that would require the Secretary of State to explicitly opt-out of compulsorily purchasing brown-field sites zoned for housing or partial housing use which have been left idle for a given period of time. Also legislation requiring local authorities to take control of vacant units, which have been deemed to be ‘not in use’.
• A re-examination of the role of housing associations as providers of social housing, with a discussion as to whether the state could be a more effective provider.
• A re-examination of the possibility which is currently in place for developers to opt-out of building social housing units in new developments by contributing to the enrichment of the community. The prevention of further ghettoisation in the housing market is an important goal which should not be compromised.
• A commitment to increasing taxes on home ownership, considering the possibility of better targeting stamp duty on high-cost units or introducing a tax on the saved income of those who own their own homes and therefore do not spend money on rent.

Johnson’s 2008 manifesto was a fascinating mix (rather like the man himself) of the sweeping, the generalised, the populist and occasional flashes of obsession with random bits of minutiae. But what was partially evident at the time of it’s publication, and has become even more so since, is that it was written with very little input from anyone who had the foggiest idea what they were talking about. Nowhere was that more clear than in the transport manifesto, saved from oblivion by The Guardian here. Everyone knows its headline-grabber: the removal of the bendy bus and the introduction of a new Routemaster – a policy which it has since become clear has no significant economic, environmental, safety or public utility case to its name. Sadly, this was not a lone case. And a badly thought-out, media-driven manifesto means a manifesto that gets broken all too easily, with just this week a new entrant to the fast growing list emerging.

“It is not good enough…that the Tube doesn’t run later on Friday and Saturday nights. [...] It would be a major benefit to Londoners if the Tube ran one hour later on Friday and Saturday nights, and we want to see this happen.” (p.20)

If it wasn’t good enough when Johnson wrote his 2008 manifesto, he’ll have to say that it still isn’t good enough when/if he writes the 2012 version. This week saw the death of this pledge after TfL announced that it was impossible to implement later running and that this would remain merely ‘an aspiration’. This should have come as no surprise to anyone who has had a passing interest in London’s transport pre-2008 – so we can assume it came as a surprise to the Mayor. In his second term, Ken Livingstone consulted on running a one hour later service on Fridays and Saturdays, with commencement of service at weekends cut back by one hour to ensure the amount of time available for engineering and upgrade works was not curtailed. From the consultation it became evident that the later start would leave the many commuters, particularly shift workers, who relied on an early Underground train at weekends heavily inconvenienced, so in 2006 TfL proposed a compromise: running trains 30 minutes later on both Fridays and Saturdays and cutting back starting time on Saturday mornings by one hour whilst leaving Sundays unaffected (this would have meant that Saturday and Sunday start up times were the same). However, by February 2007 it had become clear that negotiations with unions over changed working hours had ground to a halt, and the proposal was shelved.

Despite all this, Johnson in his manifesto reverted to the original proposal of an hour extra for both Friday and Saturday, strangely neglecting to mention that this would need two hours to be cut from somewhere else. Even if this barely-disguised Thatcherite could have succeeded where Livingstone failed with the RMT and ASLEF, he would either have had to at least partially break his manifesto promise by implementing the 30-minute extension plan or taken a potentially highly unpopular decision to leave early-morning commuters without an Underground service. And we all know Johnson doesn’t like making unpopular decisions. So, this manifesto promise was setting Johnson up for a fail, as anyone with a bit of nouse could have told him. The Mayor is trying to claim that upgrade work is what is preventing him from keeping his pledge, but this is clearly rubbish: whilst upgrade work does take place at night, so too does the day-to-day engineering work necessary to keep the Underground running. Even when the upgrades are complete, it is almost certain that any extension of operating hours in the evening will have to be matched by a curtailment in the morning.

“Listening To Londoners On The Blackwall Tunnel…We will work with the police to investigate measures on how to improve safety, with the intention of re-instating tidal flow at the earliest opportunity.” (p.16)

Johnson used the 2007 ending of the ‘tidal flow’ (a contraflow in the peak hours in one of the two tunnel bores) in the Blackwall Tunnel with some success to drum up support in southeast London. Inevitably, this became portrayed as a socialist anti-motorist plot (a well-known local journalist has a oh-so-hilarious line about ‘Transport for Livingstone’), despite the reality that the order to end the tidal flow came from the well-known Trotskyites in the Metropolitan Police who saw an increased number of motorists overtaking in the contraflow which presented a serious safety risk. The Met eventually ended the tidal flow following a motorcyclist being injured in a collision – Boriswatch has a good summary of the timeline here. The removal of the tidal flow led to a noticeable increase in congestion on the tunnel approaches. Once in office, Boris continued to insist he would restore the tidal flow, but two years on there is no sign of this ever happening – it seems likely that the Met have basically told Johnson that they won’t police a reintroduction of the tidal flow and that any serious accident arising could potentially see TfL facing a corporate manslaughter charge. Checking the viability of a manifesto pledge is generally thought to be a Good Thing, but Johnson seems to prefer simplistic populism. It is hard not to disagree with Greenwich & Lewisham Labour Assembly Member Len Duvall, when he writes

“The Mayor was irresponsible and unwise to raise local expectations of a reintroduction of tidal-flow at the tunnel given the significant safety implications of doing so”.

