Episode Ten: Ukip’s Five Year Plan
John Lanchester
It is morally wrong that five independent fee-paying schools should send more students to Oxbridge than the worst performing two thousand secondary schools combined.
Agreed.
The increasing ebb and flow of people across our planet is one of the greatest issues of our time.
Yes.
On the major issues of the day – immigration, the economy, our health service and living standards – the establishment parties have repeatedly and knowingly raised the expectation of the public, only to let us down, time and time again.
Yes, broadly speaking. The IMF’s statement yesterday, to the effect that the fiscal projections in Osborne’s most recent budget are unlikely to be met, shows that they’re still at it.
The Government continues to signal its intention to widen engagement in international conflict while, at the same time, implementing a crippling round of further military spending cuts.
Yes.
To help protect the enduring legacy of the motor industry and our classic and historic vehicles, Ukip will exempt vehicles over 25 years old from vehicle excise duty.
That gives it away – all this is from Ukip’s manifesto. If the whole manifesto were like that last proposal, all lounge-bar populism and talk of political correctness gone mad, Ukip would be a less disruptive force in British politics. The party’s policy proposals are often silly. Their willingness to identify problems, though, can be hard to disagree with. The Ukip manifesto is strong on raising issues which the mainstream parties would rather gloss over. As James Meek’s piece on Grimsby makes clear, there is more to the upsurge in Ukip’s appeal than just a protest vote.
I had always assumed that Nigel Farage is an idiot. I still basically think that, in that his solutions to Britain’s problems are what in Italy used to be called (and maybe still is) fantapolitica – fantasy politics. He is an astute idiot, though, and where it once seemed that Ukip had only populist arm-waving, it now looks as if it’s more complicated than that: Ukip has populist arm-waving, and also a medium-term plan.
That plan is known as the 2020 strategy. As summed up by Chris Bruni-Lowe, the party’s election strategist, its crucial component is to win a seat for Farage in Thanet South, and then to ‘come second in more than 100 northern constituencies’. Then, in the 2020 general election, Ukip can present itself as the only viable opposition party across whole swathes of the deindustrialised North. As Meek made clear in describing Grimbsy, the party’s appeal there is not trivial. The typical Ukip voter is older, whiter, poorer and less educated than the UK norm. It’s a demographic well represented in areas which currently feel they have no choice except to vote Labour, not least because the Conservative party ‘brand’ is still toxic.
This is the real sting in the idea ‘Vote Nigel, Get Ed’. If enough people do vote Nigel, we will indeed get Ed. Then, come 2020, a Labour-led government which has spent five years implementing austerity policies – which it will have to do, to fulfill its manifesto pledge to cut the deficit every year – will have to contest its northern heartland with a non-Tory, anti-austerity alternative. Add to that the possibility of further trouble in the Eurozone, with Ukip howling for a referendum and blaming Europe for all Britain’s troubles, and it’s not hard to imagine Labour having future problems with its traditional Northern vote to rival the ones it currently has with its traditional Scottish vote.
So although Farage is an idiot, he also isn’t. This is a viable plan, though it’s also one which could fail at the very first stage: the Thanet South ballot. Farage has said he will quit as Ukip leader if he doesn’t win the contest there, a three-way marginal between the Tories, Labour and Ukip. (Just to spice things up, the Tory candidate, Craig Mackinlay, is a former deputy leader of Ukip.) When Meek visited the constituency last autumn, Ukip were already throwing resources at the seat. But the latest constituency poll by Lord Aschroft has the Tories with a tiny lead over Ukip. ‘It is frankly just not credible for me to continue to lead the party without a Westminster seat,’ Farage has said, and also ‘if I fail to win Thanet South, it is curtains for me. I will have to step down.’ Politicians are good at saying things which when closely parsed allow them to change their minds, but there doesn’t seem to be much wiggle-room for Farage. If he loses, Ukip’s whole plan goes down the plughole. A big, big part of the 2020 general election is taking place right now, in Thanet South.
Comments
Despite all this jiggery-pokery, the Tories still managed to spin the deficit caused by the government taking over banks debt in 2008/9 to avoid their complete collapse as the result of Labour's profligate spending, which is obviously quite untrue (whatever you think of PFI, it did not cause the deficit - the banks did).
