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Showing posts with label Tory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tory. Show all posts

Saturday 6 August 2022

The people about to choose Britain’s next prime minister

Despite rumours to the contrary, the Tory faithful are exactly what you might imagine writes The Economist



It might be a queue for Marylebone Cricket Club, or perhaps an upmarket prostate clinic. There is ample linen. There are panama hats and pink cheeks and pink trousers; there is white hair and bald heads and a lurking suspicion that someone in the vicinity might bear the title “Major”. There are few women. There is almost no one, except the staff, who is not white.

The identity of the Tory party membership is a matter of national importance. The contest between Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, to become the leader of the Conservative Party will also decide Britain’s next prime minister. The franchise for this choice belongs to members of the Tory party, at least 160,000-odd of them. Probably. For no one can or will say how many Tory party members there actually are.

What is clear is that they are gathering. In Exeter and Eastbourne, in Cardiff and Cheltenham, Tories are mobilising to attend the hustings for their new leader. Go to these hustings and you can see them queuing, punctually, outside. Some say that the Tory faithful are not what you might think. The queues put paid to that idea: the Tories are precisely what you might think.



According to research from academics at Queen Mary University and Sussex University, 68% of Tory members are over 50; 96% are white; 21% belong to the National Trust or English Heritage; 66% are male (see chart). They are not quite as aristocratic as the panamas and perceptions might suggest: policemen and teachers are among those queuing to get into the hustings. Women are manifestly in the minority. Many are unwilling to speak to a journalist, scattering like startled fish when approached and proffering their husbands as spokesperson instead. The term “Tory wife” appears to be less misogyny than justifiable taxonomy.

Tories may be mockable. That does not mean that they are malignant (or that unusual for members of political parties; Labour’s are 93% white). It is a trope that deviancy lurks behind the upstanding Tory exterior. George Orwell wrote that for a murder to make a truly entertaining news story it should have been perpetrated by a pious Christian preacher or a “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch”. Edward Heath, a former Tory prime minister, felt his party consisted of “shits, bloody shits and fucking shits”.

But the mood at the hustings is benevolent. Mike Trevor, working at the Exeter event as a security guard (and one of the few non-white people there), considers the Tories a “very easy crowd”. Mr Trevor usually does arena concerts. Tories, he says, are “very nice” to deal with. Another guard pulls a face: some members had become stroppy when she took away their water bottles. In the queue, Tories—polite, if prone to the odd harrumph—shuffle forwards.

The hustings do reveal two misconceptions about the Tory party race. The first is the idea that it is about Mr Sunak and Ms Truss. There are, as it were, three of us in these hustings. Many members are there less to elect a new leader than to mourn their old one—and to berate his killer. As one Tory, a fan of Mr Sunak, regretfully observes, in the assassination of Boris Johnson Mr Sunak has been cast as Brutus. On this reading Mr Johnson’s fall was not caused by his own incompetence and duplicity; it was caused by Mr Sunak. It is notable that the largest cheer of the evening in Exeter comes when, during a montage film of past Tory highlights, Mr Johnson pops up celebrating his 2019 election victory. Banquo’s ghost rarely made a better entrance.

The other misconception involves a confusion over conjunctions. Ms Truss is currently well ahead of Mr Sunak—the favourite among mps and the public—in polling of Tory members. A recent YouGov poll put her support at 58%, and his at just 29%. Surveying such a small, opaque electorate is hard but commentators still wonder how, “despite” jibes that she is “bonkers” and a “human hand grenade”, this lead apparently yawns. Speak to Tories at the hustings and it is clear that with Ms Truss—as with Mr Johnson before her—the correct conjunction is not “despite” but “because”. Ms Truss may be “bonkers”, says Colin Trudgeon, a Tory member, but “I love a bit of bonkers. Boris…was nutty as a fruitcake.”

Inside the venues, preconceptions about the candidates are generally confirmed. Ms Truss is, as a now-famous clip in which she discussed British cheese made clear, a friend of the full stop. She peppers her speeches with them. Often even stopping. Midway through a sentence. For effect. She discusses emotive issues: Vladimir Putin, fishermen and proper crops. In our fields.

