How many UK elections can a nasty party win?

This last month I wrote my most widely read post in this blog’s nearly three years existence. Over 20,000 read this on Scottish independence. Yet I wrote that post with some regret, because I was acting as the typical economist killjoy. I had a lot of sympathy behind much of the support for the Yes campaign, which was to avoid being governed by a fairly extreme right wing party. I hope no one ever writes that the No vote was a victory for David Cameron’s Conservatives, because that would be a truly Orwellian distortion of reality. One of the most telling contrasts for me was Gordon Brown’s impassioned speech for the union compared to Cameron’s opportunistic attempt to appease his own MPs the morning after the result.

A post I have no regrets writing is this about Theresa May’s one time concern about the Conservative party being seen as the ‘nasty party’. Everything in the months since I wrote it, including the current party conference, confirms that this image no longer worries the leadership. The puzzle I raised in that post is why as late as 2010 Cameron was still keen to foster the idea of a more compassionate conservatism. What has changed so completely in just four years?

One answer is UKIP. Yet trying to prevent losses to another party of the right should not alter the traditional logic that a party needs to occupy the centre to win an election. Another answer is the recession, which has perhaps led to a hardening of attitudes among the electorate as a whole. The hypothesis is that in a recession people are more inclined to believe those on welfare are scroungers, and that immigrants steal their jobs. This hardening should reverse as the economy recovers, but we also know that real wages are still likely to be lower in 2015 compared to 2010.

That was where I ended that previous post. I wrote “although nastiness might accord with voter sentiments today, at some point in the future voters in more generous times will have no problem forgetting this, and just remembering the Conservatives as the nasty party.” But in writing this I might have been both unfair to the British electorate and to the strategy of the Conservative party.

To see why, take a temporary detour from welfare to macro. Chris Dillow rightly questioned the “groupthink bubble” that sees George Osborne’s stewardship of the economy as the Conservative’s strongest card. Yet those in the bubble could respond that they were simply reflecting what the public appear to be saying in the polls. The problem here is establishing cause and effect. What I call mediamacro believes that the last Labour government seriously mismanaged the public finances, when in reality its sins were relatively minor. Mediamacro thinks that the deficit somehow helped cause the recession, whereas in reality the causality goes the other way. Mediamacro thinks that the deficit is the most important problem of today, and largely ignores the stagnation of productivity. Mediamacro celebrates the 2013 recovery as vindicating austerity, which is an argument only the most politically committed academic economist would endorse.

So why do those answering polls think the Conservatives are more competent at managing the economy? It can hardly be because of their own experience, with real wages falling since 2010 compared to steady increases before then. While they might think that Labour allowed excessive leverage by UK banks which helped cause the recession, they are unlikely to also believe that the Conservatives were urging much greater caution at the time! Or could it be that their answers about competence are influenced by what mediamacro itself believes?

If there is this huge disconnect between reality and media portrayal for the macroeconomy, could the same thing be happening with attitudes to welfare? There is no doubt that the representation of disability in the print media has changed substantially over the last decade or so. Television has, after a lag, followed this trend. There is scant evidence that this reflects any significant change in the degree of benefit fraud. It could reflect a ‘hardening of attitudes’ as a result of the recession, but causality could also run the other way. Do people vastly overestimate the amount of benefit fraud because they want to do so, or because of the information they get through the media? Is this overestimation a reflection of a recession induced hardening of attitudes, or a cause of it?

This is crucial to answering the question posed in the title to this post. If squeezing the poor and disabled is a policy that reflects a recession induced change in public attitudes, then the party that follows this change may be vulnerable when the recession ends (although perhaps not before 2015). If it reflects misinformation provided by the media, then the relevant question is whether this misinformation might continue well beyond the economic recovery. If it does, the Conservative party may have a much more durable election strategy. 

The Conservatives and the ghost of Christmas past

In October 2002 Theresa May, the then Chairman of the Conservative Party, said to her party’s conference: "There's a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us – the Nasty Party." That tag owes something to the contrast between the public images of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair: the Iron Lady compared to Blair’s easy informality. In terms of policies it is not totally clear that the label was deserved. Poverty increased, but the poor were not denigrated. Unions were broken, but many felt the unions had become too powerful and selfish in their use of power. The state was reduced by privatising utilities, but the welfare state was not seriously diminished. Unemployment rose substantially, but inflation had to be brought under control. But whether deserved or not, I think May was right in her observation.

