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David Cameron famously got precious little from his pre-referendum attempts to negotiate a special position for the UK in relation to existing EU treaty obligations. This was despite almost certainly having held many more cards back then than UK negotiators will do when Article 50 is eventually invoked. In particular, he was still able to threaten that he would lead the Out campaign if he did not get what he wanted, whereas now that the vote to leave has happened that argument has been entirely neutralised.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about the consequences of David Cameron’s Bloomberg speech, where he set out his plans for a referendum on British membership of the EU. I was rather dubious about such a vote even happening, and even more so about the quality of the debate that would ensue. As much as I was wrong about the former, the latter has been more than borne out by events so far.
We’ve heard a lot lately about what Shakespeare would do. He’d be kind to migrants, for instance, because of this passage from the unpublished collaborative play ‘Sir Thomas More’ often attributed to him: 'Imagine that you see the wretched stranger / Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage / Plodding to th’ports and coasts for transportation (Scene 6: 84-6).
In early 2015, confidential documents were leaked to Süddeutsche Zeitung, a German newspaper. The documents leaked came from the internal database of Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm. Working with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and media organizations from around the world, the documents (which became known as the ‘Panama Papers’) were analysed and, on the 3 April 2016, media organizations around the world published their findings.
Can solidarity exist? Or is it just a fantasy, a pious dream of the soft of heart and weak of brain? Gross inequality, greed and prejudice: these manifestations of selfishness which stalk our world may seem to invite our condemnation and to call for an alternative – but what if they are part of the natural order?
Economists are better at history than forecasting. This explains why financial journalists sound remarkably intelligent explaining yesterday’s stock market activity and, well, less so when predicting tomorrow’s market movements. And why I concentrate on economic and financial history. Since 2015 is now in the history books, this is a good time to summarize a few main economic trends of the preceding year.
Wimbledon has started, the barbeques have been dusted off, the sun is shining, and all our newly elected MPs will soon be leaving Westminster for the summer recess. Domestic politics, to some extent, winds down for July and August but the nation never seems to collapse. Indeed, the summer months offer a quite different focus on, for example, a frenzy of festivals and picnics in the park. But could this more relaxed approach to life teach us something about how we ‘do’ politics? Is politics really taking place at festivals and in the parks? Can politics really be fun?
The week of the UK general election has finally arrived. After suffering weeks of incessant sound-bites, you will soon be free of political jargon for another few years. Phrases like “long-term economic plan” have been repeated so often that they have ceased to mean anything. From Margaret Thatcher to Harold Wilson, from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, British prime ministers and politicians have uttered phrases that have echoed throughout history. How many of these famous political quotes do you remember?
Northern Ireland’s part in the General Election, often seen as peripheral, has already attracted more interest than usual. The Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) status as Westminster’s fourth largest party has not gone unnoticed – except perhaps by television broadcasters anxious to clinch election debates involving the leaders of much smaller parliamentary parties.
In anticipation of the imminent General Election on 7 May 2015, we pulled together information from Who’s Who to take a closer look at the major players bidding for our votes. We’ve mapped nine party leaders and deputy leaders to their constituencies.
They don’t like to admit it, but a lot of politicians have a “woman problem”. The phrase has become common parlance in British politics. David Cameron is widely considered to have a “woman problem” after patronising comments such as “calm down, dear”, and a raft of austerity policies made in the absence of women that have disproportionately hurt women voters.
After the Scottish Independence Referendum, the journalist Cathy Newman wrote of the irony that Cameron – the man with the much reported ‘problem’ with women – in part owes his job to the female electorate in Scotland. As John Curtice’s post-referendum analysis points out, women seemed more reluctant than men to vote ‘yes’ due to relatively greater pessimism of the economic consequences of a yes vote.
The Scottish vote should remind Cameron and the Conservative strategists who advise him of a very clear message: ignore women voters at your peril.
For several decades after UK women won the right to vote, Conservatives could rely on women’s votes and the gender gap in voting was consistently in double figures. However in recent decades this gap has diminished, particularly amongst younger women and party competition to mobilize female voters has become more important. Of course women voters have many diverse interests but understanding the concerns of different groups of women voters is crucial as female voters often make their decisions on voting closer to the election.
So what does Cameron need to do to firmly secure women’s votes at the general election? We argue the Conservative Party needs to make sure it represents women descriptively, substantively, and symbolically. On all three counts we see problems with Cameron’s strategy to win women’s votes.
Pre-election rhetoric and pledges to feminise the party through women’s descriptive representation have not been matched with clear and tangible outcomes. Cameron tried to increase the number of women MPs but still the share of women in the Conservative Party in the House of Commons is just 16%. As the latest Sex and Power Report highlights this looks unlikely to increase significantly in GE2015 as so few women have been selected to stand in safe Conservative seats despite the campaigning and support work undertaken by Women2Win.
Prime Minister David Cameron talks about the future of the United Kingdom following the Scottish Referendum result. Photographer: Arron Hoare. Photo: Crown copyright via Number 10 Flickr.
Even where Cameron has strong power and autonomy to improve women’s presence – by fulfilling his pledge that one-third of his government would be women by the end of parliament – he has managed just 22%. Last July’s reshuffle did not erase the impression that women are not included at Cameron’s top table.
Without enough women representatives in Parliament and in Government to advise on policy proposals in development, there have been many problematic policy initiatives, such as the disastrous proposal to raise child care ratios. The Government’s approach to addressing public debt through austerity has been detrimental to women by reducing incomes, public services, and jobs, the effects of which even female Conservative supporters are more likely to express concerns about.
Cameron’s Conservatives in government also do not have the institutional capacity to get policies right for women. There are still not enough women in strategically significant places. For example in the Coalition Quad of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, and Alexander control policy making. The gender equality machinery set up by the last government to monitor and address gender inequality in a strategic and long-term way has been stripped out. Even at the emergency post-referendum meeting at Chequers to discuss the UK’s constitutional future there was just one woman at the table.
Although the gender gap in voting, which currently favours Labour, is likely to narrow as the election approaches, the Conservatives have, we argue, inflicted significant psephological damage on themselves in their strategies to attract women’s votes: by not promoting women into politics, by not protecting women from austerity, and by stripping out the governmental institutions which give voice to women and promote gender equality.
