Some lessons in how to combat the Tory propaganda machine

 

The initial results of voting last Thursday are very easily explained. First, voters had a terrible year in 2020 and government help in getting the vaccine out means 2021 is looking much better, so naturally voters will reward the government. That means the Tories in England, Labour in Wales and the SNP in Scotland (modified by tactical voting against a second independence referendum). It’s like Brown’s poll bounce as he saved the banks, and therefore large parts of the economy, from the effects of the Global Financial Crisis.

Second, on top of that, Conservatives have recreated their Brexit success, because to many who voted Brexit, the vaccine rollout doesn’t just reflect well on the current UK government, it validates their choice to vote Leave and the party that got Brexit done. While many Brexit voters were beginning to doubt the wisdom of their choice in the second half of 2020, those doubts have disappeared. As a result to a first approximation in England the polls last Thursday were a repeat of the 2019 election, with the Conservative party becoming the Brexit party.

In hindsight, do you think Britain was right or wrong to vote to leave the European Union?

As the results further south came in, the picture was reversed. The Tories lost Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire, lost the Cotswold's Chipping Norton to Labour, lost Tumbridge Wells and elsewhere, and Labour lost many contests in Bristol to the Greens. 

The odd thing about these elections was Starmer’s reaction to them. As he hasn’t given left wing social conservatives something left wing to vote for, how did he expect anything different from 2019 in red wall seats? Sacking Rayner is, to quote Stephen Bush, just “mystifyingly stupid, self-discrediting and self-destructive”. Johnson is a populist and to his target voters he promises whatever they want to hear. Starmer needs to start demonstrating that those promises are empty and he can do better, and not keep making the story about Labour’s internal wars. .

In terms of political deception, this idea that the UK’s vaccine rollout vindicates Brexit is the best kind of myth because it’s based on a half-truth. It is true that the UK’s vaccine rollout has been faster than the EU’s, and the EU had a joint vaccine procurement programme. That is easily enough for Boris Johnson, and it is enough for pretty well all Brexit voters. In terms of public perception it just doesn’t matter that what is stated as a truth is at best a conjecture (if the UK had stayed in the EU would it have joined the joint programme?). What makes this myth particularly powerful is that many Brexit voters want to believe they made the right choice, so they want to believe it is true.

Johnson is not the first Tory Prime Minister to create a powerful myth out of a half-truth. Perhaps the most successful in recent times was the Coalition government’s claim that austerity was necessary because of the previous Labour government’s profligacy. This was a myth that could be easily shown to be false by looking at just one chart, but that was too much for the media to do. They just recalled Labour being criticised over insufficient consolidation, which was a half-truth because any lack of consolidation was tiny compared to the impact of the GFC. Labour’s failure to challenge the myth ensured it became ‘common knowledge’, and it ended up forming the basis of Cameron’s 2015 election win.

That episode points to the first lesson in how to begin combatting the Tory propaganda machine: counter myths quickly and hard. Combating Tory spin and propaganda does not mean the odd fact check or statement by a minor minister - it means a senior opposition minister of better still the Labour leader doing the rounds of the broadcast media studios, because that is Labour’s only hope of communicating with most people. In addition only by doing this do you have any chance of preventing the political journalists from the broadcast media accepting the myth as truth, and this matters because the broadcast media is the only route to countering the Tory propaganda machine.

The Tory propaganda machine is formidable because it has most of the daily press on its side. The broadcast media tends to follow the press. It is one reason why people seem to have forgiven Johnson allowing the second wave to grow but credited him for the vaccine rollout. The only thing Labour has going for it is rules about balance that apply to the broadcast media. It will be hard for the broadcast media to ignore senior opposition ministers or their leader. It will also be hard for this media to accept as true something the opposition party fiercely contests.

This leads to a second lesson for Labour. Commission research on the airtime each party gets on each broadcast platform, and use it if (as I suspect) it shows Tory politicians appearing many times more often than Labour. (Comparable figures from the past are available.) Use that as a lever to get senior Labour politicians appearing on the broadcast media to counter important Tory misinformation.