“In the short-term we will commission a trial of orbital express bus routes for outer London, connecting key hubs…These will be express buses…limited to two or three
stops along each route, [using] coach style vehicles.” (p.20)

On paper, the introduction of express orbital buses to fill gaps in the rail and Underground network seems a sensible idea, and fitted nicely with Candidate Johnson’s professed concern for the outer boroughs. The only problem is that those who read the manifesto might have expected a brand new route to be introduced as part of the trial. Except it wasn’t: instead an existing route, the X26 (which had been introduced as a limited stop successor to the 726 in 2005) had it’s frequency doubled to half-hourly. The service runs between West Croydon and Heathrow Airport and makes at least twelve intermediate stops, not the “two or three” specified in the manifesto – precisely the same stopping pattern as already existed before Johnson’s election. Further, it seems unlikely that passengers boarding the Scania OmniCities used on the route (pictured on this page) would describe it as a ‘coach style vehicle’. A perfectly good modern urban bus, but not a coach. Despite this trial being pretty half-hearted in the context of the pledge, it has still cost an extra £1m in subsidy, and failed to convince TfL that there should be any further expansion of express orbital services. As their November 2009 report says:

“The level of benefit delivered per pound of investment suggests that further investment in express orbital routes would not be a priority over other calls on funding.”

That’s the end of that pledge, then.

“We will also convene an emergency public summit of all the train operating companies in London and Government representatives, in our first few weeks in City Hall.” (p.23)

‘First few weeks’ would be an interesting definition of the 89 weeks it took for the ‘emergency public summit’ to be convened. Presumably this level of delay was to ensure that the train operators felt at home. Once the summit actually happened, on 12th February this year, it lasted around one hour and (as Adam Bienkov reported) Assembly Members were barred from participating. Thus, the summit took place after the deal on the acceptance of Oyster Pay-As-You-Go on National Rail, which included an insanely complex fare system and the imposition by rail operators of the much-derided Oyster Extension Permit. So far as I can tell, absolutely nothing of any note emerged from the summit when it was held. Given the lack of urgency in the emergency summit, it could be fair to say that the train operators will have seen Boris as something of a push over – a more hands-on approach might have led Johnson to properly keep the pledge that

I will, unlike the current Labour Mayor, work with the local councils who fund [the Freedom Pass] to make it operational 24 hours a day. (p.8)

Whilst it is true that the Freedom Pass has become a 24-hour benefit on TfL services, there is still no agreement to make it available on National Rail services before 09:30, limiting the usefulness of the extension for older people living in many areas of London.

We want to introduce no-strike deals, and bind London Underground to independent arbitration when negotiating pay settlements. (p.23)

The inclusion of no-strike deals in Johnson’s manifesto was enough, alongside the bendy bus shenanigans, to convince many observers that Johnson, or whoever was writing the manifesto, was pretty illiterate in terms of London’s transport. The idea that any of the largest unions on the Underground would give up the most powerful weapon in their locker is, frankly, naive. It has emerged that Johnson may in fact realise this – he has admitted making no approaches on this subject to the unions, presumably for fear of just how hard Bob Crow, Keith Norman and Gerry Doherty would laugh. Johnson has now begun, rather inexplicably, started blaming the government for his inability to carry out this pledge, telling the Assembly that

“The single biggest obstacle to a no-strike agreement … is that we do not have the right government in Westminster.”

However astoundingly confrontationalist Cameron’s rhetoric on the Unite/BA situation has become, it seems unlikely that a Conservative government would change legislation to allow employers to force no-strike deals on the unions. Suffice to say that if any such attempt was made, you’d be lucky to see a moving Underground train this side of the Olympics.

“We deplore Ken Livingstone’s proposed closure of 40 London ticket offices on the underground network, including at several important suburban stations and key central London stations, such as Cannon Street and Regent’s Park…Manned ticket offices provide a reassuring, visible presence…We will halt all such ticket office closures immediately.” (p.38)

So immediate was this halting, that TfL appear to have continued to work on it for the past two years, eventually publishing proposals this month to make significant reductions in the opening hours of large numbers of ticket offices, which include almost seven hours worth of extra closures at Heathrow Terminal 4 and more than four hours at many others. A number of ticket offices will close entirely, mostly at stations with multiple offices; sadly for Mr Johnson the one exception to this rule is one he specifically picked out in the manifesto – Cannon Street (Regent’s Park ticket office had already closed before the elections). Ironically, Johnson is using the same arguments that Livingstone made before the elections for his proposed ticket office closures: that the number of Oyster users now means there is little call for manned ticket offices. Johnson, of course, vociferously opposed and signed petitions against these closures. Once again, the cold realities of power have rudely interrupted the populist reverie of Johnson’s manifesto. Maybe if he’d asked someone who knew something, he could have saved himself the embarrassment.