Cameron’s political face may have been saved by Scottish women last month but for the reasons outlined in this blog post, we suggest that in the critical contestation for women’s votes at the 2015 general election there are long standing weaknesses in the Conservative Party’s strategy for mobilising women’s votes and restoring the Party’s historical dominance among women voters.
On 18 September 2014 Scots will vote on the question, ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’
Campaigners for independence and campaigners for the union agree that this is an historic referendum. The question suggests a simple choice between different states. This grossly over-simplifies a complex set of issues and fails to take account of a range of other debates that are taking place in Scotland’s ‘constitutional moment’.
Four cross-cutting issues lie behind this referendum. National identity is but one. If it was simply a matter of identity then supporters of independence would be well ahead. But identities do not translate into constitutional preferences (or party political preferences) in straightforward ways. In the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections more people who said they were ‘British and not Scottish’ voted for the Scottish National Party than voted Tory. Scottish identity has survived without a Scottish state and no doubt Britishness will survive without a British state. Nonetheless, the existence of a sense of a Scottish political entity is important in this referendum.
Party politics, and especially the party systems, also play a part in the referendum. Conservative Party weakness – and latterly the weakness of UKIP in Scotland – north of the border has played into the sense that Scotland is politically divergent. This trend was highlighted by William Miller in a book, entitled The End of British Politics?, written more than thirty years ago. It has not been the geographic distance of London from the rest of the UK so much as the perceived ideological distance that has fuelled demands for Scottish autonomy. Polls continue to suggest that more people would be inclined to vote for independence if they thought Mr Cameron and his party were likely to win next year’s general election and elections into the future than if Labour was to win. It is little wonder that Mr Cameron refuses to debate with Mr Salmond.
The dynamics of party politics differ north and south of the border. Each side in the referendum campaign works on the assumption that membership of the EU is in Scotland’s interest, suggesting that Scotland will find itself outside the EU if the other wins while a very different dynamic operates south of the border. Debates in immigration and welfare differ on each side of the border. While there is polling evidence that public attitudes on a range of matters differ only marginally north and south of the border, the much harder evidence from election results, evident in the recent uneven rise of UKIP, suggests something very different.
It is not only that different parties might govern in London and Edinburgh but that the policies pursued differ, the directions of travel are different. In this respect, policy initiatives pursued in the early years of devolution, when Labour and the Liberal Democrats controlled the Scottish Parliament, have fed the sense of divergence. The SNP Government has only added – and then only marginally – to this divergence. The big items that signalled that Holyrood and Westminster were heading in different policy directions were tuition fees and care for the elderly. These were policies supported by all parties in Holyrood, including the then governing Labour Party and Liberal Democrats. There is fear in parts of Scotland that UK Governments will dismantle the welfare state while Scots want to protect it.
The constitutional status of Scotland is now the focus of debate. This is not new nor will the referendum resolve this matter for all time, regardless of the result of the referendum. Each generation has to consider the relationship Scotland has with London, the rest of the UK, and beyond. This is currently a debate about relationships, articulated in terms of whether Scotland should be an independent country. Relationships change as circumstances change. The backdrop to these changing relationships has been the party system, public policy preferences and identities. The role and remit of the state and the nature of Scotland’s economy and society have changed and these changes have an impact on the constitutional debate.
Adding to the complexity has been a development few had anticipated. Both sides to the debate report large turnouts at public meetings, engagement we have not witnessed in a long time with a far wider range of issues arising during Scotland’s constitutional moment than might have been suggested by that simple question to be asked on September 18th. Prospectuses on the kind of Scotland people want are being produced. This revival of political engagement may leave a legacy that reverses a trend that has seen decline in turnout, membership of political parties and civic engagement. That would make this referendum historic.
In many countries, including Britain, the Euro-elections in May showed that a substantial minority of voters are disillusioned with mainstream parties of both government and opposition. This result was widely anticipated, and all over Europe media commentators have been proclaiming that the public is losing trust in established politicians. Opinion polls certainly support this view, but what are they measuring when they ask questions about trust? It is a slippery concept which suggests very different things to different people. Social scientists cannot reach any kind of consensus on what it means, let alone on what might be undermining it. Yet most people would agree that some kind of trust in the political process is essential to a stable and prosperous society.
Social scientists have had trouble with the concept of trust because most of them attempt to reach an unambiguous definition of it, distinguishing it from all other concepts, and then apply it to all societies at different times and in different parts of the world. The results are unsatisfactory, and some are tempted to ditch the term altogether. Yet there self-evidently is such a thing as trust, and it plays a major role in our everyday life. Even if the word is often misused, we should not abandon it. My approach is different: I use the word as the focus of a semantic milieu which includes related concepts such as confidence, reliance, faith and belief, and then see how they work in practice in different historical settings.
The original impulse for Trust came from a specific historical setting: Russia during the 1990s. There I observed, at first hand, the impact on ordinary Russians of economic and political reforms inspired by Western example and in some cases directly imposed by the West. Those reforms rested on economic and political precepts derived from Western institutions and practices which dated back decades or even centuries – generating habits of mutual trust which had become so ingrained that we did not notice them anymore. In Russia those institutions and practices instead aroused wariness at first, then distrust, then resentment and even hatred of the West and its policies.
I learnt from that experience that much social solidarity derives from forms of mutual trust which are so unreflective that we are no longer aware of them. Trust does not always spring from conscious choice, as some social scientists affirm. On the contrary, some of its most important manifestations are unconscious. They are nevertheless definitely learned, not an instinctive part of human nature. It follows that forms of trust which we take for granted are not appropriate for all societies.
Despite these differences, human beings are by nature predisposed towards trust. Our ability to participate in society depends on trusting those around us unless there is strong evidence that we should not do so. We all seek to trust someone, even – perhaps especially – in what seem desperate situations. To live without trusting anyone or anything is intolerable; those who seek to mobilise trust are therefore working with the grain of human nature.
