A decade of political deceit

It is tempting sometimes to portray the Brexiters (the politicians and the media leading the Brexit campaign, not those who voted Leave) as bumbling fools who just are not very good with reality in all its detail. Boris Johnson encourages that idea, particularly when you know his true reason for supporting Brexit is personal ambition.

I considered writing up a little fantasy shortly after water was discovered on Mars, Johnson had resigned as Foreign Secretary and May had won a vote by breaking pairing. I imagined the PM had convinced Johnson to captain a spaceship put together by the New UK Space Agency so he and David Davis could sign a trade agreement with whatever lived on Mars. It had to be hush hush so the EU did not try and get there first. When Johnson expressed concern that he might miss the vote on the final deal May assured him his vote would be paired, and when he returned in triumph the leadership would be his. After days when the press asked where is Boris, NASA reported receiving distress calls from what seemed like a spaceship heading in the direction of the sun.

But while Boris is in it for himself, the motives of many members of the ERG are rather different. As Time Bale describes, they need Brexit to be able to fulfill their vision for the UK, ably described in Britannia Unchained, written in 2012 by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss. He calls them hyperglobalists. It is a UK of less welfare provision and even more ‘flexible’ labour markets, so that UK firms can compete ‘unhindered’ with the rest of the world like some kind of imagined Asian dynamo. Sort of Thatcher on steroids.

I’m not too interested on this occasion in the idiocy of such a plan, but the fact that this was never on the side of any red bus. It is another example of political deceit of the highest order. Their plan is not why most people voted Leave: quite the opposite in the case of many. As Tim writes:

“Does this disjunction between what “the people” currently say they want and what they supposedly need actually bother Tory hyperglobalists, except insofar as it prevents them, at least for the moment, from revealing all?

No – the reason being that they are Leninists, in the same way that Margaret Thatcher, their inspiration and icon, was a Leninist. Just like her, in 1979, they believe they know what we want better than we do ourselves right now. And just like her, they have a crusading vision whose details, inasmuch as they’ve been fully worked out, are best kept under wraps until the time is right and we can be made to realise – they hope gratefully rather than grudgingly – that there truly is no alternative.”

We have been seeing rather a lot of this Leninist deceit lately, similar to what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine, or what John Harris describes as "the odorous whiff of the hypocrisies and deceptions that tend to come with privilege". Austerity as a very costly device to shrink the state, for example. And immigration targets which Cameron and Osborne knew would hurt the economy if they were seriously pursued, but made them nevertheless to help attract social conservatives to vote Conservative. Pretending immigration was a problem for the NHS or welfare payments was also a useful way to deflect criticism over the impact of austerity.

I know some people will respond that all politicians deceive, and of course they do in minor ways to sell policies that help ‘their side’. But politicians who deceive at such a high level because they are Leninists at heart are something less common. It is hard to argue that any of the Prime Ministers before Thatcher were so willing to hide their true intent. Occasionally perhaps for certain foreign ventures: Eden, and then Blair. But not Brown or Miliband. The SNP over the cost of Independence, certainly. But austerity, lying about immigration and Brexit still seem an order greater in terms of the extent of the deception: promising X to really get an undisclosed Y.

There may be a reason for why this total deceit is relatively new, and it has to do with how the political process is perceived as part of neoliberalism. If you see politics like a market place, policies have to be sold like products, and politicians are the salesmen as Chris Dillow describes here. [1] So if you can sell a car by creating an image of what that car embodies, so you can sell a policy by pretending it is something else. The fact that you do not have the equivalent of the Advertising Standards Authority for political advertising just makes doing that more attractive.

Just look at the lack of shame in pretending that austerity was all about clearing up the mess Labour made (a claim easily refuted by looking at the data), or that the economy was strong when it was actually very weak in 2015. But that was dwarfed by what was to come with Brexit. Nothing was sacred in doing whatever it took to win that vote. And when it was shown that this included overspending during the campaign, they had no shame in spinning this as a mere allegation by Remainers. Anything goes, including disrespecting our pluralist democracy, just so they get what they want. 