In all this we haven’t even touched on the transport policies that weren’t in the manifesto but have emerged since – primarily the cuts to major infrastructure projects. The breaking of innumerable policy pledges (and there will no doubt be more to come) is a rich seam for London’s opposition parties to mine in the run-up to both the general and mayoral elections. More power to their elbows.

But who? And how?

The Prime Minister’s proposals for electoral reform are too limited and too late. But despite that I support them.

Not only because I believe the introduction of Alternative Vote is a key step on the way towards the introduction of a genuinely proportion (and more psephologically interesting) electoral system but also because the rabid response of the right has convinced me that Brown must be on to something. This has ranged from Cameron’s none-too-subtle barbs about rigging the electoral system at PMQs, through to the ill-advised playing of the Mugabe card by Reading East Tory Rob Wilson MP*.

As I like to give all politicians the benefit of the doubt (stop sniggering at the back, there) I’m prepared to be convinced that if we weren’t 100 days from a general election then the response would be a bit more considered. Because if this is an attempt to rig the electoral system, it would be an astoundingly cack-handed way of doing it. Alternative Vote makes no significant amendment to the UK’s constitutional settlement, it is highly unlikely to break the dominance of the two major parties and will leave the vast majority of seats in the same hands as currently, albeit with a little more legitimacy for the sitting MP.

Whether the AV transition is likely to happen this time round or not is a moot point. But I remain convinced in some degree of historical inevitability of electoral reform in the UK, and AV seems a very likely first step whenever it comes around. So what would it mean? I don’t have the time or inclination to go through each of the UK’s 650 constituencies, but I thought I’d have a run through the London region: not only because it’s my home, but also because we have some experience of this sort of system. The Supplementary Vote system used for electing the Mayor is a hybridised form of AV, in which the voter is limited to expressing two preferences, rather than being able to number all the way down the ballot paper. So there is a bit of evidence, albeit somewhat unwieldy, as to how voters might react to a preferential system.

At the next general election, London will elect 72 MPs, on new constituency boundaries. If the 2005 voting patterns were exactly replicated (using the notional results supplied by Anthony Wells), 27 of these – almost 38% – would produce results where the winning candidate took over 50% of first preference votes and would therefore be elected on the first round under AV (18 Labour, 7 Conservative, 2 Liberal Democrat). In one case (Orpington), this would be with a margin over 50%  of just 22 votes, whilst in another case (Camberwell & Peckham) the winning candidate would be more than 12% clear of the threshold. The map below shows these seats, and also the 19 seats where the winning party in 2005 took between 45% and 50% of the vote, with a clear margin (10%+) over their nearest competitors (12 Labour, 6 Conservative, 1 Liberal Democrat). Were such results to be replicated, it would be almost impossible for the leading party not to pick up enough transfers in the first few rounds of redistributions to not be guaranteed of victory.

None of these figures are a guarantor of safety, it should be pointed out, particularly not in the bottom category. I consider at least three of the Labour seats in this category (Dagenham & Rainham, Ealing North, Feltham & Heston) to be looking decidedly shaky at the coming election. Similarly, the precursors of two of the Tory seats in this category were won by Labour in the 1997 landslide. However, the key point is that the sort of swing needed to dislodge the occupants of these seats under plurality rule** would equally dislodge them under AV. I am contending, therefore that in almost 64% of London’s seats, the introduction of AV would never, or almost never, have any effect on the result.

What, then, of the remaining 26 seats – those left white on the map above? 14 of these are Labour held (or notionally held), 7 Conservative, 4 Lib Dem and 1 Respect. Of these, I am immediately throwing one Conservative seat (Uxbridge & South Ruislip) into the “electoral system won’t make a difference category”, as to overcome the 13.5% Tory lead, Labour would be having to take an unfeasably large proportion of Liberal Democrat second preferences in an area where Lib Dem voters don’t tend to be of the left leaning variety.

Let’s take a skip through the other 25. One of the tools we can use, particularly where the Liberal Democrat vote could be key, is the break down of second preferences in the 2008 Mayoral elections. The London Liberal Democrat voter base is remarkably varied – running from the social liberals of Hampstead, who might well place Labour as their second choice (perhaps after the Greens); the caring capitalists of Kingston, where a Conservative second preference seems more likely, through to Simon Hughes’ working class base in Bermondsey, whose second preferences could just as easily split to the BNP as to Labour. It is impossible, therefore, to make a city-wide generalisation as to where the bulk of Lib Dem second preferences would go. The overall breakdown of Paddick’s second preferences tells us nothing much – they split 31% to Livingstone, 30% to Johnson, 39% to other candidates or left blank. However, I believe that a very rough idea of how Lib Dem voters in a particular constituency are likely to split can be obtained by looking at the split of second preferences obtained by Livingstone and Johnson, given that a high proportion of these will be from Liberal Democrat voters. Similarly, and importantly in a number of seats, the Green vote is hard to pin down. My working assumption is that a bulk of the second preferences will move towards the Lib Dems in the first instance, or potentially directly to Labour, depending in part on individual candidates. It seems likely, though, that in Labour-Conservative fights, a sizeable portion of the Green vote would eventually end up in the Labour column (Sian Berry’s second preferences split 47% Livingstone, 14% Johnson, 39% other/blank) – or perhaps I’m just a bit too hyped up about the value of ‘progressive coalitions’ after last Saturday’s conference.