We also all need trust as a cognitive tool, to learn about the world around us. In childhood we take what our parents tell us on trust, whereas during adolescence we may well learn that some of it is untrue or inadequate. Learning to discriminate and to moderate both trust and distrust is extraordinarily difficult. The same applies in the natural sciences: we cannot replicate all experiments carried out in the past in order to check whether they are valid. We have trust most of what scientists tell us and integrate it into our world picture.
Because we all need trust so much, it tends to create a kind of herd instinct. We have a strong tendency to place our trust where those around us do so. As a senior figure in the Royal Bank of Scotland commented on the widespread profligacy which generated the 2008 financial crisis: “The problem is that in banks you have this kind of mentality, this kind of group-think, and people just keep going with what they know, and they don’t want to listen to bad news.”
Trust, then, is necessary both to avoid despair and to navigate our way through life, and it cannot always be based on what we know for certain. When we encounter unfamiliar people – and in the modern world this is a frequent experience – we usually begin by exercising an ‘advance’ of trust. If it is reciprocated, we can go on to form a fruitful relationship. But a lot depends on the nature and context of this first encounter. Does the other person speak in a familiar language, look reassuring and make gestures we can easily ‘read’? Trust is closely linked to identity – our sense of our own identity and of that of those around us.
On the whole the reason we tend to trust persons around us is because they are using symbolic systems similar to our own. To trust those whose systems are very different we have to make a conscious effort, and probably to make a tentative ‘advance’ of trust. This is the familiar problem of the ‘other’. Overcoming that initial distrust requires something close to a leap in the dark.
Whether we know it or not, we spend much of our social life as part of a trust network. Such networks can be very strong and supportive, but they also tend to erect around themselves rigid boundaries, across which distrust is projected. When two or more trust networks are in enmity with one another, an ‘advance’ of trust can only work satisfactorily if it proves possible to transform negative-sum games into positive-sum games. However, an outside threat helps two mutually distrusting networks to find common ground, settle at least some of their differences and work together to ward off the threat. When the threat is withdrawn, they may well resume their mutual enmity.
During the twentieth century the social sciences – and following them history – were mostly dominated by theories derived from the study of power and/or rational choice. We still talk glibly of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, without considering the kinds of social solidarity which underlie both forms of government. I believe we need to supplement political science with a kind of ‘trust science’, which studies people’s mutual sympathy, their lively and apparently ineradicable tendency to seek reciprocal relationships with one another, and also what happens when that tendency breaks down. It is supremely important to analyse forms of social solidarity which do not derive directly from power structures and/or rational choice. Among other things, such an analysis might help us to understand why certain forms of trust have become generally accepted in Western society, and why they are in crisis right now.
Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at University College London. A Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Doctor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he was BBC Reith Lecturer in 1988. He has written numerous books on Russian history and culture, including Russian History: A Very Short Introduction and Trust: A History.
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Image credit: David Cameron, by Valsts kanceleja. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
In June, (now former) Education Secretary Michael Gove announced that all primary and secondary schools should promote “British values”. David Cameron said that the plans for values education are likely to have the “overwhelming support” of citizens throughout the UK. Cameron defined these values as “freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions”. At root, such a policy gets at the emotional conditioning of children. To adhere to a certain ideological conceptualization of “freedom,” to feel “tolerant,” or to be “respectful” (whether of parents, teachers, authorities or institutions), is to act according to implicit feelings of rightness.
Values are never just abstract ideas, but are expressed and experienced through emotions. And they are not ideologically neutral. To stress the education of British values is to put a form of emotional education on the agenda. Though many commentators have pointed out that the broad outlines of such an education already exist in schools, the fear of “extremism”, of the promotion of the “wrong” sort of values, has triggered a vigorous debate. What has largely gone unrecognized in this debate, however, is that it is emphatically not new.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, politicians and educationalists promoted a new education based on character training and the emotions, precisely to build British citizens who would respect and uphold British institutions. This brand of education was to be accomplished at school, but also at home, and in religious and youth organizations.
Herbert Fisher, the President of the Board of Education who spearheaded the Education Act of 1918, argued that the masses should be educated “to stimulate civic spirit, to promote general culture … and to diffuse a steadier judgement and a better informed opinion through the whole body of the community.” Other educational commentators broadly agreed with this mission. Frederick Gould, a former Board School teacher and author of many books on education argued that “The community cannot afford to let the young people pass out with a merely vague notion that they ought to be good; it must frame its teaching with a decisive and clear vision for family responsibilities, civic and political duties”.
Civic duties – the civic spirit – were to be taught to the extent that they would become ingrained, implicit, felt. This was to be primarily a moral education. Educators stressed character training, linking moral education to British imperialism or nationalism in an unashamedly patriotic spirit. Education reform was to improve future citizens’ productivity and develop national character traits.
Like Gould, educator John Haden Badley stressed the need to teach active citizenship and service. Education on these lines would provide “a deeper understanding of the human values that give to life its real worth”, cultivating and maximizing the potential of a “superior” Britishness. Meanwhile, in a speech in Manchester in 1917, Fisher argued that “the whole future of our race and of our position in the world depends upon the wisdom of the arrangements which we make for education.” He observed, in language strikingly familiar to contemporary political rhetoric, that “we are apt to find that the wrong things are being taught by the wrong people in the wrong way.”
But even in 1917 the rhetoric was clichéd. A generation of commentators before Fisher argued that the civic shortfalls in mass formal education could be fixed by informal education in youth groups and religious organizations and through improved reading matter. Much juvenile and family literature, whether motivated politically or religiously, stressed emotional socialization, especially in the building of morality and character, as critical for national cohesion.
The trouble with visions of national cohesion, as the last century and a half of educational debate bears out, is the difficulty in getting any two parties to agree what that vision looks like. At the turn of the twentieth century all agreed that children mattered. How they were to be educated was important not just to individual children and their families, but equally importantly, to the community and the nation.
Yet some reformers had patriotic aims, others religious; some civic, some imperial; some conservative, others socialist. Many combined some or all of these aims. All, whether explicitly stated or not, wanted to train, instrumentalize and harness children’s emotions. Children’s reading matter, the stories they were told, and the lessons they heard were known to be powerful forces in cultivating the emotions. Hence the high stakes, then and now, on the narratives supplied to children.
