Politicians are (not) all the same

Chris Giles wrote about a month ago that “Britain will not have much of a choice at the 2015 election. However much they talk about clear differences, the parties have rarely been closer on economics”. He will probably hate me for saying this, but I was reminded of his article when I watched this interview between Jeremy Paxman and Russell Brand. The common theme, which Chris Dillow also picks up, is that the current political system offers no real choice.

This theme, common on the left, has a long pedigree. I remember being told to stop being exercised by hanging chads in 2000 because a Gore presidency would be very much like a Bush presidency. This idea is clearly ludicrous if we look at US politics today. But does it apply to the UK? I’m afraid I’m going to be very unforgiving. It either represents naivety or indulgence.

Chris Giles has grounds for his view, in that on issues like austerity Labour are trying hard not to appear very different from the current coalition. On the other hand, if you are struggling to ‘pay the bedroom tax’, Labour’s commitment to abolish it could make a big difference to your life. He may also be right that the actual content of Ed Miliband’s conference proposals on energy and housing are modest, and hardly the return to full bloodied socialism that some on the right hysterically proclaim. The governments ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is much more likely to involve a prolonged period of government intervention in a market. But I think if you were to conclude from this that a Labour government after 2015 would have a similar economic policy to a Conservative government, you would be being very naive.

Consider two big dividing lines between left and right on economic policy: the size of the state and the distribution of income. On the first, there are strong arguments that the current government’s austerity programme is not so much about the perils of high debt but a deliberate attempt to roll back the size of the state. Is it really likely that Labour would continue that policy if it was elected? It is much more likely that we would see a repeat of what happened under the last Labour government: an initial period of sticking to inherited plans to demonstrate prudence, and then a programme of real growth in areas like health and education. On the second, as I outlined here, the current government’s policies will lead to a significant increase in poverty over the next decade. When it was last in power, Labour tried very hard to achieve the opposite (although I agree it was much more concerned about poverty than inequality). Is it really likely that Labour will behave quite differently, and much more like the Conservatives, if they regain power?

Now you could argue that the financial situation of the government will remain so dire after 2015 that any government will be forced to keep cutting spending and welfare. Maybe. However I think it is more likely that the economic recovery will turn out to be much stronger than currently forecast, and that the OBR will revise up their estimate of potential output as this happens. This will create 'fiscal space'. If this occurs under the Conservatives, I would put my money on significant tax cuts, while under Labour we will see many of today’s cuts in spending and welfare reversed.

Another way of making the same point is that it is naive to believe politicians when they set out their political programmes. In a two party system within the framework of a simple left/right scheme, it may be optimal as an opposition to position yourself just to the side of your opponent, as long as this does not alienate your core vote. Once you regain power you can revert to type. (Remember Cameron’s compassionate conservatism before the last election.) The problem with that dynamic is that it may lead to the appearance that ‘all politicians are the same’ as we move towards an election, which may discourage some ‘rationally naive’ potential voters (those who are not too interested in politics) from voting. (It may also generate such a negative view of politicians that it leads otherwise sane people into rather silly positions.)

It is clear that Russell Brand is not disinterested in politics, so he should not be so naive. He seems pretty passionate about issues like equality and climate change, so it seems blindingly obvious to me who he should vote for. So why does he appear to encourage others not to vote? The argument of the true revolutionary is that anything that makes the current system more palatable just delays the revolutions eventual triumph. But that need not be what is going on here. Instead it could be a reluctance to be associated, however mildly, with a political party that is far from your political ideal (even though it is not quite as far from your ideal as the others). The number of times I have heard someone say: ‘Even though I hate party B, I couldn’t possibly vote for A because of their position on X’. But as I have argued above, the gap between parties A and B (and C) can make a significant difference when one gains power. So to refuse to vote for A because it makes you feel somehow complicit in the aspects of A’s platform you do not like seems to me just personal indulgence.

This is not to dispute that many like Brand or Dillow feel that we require much more radical change than is offered by mainstream politics. They should continue to use the media to promote that view when they can. But for people like them, working out which political party is the least bad is fairly costless. Using this knowledge to vote, and making this knowledge public, does not compromise their more radical views, and it could help make a significant difference to many peoples’ lives. 

Left, Right and Centre: some recent observations

I’m sure many political scientists hate the way descriptions in politics so often amount to a position on a straight line. It is one-dimensional. There is the obvious aggregation problem: should a person or political party, who is left of centre on issue X, and right of centre on issue Y, be described at generally in the middle of the political spectrum? How do we weight the importance of issues X and Y? But there is also a problem about whether positions are relative or absolute. This matters in part because the perception among many is that being near the middle is good (‘moderate’), and being away from the centre is bad (‘extreme’).

Three recent posts made me think about this. The first, by Noah Smith, is part of a current economics blog topic on Milton Friedman. I happen to pretty much agree with everything Noah says, but have absolutely no expertise on this - on matters of who thought what decades ago, I am curious but not interested enough to do any work. (Much better to leave it to David Glasner or Brad DeLong.) However it did strike me as obviously relevant to what has happened to the political centre, at least in the US.