This is all related to what I called neoliberal overreach, and whether it was something we could have easily avoided or something that was bound to happen. For many neoliberal politicians and advocates their ideal economy and society is not achievable through honest campaigning, because it is not what the great majority of people want. In 2016 48% of people wanted higher spending and taxes, while less than 5% wanted lower spending and taxes. Rather than patient persuasion they prefer complete deception, and crucially the ideology can be seen as endorsing that. For this reason, I am happy to add Brexit to austerity and anti-immigration rhetoric as examples of probably inevitable neoliberal overreach.

[1] Chris Dillow suggests that one of the first great neoliberals, Margaret Thatcher, did not share this view. Perhaps her ideas were sufficiently popular - at least for a time - that she didn’t need to pretend they were something else. It would be interesting to know if Tim Bale agrees.

The politicisation of immigration

This is based on the UK experience, but I think some of this will also apply in the US.

Why do right wing politicians push an anti-immigration platform? The obvious answer is that immigration is an important concern to their voters, and that is certainly correct. However I think there is an additional factor, which is illustrated by this interesting graphic from a recent Financial Times piece by Sebastian Payne.

Look at the right hand panel, based I believe on British Election Study data. This is the two dimensional way of representing political views I have discussed before. What we call the vertical axis can vary (culture, identity): I prefer the labels ‘social conservatives’ and ‘social liberals’. *** Conservative voters tend to be right wing and socially conservative. But Labour voters, while clearly left wing, include an important segment that are also socially conservative. As a result, if right wing politicians can make elections about issues that are important to social conservatives (law and order, immigration, race and abortion in the US) they have a chance of picking off Labour voters that would otherwise vote for a left wing candidate.

Immigration is particularly attractive to right wing politicians for a reason I explored in a recent post. There is a common misperception that immigration brings economic bads like lower wages and reduced access to public services. Right wing politicians therefore have a chance of persuading Labour voters to substitute their economic concerns away from supporting a left wing candidate into supporting an anti-immigration candidate on economic grounds.

The standard story perpetuated by the broadcast media in the UK is that heightened concern among voters about immigration over the last decade is a response to high numbers. However it was more than that. The Shifting Ground study has an interesting chart shown below.

The blue line is the importance that voters attach to the issue of immigration. The grey line are the number of migrants coming into the UK. The black line are the number of news stories about immigration in the print media. (See here for the source.) The standard story suggests the blue line (importance) responds, in the first instance with a few years lag, to the grey line (immigration numbers), with the black line (news stories) reflecting people’s concerns with no lag at all. But it is obvious that you can tell a very different story: people’s perceptions about the importance of immigration reflect what they read in the press.

This different story, where the press leads opinion, makers much more sense. Why the long lag between the increase in immigration in the late 90s and public attitudes about the importance of immigration? As is well known, public concern about immigration tends to be greatest in areas where there are least migrants. In a poll commissioned by the Sun newspaper in 2007 only 15% said that migrants are causing problems in their own neighbourhood, while 69% said that migrants were not having a strong local impact, either good or bad. There is a nice story Nick Clegg tells on this:

“Years ago, before I became an MP, I was knocking on doors in Chesterfield, Derbyshire – this was at the height of the controversy about asylum seekers being dispersed around the country when Tony Blair was in power. The tabloid newspapers were going nuts about it every day. I remember speaking to a guy leaning on the fence outside his house and saying: “Any chance you’ll vote for the Liberal Democrats?” And he said: “No way.” And I said: “Why not?” And he said: “Because of all these asylum seekers.” And I knew for a fact that not a single asylum seeker had been dispersed to Chesterfield. So I said to him: “Oh, have you seen these asylum seekers in the supermarket or the GP’s surgery?” And he said something to me that has remained with me ever since. He said: “No, I haven’t seen any of them, but I know they’re everywhere.” You can’t dismiss the fear, but how on earth are you supposed to respond to that?”