The third lesson is to choose which myths Labour tries to counter wisely. As I have already noted, attacking the idea that Brexit allowed the UK’s superior vaccine rollout is hard to contest, partly because so many Brexit voters want to believe it but mainly because it might have been true. In contrast, the idea that the government’s policy of Freeports is only possible because of Brexit is easy to refute because some EU countries have freeports and parts of the UK used to have them while we were in the EU. Contest those lies that are important and easy to refute.

The advantage of this strategy is that it will begin to create the idea that Johnson is not trustworthy. Starmer’s approach to PMQs does not do that for most voters. Yes Johnson avoids his questions, but all most people see are the soundbites that may appear on TV. In that context Johnson’s avoidance of the question is not obvious but he gets to rattle off various uncontested and often false claims. When one of these claims is false Labour has to contest them, otherwise many voters who see the claim unchallenged on TV and in the papers will unsurprisingly assume it is true.

That is about correcting misinformation. But Labour also needs to counteract Tory spin. This government is very good at spin, partly because they are happy to depart from facts, and if you take this spin at face value you would believe it is championing a Green revolution (it is not), leveling up economic activity northwards (it is not) and spending large amounts of public money on public services (it is not). So the fourth lesson for Labour is to do far more to counteract this spin. If Labour is to have any chance of winning back any of the Brexit seats they lost in 2019 they have not just to make a strong economic offer before the election but also convince the voters that the government is not doing the same. The former means nothing without the latter.

For those rightly saying Labour needs to say what it stands for, challenging Tory spin will go a long way to fixing that, because a standard line of most journalists confronted with an opposition pointing out obvious government lies or spin is ‘what would you do then?’ Even if it isn’t asked Labour can say where their policy differs from the government. (What you do not do is this.)

Highlighting things that are not said is as important as attacking misinformation. For example Labour really should be making more noise about NHS privatisation. Rather than a general attack I would focus on one aspect almost exclusively: the takeover of 58 GP practices by Operose Health, a UK subsidiary of the US company Centene, and the likelihood that others will follow. This is a result of the 2012 reforms, and Labour can point out that a CEO of Operose has become a No10 advisor. Labour can hammer home that a GP services run for profit is not compatible with the ethos of the NHS. The NHS may remain free at the point of use, but GPs service run for profit do not guarantee quality of service, and almost certainly will reduce quality. [1]

Labour has had some success attacking sleaze and corruption, and there is enough material there to take us to the next election. This is important to do, not only because it will influence voters at some point, but also because corruption is so close to what this government is. I think trying to equate it to sleaze under Major (‘same old’) is a mistake, because the scale of it today is well beyond that. Instead two points need to be hammered home. First, how its scale is unprecedented. Second, why it matters to ordinary people, such as here.

I’m sure there are other areas like this where Labour just are not making enough noise. Above it all is the economy, but it will be hard to make much headway in the near future when the media will be banging on about record growth (which is just the consequence of the record recession caused by the pandemic). Over the next year Labour need to relentlessly point that out, by making comparisons to 2019. What it does after the recovery is over can wait for another post.

Why have I not talked about policies? Good policies are important, but there is no point having good policies if you are not getting them across. A populist government aims to dominate the media, which is why Labour must get better at being a counterpoint to the government's propaganda machine. A populist government will only be defeated when enough voters, with the help of the opposition, realise there is little substance behind the spin and lies.

Even if Labour did all this, I still think it has almost no chance of winning the next election without cooperation with the LibDems and Greens over which party stands in marginals. The reason is structural and simple. Labour do need to appeal to left wing social conservative voters, and that is bound to alienate many social liberals who feel Labour is failing to champion enough social liberal causes. (This is not helped by making those on the left in Labour feel unwelcome [2]). The Green party did well on Thursday, and will continue to pick up votes as a result of Labour’s strategy from those unwilling to vote tactically. Without cooperation with other opposition parties Labour’s strategy is highly likely to be self-defeating. This seems like a basic problem with Labour’s strategy that Labour have failed to address.[3]

[1] To any Tory apologist that talks about private sector efficiency gains, just compare the vaccine rollout under the NHS to the government’s test and trace infrastructure that had substantial private sector involvement, cost billions and kept failing its targets.

[2] Those on Labour’s right who think they have to replay the 1980s to win again should look at the US, which is a far more relevant parallel when fighting a populist.