Mr Sunak, meanwhile, is a man who speaks in subclauses. Sentences and ideas accumulate; complexity is embraced; nuance noted. He discusses corporation tax with enthusiasm. Neither fully wows the audience. Afterwards, Tory members who speak to your correspondent consider that Mr Sunak was more “statesmanlike”. But inside it was Ms Truss’s pauses for which they whooped more.

Sunday 5 December 2021

Fraudsters of the world, come to London. And bring your dirty money

Kleptocrats love this country, knowing full well they’ll be free from proper scrutiny writes Nick Cohen in The Guardian

‘No one can say how many in the UK are living off immoral earnings.’ Illustration: Dominic McKenzie/The Observer 



There is no better representation of the decline of the English upper class into the global rich’s servant class than Ben Elliot. On the one hand, the co-chairman of the Tory party is now a rent collector, hauling in money for the Johnson administration from the Russian rich and native hedge fund bosses.

On the other, he is an actual servant: an upmarket flunkey, to be sure, praised by society magazines for his “puppyish schoolboy charm”, but a flunkey nonetheless. Elliot is a founder of the Quintessentially “concierge” service that gives the super-rich anything they want: luncheon on an iceberg; the Sydney Harbour bridge closed for a wedding proposal. There’s nothing Elliot won’t do for paying customers up to and including arranging a meeting with our future sovereign. Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is Elliot’s aunt and it appears that no considerations of good form or good manners have prevented him monetising the connection. Not that the prince appears to mind. A Quintessentially advert interrupts a montage of shots of yachts and celebrities to quote his royal highness as saying he is “particularly grateful” to Quintessentially for organising a party he attended. Members of Elliot’s Quintessentially club donate to the Conservatives. The Conservatives gave Elliot £1.4m of taxpayers’ money in 2016 to “attract the right high-value individual investors to the UK through bespoke programmes”. If on arrival, those high-value individuals went on to show how valuable they were by hiring Quintessentially and donating to the Tories, the circle would be complete.

Upstairs has moved downstairs in the remains of the Tory day and a large segment of British capitalism is now employed as the best servants money can buy. The law, PR, City, estate agency and banking know that easy riches come from serving the large part of the world where it pays to forget Balzac’s warning that the secret of a great fortune no one can explain is invariably an undetected crime. For want of an agreed name I propose “Corruptistan” to cover Russia and the ex-Soviet states, the kleptocracies of Africa and the Middle East and probably soon China as the communist elite learns how to expatriate its wealth. 

Given the secrecy of the financial system, the defunding of the police and regulatory authorities and the English libel law, no one can say how many in the UK are living off immoral earnings. But two statistics and one quotation give us a measure of the UK’s dependency culture. Graeme Biggar, of the National Economic Crime Centre, said a “disturbing proportion” of criminal money from the old Soviet Union is “laundered through UK corporate structures”. Companies House, meanwhile, has become a front organisation for organised crime. So welcoming is it to criminals that 335,000 of its listed companies do not reveal the name of their beneficial owners. And 4,000 of the names it appears to reveal turn out on close inspection to belong to children aged two or under.

Last month, Professor Sadiq Isah Radda, a Nigerian anti-corruption official, encapsulated the consequences of the UK’s tolerance of theft. An opponent of corruption in Nigeria, home to countless online scams? A joke figure, you might think. But Radda spoke with a seriousness no government minister can muster when he said the UK was “the most notorious safe haven for looted funds in the world today”. The corruption we facilitate destablised Nigeria and, he might have added, many other countries besides.

Last week, a handful of MPs asked why the Conservatives were so peculiarly soft on this particular crime. In 2017, they promised a law that would compel the foreign owners of UK property to reveal their identities. (The willingness to allow private and state criminals to launder their wealth anonymously through the prime London property market was Radda’s main charge against Boris Johnson.) Nothing has been heard of this bold “anti-corruption strategy” since.