Michael Gove, in common with his Victorian forebears, turns to the “great heroes of history” to serve as models of emulation. Back in the early 1900s, Gould thought history “the most vital of all studies for inspiration to conduct.” The study of history is certainly no stranger to being manipulated for didactic ends in order to impart “British values.”
While Gove is only the latest in a long line to link British history, British values and education, there are surely lessons to be learnt from past attempts and past failures to implement this strategy. A generation of boys and young men at the turn of the twentieth century had grown up learning the positive value of patriotic service. In this memorial year, marking a century since the outbreak of the First World War, it seems appropriate to reflect on what values we might want to instil in the young. What feelings do we want them to learn?
Stephanie Olsen is based at the history department, McGill University (Montreal) and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions (Berlin). She was previously postdoctoral fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. The co-author of Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, c. 1870-1970 she is currently working on children’s education and the cultivation of hope in the First World War.
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Tuesday’s Cabinet reshuffle by David Cameron has been trailed for some time now, but until the last moment it was not expected to be of the scale it has assumed. As a result, it sets up the government to present a rather different complexion in the run-up to the general election.
The key factor in the scope of the reshuffle looks to have been William Hague’s decision to step down as Foreign Secretary. For some, this was the result of he’s being broken/bored by the work, but to have seen him last week pushing hard on ending sexual violence in conflict should give the lie to that. The reasons remain rather unclear for now, but the consequence is that the Foreign Office is losing one of its staunchest defenders of recent decades: Philip Hammond might be an operator, but he doesn’t have the same personal attachment to diplomacy that Hague has shown over the past four years.
If Hague walked, then Michael Gove certainly didn’t. His removal from Education to become Chief Whip isn’t a vote of confidence in either the man or his project for school reform: very little is coming through the legislative process in the next nine months that will require much arm-twisting. Cameron’s decision is very odd, given the extent to which he has backed Gove until now, when he could have cut his losses much earlier. Here the judgement might have been that things have moved far enough down the line that they can’t be reversed and that Gove is better moved out now to start building a profile in another area while Nicky Morgan picks up the metaphorical pieces.
Alongside these two big changes, a third individual was also pushed into the limelight: Lord Hill of Oareford. Jonathan Hill’s name is one which has been on the lips of almost no-one until today, when he was nominated as the British member of the European Commission. A Tory party insider, Hill has been Leader of the Lords since last year, providing with the skills of political management and coalition-building that Cameron argues will be essential in Brussels. His nomination also has the propitious consequence that there will be no need for the by-election that use of an MP would have entailed.
Beyond these three big changes, the rest of the reshuffle is mainly one of filling in the gaps created and rewarding allies (see the Institute of Government’s very useful blog for more). Thus several of the 2010 intake get into the Cabinet, such as Liz Truss, Stephen Crabb, and Priti Patel.
But what is the intent behind all of this?
There are two possible readings of this, one more optimistic than the other.
The positive interpretation is that this is part two of Cameron’s strategy, building on the radical phase needed to pull the UK up from the depths of the recession and forming a new team to create a positive shine to that work in anticipation for the general election. This is certainly Cameron’s own spin, trying to create a narrative that the worst is behind us and the strength of the economic recovery means we can afford not to think too hard about the difficulty that has passed.
Part of that strategy is to make a Cabinet that is more resistant to Labour attacks. One of the more-remarked-upon aspects has been the promotion/retention of women, an obvious rejoinder to the recent months of criticism from the Opposition. Likewise, Gove’s removal has at least some aspect of depriving Labour of one of their favourite whipping boys.
However, if we are feeling less generous, then we might look at things rather differently. Hague’s departure might seem less surprising if we consider that he might expect to be out of the Foreign Office next May in any case, on the back of a Tory defeat.
This is really the unspoken sub-text: that we give party loyalists some time in the political sun because it’s unlikely to last very long. Despite the tightening of the opinion polls in recent months (see the excellent Polling Observatory posts), the Conservatives still look like being out of power in May, even as a coalition partner. That puts a big disincentive on laying long-term plans and refocuses attention on making the most of the remainder of this Parliament.
It’s easy to forget in all of this that the Tories are still in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and that whatever electoral nemesis they face next year, that still lies in the future. Hence Cameron still has to temper the desires and pressures of his party to fit the coalition agreement, not least in his allocation of government posts.
All of this has echoes of 1992, when John Major looked set to lose, only to scrap through for another five years. Back then, there was a distinct sense that the foot had come off the gas and that the long period of Tory government was coming to an end. It was to be the questions over the electability of Labour that finally proved more consequential in the vote.
Cameron might not have had the long period in power that Major did, but he does have an Opposition that has struggled to impress. Even with the more fractured arithmetic of a party political system with UKIP, Tory victory is not impossible. That raises the potential danger that Cameron might pull it all off next year and then have to follow through.
If that did happen, then Europe is going to be the big fight, which will take up almost all his energies until 2017. Whether Hammond in the Foreign Commonwealth Office and Hill in Brussels will still look like good choices then remains to be seen.
Simon Usherwood is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics at the University of Surrey. He tweets from @Usherwood.
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Image credit: Prime Minister visits Russia, by Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Flickr). Open Government License v1.0 via Wikimedia Commons
First it was football, now its politics. The transfer window seems to have opened and all the main political parties have recruited hard-hitting spin-doctors — or should I say ‘election gurus’ — in the hope of transforming their performance in the 2015 General Election. While some bemoan the influence of foreign hands on British politics and others ask why we aren’t producing our own world-class spin-doctors I can’t help but feel that the future of British politics looks bleak. The future is likely to be dominated by too much shouting, not enough listening.
Dante is a fifteen-year old African-American teenager with a big Afro hairstyle. He looks into the camera and with a timid voice tells the viewer ‘Bill de Blasio will be a Mayor for every New Yorker, no matter where they live or what they look like – and I’d say that even if he weren’t my dad’. This was the advert that transformed Bill de Blasio from a long-shot into a hot-shot and ultimately propelled him into office as the 109th and current Mayor of New York. De Blasio also benefitted from a well-timed sexting scandal and an electorate ready for change but there can be no doubting that the advert in which his son, Dante de Blasio, featured was a game changer. Time Magazine described it as “The Ad That Won the New York Mayor’s Race”, the Washington Post named it ‘Political Advert of 2013’ — “No single ad had a bigger impact on a race than this one”.