[3] I know Labour’s constitution prevents this kind of cooperation, so change the constitution! I suspect the main hurdle to this is not Labour members but the Labour leadership.

It is inevitable that Labour in opposition will not be a champion of social liberalism

 

Trump has been defeated, but only just. Trump, that most ludicrous and destructive of US presidents, still won 46.8% of the vote. More importantly, the number of votes between Biden and Trump in the Electoral College was very small. Voters still turned out for a Repubican party that backed Trump all the way. Perhaps worst of all, the aftermath of the election showed that the Republican party backed Trump’s attempts to overturn democracy. What Republicans do on a smaller scale with gerrymandering they are happy to do at a national level. The future of the US is still very uncertain when one of the two main parties does not respect democracy.

The Conservative party in the UK is only beginning down that particular route, with its plans for voter ID. Yet do they need to rig elections, having ruled for more than twice as many years as Labour since 1979? (To put it very simply, while in the UK the opposition to the right had just one election winner in Blair, in the US they had Clinton and Obama and now Biden.) More particularly, UK Conservatives by following the US strategy of right wing populism based on social conservatism seem to have a winning formula under the FPTP system.

Labour has two structural disadvantages in General Elections. First, it is one of three socially liberal UK wide parties and two socially liberal parties in Wales and Scotland. Second, social conservatives benefit significantly from the FPTP system, because social liberals are concentrated in the cities. The 2019 election was a clear demonstration of that structural disadvantage: when an election is fought on social issues Labour loses badly.

Many on the left dismiss this social conservatism, reflected particularly in dislike of immigration, as reflecting racism or xenophobia. However social conservatism is more general than that. It is in large part a reaction to the tremendous success social liberalism has enjoyed since the 1960s. I discussed this at length in this post from a year ago, and a recent tweet from @cakeylaura gives a personal illustration of what I mean. But my post had a title that was weakly justified by its contents. Is it really true that in all cases Labour should argue for social liberalism?

Socially conservative views reflect the left behind in the sense that they are out of tune with both the law and the broadcast media. Conservative MPs are far more socially liberal than their supporters, which is why we have socially liberal laws. The media is populated by younger university educated people who reflect today’s social liberal attitudes. This combination, over the last 60 years or so, has meant that social conservatives have been overwhelmed. As that earlier post pointed out aggregate attitudes have become more liberal. (Demographics help as well, of course.)

If that was the end of the story, then the resistance to socially liberal views expressed at the ballot box would be weak. However most of our newspapers reflect a different world, geared to the more socially conservative views of most of their readership. This socially conservative media both reinforces and organises social conservatives. Brexit is the exemplar of this, and is why views on Brexit were impervious to economic realities.

The left talked a lot about the left behind after the Brexit vote, but typically they meant the economically left behind. While undoubtedly there was an element of that, research suggests the left behind were more those who hadn’t kept pace with society’s social liberalism. Outside the cities, the south voted for Brexit as much as the North.

The key role played by the Brexit press in reinforcing and organising social conservatism makes it very hard for Labour to change minds. Perhaps for this reason the strategy that Labour has followed since Blair has involved appeasement rather than persuasion. The way to win elections, so this argument goes, is to make any election about economic (or more recently competence) issues, rather than social issues. The best thing Labour can therefore do is dodge alienating the Red Wall voter, and that seems to be Starmer’s strategy. On its own that is not enough, as Miliband’s defeat showed, so you need something positive to put to the electorate. Corbyn did that in 2017, but still lost. Can Starmer do better?

The alternative suggested by the title of my earlier post is for Labour to argue for social liberalism. The point I made in that post is that attitudes have changed over time, so it is possible to persuade on social liberal issues, particularly where they intersect with economics. More favourable public attitudes to immigration in the last few years is a clear example. Obviously social liberals would like to believe the main social liberal party can stand up for their beliefs, but how much of that is wishful thinking?

Again the role of the right wing press is crucial. The recent trend to more positive views on immigration will reflect in part the absence since 2016 of negative stories about immigrants in the press. The power of the right wing press to mobilise on particular issues when their government is in power should never be underestimated. Compared to articles in newspapers that are read every day, how can Labour politicians persuade on social issues when they get at best a soundbite on the main news?