Here is a more recent example.

The Shifting Ground report also looked, in 2004, at what best explained whether voters thought high immigration was important as a political issue. The best explanatory variables were readership of the Mail, Express and Sun, in that order. All three were better predictors of concern about immigration than whether people voted Conservative, which reinforces the point that immigration is a way for right wing politicians to gain votes from ‘natural’ Labour voters.

If you think about it, the idea implicit in the standard story that voters were observing greater immigration and as a result expressing concern, which the print media simply expressed, is slightly incredible. It seems unlikely during this period that voters were looking at official data: voters anyway tend to grossly overestimate the number of immigrants. A much more plausible story is that they were reading their papers. It is important to stress that these papers were not ‘brainwashing’ their readers, but instead playing on eternal fears about outsiders, particularly if these outsiders are seen as cheating the system.

Why would the print media start writing more stories about immigration? You could say they are just reflecting the numbers, again with a rather long lag. A more plausible explanation is political. In 2001 William Hague talked about Tony Blair wanting to turn the UK into a ‘foreign land’. In his 2005 General Election campaign, Michael Howard put immigration at the heart of the Conservative Party’s general election campaign. Tim Bale discusses these and later political responses here.

The right wing tabloid press in particular covered immigration in a way designed to generate hostility. As Ian Dunt noted in 2013:

“new research from the Migration Observatory at Oxford University shows just how pervasive and systematic this hate campaign is. After studying 58,000 articles in every national newspaper in Britain – over 43 million words – researchers found the word most closely associated with 'immigrant' was, you guessed it, 'illegal'. … For tabloids, other words closely associated with 'immigrant' were 'coming', 'stop', 'influx', 'wave', 'housing' and 'sham'.”

A recent report from the same source finds ‘mass’ as the most common way of describing immigration. Claims made about immigration in the tabloids are frequently untrue. They are almost always negative, often extremely negative. This is not a coincidence, or as a means of boosting sales: it is a deliberate editorial policy.

In opposition the Conservatives could do little more than ramp up the salience of the issue among their base and among readers of right wing tabloids. Labour on the whole triangulated in public. Gordon Brown’s famous remark after being challenged over the economic impact of immigration in the 2010 election showed both how Labour viewed anti-immigration arguments and also the problems with their triangulation. Once the Conservatives gained power as part of the Coalition in 2010, immigration as a major problem became official.

Furthermore, arguments linking immigration to economic problems that had nothing to do with immigration also became official, as the Conservatives used immigration as a useful scapegoat both for falling real wages and the impact of austerity on access to public services. This in turn fed back into the print media as a whole: whereas in 2006 many articles defending immigration could be found outside the right wing tabloids, these diminished in number by 2013.

If the right wing tabloids created an anti-immigration atmosphere in parts of the UK, after the Conservative’s ‘less than 100,000 target’ for net immigration it became government policy. Yet, as I argued here, it was - like the tabloids - a policy born in deceit. Every time Theresa May tried to suggest significant economic measures to reduce immigration, a combination of George Osborne and Vince Cable knocked it down for the very good reason that it would damage the economy. Her only choice was to create, literally, a hostile environment for immigrants into the UK.