Such evidence of ‘poll propulsion’, ‘soft power’ and ‘data optimization’ has not gone without notice on this side of the Atlantic and a whole new wave of election gurus have been recruited to help each of the main three political parties (Nigel Farage, of course, would never recruit such blatant overseas talent, ahem). The Liberal Democrats have recruited Ryan Coetzee who played a leading role significantly increasing the Democratic Alliance’s share of the vote in South Africa. The Conservatives have appointed the Australian Lynton Crosby with his forensic focus on ‘touchstone issues’, while last month the Labour Party revealed they had hired one of President Obama’s key strategists, David Axelrod, to craft a sharp political message and re-brand Ed Miliband.
It was David Axelrod’s former Chicago firm — ‘AKPD Message and Media’ — that had made the Dante advert for Bill de Blasio.
Of course, such spin-doctors, advisers, and consultants have always and will always exist in politics. The existence of new forms of off-line and on-line communication demands that political parties constantly explore new techniques and opportunities to improve their standing but I cannot help feel that with the recruitment of such powerful electoral strategists we risk losing touch with what politics is really about. We risk widening the worrying gap that already exists between the governors and the governed. ‘Resilience’, it would appear, seems to be the buzzword of modern party politics as a General Election approaches. It is about who can promote a powerful narrative and deliver an aggressive onslaught; it is about a form of ‘attack politics’ in which a willingness to listen or compromise is derided as weakness, and weakness cannot be tolerated; it is a form of politics in which family and friends become political tools to be deployed in shrewd, cunning and carefully crafted ways.
But does turning to the masters of machine politics from Australia and America bring with it the risk that the campaign will become too polished, too professional, too perfect?
David Axelrod’s role in relation to Ed Miliband provides a case in point. Apparently opinion polls suggest that poor Ed is viewed as too ‘nerdy’ and more than a little bit ‘weird’. The strategists suggest that this ‘image problem’ is a weakness that must be addressed through a process of re-branding. The danger, of course, of course is that by knocking-off all Ed’s quirks and peculiarities you actually end up with just another production line professional politician. Personally, I quite like politicians that are a bit different, even weird. Isn’t that why people find Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage so annoyingly refreshing?
A really smart election strategist might dare to think a little differently; to turn the political world upside-down by focusing not on who can shout the loudest for the longest but on the art of listening. As Andrew Dobson’s brilliant new book — Listening for Democracy — underlines the art of good listening has become almost completely ignored in modern politics despite being prized in daily conversation. Were any of the foreign election gurus employed for their listening skills? No. And that’s the problem. That’s why the future feels so bleak.
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Image credit: Ed Miliband. UK Department of Energy. Crown Copyright via WikiCommons.
“Noisy and aggressive,” “childish,” “over the top,” “pointless.” These are just a few recent descriptions of Prime Minister’s Questions – the most watched event in the Parliamentary week.
Public dismay at PMQs has led the Speaker, John Bercow, to consult with party leaders over reform. The Hansard Society asked focus groups what they thought of PMQs as part of its annual look at public engagement. Nearly half said the event is “too noisy and aggressive”, the same proportion as those who felt that MPs behave unprofessionally. Meanwhile, a majority of 33% to 27% reported that it put them off politics. Only 12% said it made them “proud of our Parliament”.
John Bercow. By Office of John Bercow CC-BY-SA-3.0
Both the Deputy Prime Minister Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed that the baying and screeching gave politics and politicians a bad name, and while Prime Minister David Cameron was a little more guarded, he too thought that Mr Bercow’s ideas were interesting and worth looking at.
So would it help if politicians listened to each other little bit more and shouted at each other a little bit less? The fact that PMQs is simultaneously the most watched and the least respected Parliamentary event is significant. No doubt we watch it precisely because we enjoy the barracking and the bawling, and there is always the possibility of grudging admiration for a smart bit of wordplay by one or other of the combatants. Parliamentary sketch writers nearly always judge the winner of PMQs on the basis of which of the party leaders has bested the other in terms of quips and ripostes – and very rarely on the basis of political substance.
So it’s hardly an informative occasion. Indeed the Hansard’s respondents’ main gripes are that questions are scripted, and that there are too many planted questions and too few honest answers.
Once again, though, maybe this misses the point. Some will say that the civilised and serious political work is done behind the scenes in committee rooms, where party loyalty is less obviously on display, and where considered debate often takes place. On this account, PMQs occupy a very small amount of parliamentary time, and anyway, the sometimes angry jousting that takes place between party leaders on Wednesdays is as much a part of politics as the polite exchange of views we find in Parliamentary committees. Where would politics be without disagreement? Would it be politics at all?
David Cameron. By World Economic Forum/Moritz Hager (Flickr) CC-BY-SA-2.0
And it’s a fact that although good listening is much prized in daily conversation, it’s been almost completely ignored in the form of political conversation we know as democracy. While PMQs show that politicians aren’t always very good at listening to each other, they’re not much better at listening to the public either. Politicians instinctively know that listening in a democracy is vital to legitimacy. That’s why when they’re in trouble they reach for the listening card and initiate a “Big Conversation,” like the one Tony Blair started in late 2003, not so many months after the million people march against the Iraq war.
But won’t a government that listens hard and changes its mind just be accused of that ultimate political crime, the U-turn? In 2012, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, announced some radical changes in UK secondary school education, including a return to an older style assessment regime. Then in February 2013 he suddenly announced that the changes wouldn’t take place after all. Predictably, the Opposition spokesman called this a ‘humiliating climbdown’. Equally predictably, Gove’s supporters played the listening card for it was worth, with Nick Clegg saying effusively that, “There is no point having a consultation if you’ve already made up your mind what you’re going to do at the end of it.”
So it looks as though, as far as listening goes, governments are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: accused of weakness if they change their mind and of pig-headedness and a failure to listen if they don’t. On balance, I’d rather have them listening more – both to each other and to us. John Dryzek is surely right to say that, “the most effective and insidious way to silence others in politics is a refusal to listen.”