Battersea Currently Labour held, majority 0.8% over Con This is an ultra-marginal, which could well become more favourable for Labour under AV. Labour was 9.4% short of the threshold, with 18.8% worth of Lib Dem and Green votes to come into play and every indication that these would be weighted towards Labour in the redistributions: there was a 56.3:43.7 Livingstone-Johnson split on second preferences here.

Bethnal Green & Bow Currently Respect held, majority 3.4% over Lab This seat would be fascinating to watch under AV (as it is already!). Both of the main contenders are a long way short of the threshold and it’s hard to judge how the preferences of Lib Dem, Conservative and Green voters would break down. Mayoral second preferences show strong support for Livingstone, but there was no Respect candidate for Mayor, so we can’t know if Lib Dem or Green voters would number Labour above or below Respect. The identity of the Respect candidate and whether Conservative voters choose to number Labour above Respect in a perceived anti-extremist gesture could decide this.

Brentford & Isleworth Currently Labour held, majority 8.0% over Con An intriguing seat which could almost be considered a three-way marginal (38.8/30.8/23.3). Even if they can’t quite reach contention, the size of the Lib Dem share is easily large enough to take the Tories to victory if their second preferences lent right. However, Livingstone had an 8% lead over Johnson on second preferences here, suggesting that the opposite might be the case. A curve-ball here could be a Green boost as a result of Heathrow Third Runway unpopularity, possibly translating into a boost for the Lib Dems on second preferences – could it in fact create a Labour/Lib Dem run-off after all?

Carshalton & Wallington Currently Liberal Democrat held, majority 2.5% over Con Along with a number of other marginal south west London constituencies, AV would seem likely to make Carshalton & Wallington a much safer prospect for the Liberal Democrats. There is a 17.2% Labour share to milk lower preferences from, the vast bulk of which would be very likely to end up in the Lib Dem column.

Croydon Central Notionally Labour held, majority 1.2% over Con Boundary changes bring this seat marginally back into the Labour column, but even without a swing against Labour, AV would stack the odds against it holding on – firstly there is a 2.2% UKIP vote share which could be expected to swing heavily towards the Tories, thus overturning Labour’s lead. Add to this the fact that on second preferences, Johnson had a 2% lead over Livingstone which might suggest that the 13% Lib Dem block would preference the Conservatives over Labour.

Ealing Central & Acton Notionally Conservative held, majority 0.2% over Lab A fascinating 3-way marginal has been created here, with the largest parties within 3% of each other. Despite being only a handful of votes behind the Conservatives, Labour would be fearful that the large 4.9% Green share would push the third-placed Lib Dems ahead of them on redistributions, thus leading to a Con-Lib Dem run off. In such a scenario and with a huge Labour block to harvest from, the Lib Dems would seem assured of a win. If Labour can avoid this scenario and ensure a run-off with the Tories, the odds are in their favour: Livingstone led Johnson by 10% on second preferences in this constituency.

Eltham Currently Labour held, majority 8.1% over Con Despite Labour’s reasonably healthy lead in this constituency, the weighting of the smaller parties towards the right must be of concern, with a combined BNP+UKIP vote share of 5.2% – if transferred overwhelmingly to the Tories, as seems likely, this would immediately half Labour’s lead and leave them needing to pick up a high proportion of Lib Dem second preferences. Johnson’s 7% lead on second preferences here suggests that might be tricky.

Enfield North Notionally Conservative held, majority 2.3% over Lab A 4% vote share for UKIP+BNP looks likely to significantly strengthen the Conservative position here. The Lib Dems are weak here (11.5% vote share) and Livingstone’s second preference advantage relatively small (2.3%), making it hard to see enough lower preferences coming Labour’s way to overturn the Tory advantage.

Enfield Southgate Currently Conservative held, majority 2.8% over Lab The major party results for the two Enfield constituencies are disturbingly similar, but what happens beneath them is almost a mirror image. The right wing fringe parties are much weaker here (1.2%), whilst there is a small but significant Green share (2.6%). This might suggest a more hopeful outlook for Labour than in North, until you note that in this seat Johnson had a 3.8% second preference advantage over Livingstone, which doesn’t bode well for the crucial Liberal Democrat split.