One of Paul Krugman’s frequent complaints is that political commentators define the political centre as being somewhere between the Democrats and Republicans, regardless of the positions that each side take. He argues that the Republicans today are much more right wing than a generation ago, so that under this definition the centre today becomes what was right wing back then. This matters in part because the presumption is that the centre is the place for commentators to be.

Now one reaction might be: well he would say that, wouldn’t he. He is just trying to make his own views, which are ‘obviously’ to the left, sound more centrist than they actually are. But on economics at least, how politicians see Milton Friedman’s views provides some sort of objective yardstick. As Noah points out, some of Friedman’s positions would now be regarded as dangerously left wing by a good part of today’s Republican Party, whereas they were not so regarded 30 years ago.

The second post was my own, and the comments on it. It was about the increase in support for parties away from the centre in the UK and Netherlands, which I thought could be related to the recessions and austerity there, and more particularly to falling real wages. (Incidentally Robert Reich wrote a post on the same day making a similar argument about US politics.) I received many interesting comments on my post, and I want to thank everyone involved. A persistent theme was that I was wrong to call UKIP and the Freedom Party ‘far-right’, and imply any kind of equivalence to fascism.

I deliberately did not use the term fascist. Nor did I intend to imply that UKIP or the Freedom Party was fascist, or indeed that they were comparable - except to the extent that they are to the right of their respective and longer established mainstream right-of-centre parties. I used the term ‘far-right’ to denote this, as commentators often do, but I appreciate that many people read that as short for ‘furthest-right’ rather than the ‘farther-right’ that I had in mind.

I think many of these comments raised important issues. For example, would it make more sense to characterise UKIP and perhaps others not as a point on a left/right spectrum, but instead as specific issue parties? But the comments also revealed how sensitive people are to where the party they may support or sympathise with is placed on the political spectrum, and the obvious reason why. The endpoints of the political spectrum are typically defined by fascism and communism, and therefore the farther away you appear to be from those extremes, the better. Whether that is a deficiency or an advantage of this simple left/right model is an interesting question.

Why this may have a more substantial importance is illustrated by the third post, which involves think thanks in the UK. The right of centre think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), had publicised its study into BBC bias, based in part on how the BBC uses different think tanks. [1] Part of their argument is that the BBC often calls left-of-centre think tanks ‘independent’, but mentions the ideological position of right wing think tanks. One of the think tanks it defines as left-of-centre is the Social Market Foundation (SMF). Yet, as this post from SMF complains, the SMF do not think of themselves as left-of-centre, and they provide evidence about why that description is wrong.

Now I have worried in the past about whether some think tanks are in the business producing propaganda instead of being in the business of thinking. So I cannot resist quoting the end of SMF’s post. “Especially on a significant issue of public debate - ie. public service broadcasting - think tanks owe a duty to follow the evidence. Or are CPS doing something slightly different than the normal work of a think tank? Without more evidence, I won't stick any other name on them for now.” The post is both short and amusing (unless you work for the CPS), so please have a look. [2]

Yet putting the thinking versus propaganda issue aside, this little tiff does illustrate why these issues can have immediate relevance. An organisation like the BBC tries very hard to be balanced. How you achieve balance depends in many cases on a judgement about where positions or organisations are on the left/right spectrum. The spectrum becomes like a balance scale, with the pivot right in the middle. So if you can persuade an organisation like the BBC that the mid-point is not where they thought it was, you can significantly change the content of their reporting and coverage. Or, even more seriously, if you can convince others that the BBC’s judgement is wrong, you can threaten their future.

If you think I’m being alarmist in this respect, here is how the director of the CPS ends his comment on their own research. “The most important [question] is why should everyone in the UK be forced to pay a poll tax to support an institution which has so conspicuously failed for so long to obey its founding principle of impartiality?” A serious charge if true, but is it true? It is clear that governments (of whatever colour) put a lot of pressure on the BBC, although measuring its effect is very difficult (although sometimes the circumstantial evidence is strong).

However some simple things can be measured, like how much coverage different political parties get. Of course coverage always tends to be biased towards the party in power. But, as Justin Lewis of Cardiff University’s School of Journalism notes, one study suggests that whereas in 2007 the margin between the Labour government and Conservative opposition was less than 2 to 1, the margin in 2012 favoured Cameron over Miliband by more than 3 to 1, with a ratio of more than 4 to 1 between Government and Shadow Ministers. So on this count, the people who should be claiming that the BBC is biased is Labour, not the Conservatives or the right. Are we in danger of entering that state of affairs where everyone just ‘knows’ that the BBC is biased to the left, just as everyone ‘knows’ that there is a liberal bias in the US media, without bothering with that annoying stuff called evidence?

Now one response to this emerging state of affairs is to ask why the left does not bang on about media bias the same way as the right does. Although with a coverage ratio of 1 to 4, perhaps they do, but we just do not get to hear about it.

[1] The publicity appeared to predate publication of the report, which seemed like a strange thing to do.

[2] The blog response from the CPS is also worth reading. As far as I can see, their reason for characterising the SMF as left of centre is that their objective is to “champion policy ideas which marry markets with social justice and take a pro-market rather than free-market approach.” So social justice in the context of a pro-market approach is left wing! One rather telling comment on the SMF post suggested that the CPS used transparency of funding sources as their guide to who was left or right wing.