As the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus says: “Nature hath given men and one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”
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Image credit: John Bercow, by Office John Bercow, CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) David Cameron, by World Economic Forum/Mortiz Hager (Flickr), CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
“The Americanisation of British politics has been striking this conference season,” declared The Economist last autumn. “British politicians and civil servants love freebies to the US ‘to see how they do things,’” reported Simon Jenkins in The Guardian in November. Among the keenest such travellers is Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. Talking to the Daily Telegraph in February 2014, Gove spoke of the entrepreneurial spirit he found in California, and how his contacts with Microsoft and Google were helping him bring the skills of Silicon Valley to Britain. Perhaps Gove simply didn’t know how many UK governments of recent decades have journeyed along the same road, with the same aims. When Chancellor, Gordon Brown was tireless in his efforts to get British business “to rival America’s entrepreneurial dash,” as he told the same Daily Telegraph in December 2003, with speeches, conferences, educational programmes and other gestures, including visits from stars such as Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan.
One of the resources the British governing class most often turns to in its search for a successful, competitve identity for their country is ‘America’. Not American policy or money of course, not even that ‘Special Relationship’ which London clings on to so forlornly. Instead it’s an inspirational version of the United States: a source of models, examples, energies, ideas, standards; an invoked America whose soft power influence and prestige never fade. It is a form of virtual political capital which governments from Thatcher to Cameron feel they can draw on to compensate them for all their frustrations in Europe, their humiliations in the wider world and the intractability of their problems at home.
Overlooked by all the commentators without exception, there has long been an American question in Britain’s identity debate. It has not been put there by artists, experts, army officers, sports personalities or even Rupert Murdoch. It has been imported systematically and with great persistence by the governments of the last thirty years, and with it they have brought a series of possible answers. The underlying purpose has been to solve the identity crisis by way of ceaseless efforts to ‘modernise’ the nation, to renew its democracy but also to raise its ranking in those league tables of world competitiveness which the land of Darwin takes so seriously, and — of course — to distinguish it from everything supposedly going on in the European Union. Where better than America to find inspiration and encouragement for this permanent revolution of change the governing class repeatedly insists on?
A visionary image of the United States was central to Margaret Thatcher’s political revolution of the 1980s. As she told a Joint Session of Congress in 1985: “We are having to recover the spirit of enterprise which you never lost. Many of the policies you are following are the ones we are following.” Employment policy was one of the first examples, with reforms explicitly modelled on Reaganite ideology and experience. Even the wording of legislation was directly copied. Under Thatcher, Blair and Brown, certain public sectors, in particular the school and university systems, were reformed again and again in the hope of hooking them up to the motor of economic growth in the way their equivalents were thought to function in the United States. Since the 1980s, the Home Office has been the most zealous of departments in importing American methods and innovations. Simon Jenkins says: “An American friend of mine spent much of his time showing British officials around New York’s police department after its recent success in cutting crime.” Labour’s recent prime ministers were both enthralled by America’s examples. Gordon Brown proposed that school children should swear allegiance to the Union Jack, that there be a British Fourth of July, and a museum celebrating great documents of British democracy. Blair and Brown were the ones who started introducing American private health care firms into the running of the NHS.
David Cameron has followed the American path laid down by Thatcher, Blair, and Brown with zeal and ambition at least equal to theirs. The Tory foreign policy platform for the 2010 election was written by a Brit sitting in the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Just as the outgoing Labour administration created a British Supreme Court, the incoming coalition has set up a new National Security Council, with a National Security Adviser. In November 2012 the country was called upon to elect its first police commissioners, and there was talk of a single school commissioner. Now the Prime Minister talks of life sentences really meaning life in prison. All of this is based on American precedents. But Cameron’s affiliations in America seem to be deepest in parts of California where even Tony Blair did not reach, in particular the Google Corporation. A featured speaker at Google Zeitgeist conferences, Cameron is said to believe that the internet revolution as configured by Google, “meshes with the modern conservative mission – flattening hierarchies and empowering people…” Across Silicon Valley, Cameron and his strategists see a land where “a dynamic economy meets the family-friendly work-place…where hard-headed businessmen drink fruit smoothies and walk around in recycled trainers,” as an admiring journalist put it.
The evidence of the last 40-odd years suggests that in their failure to invent a generally agreed moral theme or narrative of change for their society, the British governing class clings to the America of their imaginations to fill the void. Not because the creed of Americanism as such, far less American politics as currently displayed, can provide the cohesiveness required but simply because US experience over time appears to show how a uniquely powerful machine of national pride and aspiration, embodied in institutions, rituals, stories, and proclaimed values, can keep a multicultural nation glued together and provide ever-lasting hope of renewal. With its exceptional levels of child poverty, social inequality and numbers of people in jail, the governments of the last 30 years may not have got the Americanised Britain they dreamed of. But this has not discouraged them. After all, Ministers know that their enthusiasms can always count on a far warmer reception across the Atlantic than anywhere else in the world, including in Britain itself.
David Ellwood is Senior Adjunct Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna Center. He is the author of The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century. His first major book was Italy 1943-1945: The Politics of Liberation (1985) then came Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (1992). The fundamental theme of his research — the function of American power in contemporary European history — has shifted over the years to emphasize cultural power, particularly that of the American cinema industry. He was President of the International Association of Media and History 1999-2004 and a Fellow of the Rothermere America Institute, Oxford, in 2006. Read more from David Ellwood on OUPblog.
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Image credit: Supreme Court of the United States. By US Capitol. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The 29 August 2013 will go down as a key date in British political history. Not only because of the conflict in Syria but also due to the manner in which it reflects a shift in power and challenges certain social perceptions of Parliament.
“It is very clear to me that Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action,” the Prime Minster acknowledged, “I get that and the Government will act accordingly.” With this simple statement David Cameron mopped the blood from his nose and retreated to consider the political costs (both domestically and internationally) of losing the vote on intervention in the Syrian conflict by just 13 votes. While commentators discuss the future of ‘the special relationship’ with the United States, and whether President Obama will risk going into Syria alone, there is great value is stepping back a little from the heat of battle and reflecting upon exactly why the vote in the House of Commons matters. In this regard, three inter-related issues deserve brief comment.
