One of the key marginal seats in the upcoming general election is my own constituency of Withington, in South Manchester, which is making national headlines for its too-close-to call battle between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Comprising a clutch of suburbs not far from Manchester city centre and Manchester University, Withington is home to a large student population. Traditionally safe Labour territory, in 2005 there was a stunning 17% swing to the Liberal Democrats who pulled off a surprise victory over Labour, winning by a mere 600 votes. This time around, Lib Dem MP John Leech is involved in an epic struggle with Labour, who have listed Withington as number 3 on their list of target seats. I met him two days after the first leaders’ debate and talked to him about the Nick Clegg effect, the coming hung parliament and the prospect of a Lib Dem-Tory coalition, tuition fees, dirty campaign tactics… and Eddie Izzard.
In UK election news, the Liberal Democrats have a clever new campaign that’s attacking both Labour and the Conservatives through the use of fake ads for a fake party, the “Labservatives”. From the Guardian:
The Labservatives use the slogan “For more of the same”, and has a logo of a scribbled tree sitting on top of a rose stem.
The outdoor ads feature a number of different headlines placed on a purple background, which merges Labour’s red and Conservative’s blue.
Headlines include: “Scandal. Recession. War. There’s no substitute for experience,” “You might not trust us but at least you know us,” and “We’ve had 65 years to get it right. So what’s another five?”
This is quirky and inventive and it’s no surprise that the Ad agency behind it is claiming to have been inspired by the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that Barack Obama used in his campaign stateside. But is it effective? I don’t think so. It suffers from the one thing you don’t want in an election campaign: too many messages. Look at all the points it’s trying to get across: Labour are the same as the Conservatives… They are both rubbish… Together, they’ve been in power for ages… They have a lot of experience, but since they’re rubbish this experience is actually a bad thing… They’ve had ages to get it right, but have only given us war and recession instead…
Great for a speech, not so good for a poster campaign. But to be fair, this isn’t really a creative fault. It’s a result of the ridiculously tricky situation that the Lib Dems, as the third party in a two-and-a-half party system, find themself in. On the one hand, they obviously need to attack the government, but they also have to make sure that those attacks don’t send voters into the arms of the Tories. In electoral terms, they are hindered by our brain-meltingly mental first-past-the-post voting system which means that while their candidates face mostly Labour opposition in the North of England, in the South they are mainly up against Tories. This means they are having to attack two flanks at the same time, and it makes electoral messaging very difficult.
Nice idea though!
18:45 BST: Well, the time has come for me to quit this epic live-blog, given that I’ll soon be entering my twelfth hour of continuous live-blogging. I know; I know – Obama’s about to give his press conference. But I’m about to collapse; so that’s that. I hope you enjoyed the random, disparate, often unhelpful observations from yours truly. I know I did – live-blogging’s great! There’ll be some more analysis tomorrow from Entangled Alliances, looking in more detail at the exact provisions of the groundbreaking G20 agreement: what they are, whether they’re good and whether they’ll actually change anything, as well as a look at how the G20 will benefit its main players. But for now, I’ll leave you with a fitting quote from BBC business correspondent Robert Peston:
There are no surprises in the deal announced today to reform the banking system, to prevent banks making the kind of risky loans and investments that precipitated the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s.
But it’s nonetheless a historic event that the world’s 20 most powerful economies have signed up for these reforms – because they represent the death knell for the Anglo-American doctrine that economies flourish when financial firms are left alone to do as they please.
Indeed.
18:32 BST: Buried under all the G20 news has been the potentially groundbreaking meeting between Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which resulted in an agreement to reduce the nuclear arms of both sides much further than the current agreement demands. This could be very important…
18:30 BST: A wise comment from the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow (whose live-blog was probably better than mine but nowhere near as epic!):
I’ve been busy updating our main story, having sat through the opening of Brown’s statement. First reaction: I found myself sitting there thinking ‘David Cameron could not pull off an event like this’. That’s not because I think Cameron’s a lightweight. I don’t. It’s because the most important summit conclusions involve international finance, global trade and the inner workings of organisations like the IMF and there are probably very few prime ministers or presidents in the world who understand this stuff as well as Brown.