Finchley & Golders Green Currently Labour held, majority <0.1% over Con With a Labour majority of just 31, this is one of the most marginal seats in the country. There’s little question that this will go Tory in 2010, but with a 16.7% Lib Dem share to be redistributed, hope might not be fully extinguished for Labour under AV. There are no real clues from the Mayoral election here, where Livingstone practically replicated the parliamentary situation, leading Johnson by just 0.2% on second preferences.

Hammersmith Currently Labour held, majority 13.5% over Con Hammersmith only just failed to get into my “electoral system wouldn’t make a difference” category – although it is by no means a shoe-in for Labour as demographic change works against them. On the current figures, however, there is little hope that the Tories could take anything like a large enough proportion of the 19.2% Lib Dem share (+3.9% for the Greens). With a whopping Livingstone lead of 15.5% on second preferences that seems a very tough call.

Hampstead & Kilburn Currently Labour held, majority 2.7% over Lib Dem With a strong Lib Dem challenge, Labour’s best hope of hanging on here under the current system is that a Tory surge splitting the opposition vote lets Glenda Jackson ride through the middle. This route is pretty much shut off under AV, with the large Conservative 24% share likely to favour Liberal Democrats on lower preferences, at least under current circumstances. It seems clear, however, that AV would end forever any hopes the Tories might have in this seat, placing it in a pretty much guaranteed Labour/Liberal Democrat alternation.

Harrow East Currently Labour held, majority 6.2% over Con The effect of AV on this seat would be heavily dependent on how the Lib Dem’s 14% vote share splits on redistribution, with a small margin in the Conservatives’ favour being enough to overhaul Labour, especially with a UKIP share of around 2% already swinging in their favour. However, the mixed demographics and electoral history of this area suggest that preferences might be pretty evenly split: Livingstone had just a 0.4% lead on second preferences here.

Hendon Currently Labour held, majority 7.6% over Con Labour’s situation here is quite similar to that in Harrow East, with a tight majority and a 14% Lib Dem share to be redistributed. However, more strongly than in Harrow East, there would seem to be good reasons to think that the Liberal Democrat second preferences would break rightward, not least the small but significant 2% bias towards Johnson in second preferences.

Holborn & St Pancras Currently Labour held, majority 16% over Lib Dem In percentage terms, this is the safest seat to be examined here. However, it is one where AV could have a devastating effect for Labour if it was unable to convince progressive voters to provide it with valuable second preferences. Labour is 6% short of the threshold, and there is a very strong 8% Green vote. If Labour can get even half of Green voters to second preference it, its position would be unassailable. The danger is if the seconds go overwhelmingly to the Liberal Democrats, boosting their vote share into the mid-30%s before the 20% Conservative share is redistributed. This could propel the Liberal Democrats to a narrow victory on the back of a weird coalition of progressive and ‘anyone but Labour’ right-wing votes. My opinion is that Labour would need to hold onto Frank Dobson, or someone of his ilk, as the candidate here for as long as possible.

Hornsey & Wood Green Currently Liberal Democrat held, majority 4% over Labour This end of Haringey appears to be solidifying behind the Liberal Democrats and it is hard to see how AV would do anything other than assist that at a Parliamentary level. Whilst the Conservative vote is very small (12.7%), it is still likely to transfer overwhelmingly into the Lib Dem column. Barring a major shift in voting behaviour, Labour’s only realistic chance here under AV would be to convince most of the Green’s 5% share to second preference them and hope that most of the Conservative vote doesn’t preference as far down as the Liberal Democrats.

Ilford North Currently Conservative held, majority 4% over Labour It seems unlikely that AV would help Labour take this seat back: the Conservative margin would be boosted by transfers from UKIP’s 2% share, and the Liberal Democrat split, whilst of less than a 14% share, is likely to be unpromising in an area such as Ilford. Johnson had a margin of 4.4% over Livingstone on second preferences here.

Islington South & Finsbury Currently Labour held, majority 1.6% over Lib Dems Holding this seat would be a very tough challenge for Labour under AV, starting as it does with less than 40% of the vote share and the Liberal Democrats effectively neck-and-neck. The two big blocks for redistribution are Greens (4.8%) and Conservatives (14.8%), both of which are likely to favour the Liberal Democrats. Labour’s best hope would be if the Liberal Democrat’s local government travails in Islington (or perhaps the incumbent’s record on environmental issues) were to convince enough Green or Conservative voters to preference Labour above them. I fear this is a forlorn hope.

Poplar & Limehouse Currently Labour held, majority 11.5% over Con Despite this looking pretty safe for Labour on paper, demographic change in the old East End and the intervention of George Galloway are pushing it towards three-way marginal status. With the Liberal Democrats clearly in fourth place, it is the division of their not-insignificant 14.8% share which would probably decide this seat under AV, given it could make all the difference as to which of the three remaining parties is knocked out. On the face of it, Livingstone’s stomping 16% lead on second preferences here suggests Labour might be in line for a significant benefit, but it has to be remembered that there was no Respect Mayoral candidate. Would a sizeable portion of Lib Dem second preferences end up with Respect? My gut feeling is that AV will help Labour here, but it does need to be wary of the danger of not picking up enough transfers in the penultimate redistribution and being knocked out at this stage. A Labour/Conservative run-off would, under AV, almost certainly lead to a Labour victory.

