Why have pundits got politics so wrong since 2015?

I have just read a paper called “Political science, punditry, and the Corbyn problem’ by Peter Allen, a Reader in comparative politics at Bath. It reflects on how most pundits, including some political scientists, got Corbyn’s initial success and then survival completely wrong. I will not attempt to summarise the paper here. It is well worth reading. I am going to take it as read that many pundits did get Corbyn completely wrong in 2015 and 2017. This has nothing to do with whether the left ascendency is a good or bad thing, but just the failure of pundits to see why it was happening.

Allen notes a kind of epistemic snobbery “‘whereby people who do not meet the above criteria of political inclusion are not seen as worthy participants or contributors in political discussions, or whereby their political opinions are devalued in some way”. It was a kind of “othering” that I felt personally when I joined Labour’s Economic Advisory Council. I was told, by people who I respect, that my academic standing would be harmed if I joined the group. It was if I had decided to give economic advice to the BNP rather than the Labour party.

Part of this represented a longstanding dislike by the centre and centre-left of the left in the UK that stems from the political battles within Labour in the 1980s. Andy Beckett tells some of the story here. There was a lot wrong with the Labour left at that time, and Labour leaders from Kinnock to Blair found they could gain a certain credibility by attacking both the left and the unions. Indeed some of those who attack the left today were part of the left back then, and now see the error of their ways. The Labour left came to be seen as generically toxic.

As Allen notes, another element in this failure to understand Corbyn was a belief in triangulation. In the world that takes triangulation as the theory rather than just a useful model with limitations, moving sharply to the left when a party of the right wins an election makes no sense. But why were the same pundits not already noting that the theory of triangulation had broken down, because the Conservative party from 2010 to 2015 had moved sharply to the right and yet had won a general election? This is what the rest of this post is about.

Allen does not mention austerity specifically, but I think misunderstanding austerity plays a large role in failing to see how far right the Conservatives were moving, and therefore Corbyn’s rise in 2015 and Labour’s gains during the 2017 campaign. If you look at what the Coalition did collectively there can be no doubt about what was going on. The hostile environment, privatisation of the NHS, demonisation of those on welfare and so on. Yet perhaps all of these things could be explained away individually if that is what you want to do: continuing Blairs policy on the NHS, responding to popular opinion on immigration and welfare. The dominant narrative, at least to begin with, was of Cameron the moderniser.

The clearest indicator of a rightward shift was austerity. It should have been clear by 2012 if not earlier that the recovery was stalling. Thatchers experiment with austerity had been brief and was quickly reversed, but Osborne was not for turning. We had for the first time since WWII a government attempting sustained austerity during a recovery phase of a recession. Perhaps too many placed their faith in City folk that told stories of imminent bond strikes, so they believed deficit reduction had to be done. But when interest rates on government debt started falling curious academic minds at least should have begun to smell a rat. Did pundits not notice that the majority of economists were against austerity? This is a genuine question rather than a rebuke, because you had to do a little research to find out they were.

Once you miss the rightward move of the Coalition government, and note that it would have been worse still but for the Liberal Democrats, then you also fail to see that Labour from 2010 to 2015 had been following a triangulation strategy and failed. Did pundits put everything down to Miliband’s unpopularity? Once you understood that Labour had moved to the right and lost, then Corbyn’s victory should have come as no surprise, as I argued here before the result.

Understanding the deep damage that the austerity policy did to the country means that it is hardly surprising that under a left leader opposed to austerity the Labour party should attract half a million members. Too many pundits talked about this in terms that applied to the Labour party in the 1970s and early 80s, but this was a danger for rather than a description of the mass movement that Labour were becoming.

There was one feature of received wisdom that seemed to be holding true, however, and that was that Labour led from the left would be defeated decisively in any general election. Poll after poll suggested this was true. I was told too many times that the left were only interested in controlling the party (how surprising) and not interested in winning elections. It was nonsense of course.

As soon as Labour's position in the polls started rising in the middle of the campaign I suggested that Corbyn’s unpopularity before the campaign told us more about the media than anything else, but I’m not sure this is accepted by most pundits. Many will blame the Tories bad campaign, but what that showed us was that May and her team were pretty bad at doing politics, which was something that should have been clear given the evidence if the media had been doing its job properly. But underestimating the role of austerity is important here too.

Austerity was, after a time if not initially, designed to shrink the UK state. And it succeeded. Attitude surveys tell us that is very unpopular, with less than 10% of the population wanting lower taxes and spending. So a party proposing the opposite, with a tax financed fiscal expansion that was at the heart of the Labour campaign, was bound to be popular on that account. Again the Labour surge was a consequence of a media that preferred talking about Labour divisions and personalities rather than policies, so Labour's policy stance came to voters as a surprise.

Thus in my view the failure to see austerity for what it really was is crucial in understanding why pundits got Corbyn so wrong. However I would be fascinated to know how some of those same pundits themselves account for this failure, and whether they see my account having some validity or not.