I think it is important to distinguish between Labour in government and Labour in opposition. Governments get considerable exposure in the broadcast media, and so it is possible to believe that they can provide a counter-argument to the right wing press on social issues. In opposition it is much harder. While Labour should argue for social liberalism while in government, to do so in opposition would seem to be a recipe for worthy failure.

There is a third argument, in between persuasion and appeasement, which has been recently put by Timothy Garton Ash in a recent Prospect article. He writes

“What follows from this analysis is that, where possible, we need to slow down the rate of change to one that most human natures can bear, while preserving the overall liberal direction of travel…..This means, for example, limiting immigration, securing frontiers, and strengthening a sense of community, trust and reciprocity inside them.”

I have strong doubts about this. It might make sense with immigration, but is it tolerable when it comes to enforcing rights and tackling discrimination? Even with immigration, I continue to argue it was newspaper coverage of immigration rather than its scale that raised concerns about immigration.

So it seems inevitable that without a progressive alliance and with a FPTP system biased towards social conservatism, it is bound to be the case that Labour will be forced to appease the Red Wall voter. That is why the leadership will vote for the Brexit deal, and why it will dodge all the socially conservative traps that the Conservative government puts in its path. When the marginal voter is socially conservative, that is what you have to do.

While this strategy avoids an almost certain loss at the next election, it is fraught with danger. If Labour seems to be adopting Blue Labour ideas, that risks alienating its own supporters sufficiently for them to abstain or vote for other social liberal parties. Even if the leadership manages this difficult balancing act, the right wing press can still suggest that at its heart Labour is now the party of social liberals, which of course is true. Labour’s positive message on competence or the economy may fail to attract voters sufficiently to counteract voters socially conservative inclinations.

Just because the path is fraught with danger does not mean a better one exists. It may be the case that, with FPTP biased towards social conservative voters and competition for the social liberal vote, it is just highly unlikely that over the next decade or more that the Conservatives can be defeated. In the long run demographics are on Labour’s side, but that is not going to ride to the rescue anytime soon.

How the electoral system in the US, and to a lesser extent the UK, is biased towards social conservatism.

 

The UK is often torn between following the US or following Europe. We share a language with the US, and a lot of popular culture. But we also share a voting system that ensures the political right has a heavy built in advantage. The United States may be too far down that road to change, but in the UK there is still hope if only the current opposition leadership see sense.

Once we get over the relief that Donald Trump is no longer President, comes the realisation of just how bad the US election results really were for Democrats. Trump was a Republican, and the Republican party backed him almost without exception. Even in the current ludicrous situation where Trump is refusing to concede, many senior Republican politicians continue to back him.

It should come as no surprise that Republicans have an ambiguous relationship to democracy. Republicans see nothing wrong in distorting district borders to give themselves better election results in terms of seats than their polling numbers deserve. Gerrymandering is endemic, and it gives the Republicans an inbuilt advantage in one half of Congress, the House of Representatives. They also habitually make it hard for democrat voters (particularly black voters) to vote: the long lines we see during US elections are there for a reason.

Recently Republican senator Mike Lee said “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” This view is not unusual among Republican politicians, it is just that most are not so foolish as to say it out loud.

But Trump’s attempt to cling to power is not the problem. The problem is that the Republican party won seats in the House, and is likely to retain its majority in the Senate. Why the Democrats did so badly in both of these contests is something that will be analysed by others at length later. But I suspect what few outside the US understand is just how difficult it is for the Democrats to win big in the Senate.

As Shaun Lawson explains in an excellent piece, the Senate is constructed such that each state has two senators, whatever its population. To take the most extreme example, Wyoming with a population of 563,626 gets the same representation in the Senate as California with a population of 37,253,956. Now if political support was evenly distributed among big and small states alike this would not be an issue . However it is not: Wyoming has two Republican senators and California has two Democratic senators. The Senate structure influences the Electoral College used to choose a President.

The basic problem with the Senate is that it gives rural and small town states much more political clout than their population warrants. With political polarisation increasingly between liberals and social conservatives (the culture war), and with liberals concentrated in the big dynamic cities and conservatives in the rest of the country, anything that gives the latter an advantage relative to their number is a political problem.

