Competing Interests

Caroline Penn writes:

Following her arrest at the anti-fracking protest in Balcombe, Caroline Lucas won praise for her principled stand. Labour members have even gone as far as suggesting there should be a place for Caroline Lucas in any future Labour Coalition.

Caroline Lucas has managed to achieve a status few MPs can claim; she is a popular politician. Her deft selection of high profile campaigns has meant as single MP, representing a party with only 11,000 members, she has punched well above her weight.

However, for many Labour activists who have campaigned against the Greens, the prospect of any alliance is an unwelcome one. A coalition would require three things: mutual trust, party discipline and shared values.

The Green Party have never shied away from targeting Labour seats. Indeed, Caroline Lucas, an MEP from Oxford, won her seat in Brighton Pavilion from Labour. Capitalising on Lucas’s popularity, the Green Party took control of Brighton & Hove City Council the following year.

Their victory was again secured by a ruthless campaign against Labour, a campaign that continues today. Despite having two Tory MPs in the city, Labour remains the target of their enmity.

In the 2011 local elections, the Green Party in Brighton offered a positive manifesto, a seemly attractive alternative to austerity. Their core message was a promise to “resist all cuts” and a commitment to “to do politics differently”.

This has been the first time Green polices faced scrutiny and they have failed to deliver.Like the Lib Dems, they have found it impossible to translate opposition politics to being in power. Worse, their hostility towards Labour has meant cooperation and consensus building has been near impossible.

Recycling rates in the city have fallen and bus routes have been cut. An inability to engage with communities has meant policies such as the introduction of 20mph zones have met with resistance. The council appears incapable of meeting the challenges the city faces: inequality, child poverty and an acute housing shortage.

When door knocking, it’s hard to avoid the animosity towards the Greens in traditional Labour areas. While claiming to stand for social justice, the very people the Greens aspire to represent feel alienated, ignored and even patronised by the pursuit of a very narrow, middle class agenda.

Dominated by white middle class university graduates and former public school pupils, the party looks as unrepresentative to ordinary people.

The Green’s failure to deliver can be attributed in part to their reluctance to operate on traditional party lines. With no whip or structure, the local party is divided by infighting and disagreements. This culminated in an attempted coup against the council leader. One Green blogger described the councillors as pursuing a “Thatcherite individualism”. There has been no attempt to address the fundamental issue of indiscipline. 

Caroline Lucas admirably attacked sexism in Parliament. Yet when a female Labour candidate for a recent by-election was subjected to what Lucas herself described as “misogynistic blogging” by a Green Party member, he faced no sanction.

Rather than leading a bold new political movement, Caroline Lucas is a lone voice in the Green Party. In response to the unpopularity of the Green council, she has increasingly attempted to distance herself from them.

Nowhere was that more apparent than during the City Clean dispute. Following a Green/Tory vote, council bin men were faced with up to a £4,000 pay cut. Lucas found herself on the GMB picket, protesting against her own council.

While members and half the Green councillors joined her, the rest of their councillors supported the council line and even took to attacking the union’s position.

But Brighton isn’t an isolated case. An unwillingness to respond to the City Clean strike highlighted the lack of leadership from Natalie Bennett and the Green Party Executive.

Each local Green Party operates in a near autonomous state. Green councillors take contradictory positions on everything from housing and budget cuts to last year’s PCC elections.

Tensions in Brighton are mirrored in the wider party where factions, some very critical of the Brighton Greens, battle for the heart of the party. In reality, Caroline Lucas is not an MP of a national party, but a loose collective of local pressure groups and competing interests.

After 2015, Labour will face huge challenges. Issues that will decide the next election: the cost of living, rising housing prices, the future of the NHS, fuel poverty and the environment.

Providing an effective opposition isn’t enough. We need to be able to deliver and to do that, Brighton Pavilion needs a Labour MP – an MP that can influence Labour policy and debate, an MP that reflects Labour values and an MP that provides a voice for those that the Greens and Tories have alienated and ignored.

