No doubt, conservatives want to paint it as a victory for Team Austerity. Simon Wren-Lewis notes that many are chiding Labor for failing to run from in the Center:
"I took a short break after the election, so I managed to avoid most of the immediate post-election analysis. But I could not avoid seeing some Labour people complaining about how Labour’s defeat was because they vacated the centre ground and went for a core vote strategy. This seems very odd. In terms of ‘vacating the centre ground’, I thought it was pretty obvious that occupying it was the main Liberal Democrat strategy, and that didn't go too well. In terms of a core vote strategy, it seems to me this applied at least as much to the Conservative campaign."
"I took a short break after the election, so I managed to avoid most of the immediate post-election analysis. But I could not avoid seeing some Labour people complaining about how Labour’s defeat was because they vacated the centre ground and went for a core vote strategy. This seems very odd. In terms of ‘vacating the centre ground’, I thought it was pretty obvious that occupying it was the main Liberal Democrat strategy, and that didn't go too well. In terms of a core vote strategy, it seems to me this applied at least as much to the Conservative campaign."
"Rather than Labour and Liberal Democrat people asking what they did wrong, they should ask what the Conservatives did right. What they did right had very little to do with actual Conservative policies, beyond fiscal sweeteners mainly directed to their core voters. Instead it was about attacking their opponents in areas where - for whatever reason - their opponents failed to fight back."
http://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/dont-ask-what-lost-ask-what-won.html
But what a minute! Why should we be lumping 'Labour and Liberal people' into the same category here? I think what you get by reading Matt Yglesias is that it's less that Team Austerity won than that Labor lost.
"To set the table, it's important to understand what actually happened in the 2015 election. Back in 2010, Cameron's Conservative Party scored 36 percent of the vote and 306 seats in Parliament. That made it by far the largest party, but left it short of a majority. Rather than lead a minority government that would have to try to cobble together majorities on a case-by-case basis, Cameron formed a coalition with the third-place Liberal Democrats — a centrist party that had won 23 percent of the vote and 57 seats."
"In 2015, the Conservatives won 37 percent of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats won 8 percent."
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/8/8572961/austerity-uk-election
This is a crucial point. Remember: Team Austerity was a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Ergo, you shouldn't speak of 'Labor and Liberal Democrats' but 'Conservatives and Liberal Democrats' and this coalition that gave Britain Team Austerity collapsed from a total of 59% of the vote to 45% of the vote.
So the Austerity Coalition lost almost 25% of it's 2010 vote and yet Labor failed to take advantage. So I have to disagree with Wren-Lewis here. What is far more notable than what the Conservatives did right was what Labor did wrong.How are you able to pry so few of those voters who left the Liberal Democrats?
Clearly, Nick Clegg's coalition with Cameron has simply destroyed the party's brand, perhaps permanently. In order or the Lib Dems to finally have a seat at the head of government they totally sold out everything they were supposed to believe in. The LDs which have been a minority third party since the 1920s-after being along with the Conservatives one of the 2 majority parties for 100 years-may have finally taken themselves out of any relevance.
The question Labor needs to ask itself is how they failed to get all these voters fleeing the Liberal Democrats. Instead the voters fled to the Scottish Nationalist Party and elsewhere.
This also makes you wonder if even though Scottish independence was defeated at the ballot box the genie still isn't in some sense out of the bottle; is Britain's days numbered after all?
P.S. For his part, Yglesias argues that the real problem in Britain remains the economy-it's drop in productivity. Ideally, workers should be able to go where things are better-London, etc-but they can't because of the sky high prices of housing-the second highest prices in the world.
What is needed he says is housing liberalization. To be sure this is a recurring theme with him as he thinks it's the answer in NYC too and most other places.
http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431620106&sr=1-1&keywords=matt+yglesias
The very modest austerity "worked", just like in the US. Unemployment fell strongly and numbers in work rose. Good things. The LDs foolishly distanced themselves from this economic success, even dis'd it.
ReplyDeleteActually, it was the modest monetary easing, aka QE, that worked and more than coped with modest fiscal tightening in the UK and robust fiscal tightening in the US.
It's really not that complex.
I sincerely doubt that this is how they lost 69% of the vote.
ReplyDeleteIf you were right you would expect this 15% drop in the LD vote to go to the Conservatives which didn't happen-the Conservatives gained just 1% from their 2010 vote.
So not hailing austerity loudly enough wasn't the cause of their demise or this would have pushed up the Conservatives share of the vote.
My point-Yglesias pointed this out initially-is that this election wasn't an affirmation of Cameron's policies but a failure of Labor to pick off all the previous LD voters turned off by their embracing austerity.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea why you and other progressives keep going on about austerity. There hasn't been that much. What there has been is jobs, jobs, jobs. It used to be a progressive cause, jobs, but somehow you've all tried to ignore this rather large fact. The voters didn't.
ReplyDeleteAll I was talking about is what happened in the election. Do you dispute that the LDs went from 23% to 8%?
ReplyDeleteThe reason people left the LDs could not be because they repudiated Cameron's wonderful policies as then these voters would have gone to the Conservatives which they didn't.
That was my main point about what happened in the election, not austerity.
However, while this election was clearly a failure for Labour, it doesn't prove that the Conservatives have won everyone's hearts and minds in the country either-they got basically the same share of the vote in 2015 as 2010.
It's more complex. A big chunk of Conservatives went to UKIP, perhaps as much as 10% of the total vote. A big chunk of LDs returned to the Conservatives, filling the gap. We'll never really know. Progressives are very quiet about UKIP, but if you put them on the "right", the "right" had a storming swing from the "left". Have you heard of UKIP?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results/england
Sure and then there was the SNP. Overall though this was my point-the picture is complex enough that no simple narrative of vindication quite fits.
ReplyDeleteWhat actually strikes me is that Britain is in quite a mess these days-I say this as a British citizen. I was born in London and have a dual citizenship.
In some ways I think you folks have a better system-parliamentary rather than Presidential.
But right now it seems to me there are too many parties and too much splintering.
Ukip wants to leave the euro I believe. The SNP is still on about Scottish Independence. Then you have Yglesias' point about high how the price of housing is in London-the second highest in the world.
A lot of people think America would be better off with a meaningful 3rd party but seeing Britain-among other things-I disagree.
While everyone is tired of Congressional partisanship, it's a good thing we only have 2 parties.
So I like the parliamentary system in some ways but not all the parties. But I guess the splintering is due to the fact that Britain is really torn: if the SNPers are successful, Britain would be no more.
Regarding the LDs these are not natural conservative voters-they always ran as the liberal alternative to Labour.
ReplyDeleteThen too, at the end of the day, UKIP won just 1 seat in Parliament for all the storm and stress
ReplyDelete