Putney Currently Conservative held, majority 4.9% over Lab Providing a major surge doesn’t take the Conservatives too much closer to the 50% threshold here (on 42.4% currently), AV could help Labour’s chances here. There is a not insignificant Liberal Democrat vote to be redistributed (16.3%) – and my feeling is that the Conservative already took most of the right-leaning Lib Dem vote in order to win the seat back in 2005. Despite Wandsworth’s right-wing heritage in local government terms, Livingstone racked up healthy second preference leads across the borough, including 9% here in Putney.

Richmond Park Currently Lib Dem held, majority 7.2% over Conservatives I would suspect that Zac Goldsmith, for all his claimed reforming credentials, would not be a strong advocate of AV. It certainly wouldn’t help his chance of de-seating Susan Kramer in this seat: as with much of the rest of South West London, Lib Dem hegemony would become much more entrenched with preferential voting. Labour’s vote share here is risible (9.3%), but it is enough – especially combined with the Greens’ 2.7% – to catapult Kramer over the threshold (she was only 3% short in 2005), even if the bias in preferences was only narrowly in her favour.

Sutton & Cheam Currently Lib Dem held, majority 6.7% over Conservatives I could simply say ‘See Richmond Park’, given that the 2005 vote shares are almost identical. Whilst there is no Green presence here, the Labour share is slightly higher at 11.9%, more than enough to keep the Lib Dems safely ensconced.

Tooting Currently Labour held, majority 12.2% over Conservatives All three Wandsworth seats become better prospects for Labour under AV. There is a big Lib Dem pool (19.4%) for Labour to fish in for second preferences, plus they could hope for some transfers from the Greens’ healthy 4.1%. The 2008 elections suggest that there would be no difficulty for Labour in achieving a significant bias in their favour from these transfers – Livingstone was 18.6% ahead on second preferences here.

Westminster North Currently Labour held, majority 9.1% over Conservatives This is another demographically mixed seat where the final outcome under AV would be very much dependent on how the Liberal Democrat transfers split. The Lib Dem share is strong (18.7%), but Labour would need to take over half of the second preferences to be assured of victory. Given that Livingstone was 11.7% ahead of Johnson on second preferences here, that’s not too great an ask.

Wimbledon Currently Conservative held, majority 5.5% over Labour I don’t think the wind is likely to be blowing in Labour’s direction in this seat any time soon, but there is a sizeable ‘progressive’ pool for it to fish from in happier times under AV - 18.2% for the Liberal Democrats, 3.2% for the Greens. I was surprised to find that Livingstone took a 5% lead over Johnson on second preferences here, so maybe an AV-assisted win for Labour might not be so far off here after all.

Without trying to make actual predictions (we don’t, after all, know what the political climate would be when the first AV elections were fought), this run through certainly doesn’t seem to be a very effective vote-rig in Labour’s favour, at least not in London. If anyone wins, its the Lib Dems, with a number of seats becoming much safer for them and a handful of gains from Labour looking clearly cemented in. None of this, of course, considers whether people’s voting behaviour might change under a reformed electoral system (there’s little evidence of it doing so under the current variety of electoral systems in the UK). The key fact is that the introduction of AV would force every party to think differently about how it fights marginal seats and which voters it targets. This could be a pretty dramatic change.

A final point – I haven’t mentioned the cause celebre of Barking here. Not wishing to be complacent, but I do not consider it to be a marginal seat (the real danger from the BNP is over control of Barking & Dagenham Council). Nevertheless, I would strongly recommend Next Left’s post on the issue, which demonstrates very clearly the value of preferential voting in creating a pro-democracy bloc against an extremist threat.

*As an aside on Mr Wilson, I discovered today that he has a Chief of Staff. A Chief of Staff. The President of the USA, the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London have Chiefs of Staff. Opposition Departmental Whips don’t. Or apparently, they do.

** Still can’t bring myself to call it First Past the Post after being threatened with lost marks if we did so by a university lecturer ten years ago. As he put it, “the key feature of so-called First Past the Post, is that there is no post”.

Ivo Josipović, the new Social Democrat president of Croatia

With 2010 now well underway, and with one election under it’s belt already, it is high time for a quick look ahead at the prospects for the Socialist International‘s member parties over the course of the next 12 months (an overview of what European Leftwatch is about can be found here).

2009 was a pretty mixed bag for the democratic socialist and social democratic parties of Europe, who for a variety of reasons have failed in many cases to reap any significant rewards from the continuing crisis of laissez-faire capitalism. The biggest story was, of course, the disastrous showing for the SPD in Germany, ending the grand coalition and ushering in (an already rather tarnished looking) right-wing coalition. The centre left was also heavily defeated in Bulgaria and Macedonia and failed to break out of opposition in Albania. Positives included victories in Greece and Iceland at the expense of incumbent centre-right governments (although both new leftist governments may well be seeing their victories as poisoned chalices by now) and the Partido Socialista’s re-election in Portugal.