BBC Bias

Although when it comes to Eurosceptics the question is as to which ones, and although "left-wing" and "anti-business" are not the same thing, Mike Berry writes:

If you are a reader of the right end of the British press you will be familiar with stories claiming that the Corporation has a liberal, left-wing bias.

Only last week the Daily Telegraph reported a new study had found that the BBC “exhibits a left-of-centre bias in both the amount of coverage it gives to different opinions and the way in which these voices are represented”. Other critics have accused the BBC of having a pro-EU and anti-business slant. But how true are these accusations and what does the evidence suggest about the range of views the corporation features in its news output?

Along with a group of colleagues at Cardiff University, I recently completed a major content analysis of BBC coverage. This research was funded by the BBC Trust as part of an ongoing series of studies examining the impartiality of its reporting in areas such as regional news, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Arab Spring, business and science.

Our research had two strands. One examined the range of topics and sources featured in BBC broadcast news and how that compared to what was provided by other broadcasters. A second strand looked in detail at the BBC’s online and broadcast reporting of immigration, the EU and religion. We analysed news coverage from both 2007 and 2012 in order to identify any possible changes over time. 

Tories get more airtime than Labour

One of the most striking findings was the dominance of party political sources. In coverage of immigration, the EU and religion, these accounted for 49.4% of all source appearances in 2007 and 54.8% in 2012. In reporting of the EU the dominance was even more pronounced with party political sources accounting for 65% of source appearances in 2007 and 79.2% in 2012.

Political sources were also much more likely than other sources to be featured in the opening sections of news reports which had the consequence of reports being framed from party political perspectives which other sources then had to respond to.

Among political sources, Labour and Conservatives dominate coverage accounting for 86% of source appearances in 2007 and 79.7% in 2012. Our data also show that Conservatives get more airtime than Labour. Bearing in mind that incumbents always receive more coverage than opposition politicians, the ratio was much more pronounced when the Conservatives were in power in 2012.

In strand one (reporting of immigration, the EU and religion), Gordon Brown outnumbered David Cameron in appearances by a ratio of less than two to one (47 vs 26) in 2007. In 2012 David Cameron outnumbered Ed Milliband by a factor of nearly four to one (53 vs 15). Labour cabinet members and ministers outnumbered Conservative shadow cabinet and ministers by approximately two to one (90 vs 46) in 2007; in 2012, Conservative cabinet members and ministers outnumbered their Labour counterparts by more than four to one (67 to 15).

In strand two (reporting of all topics) Conservative politicians were featured more than 50% more often than Labour ones (24 vs 15) across the two time periods on the BBC News at Six. So the evidence is clear that BBC does not lean to the left it actually provides more space for Conservative voices. 

A win for Euroscepticism

So what about the accusation that the BBC is pro-EU? Again the evidence points in the opposite direction.

In each sample period, a single story was dominant in broadcast coverage. In 2007 it was the Lisbon Treaty, which accounted for 70% of coverage and in 2012 it was negotiations over ratifying the EU budget which accounted for 72% of coverage. In both cases the debate was dominated by the representatives of the two main parties and the EU was framed narrowly as a threat to British interests.

In 2007 debate revolved around three points argued by Conservative Eurosceptics: that Britain hadn’t secured her “redlines” on maintaining British sovereignty; that the treaty was a repackaged version of the EU constitution; and that a referendum was necessary to ratify it. Labour contested these arguments. In 2012 the budget debate pitted the Conservative leadership (for the budget settlement) against the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party and Labour who opposed it.

There are two points to be made about this coverage. First, it saw Europe almost exclusively through the prism of political infighting between Labour and the Conservatives so a rounded debate about the multiplicity of ways the relationship between the EU and UK affects Britain was almost completely absent. Second, although UKIP received very little airtime, Euroscepticism was very well represented through Conservative politicians.

Voices arguing for the benefits of EU membership were very sparse. This was a consequence of Labour politicians being unwilling to make the positive case for Europe because of its perceived unpopularity amongst voters. This meant that business lobbyists provided much of what little pro-EU opinion was available. 