Ever since, Labour have been terrified of anything which might allow the Tories to point the finger of fiscal irresponsibility at them again and so have locked themselves into a position where the raising of taxes to balance the books and invest is taboo and increasing government borrowing equally so. And so they have denied themselves any alternative to being watered-down Tories. To be boldly socialist (or even social-democratic), they perceive, will make them automatically unelectable again.
Maybe they are right, who knows? But, as the public response to, say, freezing energy bills shows, maybe the electorate might respond to some good old-fashioned Labour policies in place of the pale Tory imitation now on offer. But the more Labour become Tory-lite, the less likely they are to attract votes (see Scotland, for a glaring example).
I wonder too if we'll see some more explicit Keynsianism if Labour form a government. It is in the manifesto, it's just quite well-disguised to blunt Tory attacks.
Actually, Jim, Keynes was all about getting money into the economy to make it function and, in extremis, was quite happy about paying people to dig holes so that other people could fill them in, as long as that produced a net increase in money in circulation (i.e. by paying these people a wage which they would then put into the real economy). The point here is that it is always better in times of stagnation or deflation to increase the circulation of money and the best way of doing this is to pay people to do things, as the majority of wage-earners do not save very much - they mostly need to spend their wage on living. This is not to say that it is not better to invest in things which are useful, but it is essential that at least a proportion of this investment goes in the form of wages - one can spend an enormous amount 'investing' in things, but if the so-called investment is in things which do not increase money in circulation (or even takes money out of effective circulation, like property investments), they won't do much good.
So, while in the long term Keynes would prefer to see long-term useful investment which increases the aggregate amount of wages and thus money circulating in the economy, he would be extremely relaxed about short-term support for the poor - on the grounds that it gets money into the economy in time of deflation.
What he would have been very concerned about, however, is the present situation in the housing sector, where rentiers have taken over the private rented sector. This has led to two results which directly lead to stagnation: (1) that the rentier class extracts money from circulation by over-charging for a good which is in short supply in an unregulated market and (2) because the artificially high rents are unaffordable for many (also because wages are artificially low for many), the state wastes money which could be used for productive investment (or reducing the deficit, for example, if that's your thing) in providing housing benefit - effectively a direct subsidy to the rentier. Was this what Margaret Thatcher intended when she forced the sell-off of council houses? Do the Tories understand what a forced sale of housing association stock will lead to? Ultimately, once again, the poor will be thrust into more overpriced substandard housing, the level of housing benefit will rise and people like you will be mumbling about how 'charity' doesn't work. plus ça change...
Have to take extreme exception to your closing remark: "Only if the next generation is a lot cleverer than this will it have anything to offer that the world is prepared to pay decent wages for." Hmmm, as the present generation is arguably (on paper, at least) better qualified than ever before, this seems a little disingenuous: many a barista has a degree these days. This sounds suspiciously like blaming the un- and underemployed for not being well enough qualified, when there are simply not enough jobs (and, thanks to 'flexible' working practices, employers can exploit those desperate enough by offering jobs which pay starvation wages, if anything at all, all in the name of 'efficiency' and 'market value').
Who do you work for, the CBI?
P.S. One major plank of Keynes' platform, which most people don't understand, usually because they haven't actually read Keynes, is that governments should save (i.e. run budget surpluses) in the good years in order to be able to invest in the lean years - anti-cyclic investment, the basis of Keynesian economic stimulus. Unfortunately, governments of all stripes tend to give away the shop in the good times (for populist or purely ideological reasons) and then have nothing to invest in the bad times. Hence we all have embrace 'austerity'.
Keynes would approve.
Indeed, rentiers have taken over the privately owned sector too. It's just that we call them banks.
In this way, as in the US, the poor are often tricked into voting for parties whose policies are mostly explicitly not in their interest, if only they examined the fine print.
On the other hand, one thing we can determine quite quickly is this: the huge increase in personal debt (and not just in the UK) has not been driven by the profligacy of the borrower, in the main, but by the need of the borrower to borrow just to make ends meet. Hence the explosion in payday lenders in the UK.
Once again, the flat lining of pay against the general increase in inequality has led to more debt as people attempt to kick the can down the road, hoping that they can sometime pay off the credit cards...
More in hope than expectation, I suspect.