Likewise, the government has said it wants to stop Companies House being a crime scene where anyone can set up a firm without proof of identity or the most cursory checks. Even the Conservative party appeared to agree that it should not be harder to apply for a passport than to set up a shell company. But once again nothing happened.As for the recommendations in the Russia report on money laundering, they vanished as soon as they were made.

The SNP’s Alison Thewliss asked: “I wonder who benefits from this delay. Is it the oligarchs and those to whom they donate?” Pat McFadden, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, asked Conservative MPs why they thought “their party has been such an attractive destination” for £2m in gifts from Russian donors.” Change must come soon or not at all. Britain has benefited so greatly from the wealth of the corrupt we may soon be at the stage where we cannot afford to clean ourselves up. So many people are making so much money, what was once outrageous has become normal. This to my mind is why the security services and the judges just shrug when oligarchs with links to hostile foreign powers use the intimidatory costs of England’s unreformed legal system to menace critics. No one likes hard questions about a nation’s guilty secrets, not even the men and women who are professionally obliged to ask them. Labour certainly believes that tolerance of fraud is now part of the government’s economic strategy and the Treasury wants to loosen what few protections exist to compensate the financial services industry for the Brexit debacle.

Cynical readers may not care as long as the UK can wallow in streams of hot money. They should recall how many times con artists have tried to fleece them. Online fraud is the crime you are most likely to suffer from, yet nowhere in the government’s online safety bill is there a word about fighting the fraudsters who flourish on social media platforms. Once the Tories started turning a blind eye, they found it impossible to stop.

You cannot profit from economic crimes committed abroad while enjoying the rule of law at home. The presence of the global plutocracy’s valets at the top of government and society shows the UK no longer even bothers to pretend that it can.

Friday 20 December 2019

Maybe Corbyn was right and Labour ‘won the argument’ after all?

The Conservatives have not had transformative ideas since Thatcher in the 1980s wtites JOHN MCTERNAN in The FT

Jeremy Corbyn has been much mocked for his claim that the Labour party “won the argument” in the UK general election. A defeat of historic proportions — Labour’s worst result since 1935 — would seem to prove otherwise. But what if Mr Corbyn wasn’t wrong? What if Labour has, in his words, “rewritten the terms of political debate”? 

Consider the evidence. Just this week Boris Johnson’s newly elected government restored bursaries to student nurses and vowed to put into law its commitment to increased funding for the National Health Service. The concession on nursing is a significant reversal of direction, but is being packaged with other policies as an acknowledgment of the new electorate that the Conservatives now represent. 

Winning seats that were formerly solidly Labour will shift the balance within the parliamentary Conservative party. New Tory MPs will find that many Labour arguments were driven more by place than by ideology. 

Yet something deeper is going on. From corporate capitalism to housing, from climate change to transport, Labour’s ideas are framing the decisions the new government is making. 

Take business. A common attack on Mr Corbyn is that he is “anti-business” — and there is plenty of evidence for that in the interventionist manifesto on which he stood. Yet how does one describe the reported comments of Mr Johnson at a diplomatic gathering when he was foreign secretary? “Fuck business” may be of a piece with Michael Gove’s quip that people “have had enough of experts”, but it is not far from the Corbynite narrative.  

Delegitimising business has traditionally been a fringe far-left position. It is now bipartisan. Think back to the general election campaign. Did either party reflect in their rhetoric or policies the fact that only 16 per cent of people in the UK work in the public sector? When both parties campaign as though the public sector is the norm and the benchmark, who speaks for competitive markets? 

Mr Johnson’s promise to intervene, to buy British and to use state aid to protect UK industries was interpreted as another example of parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn. But at what point does the mask actually become the face? When does Michael Heseltine-style intervention before breakfast, lunch and dinner become Bennite control over the commanding heights of the economy. As we learnt to our cost in the 1970s, government can’t pick winners but losers can sure pick governments. 