Although formally the policy is only designed for illegal immigrants, it inevitably turns the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the tabloids into official government policy. Landlords are reluctant to let accomodation to EU immigrants in case their papers are not in order. The same applies to healthcare. I wrote about the bureaucratic cruelty shown to foreign students, and most academics will have similar stories from their own experience. Colin Talbot describes the experiences of EU academics after the Brexit vote. The simple cruelty of this policy does not go unnoticed abroad (for example here and here from Heiner Flassbeck and well worth reading), and the contrast with Germany’s policy towards refugees is stark. [1]

Brexit was the apotheosis of this policy towards immigration. Although Remain gained a few liberal Conservatives, they lost more left wing social conservatives, as the left hand side of the first figure shows. The right wing tabloids were of course not innocent bystanders in this, but the key point is that they didn’t need to do anything new except ramp up their anti-immigration stories and make sure they always mentioned the EU. The key point of this post is that what happened in the Brexit vote was simply what right wing politicians and newspapers have been trying to do for nearly 20 years: use immigration as a way of preventing socially conservative left wing voters from going with Labour.

[1] Viewing from abroad you might be forgiven for thinking the British were now an insular, uncaring, rather bigoted nation. Yet when a photograph of the body of a three-year-old refugee washed up on a Turkish beach went viral, the Sun - always quick to see the limits to how far it can distort news - launched an appeal and within two days had raised £350,000 to help other refugees. It was a brief and short-lived moment when natural compassion proved stronger than years of conditioning.

*** Postscript (18/12/17) These are the same terms as John Curtice uses here

Does free movement really enable a low wage economy?

Tom Kibasi writes

“Immigration is such an important issue precisely because free movement of labour is the crucial enabler of the low skill, low productivity, low wage economic model that has been imposed on much of the country.”

This line may be very attractive to the liberal left: it gets to love immigration controls and can begin again to represent the part of working class that dislikes immigration. 

The reasoning is attractive. Starve firms of cheap labour, and they are forced to innovate and invest in labour saving machinery and/or in training their workers, which drives up productivity and real wages. In a world where capital is not mobile, that mechanism could work over a very long time period. But when capital is mobile, the firm has an obvious alternative: produce somewhere else where labour is cheaper. Keynes taught us not to make the mistake of assuming output was fixed, and the same is true here. Labour shortages could equally lead to less production, more imports, and a depreciation that makes everyone poorer.

Chris Dillow talked about these issues some time ago. He wrote

“The answer to this set of problems is to increase workers’ bargaining power – which requires, among other things, policies such as stronger aggregate demand and greater redistribution.”

Chris is right. If wages are low because of immigration, that will also mean that wages are unlikely to rise if demand expands. That in turn reduces the level of unemployment at which inflation is stable, allowing stronger aggregate demand and higher output. It is this additional demand that will allow firms to invest in more productive techniques, driving up productivity and real wages.

The endogeneity of aggregate demand and therefore output is key here. We could argue about whether labour shortages would be more likely to encourage firms to invest in labour saving machinery or move production abroad. But there is a third option which can achieve higher investment without running the risk of firms going overseas, and that is to expand demand. At the end of the day the only constraint on demand expansion is inflation, and if immigration is holding back wages it will also hold back inflation. We should not base policy on the assumption that governments undertake unnecessary austerity or central banks make deflationary mistakes. [1]

The link with austerity is even clearer when Kibasi writes

“What’s more, there is nothing progressive about declining to invest in skills in this country, while plundering poor countries of nurses or doctors or carers and then approaching immigration as if people were commodities to be bought up on the open market.”

This makes exactly the mistake that right wing newspapers have encouraged voters to make, which is to confuse the symptom for the cause. It is not private sector firms that have failed to invest in training nurses or doctors, but the public sector, most recently because of continuing austerity. Once again, what would be the consequence of cutting the immigration option? More money spent on the NHS, or a smaller NHS? It seems bizarre to argue that immigration enabled austerity, and that therefore EU immigration should be controlled. [2]

There is no evidence that immigration has in practice had any significant (in term of magnitude) impact on real wages. The trend in UK GDP per head had remained remarkably constant until the global financial crisis, despite periods of low or high immigration. The initial years of A8 EU immigration showed no fall in average earnings growth, with real wages continuing to rise. What we do know is that immigration helps the public finances, which means reducing it will mean either lower spending per head on public services like the NHS or require higher taxes. 