The broader political canvas on which the vote on military intervention in Syria must be painted can be summed up by what is known as the Parliamentary Decline Thesis (PDT). In its simplest manifestation the PDT suggests that the government became gradually more ascendant over Parliament during the twentieth century. Texts that lamented the ‘decline’ or ‘death’ of Parliament — such as Christopher Hollis’ Can Parliament Survive? (1949), George Keeton’s The Passing of Parliament (1952), Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain (1962), Bruce Lenman’s The Eclipse of Parliament (1992), to mention just a few examples — have dominated both the academic study of politics and how Parliament is commonly perceived.
What the vote on Syria reveals is the manner in which the balance of power between the executive and the legislature is far more complex than the PDT arguably allows for. There is no doubt that the executive generally controls the business of the House but independent-minded MPs are far more numerous, and the strength of the main parties far more constrained, than is generally understood. (Richard Crossman’s introduction to the 1964 re-print of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution provides a wonderful account of this fact.)
Drilling down still further, this critique of the PDT can be strengthened by examining the changing constitutional arrangements for the use of armed force. The formal legal-constitutional position over the use of armed force is relatively straightforward: Her Majesty’s armed forces are deployed under Royal Prerogative, exercised in practice by the Prime Minister and Cabinet. However, the last decade has seen increased debate and discussion about Parliament’s role in approving the use of armed force overseas. From Tam Dalyell’s proposed ten-minute rule bill in 1999 that would have required ‘the prior approval — by a simply majority of the House of Commons — of military action by the UK forces against Iraq’ through to the vote on war in Iraq on 18 March 2003, the balance of power between the executive and legislature in relation to waging war has clearly shifted towards Parliament. Prior assent in the form of a vote on a substantive motion is now required before armed force can be deployed. The problem for David Cameron is that he is the first Prime Minister to have been defeated in a vote of this nature.
Defeat for the coalition government brings us to our third and final issue: public engagement and confidence in politics (and therefore politicians). The data and survey evidence on public attitudes to political institutions, political processes and politicians is generally overwhelmingly negative with a strong sense that MPs in particular have become disconnected from the broader society they are supposed to represent and protect. The public’s perception is no doubt related to the dominance of the PDT but on this occasion it appears that a majority of MPs placed their responsibility to the public above party political loyalties.
With less than 22% of the public currently supporting military intervention in Syria, Parliament really has ‘reflected the views of the British people’. The bottom line seems to be that the public understands that ‘punitive strikes’ are unlikely to have much impact on a Syrian President who has been inflicting atrocities on his people for more than thirty months. (Only in Britain could war crimes in Syria be relegated for several months beneath a media feeding frenzy about Jeremy Paxman’s beard!) War is ugly, brutal, and messy; promises of ‘clinical’ or ‘surgical’ strikes cannot hide this fact.
At a broader level — if there is one — what the ‘war vote’ on the 29 August 2013 really reveals is that politics matters and sometimes works. Parliament is not toothless and it has the ability to play a leading role in restraining the executive in certain situations. Could it be that maybe politics isn’t quite as broken as so many ‘disaffected democrats’ seem to think?
Professor Matthew Flinders is Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He wrote this blog while sitting in the Casualty Department of the Northern General Hospital with a broken ankle and is glad to report that he received a wonderful standard of care.
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Image credit: London Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge. By Francesco Gasparetti [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
As the world wrings its hands at the slaughter in Syria and ponders what, if anything, it can do, the precedent of intervention in Libya constantly raises its head. Why was it right and proper for us to intervene in Libya to prevent humanitarian catastrophe, but we are choosing not to do so now in Syria? The most readily available response is that “Syria is much more complicated than Libya”, but this hardly seems to help our understanding.
For a country such as the UK, these are not only tricky questions of foreign policy; they also serve to throw into the spotlight that most tricky question of all: what sort of player should Britain be on the international stage in the twenty-first century? Are we at the vanguard of the free world, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our American cousins in spreading democracy, liberal values and universal human rights around the world (a process that the UK government calls “Shaping a Stable World”), or are we – realistically – just a medium-sized European power with fairly limited military capabilities? As a Conservative back-bencher described it, in rather discourteous terms, is Britain fast becoming just a “Belgium with nukes”?
Prime Minister David Cameron. Source: number10.gov.uk.
When David Cameron came to power in 2010, one of the first things he did was to set up a National Security Council. This was the first time in British history that such as institution – at least under this name – has been at the centre of foreign policy-making. The origins of the idea date back to the political aftermath of the Iraq War and Tony Blair’s much-derided “sofa politics” style of government, where big decisions (such as committing Britain’s military to a major conflict) were seen to be made as much by unelected special advisers as by cabinet members and Parliament, and the decision-making presented in Dodgy Dossiers. This, claimed Cameron, was no way to deal with major decisions affecting national security, and he pledged to change it as soon as he was in power.
Cameron made good on his promise. He linked the publication of a new National Security Strategy at the end of 2010, with the announcement of the findings of a Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). With the bitter recriminations from the Armed Forces ringing in his ears in the face of the substantial defence cuts announced in the SDSR, the new National Security Council was almost immediately thrown into overdrive as the Arab Spring swept like a tsunami across North Africa and the Middle East. It was time to put the new policy-making process into practice. Within weeks, British fighter jets found themselves operating alongside French and other NATO partners in the skies over Libya. No-one in government would have predicted such a turn of events, and it suggested that Britain does see itself as an essentially interventionist power, at least in some cases.
Decisions
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Over the past several weeks, leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have placed on public display the lessons they have learned as Egypt’s officially banned but most influential social and political movement by trying to pre-empt alarmist declarations that the country is now headed for an Iran-style theocracy.
Members of the venerable Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by an Egyptian school teacher to revitalize Islam and oppose British colonial rule, have so far stated no plans to run a candidate in the next presidential election, and they surprised many by their halting participation in the transitional government, after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. They also have made it clear that they have no desire to seek a majority in the Egyptian parliament, when free elections are held, as promised by Egypt’s current military rulers. In fact, the Brotherhood has voiced its commitment to work with all groups within the opposition – including the secular-leaning youth who inspired the revolution – without demanding a leading role for itself.