This is not a new process. It started with Mr Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, and became a dance as formal as a gavotte. Labour would propose a policy. The Tory government would denounce it as extreme. The tabloid press would pile in. Then the government would adopt it after all. It happened with energy price caps. And it happened with the living wage. 

The problem for the Tories is that they have not had ideologically transformative ideas for public policy since Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. The trifecta of right to buy, privatisation and ending union power were fundamental in impact and irreversible. And, in truth, those ideas were developed in the 1970s and set out in policy documents in opposition. 

This is not to say there haven’t been other Tory-initiated policies that have been a lasting success. But they’ve all been bipartisan. There is a continuity between Norman Fowler, Peter Lilley and, say, Alistair Darling and John Hutton on welfare. The same continuity is discernible between Kenneth Baker and Andrew Adonis on education, Kenneth Clarke and Alan Milburn on health. 

The core of political leadership is having a strong point of view — a question that you ask in every situation. For Thatcher’s policy unit it used to be: “Is there a more market-based solution to this problem?” And there always was. To Mr Corbyn’s Labour party it was: “Is there a way this policy can help build a socialist economy?” And there always was. 

The government was elected on the promise of fulfilling a process — “getting Brexit done” — rather than answering a question. It has not formulated the challenge about the future to which it is the only answer. 

The worst of the Conservative attempt to devise an agenda aimed at working people was shown in an infographic after a recent budget in which they boasted about cutting tax on beer and bingo. That one-dimensional vision of working-class needs and desires has been ditched, thankfully. But the void has to be filled — and that is where Labour policies present themselves. 

When Tory plans for new council house building are announced or the remake of rail franchising begins, it will all be the hand of Mr Corbyn. The Conservative party won the election, but they are far from winning the battle of ideas.

Thursday 1 November 2018

Finally, the Tories are discovering the state can be a force for good

Martin Kettle in The Guardian


 
Illustration by Mitch Blunt


According to WH Auden, all good dramas consist of two contrasting acts: “First, the making of a mistake; then, the discovery that it was a mistake.” A similar corrective arc often also applies in politics. On the issue of the progressive role of the state, the late-20th-century Conservative party made a historic mistake. Now it is struggling with the dawning of discovery.

The single most obvious thing to say about the Tory party in autumn 2018 is that it is split over Brexit. But the significance of the Tory divide on Brexit, and its tendency to dominate all aspects of domestic political coverage, masks another internal argument – one that is more important in terms of the party’s history, and may hold the key to its future too.

This second argument is about the necessary role of government in shaping economic and social policy. One way or another, this is an issue that has woven its way through Conservative history since the late 18th century. Tory leaders from William Pitt the Younger to Theresa May have confronted it. Philip Hammond’s budget this week was a striking embodiment of why the issue is both enduringly important and still politically unresolved.

His budget was not the end of austerity. But it was unquestionably a decisive move away from it. If the austerity doctrine of 2010-18 had still been in full force, the £68bn windfall in government receipts over the next five years announced this week would have been overwhelmingly used to get the finances back in the black by the mid 2020s as planned. Instead, the normally cautious Hammond chose to spend the lot, mainly on the NHS, but also in a cluster of short-term giveaways and to pump another £15bn into the economy next year.

This would not have happened in the previous eight years. It has happened because May is trying to reposition her party more centrally on domestic policy in the aftermath of the Brexit deal she hopes to secure. May herself would probably have gone further this week.

May and Hammond are not trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn”, as former chancellor George Osborne put it this week in an interview in which he offered a mea culpa on the EU referendum but not on austerity. But they see the need to counter the Labour leader. This was in many respects a holding budget, but it placed anti-austerity options in tax and spending and in the role of government back on to the Tory agenda.

May and Hammond are a bit like a couple circling a roundabout in their car, debating which route to follow, but clear which one they should no longer take.

This is where Auden’s point comes in. Many times in its pre-1975 history, the Conservative party found its way, often against its supporters’ instincts and interests, towards strengthening the role of government in rebalancing the economy in favour of the poor and the moderately waged. From Robert Peel’s reintroduction of peacetime income tax in 1842 onwards, the one-nation tradition was the key to the party’s famous ability to reinvent itself.