David Cameron also appears to have believed that the Conservatives had this image problem, and in opposition he aimed to create the idea of a modern compassionate Conservative Party. Hoodies were to be hugged, environmental goals embraced, and most tellingly of all, rather than deny the relevance of ‘society’, he wanted to create a ‘Big Society’. I am not concerned here about how real or radical these changes were, but instead just note that he felt a change of image was necessary to end the Conservative’s run of election defeats. The fact that they did not win the 2010 election outright perhaps suggests the strength and toxicity of the nasty brand.

What a difference a few years make. As the government finds it more and more difficult to cut government spending on goods and services, it aims austerity at welfare spending. There is plenty that has already happened, some well known, some not. As to the future, here is Paul Johnson of the IFS talking about the implications of the latest Autumn Statement. The scale of cuts he is talking about for welfare are huge (particularly if state pensions are ring fenced), yet they appear to be Osborne’s preferred option. The Conservative’s current Party Chairman  and an influential MP have recently suggested restricting benefits for those with more than two children, to encourage ‘more responsible’ decisions about procreation. Never mind the impact this would have on those children.

Changes to welfare already introduced, together with falling real wages, have led to a huge rise in the use of food banks in the UK. Here is data from the Trussell Trust, one of the main operators of voluntary food banks. 346,992 people received a minimum of three days emergency food from Trussell Trust food banks in 2012-13, compared to 26,000 in 2008-09. Of those helped in 2012-13, 126,889 (36.6 percent) were children. The Red Cross is to start distributing food aid in the UK, for the first time since WWII. A letter from doctors to the British Medical Journal talks about a potential public health emergency involving malnutrition. It is undeniable that benefit changes are a big factor behind these developments, yet the government seems intent on hiding this fact. 

Actions are of course more important than rhetoric, but rhetoric can help define image. It is undeniable that ministers, including the Prime Minister and Chancellor, have attempted to portray the poor and unemployed as personally responsible for their position due to some character failure. Even a proud institution like HM Treasury cannot resist being part of this process. (‘Hard-working families’ looks like going the same way as ‘taxpayers money’, becoming a routine slight against either the unemployed or the poor.) Both Cameron and Osborne will be too careful to emulate Romney’s 47% moment, but too many Conservative MPs appear to share the attitudes of some of those on the US right.

So what accounts for this U turn from compassion to disparagement? The recession is one answer, which has hardened social attitudes. The success of UKIP, the political wing of the majority of UK newspapers, is another. [1] Yet it seems incredible that a political calculation that appeared valid before 2010 can have been so completely reversed in just a few years. Even Theresa May, whose speech started this blog, has joined in on the act. There are those vans of course, but asking landlords to check the immigration status of tenants is an incredibly stupid and harmful policy. We will see in 2015 whether it pays to be nasty. [2]

Yet even if the strategy works in the short term, and even recognising that politicians often do questionable things to gain votes, this just seems a step too far. It is one thing to create hardship because you believe this is a necessary price to improve the system or reduce its cost. Perhaps you really believe that cutting the top rate of tax at the same time as cutting welfare will benefit everyone eventually. But it is quite another thing to try and deflect any criticism by unjustly blaming those who earn too little, or who are trying to find work. That just seems immoral.

I suspect Cameron as the Compassionate Conservative would have agreed. He would have also noted that, although nastiness might accord with voter sentiments today, at some point in the future voters in more generous times will have no problem forgetting this, and just remembering the Conservatives as the nasty party. As Christmas approaches, this tale from Charles Dickens seems apt. 

[1] For those who are offended by this sentence, let me say this. There are two obvious explanations for the correlation between UKIPs policies and the views of the Telegraph, Mail and Sun. One involves the causality implied by the sentence and the post that it links to. The other is that newspapers just reflect the concerns of voters. But if the latter is true why do they (with the odd exception) just reflect the views of voters on the right, rather than those on the left? And why do the mistaken beliefs of voters tend to correlate with the impressions created by these newspapers, as I note here?  

[2] Even if it does, I strongly suspect one casualty will be the LibDems. If their leader spoke out as Vince Cable has done, they might just have a chance of not being associated with these policies and attitudes. But he has not, and as a result the party is in serious danger of losing many votes and I suspect much of its activist base.