Business as usual

What about the accusation that the BBC is anti-business? Once again the evidence shows that the opposite is the case.

In both 2007 and 2012, across all programming, business representatives received substantially more airtime on BBC network news (7.5% and 11.1% of source appearances) than they did on either ITV (5.9% and 3.8%) or Channel 4 News (2.4% and 2.2%). When we compare the representation of business with that of organised labour, the findings are even more striking.

On BBC News at Six, business representatives outnumbered trade union spokespersons by more than five to one (11 vs 2) in 2007 and by 19 to one in 2012. On the issues of immigration and the EU in 2012, out of 806 source appearances, not one was allocated to a representative of organised labour. Considering the impact of the issues on the UK workforce, and the fact that trade unions represent the largest mass democratic organisations in civil society, such invisibility raises troubling questions for a public service broadcaster committed to impartial and balanced coverage. 

City voices

The robustness of these findings is reinforced in research on how the BBC’s Today programme reported the banking crisis in 2008. The table below shows the sources featured during the intense six weeks of coverage following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Today programme banking crisis interviewees 15/9/2008 to 20/10/2008.

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The range of debate was even narrower if we examine who the programme featured as interviewees in the two week period around the UK bank bailouts. This can be seen in the next table.

Today programme banking crisis interviewees 6/10/2008 to 20/10/2008.

Click to enlarge

Here opinion was almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices. Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage.

The fact that the City financiers who had caused the crisis were given almost monopoly status to frame debate again demonstrates the prominence of pro-business perspectives.

So the evidence from the research is clear. The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda.

A Proper Charlie

I cannot understand the fuss about Prince Charles's frequent meetings with Ministers. Or about the secondment of members of his staff to Departments of State.

Or about the practice, alleged (if that is the word) by Lord Rogers in the latest edition of the New Yorker, that London developers now check with Clarence House before making any major commitment.

The Prime Minister is summoned to the bar of a public house in order to pay court to our pre-eminent intellectual, who is a gameshow host, an occasional actor, and a long-lapsed comedian. Oh, to be Russian. Or any other kind of European. Less EU, please. But more Europe.

The Education Secretary and would be Prime Minister is still having regular, off-the-record meetings with Rupert Murdoch, to whom he owes his entire elevation. The Secretary of State for Health shares the Prince's enthusiasm for homoeopathy, but the Prince does not share the Secretary of State's power over the matter.

That a Royal staffer has been attached to the badger-culling DEFRA cannot be said to matter when the Prince himself supports the badger cull, even if his newspaper critics do not. It is not as if they have been seconded to DEFRA. That really would be a story.

And there does need to be someone in our national life, some Sage of the Age or what have you, who is informally but unmistakably empowered to put the kibosh on daft development proposals. That may as well be Prince Charles as anyone else. I am not aware of any other applicant for the position.

Actually Getting Houses Built

George Eaton writes:

Demand for housing might be surging owing to George Osborne's Help to Buy but supply remains pitifully constrained.

The Local Government Association reveals today that 381,390 homes have been given planning permission but have yet to be built. Rather than the planning system (as many on the right claim), it is a lack of finance that is blame. 

Tory councillor Mike Jones, the chairman of the LGA's environment and housing board, has responded by calling for the government to lift the "artificial cap" placed on councils' borrowing and allow them to build more affordable homes. He said:

While there has been progress made, this risks being undermined if we do not find a way to ensure developers keep up with demand. These figures conclusively show that it is not the planning system holding back the building of much-needed new homes.

The challenge now lies in actually getting houses built. Government schemes to help buyers access finance risk creating a bubble if there isn't an increase in house building to match it.

Government has an unrivalled opportunity to create jobs, provide tens of thousands of homes and help the economy without having to find a single extra penny.

New homes are badly needed and councils want to get on with building them. The common sense answer is for the Treasury to remove its house-building block and let us get on with it.