The problem the modern Tory party faces is not confined to the unpopularity of austerity. Its roots lie in the period after 1975, when Margaret Thatcher – massively aided by the press – captured the party with her rejection of postwar Keynesianism in favour of an agenda of privatisation, small government, tax cuts and individualism. It won the Tories four successive elections. But it was also massively destructive and divisive.

The Conservatives have not won a decisive general election majority since Thatcher did so in 1987. John Major, David Cameron and May have all led weak governments. In spite of efforts by all three, the party seems unable to move decisively beyond Thatcherism or to reconnect fully with its one-nation past at a time when it is needed. As one senior Tory put it bluntly to me recently: “We will never win a clear majority while we remain in thrall to Margaret Thatcher.”


  Harold Macmillan: many of today’s Conservative MPs relate to his approach. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

Brexit is tightly bound in to this problem. Most ardent Brexiteers are ardent Thatcherites, just as most Thatcherites are Brexiteers. Many of the most threadbare of the Brexit fantasies – those about easy free trade deals, a no-deal break with the EU, Singapore-style deregulation and Britain’s supposedly enhanced standing in the world – contain ghostly echoes of Thatcher.

But the central issue is political economy. In 1938, Harold Macmillan warned the Tory party: “Unless we can continue this peaceful evolution from a free capitalism to planned capitalism, or, it may be, a new synthesis of capitalist and socialist theory, there will be little hope of preserving the civil, democratic and cultural freedoms.” No Tory MP would write in such terms today. But the essence of this warning remains valid on many levels 80 years on.

Today’s party contains more MPs who relate to Macmillan’s approach than you would ever guess from the constant publicity given to the Brexiteers. The most prominent of these is May herself, with her repeated – but unfulfilled – commitment to the section in the 2017 manifesto that said “government can and should be a force for good – and its power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people”.

May is not alone. Justine Greening said this week that the Tories should “get into the centre ground” and that they had not properly connected with the public in more than 30 years. George Freeman wrote in September that aspirational professional voters under 45 are rejecting the old politics. “Unless the Conservative party reconnects with them, we risk becoming a rump party of nostalgic nationalists,” he claimed. Nicky Morgan wrote last month that “we cannot secure growth in the 21st century by following a 20th-century model”. Jesse Norman, in his recent book on Adam Smith, writes: “It is easy to forget the central importance of the state in his thought, as protector of the nation, adjudicator and enforcer of justice … provider of public works, infrastructure and local schools, and, yes, as regulator of markets.” Most of the 2010 and 2015 Tory intakes share these instincts.

These MPs do not have identical views. But they all share the crucial recognition that government is, as the US writer Garry Wills puts it, “a necessary good not a necessary evil”. If Labour people tend to be too starry-eyed about government, too many Tories, influenced by Thatcher’s aberrant period of power, tend to be unduly distrustful of it. The public, who depend on good government, do not share either view.

The most interesting current question in British politics is this: what comes after May’s Tories and Corbyn’s Labour? My guess is that a large part of the answer will depend on the road May and Hammond decide to take off the roundabout to which they have belatedly returned this week.

Friday 5 January 2018

Tony Blair on Brexit

Tony Blair


2018 will be the year when the fate of Brexit and thus of Britain will be decided. 2017 was too early in the negotiation. By 2019, it will be too late.

Realistically, 2018 will be the last chance to secure a say on whether the new relationship proposed with Europe is better than the existing one. And to insist that the ‘deal’ contains the necessary detail to make the say meaningful.

Today we publish ‘What We Now Know’, what we have learnt about Brexit since 23rd June 2016.

I make no secret of my desire that Britain stays in the European Union. This is the most important decision we have taken as a nation since the Second World War. It decides the destiny and fortunes of our children for years to come. And I believe passionately that by exiting the powerful regional bloc of countries on our doorstep, to whom we are linked physically by the Channel Tunnel, commercially by the Single Market, historically by myriad ancient ties of culture and civilisation, and politically by the necessity of alliance in an era which will be dominated by the USA in the West and China and India in the East, we are making an error the contemporary world cannot understand and the generations of the future will not forgive.