This point about public services illustrates the real problem with how the government dealt with A8 immigrants. As Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour relate, it was not a problem of poor forecasts: the forecasts were not bad once you factored in that Germany would impose transitional controls. It was a problem that the migration was concentrated in particular areas or towns, and nothing was done by government in response. So these towns saw greater pressure on public services, while the taxes immigrants paid went to the Treasury in London.

The data suggests that people in the UK have always favoured lower immigration. I suspect this is similar to questions like ‘do you favour lower taxes’: faced with something that naturally raises questions and concerns, it appears most people would rather have less of it. What began to happen at the beginning of the century is voters started saying that immigration was a key issue, alongside the economy or the NHS. This rise predates A8 immigration, and is strongly correlated with concern over defence/terrorism until 2008.

In truth, immigration is too tempting for some politicians and the media. As Tim Bale reminds us, the Tory opposition quickly started talking about Britain becoming a ‘foreign land’ after Labour was elected. Stories about benefit tourism play upon existing fears, and when politicians join in they appear to validate the problem. If that happens voters can easily turn their concerns about real wages or public services into concern about immigration, erroneously believing that immigrants are the underlying cause. So when austerity began, the government exploited these associations and the media either led or played along. If spending on the NHS was being ‘protected’, what else could rising waiting times be due to other than immigration? As concern about the NHS rose, so did concern about immigration. The truth was that the NHS was not being protected, but that truth was hard to find. 

The coup de grace of this strategy was to then associate immigration with the EU, which until the beginning of 2016 had been way down the list of popular concerns. Leavers managed to convince voters that reducing immigration required leaving the EU, even though non-EU immigration remained as high as EU immigration. The Prime Minister and Chancellor, having both pretended that immigration was a major problem, could not turn around and start singing its virtues. In that sense austerity beget Brexit.

As the referendum shows, no good comes from a strategy of using immigration as a scapegoat. The obvious way of handling such a close referendum vote would have been to leave the EU but stay in the single market. But by electing a Prime Minister who had spent 6 years trying and failing to reduce immigration, that option was ruled out because it would preserve free movement. EU immigration may fall anyway as a result of the Brexit and the depreciation it has caused, but beyond that it will be difficult for the government to reduce it further without hitting businesses at a very difficult time.

You do not kill immigration as an issue by talking about British jobs for British workers, still less by pretending that low wage jobs and a decade where GDP per head has hardly increased is the fault of immigration. As I argued here, to allow policy to be dictated by popular concerns risks making exactly the same mistake of those on the left who wanted to embrace austerity, although as I also noted popular concern is more deep rooted in the case of immigration. For that reason, turning the tide on attitudes to immigration will need much more than just facts and figures.

Although that task may seem daunting now, in five years or so it is likely to seem much easier. The chances are we will have left the EU, and the benefits that so many expect in terms of their access to public services or their real wage will not materialize. Either the government will avoid bringing immigration down, or if immigration does fall no obvious benefits will follow and there will be plenty of stories of firms suffering from labour shortages and leaving to produce elsewhere. Arguing then that lower immigration will usher in a period of high wage jobs will seem even more far fetched than it does now.

[1] A point that opponents of immigration often make is that immigration puts upward pressure on house prices. If there is no constraint on building houses, that in itself is no problem, just as it is no problem that immigrants will need refrigerators or cars. Those who argue that the country is full up have obviously never been to Scotland. Of course it may be a problem that most immigrants will go to English cities rather than Scotland, but that is again an existing problem of regional or industrial strategy which can and should be solved.

[2] The language of ‘people as commodities to be bought up on the open market’ is really too much. Are people in Poland forced to go and work in the UK? Of course not. They choose to do so, and most are better off as a result. If you want to be emotive then be accurate, and talk about how immigration controls cut off the chance of potential immigrants making a better life for themselves. 