These gestures have produced two reactions from Western governments and other international actors heavily invested in Egypt’s future: Some simply see this as evidence that there is no reason to fear the Brotherhood will become a dominant force in the next government.
Others view the Brotherhood’s public declarations with skepticism, saying the promises are designed simply to head off any anxiety over the future influence and scope of the religious-based movement. For example, British Minister David Cameron, who last week became the first foreign leader to visit Egypt after Mubarak’s downfall, refused to meet Brotherhood leaders, saying he wanted the people to see there are political alternatives to “extreme” Islamist opposition. Such simplistic characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood simply echoes Mubarak’s long-term tactic to scare the West into supporting his authoritarian rule as the best alternative to Islamic extremism.
But the future on the horizon for the Brotherhood lies most likely somewhere between these divergent views. Now that Egyptians have freed themselves from decades of restraint and fear, a liberalized party system will logically follow, reflecting the values, aspirations and religious beliefs of Egyptian society as a whole.
What the outside world seems to have missed during the many decades since the Brotherhood was banned is the fact that the movement has never been a political and social force somehow detached from Egyptian society. Rather, the widespread popularity of the movement – which is fragmented along generational lines – can be best explained by the extent to which it reflects the views of a vast swathe of Egyptians.
The Brotherhood has waited patiently for society to evolve beyond the Free Officers movement of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Beginning in the early 1990s, it was clear that Islamization was taking hold in Egypt. In my book, No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam, which documented the societal transformation from a secular to more religious Egypt during the 1990s, I made it clear that the Brotherhood was on the rise. This was in part responsible for the Brotherhood’s strong showing in parliamentary elections in 2005, when they ran candidates as independents because Egyptian law prohibits religiously-based parties to run candidates in elections.
The question now is wh
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Jon Lawrence is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British Political History at Cambridge University, and is particularly interested in politics as a site of interaction between politicians and the public. He is the author of Electing Our Masters: the Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair. In the original post below, he looks at how the spirit of the hustings is being kept alive during the election campaign by the Internet and the UK’s first televised Prime Ministerial debate, which aired last week. You can read more by Jon Lawrence here.
The spirit of the hustings has brought British politicians face-to-face with an irreverent, questioning public for centuries. It is arguably the most distinctive and valuable feature of our electoral culture, but it is not one that political parties can be trusted to keep alive in the internet age. It is no accident that Gordon Brown switches off the comments function on his YouTube postings, or that most of the free-comment facilities on the Conservatives’ innovative WebCameron site were switched off after its first 8 months. But for all that, the 2010 election has already shown encouraging signs that the spirit of the hustings is alive and well in British politics. For sure, the role of the public has been tightly circumscribed in the televised leadership debates, but there is still a clear recognition that, as the rules put it, ‘the audience is a key element of the programmes and has to be seen by the viewers’. The audience may not be allowed to applaud, let alone heckle, but their presence is central to the theatre of these debates. It was striking in the first debate how, as the leaders warmed-up, so they got better at answering questions directly and personally (in turn this allowed ITV to focus more closely on audience reaction since one of the 76 rules governing these broadcasts stipulates that ‘if one of the leaders directly addresses an individual audience member, a close-up shot of that individual can be shown’). Nick Clegg not only appeared the most comfortable with this intimate style of politics, but he also pushed it furthest –notably by addressing most of the questioners by name in his 90 second peroration. Although David Cameron has spent much of the last two years criss-crossing the country addressing open meetings of voters in key marginal constituencies, it was Clegg who appeared instinctively to understand the power of the hustings to re-connect politics (and politicians) with the public. Of course it helped that he could play his ‘plague on both your houses’ card, but this was made more credible by his mastery of the old arts of the hustings.
And what of the internet? Is all the hype about the virtual election justified, and, perhaps more importantly, has the web restored spontaneous, irreverent interaction to British politics? Well it’s trying, but there’s still a long way to go. There is no doubt that both the media and party activists are hooked on the internet campaign, but
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As we peek into the future to see just what life will be like in the UK in 2020, a grim sight lies before us…
Power is now firmly in the hands on the heavily armed, tear-away children, nurtured by the recent Labour government, and statistics show over half the population is now Muslim. Christianity is an underground religion, practiced secretly, for fear of retribution, and the NHS has decided it will ONLY treat foreigners. Council houses are reserved exclusively for gypsies, asylum-seekers and paedophiles. And education (in the areas it’s still available face-to-face) is a guarded operation, with the teacher sitting behind bullet-proof glass and children wearing full body-armour (with an army of translators at the ready). Adults have resorted to leaving their boarded-up homes only in large gangs, or in tanks provided by the army. (The army is now boasting such fine military planners as the two prospective young terrorists recently found not guilty of planning toblow up their school, after hoping to kill hundreds of their innocent schoolmates.)
The newly elected Lib-Dem goverrnment - voted inafter the late Conservative leader, David Cameron, was discovered to be nothing but a holographic image, projected by the President of America (as was Tony Blair), in order to control our country from afar – are using the military police to import illegal drugs, bought from the Afghan government, in order to keep the children on the streets as calm as possible. They still believe there’s some way out ofthis mess.
Anyone who was able jumped ship years ago. Now only the poorest remain, along with the millions of half-blind elderly people who’ve been imprisoned for failing to pay the fines handed out for recycling offences (such as accidentally disposing of a potato peeling in the box designated for tin cans).
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Such evidence of ‘poll propulsion’, ‘soft power’ and ‘data optimization’ has not gone without notice on this side of the Atlantic and a whole new wave of election gurus have been recruited to help each of the main three political parties (Nigel Farage, of course, would never recruit such blatant overseas talent, ahem). The Liberal Democrats have recruited Ryan Coetzee who played a leading role significantly increasing the Democratic Alliance’s share of the vote in South Africa. The Conservatives have appointed the Australian Lynton Crosby with his forensic focus on ‘touchstone issues’, while last month the Labour Party revealed they had hired one of President Obama’s key strategists, David Axelrod, to craft a sharp political message and re-brand Ed Miliband.
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