But the campaign in the first instance is not to reverse the decision; but to claim the right to change our minds once we see the terms of the new relationship.

No one disputes the 2016 vote. And no one disputes that if it stands as the expression of British opinion, we will leave.

The issue is whether as facts emerge, as the negotiation proceeds and we have clarity over the alternative to present membership of the EU, we have the right to change our mind; whether the ‘will of the people’ – this much abused phrase - is deemed immutable or is permitted to mutate as our perception of reality becomes better informed. 







When we voted in 2016, we knew we were voting against our present membership of the European Union, but not what the future relationship with Europe would be.

It was like having a General Election in which the question is ‘Do You Like the Government’? If that were the question, few incumbent Governments would be re-elected.

Once we know the alternative, we should be entitled to think again, either through Parliament or an election or through a fresh referendum, which will, of course, not be a re-run of the first because it will involve this time a choice based on knowledge of the alternative to existing EU membership.

Over the past months the Brexit landscape – hitherto obscured in the fog of claim and counter claim – is being illuminated.

We have now had the Budget prediction that, due to Brexit, economic growth is going to be below expectation not just this year but averaging 1.5% for the next 5 years in a row. This has not happened for over 30 years. This is in addition to the fall in our currency, fall in living standards and now the first falls in employment.

Concomitant with that was the admission that we would have less and not more to spend on the NHS and that, for the next years at least, we will not be getting money back from Europe but, rather, giving a large sum to it.

Then there was the Northern Ireland negotiation. The claim the issue is now ‘resolved’ is risible. It is merely postponed. Instead, the negotiation revealed the nature of the real choices we face and the tension at the heart of the Government’s negotiating position.

In essence, there are 4 options in approaching the Brexit negotiation:

To re-think and stay, best done in a reformed Europe, where we use the Brexit vote as leverage to achieve reform.

To exit the political structures of the EU, but stay in the economic structures ie the Single Market and Customs Union.

To exit both the political and the economic structures of Europe but try to negotiate a bespoke deal which recreates the existing economic benefits and keeps us close to Europe politically.

To exit both structures, to make a virtue of leaving, to negotiate a basic Free Trade Agreement and market ourselves as ‘Not Europe’.

Here is the rub: all the last three options are Brexit. But they have vastly different impacts and outcomes.

The Government has ruled out option 2, is seeking to negotiate option 3, but a substantial part of the Tory Party is prepared to go for option 4.

The problem with option 3 is that this is simply not negotiable without major concessions which make a mockery of the case for leaving.

The problem with option 4 is that it would involve significant economic pain as we adjust our economy to the new terms of trade.

It is absurd to say that it is undemocratic to demand that the people be free to have a say on what the final deal is, given the wide disparity in the forms of Brexit and their consequences.

How can we assess the true ‘will of the people’ before we know what the alternative to present EU membership looks like given that the alternatives have such different effects?

Northern Ireland is a metaphor for the central Dilemma of this negotiation: we are either in the Single Market and Customs Union; or we will have a Hard Border and Hard Brexit.

It is the difference between the status of Norway and that of Canada. In the Norway case, there is full access to the Single Market but with its obligations, including freedom of movement.

In the case of Canada, there is a standard FTA with considerable easing of trade in goods but with border checks and without anything like the services access of the Single Market.

This really is a zero sum game: the nearer the Norway option, the more the obligations; the nearer the Canada option, the less the access.

It is not a matter of who is the toughest negotiator. The Dilemma flows naturally from the way the Single Market was created. It is a unique trading area with a single system of regulation and a single system of arbitration namely the ECJ.

The whole point of it is that it is not a FTA. It is qualitatively different.

So there is no way you can say I want to be out of its rules, but in its advantages.

The Single Market is one game; a FTA is another.

Think of it in this way. Suppose the English FA wants to arrange a football match with France. There are many things to negotiate about: the venue, the timing, the price of the tickets etc.