In his recent manifesto for London 2020 Vision, Boris Johnson similarly argued: 

We should allow London’s councils to borrow more for house building - as they do on continental Europe - since the public sector clearly gains a bankable asset and there is no need for this to appear on the books as public borrowing.

In policy terms, it is a no-brainer. The Chartered Institute of Housing estimates that raising the cap by £7bn could enable the construction of 60,000 homes over the next five years, creating 23,500 jobs and adding £5.6bn to the economy.

So what's holding Osborne back? In a word, ideology. Unlike in other European countries, borrowing by councils appears on the national balance sheet making the deficit appear larger than it is.

For a Chancellor determined to ensure that borrowing falls every year (to the extent that he delayed payments to institutions such as the World Bank and the UN and forced departments to underspend by £10.9bn), regardless of other policy objectives, lifting the cap is out of the question. 

In an attempt to win Osborne round, Vince Cable proposed allowing councils to pool their borrowing limits so those not using their full entitlement can donate it to authorities with housing waiting lists, but this too was blocked. As Cable recently told the Social Liberal Forum:

"What is stopping them? Frankly, Tory dogma. And the Tories are hiding behind Treasury methodology, saying that more borrowing by councils beyond permitted limits will break the fixed rules.

"So even though freeing up this borrowing space would result in tens of thousands more homes being built, and many times more jobs, they would rather start talking about the cuts they want to make, rather than the houses that we should build. That is the difference between Lib Dems and Tories on this matter."

Cable's housing plan will be put forward for endorsement at the Lib Dem conference next month. So long as Osborne continues to resist any reform, he risks being outflanked on an issue of increasing political significance. 

Reaching The Destination

Caroline Lucas writes:

"No direction", "dithering", "rudderless". Ed Miliband isn't the first opposition leader to hear this kind of language as an election looms, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that his MPs are queuing up to offer him friendly encouragement to fill the policy vacuum.

Clearly, it's not easy being in opposition, knowing that every policy announcement can and will be used against you by the government and a hostile media. But that's why politics requires courage.

Labour now has some fantastic opportunities to get behind progressive policies that would resonate with its traditional support and with voters. One in particular is about to pull into the station.

With the dreadful news last week that rail fares will go up by an average of 4.1% next year (and sincere sympathies to you if you're one of the many passengers who will be hit much harder than that), it's surely time for Labour to accept that privatisation of the railways was a disastrous failure that it should have reversed when it had the chance.

With the prime minister's former speechwriter, Ian Birrell, leaping to the defence of privatised services and talking about record levels of passenger satisfaction, surely now is the time for Miliband's team to sign up to a policy that would genuinely distinguish him from the coalition.

The shadow transport secretary, Maria Eagle, sounds as if she wants to head in that direction. She recently criticised the government's determination to re-privatise the East Coast service, calling it "bizarre and dogmatic".

East Coast, she noted, makes one of the highest payments to the public purse, receives the least subsidy and is the only route on which all profits are reinvested in services. So why doesn't Labour go the whole way?

The Rebuilding Rail report, published last year by Transport for Quality of Life, offers a superb analysis of the mess Britain's railways are in.

It finds that the private sector has not delivered the innovation and investment that were once promised, that the costs of back-room staff have massively increased, and that the costs of train travel rose by 17% between 1997 and 2010 (while the costs of travelling by car fell).

It conservatively estimates that £1.2bn is being lost each year as a result of fragmentation and privatisation. The irony is that some of the biggest profiters are the state-owned rail companies of our neighbours: Deutsche Bahn, for example, owns three UK franchises.

Birrell seeks to paint opponents of privatisation as dewy-eyed nostalgists. But the modern, efficient, clean, affordable services enjoyed in other parts of Europe offer a much better blueprint than our own past.

The solution the Green party is proposing is for our railways to be brought back into public hands, with passengers having a greater say in the development of the system. The government would take back individual franchises when they expire, or when companies fail to meet their conditions.

The enormous savings generated could and should then be reinvested in rail infrastructure, and to reduce the soaring cost of fares.

My private member's bill sets out the process to make this happen, and is due to have its second reading in October. I've written to Maria Eagle asking if Labour will get behind it.