The example of the US senate is far more extreme than anything in the UK, but that does not mean that the problem does not exist here. We saw that very clearly with Brexit, which is essentially a culture war issue. The referendum of course involved the whole population, and we all know the result of that. But if a general election had been held on just that issue, it is estimated that Leave would have won a landslide: 406 Leave | 242 Remain.

We can do a similar calculation for the 2019 election. If you add up the vote totals of parties supporting a second referendum, it was just more than 50%, but of course the Conservatives won a landslide and Brexit went ahead. That partly reflects the fact that the second referendum vote was more divided among different parties than the Brexit vote, but it also reflects the way the social liberal/conservative divide is split among parliamentary seats.

Socially liberal votes are concentrated in the cities. Seats outside the cities have many social liberals as well, but they are typically outnumbered by social conservatives. However you will find very few social conservatives in big city seats. That means that even if social liberals are in a small majority in the population as a whole, they are outnumbered in terms of seats. When it comes to culture war issues, the First Past The Post (FPTP) UK constituency system for general elections represents accidental gerrymandering favouring social conservatives.

An illustration of this is to compare the 2017 and 2019 elections. In 2017 both main parties backed Brexit and the Remain movement hardly existed, so Labour could focus on a relatively popular economic programme and do relatively well. In contrast, the 2019 election was mainly about Brexit, and the seat totals (once you allow for other parties) was not very different from those implied by the 2016 referendum result. 2019 also reflects the difficulty Labour had in focusing on economic issues given a slanted media.

If you think this is just about Brexit, or that Cummings’ departure means that Johnson will reveal his true social liberal self, think again. The Conservatives were using immigration as a weapon against Blair under William “foreign land” Hague, and will continue to try and capture socially conservative voters after Cummings' exit, because it works at winning elections.

One solution is for Labour to try and do what it did in 2017, and effectively match the Conservatives on the key culture war issues. However, that creates two related problems. The first is that Labour’s current base is very socially liberal. The second is that other socially liberal parties exist. The danger is that we see a repeat of what happened in the period before the 2019 election, where voters defecting over Labour’s socially conservative stance leads to lost votes whatever choice it makes. I'm not saying that Labour cannot succeed doing this, but it is hard and divisive. 

Both this problem, and the problem of the socially liberal vote being split among parties, can be overcome by elections determined by some form of proportional representation (PR).

A traditional argument for the UK’s existing first past the post system, and the constitutional system in the US, is that it keeps out political extremes as both major parties strive to capture the centre ground. This has been completely refuted by events over the last decade. It appears, in fact, that both systems allow governments that are politically extreme to capture power.

While there seems little chance that the US will change its system, there is more hope in the UK. It requires a Labour government to be elected that is committed to some form of PR. It has to be a commitment before they gain power, because once elected every Labour government believes it can now become the natural party of government. One advantage of a prior commitment to PR is that it makes cooperation between Labour and other socially liberal parties easier during the election.

There is considerable support for electoral reform within the Labour party. Unfortunately any Labour leadership that thinks it can win power is also a leadership that prefers to remain in power rather than becoming part of a coalition that any subsequent PR election is more likely to bring. While we can appeal to statistics to show the dominance of Conservative governments, political leadership is naturally focused on its own short term.

Can we think about politics from Blair onwards in one chart? and what it means for Blue Labour

This is an experiment. You can judge how successful it is. I am trying it because with this election there has been a lot of talk about a revival in Blue Labour to recapture the Red Wall. The Conservatives have been playing to socially conservative voters since at least William (‘a foreign land’) Hague. So why has the strategy succeeded so well in 2019 when it has had at best modest success before now?

We can represent all this in a simple diagram that is now widely used

The precise positions of the party leaders could be the topic of endless discussion, but for this post I just need them to be roughly right, and for the directions of travel to be right. Blair was fairly liberal but moderately left wing. The Tories since Thatcher have always been pretty right wing in economic terms, and where we have seen movement has been mainly on how socially conservative they are.

If people are uniformly distributed around this map, then the centre is the place to be in a two party, FPTP system. Parties do not go there because their ideology/principles, maintained mainly by their members, stops them.