Brexit and neoliberalism

In a recent post I talked about the “neoliberal fantasists who voted Leave”. Here is Ryan Bourne from the influential Institute of Economic Affairs. He notes that “the mood music from the post-referendum Conservative party — with former Remain backers in No 10 and the Home Office overcompensating with a caricatured view of what voters want — is not a good sign for the short-term”. But he still believes that Brexit can be transformed into some kind of neoliberal wet dream, with a bonfire of regulations and a unilateral abolition of UK tariffs on trade.

The economics of this was always fantasy, as John Van Reenen and colleagues painstakingly demonstrate here, but it also seems politically naive. After all the Leave campaign was a success largely because it promised to control immigration as a result of leaving the EU, controls which are distinctly anti-neoliberal. Controlling immigration is not a caricature of what the majority of Leave voters wanted, but instead what most were voting for. It does seem naive to believe that a government after Brexit would try and quietly forget about this, particularly when led by someone who had spent the previous 6 years trying and failing to control immigration. It also seems naive to imagine that this turn against neoliberalism would not go beyond immigration.

And yet, the ‘southern strategy’ was highly successful for the Republican party in the US. This combined an economic policy that favoured finance and corporates, increased inequality and free markets with an identity politics that appealed to race, religion and cultural identity. (I could perhaps add geographical identity here as well: see this article by David Wong.) Perhaps the UK party of the right could follow a similar course, using immigration as a substitute (and for some a proxy) for race, whilst pursuing an otherwise neoliberal agenda?

Is this what the Conservative party tried to do under Cameron and Osborne? Actually I think that is the wrong question, for reasons I will come to shortly. In terms of what the Coalition government actually did, Jonathan Portes summarises it thus:

“The promise to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands” was generally regarded by immigration policy experts as unachievable, or achievable only at an economic cost no sensible government was willing to pay. In practice, the latter course was never tested: resistance from within government from the Department of Business, supported to a greater or lesser extent by the Treasury, meant that even non-EU migration was only reduced very substantially for non-HE students; for most other routes it has stabilised. Non-EU net migration is currently about 150,000 a year, slightly higher than EU net migration

This does not mean the policy changes had no impact: the increase in the regulatory burden on business and the education sector has been substantial, and has certainly resulted in some reduction in skilled and student migration. The most damaging single decision was probably the closing of the Post-Study Work Route. However, overall, any economic damage was considerably mitigated.”

Of course that resistance from the Department of Business came from a Liberal Democrat, Vince Cable, and not a Conservative. Which leaves open the possibility that the economic damage from attempts to hit the immigration target might have been greater if just the Conservatives had been in power. So it is not clear that the Conservative focus on immigration was just so they could win elections with zero cost to their more neoliberal objectives. It still remains the case that, just as Trump exposed the flaw in the Republican’s southern strategy, so Brexit was the critical flaw in Cameron’s emphasis on the problem of immigration and his failure to meet his own targets.

I said it was the wrong question, because I think in this case it was not a political party that was calling the shots but a section of the print media: the right wing tabloids. As Andy Beckett writes in this comprehensive history of this part of the UK media:

“[Brexit] was an outcome for which the tabloids had campaigned doggedly for decades, but never more intensely – or with less factual scrupulousness – than this spring and summer, when the front pages of the Sun, Mail and Express bellowed for Brexit, talking up Britain’s prospects afterwards, in deafening unison, day after day. Two days before the referendum, the Sun gave over its first 10 pages to pro-Brexit coverage.”

And the principle means the tabloids used to obtain this result was the “endless xenophobic nudges of its immigration coverage.” Of course these newspapers will say they were just expressing their readers fears, but when they are reduced to making up stories to encourage this fear any claim to innocence becomes very hollow. Fueling anti-immigration feeling was their version of a southern strategy, and Brexit saw its culmination.

Having achieved this objective, will the tabloids start ignoring the immigration issue, enabling the greater immigration and zero tariffs that Mr. Bourne desires? Or will the influence of these tabloids, perhaps now greater than it has ever been, start to fade away? To the extent that these seem silly questions reveals the political naivety of the neoliberal Leavers. It is highly unlikely that Theresa May will become squeamish about damaging business through immigration controls to enable her to meet her immigration target. The best hope of those who do not want to go down this path is that, as Jonathan Portes expects, the Brexit vote itself starts to reduce the immigration numbers.

Brexit will also put other pressures on May which are likely to move her away from neoliberal policies, as the assurances given to Nissan indicate. As Bourne writes in a recent blog: “if this is a commitment to permanent or semi-permanent support to almost ‘make up for’ changed trade arrangements then it is hugely misguided.” Misguided it may be, but that is the direction the politics will push a Prime Minister determined to be seen as making a success of Brexit. Just as Republican’s have agonised over how to deal with Donald Trump, so it will become clear to UK neoliberals the damage to their cause that Brexit will generate.