With the centre left firmly out of power for the foreseeable future in France, Germany and Italy, that leaves only Britain and Spain of the major EU powers in Socialist International hands (and if you want to add Poland to the list of major powers, that shows no signs of shifting left any time soon). I don’t think the vast majority of readers of this blog are going to need reminding of the prospects for the British social democrats during 201o; basically, it seems highly unlikely that 2010 is going to be a vintage year for the European left. Below, we take a quick skim over national elections that either will or are likely to be held during the course of the next twelve months, starting with a calendar of those with fixed dates, then moving on to those with flexible term lengths.

January

10th: Croatia Presidential (2nd round) – This one’s already happened (in fact, the first part took place in 2009) and has chalked up a comfortable win for the candidate for the local Socialist International member. Whilst the post of President has relatively little executive power in the Croatian system, he or she does hold a degree of foreign and defence policy influence. The incumbent president, Stjepan Mesić, was term limited after 10 years in office. Mesić has had a complex political past, which included being the final president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and membership of three different parties since Croatian independence. During his tenure as Croatian President he has been a member of Hrvatska narodna stranka – liberalni demokrati (Croatian People’s Party – Liberal Democrats), a left-leaning liberal grouping which generally holds fourth party rank in Croatian politics. The run-up to the presidential election saw some degree of turmoil within both major parties – in the governing Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (HDZ – Croatian Democratic Union) over its unpopular response to the economic crisis; in the opposition Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske (SDP – Croatian Social Democratic Party) over its choice of presidential candidate. The disagreements with the SDP proved particularly divisive, leading to the popular fourth-term Mayor of Zagreb Milan Bandić leaving the party and running as an independent against the official candidate Ivo Josipović, an MP who had played a leading role in the SDP’s transition from its roots in the League of Communists of Croatia. The first round of voting, held on 27th December, saw the remarkable result of the SDP official candidate and the break-away independent topping the poll, with 32.4% and 14.8% respectively. This pushed Andrija Hebrang, the governing HDZ’s candidate, into third place (with 12.0% of the vote) and out of the contest. The candidate of the outgoing President’s party, Vesna Pusić, came fifth with just 7.3% of the vote. The first round results massively favoured Josipović in his second round run-off against Bandić on January 10th – and this proved to be decisive. Josipović swept the board with 60.2% of the vote (a far higher share than that predicted by opinion polls), translating into a majority in all but one of Croatia’s counties. Surprisingly, Bandić failed even to take his mayoral seat of Zagreb, winning only the (rather empty) northern Dalmatian county of Lićko-senjska. Josipović will take office in February, with overseeing accession to the European Union likely to be one of the major challenges of his term of office. Whether the SDP’s sweeping victory in the presidential elections can be taken as any indication of likely success in the next legislative elections is open to debate: opinion polls currently give a slight advantage to the SDP over the HDZ, but voting could be two years away yet – December 2011 is the deadline for the polls.

April

25th Austria Presidential After inconclusive legislative elections in 2008 which saw the reluctant continuation between the two main parties and a surge for the hard right, Austria goes to the polls in the spring to elect a President, a role that could be particularly important if future legislative elections prove equally close run. The incumbent President, Heinz Fischer – of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ – Social Democratic Party of Austria) – has announced his intention to seek re-election for a second term, possibly with the support of the Greens. To date, the SPÖ’s centre-right grand coalition partners (the ÖVP) have proved very tardy in selecting a candidate, with former front-runner Erwin Pröll (governor of the important Niederösterreich länder) rulin g himself out. With candidates also not yet chosen by the two hard right parties, it is unsurprising that opinion polls are showing huge leads for Fischer, possibly taking a little over 50% in the first round against various hypothetical match-ups. Fischer is evidently highly popular in Austria, outperforming his own party by some way, hence the lack of eagerness of any challengers to come forward.

June

12th Slovakia Legislative The coalition led by the Socialist International member party Smer – sociálna demokracia (Direction – Social Democracy) will be seeking to win a second term in office, having defeated the centre-right Slovak Democratic and Christian Union led government in 2006. The choice of coalition partners of Smer’s leader, Robert Fico, proved controversial: they included the ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party. This led to an 18 month suspension for Smer from the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. There would appear to be a reasonably strong chance of Fico’s government achieving re-election: in presidential elections held in April 2009, the coalition-backed candidate Ivan Gašparovič won re-election by a 56%-44% margin over the centre-right candidate.