18:20 BST: Lest I be judged by my comments below to have been a bit too harsh on the protests, I want to stress that I have great respect for most of them. I say most of them, because the anarchists were just so annoying. Proper anarchism is really cool. It’s an extremely sophisticated ideology . These guys, however, were just pathetic. Bad anarchists! The majority of protests, however, made some good points.The fact remains, though, that they surely made no difference on the summit at all. If you want to get something changed, you focus on it like a laser and you don’t go off message. But the protests were never on message to begin with – from homelessness to climate change to ending the war to the death of capitalism; only a minority were actually focused on the topics of the summit! The question becomes then – did they really want to influence the summit? Or did they just want to get their message out there in a sort of vague picture of defiance? In their defence, however, you could respond that they never stood a chance anyway: governments don’t respond to the people anymore. No-one listened to Iraq protests, for example and they were very focused. So it’s an interesting debate. But I do think that they could have maybe stood a chance at getting some traction if they focused on one message and, you know, stuck to it.
18:13 BST: Here’s the full text of the communique, courtesy of the Guardian. There’s tonnes of details here…
18:10 BST: Oh and I forgot to add that hedge funds and other non-banking institutions will come under the aegis of this new Financial Stability board. Since the mysterious financing of hedge funds helped to exacerbate the mess, this is also good news; but again it all depends on how strong the regulation is…
18:05 BST: The headlines are focusing on the issues of tax havens and that $1 trillion figure, but there’s tonnes of other stuff that’s just as interesting. For example, there’s going to be a new Financial Stability Board that will work with the IMF to monitor the risk of banking transactions and impose limits on things like capital reserves and leverage requirements (not to mention executive bonuses.) This is absolutely crucial in getting the banks back on track and preventing such a crisis happening again, since it was an inherent failure in the banks’s ability to evaluate “systemic risk” that made the crisis so bad. This is pretty complicated and I’ll come back to this another time, but suffice to say it’s a good move – that is, as long as this new regulatory body actually has proper regulatory oversight.
17:54 BST: A timely article over at Foreign Policy discussing whether protests ever work. I agree with its basic conclusion: protests have to be unified and targeted; and focused on changing the system not overthrowing it. The G20 protests were none of these things and so I’m afraid that they’ve had absolutely no effect whatsoever.
17:46 BST: Did Sarkozy and Merkel get their victory? Or was there never any “victory” to begin with? Everyone was in agreement over the basic regulatory provisions. and had been for weeks. The real controversy- over the possibility of national stimulus packages – was won by Merkel and Sarkozy weeks ago, and so it was no surprise to see no such provisions today. However, Sarkozy must be feeling pleased that the language on tax havens was quite fierce. In the big picture, it’s not really much of an issue, but he’ll make a big deal of it, which is fair enough…
Last Monday The Times reported that the Lib Dems have started “scenario planning” for what they should do in the entirely plausible event of a hung parliament – which is what would occur if the Conservatives win the election but can’t form a majority government. According to the Times article, they plan to use a variety of scenario planning techniques including mind maps, game theory and, uh, writing on whiteboards – indeed, the article itself has pictures of some tantalising yet conveniently vague whiteboard scribblings in Vince Cable’s office, which I assume we are meant to think are incredibly clever what with Cable’s past experience as a professional scenario planner for Shell.
Game theory aside, two things really struck me from the article’s fascinating discussion of what the Lib Dems are thinking vis-à-vis a hung parliament. One is their determination not to prop up Gordon Brown:
There is an assumption that should the Tories be the largest party in a minority Parliament, the Lib Dems will probably support them in some form. This seems unlikely, at this stage, to be a formal coalition. But they recognise it would be electoral “suicide” to do the reverse and prop up Gordon Brown to keep him in Number 10 if the Tories are the largest party.
Now it could be argued that this isn’t a very logical view to take. If you agree that the Lib Dems and Labour are both centre-left, then the fact is that in every election since 1979 there has been a centre-left majority – yet in 18 out of the last 30 years we have been ruled by a centre-right party. Following this, it makes complete electoral sense for two centre-left parties – that together form a bigger majority than the centre-right one – to form a coalition. It is, technically, the best way to express the will of the voters. This is my view, at least. However, I concede that this arguably ignores two vital points. The first is the truism that though we have three main parties, we are in many ways rooted in a two-party mentality: if Labour is losing, then the Tories must win and vice versa. The idea that a ruling party could fail to get a plurality but still remain in power (albeit in a coalition) is one that might seem perfectly natural to the inhabitants of many proportional representation-using, coalition-loving countries out there but would seem entirely alien to us.