Blair won because in economic terms he was closer to the economic centre ground than the Tories. After 18 years of Tory rule voters wanted better public services. Yet after the Thatcher revolution in the Conservative party the Tories were stuck with taking a right wing stance, so they tried to shift the debate on to social issues where either side was some way from the centre. A focus on immigration was a way of doing that, with the added advantage of being perceived to be pro-worker and pro-public services (the lie that immigration significantly reduced wages and put pressure on public services).

This move had some effect, reducing Labour’s vote. Yet under good economic times (and economic times were good under Labour for ten years) the immigration issue was not enough to defeat Blair. Public services were getting better. As Theresa May put it, the Tories were still known as the nasty party. This is why Cameron tried to portray himself as a liberal conservative. In opposition he tried to move closer to the centre in both economic terms (accepting Labour’s levels of government spending) and social terms.

But everything changed after the Global Financial Crisis. Regrettably, social conservatism has more appeal when times are bad, at least in part because the (incorrect) real wage/public service argument gains traction. Yet at first sight that should have been counteracted by Osborne moving sharply right with anti-Keynesian austerity (spending cuts in a recession). So although Cameron had tried to move nearer the centre on social issues, in economic terms by 2010 he moved further away.

Here is where we have to make an important modification to this apparatus. In a country where one party has a media that is very sympathetic to the right, it can change how its policies are perceived. Cameron dressed austerity in socially conservative terms (the government is like a household). For various reasons that I and others have documented at length, a policy that was sharply contrary to basic economic theory was adopted by most of the media as a necessity, and the media therefore turned it into a sign of good government.

So austerity was not perceived by most people as a right wing shrinking of the state at great social cost (higher unemployment and lower real wages), but as a neutral policy signifying economic competence. Once we allow for this it is clear that for many Cameron was now closer to the centre is perceived economic terms, and so became the government in 2010.

Austerity was so successful that Labour eventually concluded they would have to accept it to some extent. Miliband not only moved nearer the centre in economic terms by accomodating austerity, he also did so by trying to appear more hawkish on immigration (remember the mugs). But Labour do not have a means of influencing perceptions, so their perceived position was their actual position. In addition Miliband was tainted with the perceived incompetence of the Labour government and was not closer to the centre compared to Cameron’s perceived position, so he lost.

Ed Miliband’s defeat in 2015 was narrow but hard for Labour to take. Most of the political commentators (as they always do) said Labour should move to the right, and after the 2015 defeat they began to before the leadership elections. Recall that parties find it hard to move to the centre because their members will not allow it. That post 2015 rightward drift and the apparent acceptance of austerity was too much for the membership, and they voted for Corbyn.

There are more than two parties in the UK. So far we have been able to do the analysis without mentioning them but now they become crucial. Cameron by becoming more socially liberal allowed UKIP to gain votes. His response was to offer a referendum on the EU. Brexit, particularly a hard Brexit, should be an easy fail according to this diagram. It is socially conservative and right wing: trade restrictions are created so that labour and environmental regulations can be scrapped and not to preserve workers jobs. Its true position is close to Johnson’s in this diagram, while staying in the EU is a pretty centrist idea.

Brexit shows more than anything how we have to think about perceptions. What made Brexit a narrow winner when its true position suggested an easy loss? In short a brilliant if totally dishonest campaign that painted it as something it is not. Project Fear, with the help of the media, completely nullified the right wing economic dimension of Brexit, and turned it into a plus by talking about more money for the NHS. Staying in the EU was successfully painted as ultra liberal (letting the whole of Turkey come to the UK). As with austerity, the perceived position of parties and policies is what matters when it comes to winning elections and a referendum.

Now you could say that by allowing perceptions I can put party’s positions wherever I need to get the result I need. But just as we have good empirical evidence that austerity was perceived as economically neutral by much of the population, we also have good evidence that those who voted for Brexit thought it would have no negative impact on the economy or their personal incomes.

That Corbyn came close to defeating May was not a surprise if you look at his position on this diagram, once we recognise that what Corbyn managed to do in 2017 was neutralise Brexit as an issue. Because he remained as close to the centre as May, he gained votes once his policies became clear as a result of his manifesto. Without his portrayal in the right wing press he might have won.