The anti-Corbyn militants have failed

It was a day of contrasts. Labour MP Sadiq Khan was elected mayor of London, overcoming an openly Islamophobic campaign against him. The person who played a major part in putting together that Islamophobic campaign, Lynton Crosby, was knighted on the same day for services to the Conservative Party politics.

It was also the day after many council elections across the UK. As anyone familiar with mid-term elections will know, expectations are critical in how a result is received. In this case the agenda was set (because of their media access) by those within Labour who openly attack the new leadership. In this post I called them Labour’s new militant tendency, but anti-Corbynistas is simpler. The constant anti-Corbynista refrain is that this leadership is an electoral disaster. So when the council elections were not a disaster, they looked stupid and Labour ended up feeling better about the results than they should have done. (Despite open Conservative divisions over Europe and a clearly regressive budget, Labour only had a slight national lead over the Conservatives.)

You can of course be neither a Corbynista nor an anti-Corbynista, which is where I am, where Sadiq Khan is and I suspect the majority of Labour party members are. Khan nominated Corbyn for the leadership because he thought the left should have a voice, but he did not vote for him in the actual contest. Giving people a choice, and being prepared to accept when that choice goes against you, are part of democratic politics.

Returning to the council elections, this own goal by the anti-Corbyn militants is an illustration of how their strategy is flawed. As I explained here, constant high profile attacks on the Labour leadership from within just make it difficult for Labour party members to read the polls: are bad results because the leadership is poor or because it is under constant attack from within? That in turn just delays the very thing the anti-Corbynistas want, because it is only the party membership that can vote for a new leader.

At one point when I was writing that earlier post, I suddenly thought I was being stupid. The goal of many anti-Corbynistas is not to unseat the leadership as soon as possible, but to provide the momentum for a new centre-left party. You can see that very clearly in this article by Tim Bale. Those making that call know that time is not on their side, so there is a constant refrain of urgency. To quote Bale, MPs “are fast running out of options”, they are about to be deselected, the new leadership is tightening its grip on the party, and so on. I think in reality time has run out for those that want (one way or another) to override the views of Labour party members.

Naivety among anti-Corbynistas is only matched by the traditional left. Those who dismissed the antisemitism issue as just a ruse by anti-Corbynistas showed no awareness of the structural problem that Labour has, as both the party that is most critical of the current government of Israel and the party that many Muslims have taken a leading part in. Contrast Naz Shah’s genuine apology to Ken Livingstone’s incendiary remarks. Getting Shami Chakrabarti to lead an inquiry is an excellent start in dealing with that issue.

I think Nick Cohen is right that this is an example of a general tendency on the traditional left to divide the world into heroes and villains, and choose which side particular people or leaders are on by a dubious process of association. Within that framework any leader that opposes US imperialism gets most of the way into the good guys camp, whatever the nature of their regime. It is an approach to international relations worthy of a neocon.

This Labour leadership is generally as hopeless as the last in combating a generally hostile media. I have not heard a single Labour shadow minister or MP, in response to yet another question on antisemitism, counter attack with the nature of the Conservative campaign for London mayor. (As in ‘at least we are dealing with this issue. The Conservatives are continuing to run an Islamophobic campaign’.) It has to be prepared to learn the dark arts of political spin.

There is a great deal of progress that needs to be made before the Labour party is able to unseat what is one of the most incompetent, divisive and ideological UK governments. Good leadership is part of how that will be done, but it is not everything. The 2015 election was lost for Labour partly because Ed Miliband was not popular, but also because the party decided not to oppose the myth about the previous Labour government’s economic record. To help win in 2020 or 2025 the party needs to completely rethink how it appeals to the electorate while facing a hostile environment. How it deals with widespread antagonism towards immigration. How it takes on the SNP. How it handles the financial sector. How it shifts the economic debate away from deficits to the issues that really matter. With so much to do, fixating about a leadership when there is currently little you can do about it and there is no proven alternative is just a waste of time that only benefits the current government.