As a policy for Labour, it's unlikely to play well in the Mail and the Telegraph. But I suspect many of their readers – particularly those reading their papers while jammed up against a fellow commuter on an overcrowded, overpriced train – might be more receptive.

And certainly there are many rank and file Labour MPs, many of whom are already backing the bill, who are desperate to see their leader prove himself as the conviction politician he says he is.

The Next Prime Minister

John Denham and Peter Hain write:

Three years ago few gave Labour much chance of winning the 2015 general election. Crushed in 2010 and widely if unfairly blamed for the economic crisis, history also told us that no party had ever come back from such a position to win a majority in just one term. These were the unpromising circumstances in which Ed Miliband became leader.

Although we had been in power for 13 years Ed was not afraid of criticising our record. He had been a cabinet minister, as we had been, and like us, he was proud of the great bulk of our achievements. But he was also clear that many of the problems facing Britain required fundamentally different approaches and new solutions.

At the heart of his argument was the idea that the British economic model that had evolved over nearly 30 years was not capable of enabling this country to pay its way, or of offering jobs which would let our citizens enjoy a good, secure standard of living.

The banking crisis was global, and Labour had responded well, showing global leadership and decisive action at home. But it also revealed an economy that was too dependent on the riskier parts of the financial services industry and with too little depth everywhere else.

Ed's willingness to confront these uncomfortable truths helped firm up our core vote, win back some of those who left us in 2005 and 2010, and establish a lead over the Tories. His attempts to define the challenges struck a chord with the public.

He was the first to point out that our economy failed the "squeezed middle" as well as the poorest. He knew that low incomes could not be alleviated by redistributive taxation alone. He was brave enough to confront media power and to lead criticism of the banks.

His understanding that these structural problems reflected wider dysfunctions and injustices about economic and social power led him to launch the debate about "responsible capitalism".

There was initially much media sniping, but then his critics had to concede that he was right: the "rules of the game" had to be changed and financial regulation radically improved, both to discourage destructive corporate behaviour and encourage companies committed to long-term investment, innovation and good employment practice.

This was never a "leftwing" agenda in an "old Labour" sense. It was clear to a broad spectrum of opinion that both the current government's and New Labour's over-reliance on free market liberalism and underplaying the role of the state in modern economies lay behind Britain's economic weakness.

At the heart of Ed's One Nation vision was his willingness to take a different direction on economic policy. It gave us credible answers to the problems facing the squeezed middle and to the question of where decent jobs would come from.

It's no coincidence that when these messages were at their sharpest and most consistent, Labour's lead was strongest. It's in the past few months, when we've heard less of this fundamental approach to the economy, that Labour's lead has weakened.

On the one hand, the commonsense acceptance that incoming Labour ministers will have to work to the first year budgets they inherit has been wrongly seen as wholesale acceptance of Osborne's disastrous economic strategy. On the other, criticism of poor corporate behaviour has been muted, and areas such as tax abuse have ceded to simplistic coalition sloganeering.

All the signs point to Ed Miliband being the next prime minister – and this because of, not despite, his leadership. But the modest Tory revival is a healthy warning to stick to his core message. Detailed policy can wait, but on the big issues it is not better to have less definition rather than more.

The public don't like any politicians much. They have little time for parties who just want to rubbish the other lot. For Labour, a party that was in power so recently and for so long, an acrimonious debate about whose record is worse is unlikely to produce a decisive winner.

The most valuable members of the shadow cabinet have been those who have set out radical long-term visions for their area of responsibility, such as Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall on the need to integrate a National Care Service into the NHS. Labour has been at its strongest when we have risen above the party political dogfight to speak the truth about what needs to be done.

There's nothing to worry about in our current position so long as the entire Labour leadership team swiftly rediscovers the ability to do the same.

It Could Be Yule

With May and Hague out of the running after this Miranda business, who is going to be Prime Minister at Christmas, three months into the first trial of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, and with Cameron therefore either in custody or in exile?