So what changed by 2019? He was not able to neutralise Brexit, because parliament had agreed a deal. He had to choose, and whatever choice he made would lose votes. For that (not good) reason he delayed choosing, which allowed the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats (and Greens) who portrayed themselves as the true Remain party.

Yet Corbyn is still closer to the centre than Johnson. He lost badly partly because Brexit is perceived as neutral in economic terms by many, so Johnson’s perceived economic position has become synonymous with Brexit. However crucially he also lost because the UK is not a two party system. The Liberal Democrats, the SNP and the Greens are all perceived to be in liberal/left space, and together with Labour they won more votes than Johnson and the Brexit party put together.

The lesson of all this is twofold. First, this two-dimensional diagram can explain a lot, once you replace the parties’ actual position against their perceived position generated with a right wing media. Of course it leaves out a lot (the popularity of leaders, which is related to their charisma, the effectiveness of campaigns etc), but it seems like a good place to start. Second, as long as the Conservative party has the monopoly of the right wing/socially conservative vote, left social liberals cannot afford to split their vote among several parties. If Labour ever made a significant move in a socially conservative position, as Blue Labour wants, it would be defeated by yet more votes going to the other left/liberal parties.

Postscript. For an excellent discussion of some of the points made here, see this post by Marios Richards

Leave and the Left Behind

I argued at the end of last year that immigration was an attractive issue for the right, because it offered the possibility of capturing votes from those who would vote left on economic grounds, but who were also socially conservative. It was particularly attractive if you could convince leftish social conservatives that voting to reduce immigration would improve their economic situation. The EU referendum vote exemplified how successful that strategy could be. The socially conservative vote went to Leave, irrespective of where those voters were on a left right spectrum (see here).

In this situation, it is understandable that a lot of focus goes to the left/social conservative voters. As voting left clearly correlates with income and areas of social deprivation more generally, we get stories about the economically left behind Leavers. At the same time, some social scientists object, saying that voting Leave clearly correlates with socially conservative views, like hanging for example. There seems to be a contradiction here, but there is not. As I argued here, it is the fight over whether left social conservatives vote on economics or on their social views that swings these votes. The same point could be made for the US as the UK, particularly if we add in race as an issue.

Those controlling right wing media understand all this. Another post from last year looked at how economists had shown clear evidence that Fox news was not in the business of reflecting their viewers beliefs and voting patterns, but in moulding them. They did this by looking at what economists call natural experiments: events that in this case influenced whether people watched Fox that had nothing to do with their politics. Over Wren-Lewis Christmas we were talking about whether there were any natural experiments for assessing the influence of the Mail or Sun in the UK. One possibility we discussed was whether the Liverpool boycott of the Sun over Hillsborough might be a useful natural experiment.

I then read this twitter thread from @marwood_lennox. They first note the clear correlation between measures of deprivation by constituencies and votes in the 2017 general election. They then show the imputed EU referendum vote against measure of deprivation: apart from the least deprived areas voting to Remain, there is no clear correlation. So far much as we would expect from the analysis above. But it was these two tweets that really caught my attention:

“Deprivation doesn't clearly correlate with strength for Remain either. There are eight >60% Remain seats in most deprived decile …. Two of those eight are in very white working class Liverpool. What happened there?”

Is this the ‘natural experiment’ of Sun readership at work?

If only social science was this easy. There are, unfortunately, plenty of other explanations. First, cities tended to vote Remain, it was the towns that did not. Liverpool’s Remain vote was not that different from Manchester. True Manchester has less acute deprivation, but if deprivation and voting Leave are uncorrelated, so what? One reason that cities voted remain is that they have large universities.

Furthermore, as a result of twitter (thanks everyone), I learnt that the local papers had made much of EU funding for the docks and elsewhere. There is also a legacy of Irish immigration. Liverpool has a strong international tradition based on its port and football club, recently reinforced by being a European city of culture. Thus plenty of other reasons why Liverpool might be unusually Remain, if that is what they were.

Despite all this, I have learnt from experience not to let such difficulties get in the way of a potentially interesting result. So I would be very interested if by chance anyone who did proper multivariate analysis of the Leave vote is reading this, and noticed that Liverpool constituencies were, or were not, unusually Remain (given age, education etc). Or if anyone else has any ideas about natural experiments that might affect recent newspaper readership.