Unfixed date Czech Republic Legislative The Czech Republic has seen a high degree of political instability over the past twelve months, following a succesful no-confidence vote against Mirek Topolánek’s right-wing coalition government, led by the Občanská demokratická strana party (ODS – Civic Democratic Party, incidentally one of David Cameron’s partners in the new European Conservatives & Reformists grouping). Since April 2009, the Republic has been governed by an interim government composed half of the previous coalition government and half of the opposition Česká strana sociálně demokratická (CSSD – Czech Social Democratic Party), under the leadership of an interim prime minister, the non-partisan Jan Fischer (formerly head of the National Statistics Office). Plans for early elections fizzled out, and are now to be held at some point in June. Latest opinion polling suggest that the CSSD, led by former Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek are on course to obtain largest party status, but with a margin of only around 5% over the ODS will certainly have to form a coalition government.

September

19th Sweden Legislative The right-leaning Moderata samlingspartiet (Moderate Party) Swedish government of Fredrik Reinfeldt has acquired some significance in the UK, being seen as a major influence on David Cameron’s ‘modernised’ Conservatives. Ironically, the likely Conservative victory in May could well be followed by the Moderates being defeated in September. Right-wing periods of government in social-democrat dominated Sweden have traditionally been short, and opinion polling suggests that this may be no exception. Reinfeldt’s coalition (Alliance for Sweden) achieved a narrow majority over the Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti (SAP – Social Democratic Labour Party of Sweden) and it’s partners (Red-Greens) in 2006, but quickly slipped behind in the polls. Despite some narrowing, the Red-Greens, led by SAP’s Mona Sahlin, have retained a reasonable sized lead. However, disappointing results for SAP in last year’s European Elections suggest there is little room for complacency on Sahlin’s part.

October

Unfixed date Bosnia-Herzegovina Legislative & Presidential Elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina are complex affairs, with a tripartite presidency – one president for each set of constitutional peoples (Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs), an ethnically divided House of Representatives and two Entity Parliaments. Recent tensions within the federation make the October elections hard to call – indeed, some have cast doubt over whether they will happen in their expected form at all. The 2006 elections saw Socialist International member parties win two of the three presidencies: Nebojša Radmanović of the Savez nezavisnih socijaldemokrata (SNSD – Alliance of Independent Social Democrats) took the Serbian presidency and Željko Komšić of the Socijaldemokratska Partija Bosne i Hercegovine (SDP – Social Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzgovina) the Croat presidency. The SNSD also currently hold the Chairmanship of the Council of Ministers.

Unscheduled Elections that must be held during 2010

Hungary Legislative (at latest May 2010) The Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSZP – Hungarian Socialist Party) is currently eeking out what will almost certainly be its final few months in power, governing as a minority administration since its junior coalition partner walked out in May 2008 (when anger against the government led to serious civil unrest), and trailing badly in opinion polls. The MSZP Prime Minister since 2004, Ferenc Gyurcsány was deposed in a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April 2009 and replaced by the reluctant Gordon Bajnai, who took office only after his own party agreed to the implementation of significant austerity measures. The new Prime Minister was unable to prevent disastrous European Election results for the MSZP, which took just 4 of Hungary’s 22 seats. Bajnai will stand down at the election, with the MSZP nominating Attila Mesterházy as candidate for Prime Minister. However, the likely outcome of the election is a centre-right government led by the Fidesz party under Viktor Orbán.

Latvia Legislative (at latest October 2010) Latvia’s politics were thrown into crisis by the effective collapse of its economy in the early part of 2009. At one stage, early elections appeared inevitable when violent protests erupted against the conservative People’s Party led coalition government, which had secured re-election in 2006. Following the effective collapse of the government in February 2009, President Zatlers convened talks with all parties, and early elections were averted when an interim government of five centre and right-leaning parties was formed. It remains to be seen if left-leaning parties, most notably the Saskaņas Centrs (Harmony Centre) alliance of three parties of various degrees of leftist radicalism, can benefit from the seismic shift in Latvia’s economic fortunes.

Poland Presidential (likely to be late in 2010) The remaining half of the populist right-wing twins who once ran Poland together is likely to seek re-election in 2010. Lech Kaczyński, whose Prime Ministerial brother Jaroslaw was heavily defeated by the more moderate right-winger Donald Tusk in 2007, is likely to face a hard battle as his Law & Justice Party (another of Cameron’s interesting friends) appears to have lost the affections of the Polish people. However, the challenge seems unlikely to come from the left, with Socialist International member Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (Democratic Left Alliance) and the break-away Socjaldemokracja Polska (Social Democracy of Poland) splitting the limited left vote between their candidates. The succesful candidate would seem likely to come from the governing Civic Platform, although the identity of their candidate is not yet known (Prime Minister Tusk is considered a strong possibility)

United Kingdom Legislative (at latest June 2010) – You know the drill.

So, to round off, a summary of my unscientific and uninformed predictions for the European left’s fortunes in 2010:

Likely left gains: Czech Republic legislative, Sweden legislative

Likely left holds: Austria presidency, Slovakia legislative

Likely left loses: Hungary legislative, UK legislative

Likely left total irrelevancy: Latvia legislative, Poland presidential

Could end up anywhere: Bosnia-Herzegovina presidential & legislative