But suppose the FA then said to their French counterparts, we also want to negotiate whether we have 15 players on our team not 11. The French would say sorry but you have the wrong address, talk to the Rugby Federation.

Yet this seems to be the negotiating position of the Government.

David Davis asserts we will leave the Single Market and Customs Union but replicate ‘the exact same benefits’ in a new FTA.

Boris Johnson talks of diverging from Europe’s regulation but having frictionless border trade and full access to Europe’s services market.

The PM insists we will have the most comprehensive trade deal ever, weirdly forgetting we already have it.

Philip Hammond is arguing for close alignment to Europe after Brexit.

Meanwhile Liam Fox is cheerfully talking up the trade deals we will make once we are out of the Customs Union and away from that alignment.

Of course the FTA can be far reaching, though the more it covers the more complicated the negotiation and the greater the regulatory alignment.

But it can never replicate the ‘exact same benefits’ of the Single Market; not without obedience to its obligations and regulation.

The concessions we were rightly forced to make in respect of Northern Ireland express and expose the Dilemma.

If we want freedom of movement of people across the border on the island of Ireland, we can do it but only by effectively abandoning border controls on migration. So someone could move from mainland Europe to Dublin to Belfast to Liverpool without any check.

It is often said by Brexiteers that Norway and Sweden don't have a hard border for the movement of people. It is true. But that is because Norway is part of the Single Market; and so accepts freedom of movement.

In any event, it is now virtually conceded that Britain needs the majority of the European migrant workers and as our study shows, Brexit is already seriously harming recruitment in vital sectors, including the NHS.

If we want free movement of goods, then Northern Ireland will have to be in a relationship with the EU where the rules of the Customs Union still apply.

But if we do that, then how can the UK be out of it?

This is the conundrum we will face across the board. How will financial services and other sectors be able to trade freely in Europe without regulatory alignment?

Suppose Europe even agrees to do this on a ‘pick and choose’ basis, the ‘alignment’ they will demand will be alignment with Europe’s rules.

And how will disputes in these circumstances be arbitrated other than through the involvement of the ECJ?

Once this central Dilemma becomes manifest during the negotiation, the split in the Government will re-emerge.

The PM will still be in favour of Option 3, making the concessions and trying to present them as consistent with ‘taking back control’.

The true-believer Leavers will recognise the concessions contradict the essential reasons for leaving and will be in favour of then moving to option 4.

The British Civil Service is – or at least was in my time- probably the best in Europe. The problem isn't with the negotiators but with the negotiation.

The risk is that we end up with the worst of all worlds. We muddle along, alternating between options 3 and 4, depending on what part of the Tory Party is in the ascendency, try to ‘leave’ without really leaving, with a patchwork of arrangements which allows the Government to claim Brexit has been done; but which in reality only mean we have lost our seat at the table of rule-making.

This would be a grim outcome for the country.

And it is where the Labour Party faces its own challenge.

I would like the Labour Party to be on the high ground of progressive politics, explaining why membership of the European Union is right as a matter of principle, for profound political as well as economic reasons.

I disagree with our present position strategically.

But even tactically, it is mistaken.

First, because the Labour Party is saying that we too would do Brexit, we cannot attack its vast distractive impact. Labour could mount such a powerful assault on the Government’s record from the appalling state of the NHS to crime, which through neglect and failure to support the police is on the rise again, if we were saying to the country: here's the agenda which could be delivered for the people were not for the fact that all the energies of Government and substantial amounts of cash are devoted to Brexit.

And, second, it puts us in a vulnerable position when the Government concludes ‘the deal’ some time in 2018.

My bet is that the Government will try to negotiate an agreement which leaves much detail still to negotiate, because there is no way round the Dilemma. They will bank some low hanging fruit possibly e.g. tariff free access for goods (leaving for later non tariff issues). For Europe since they have a whacking great surplus with Britain on goods, this is a no-brainer.

But on access for services, which have driven most of our export growth over the last 20 years, are 70% of our economy, and where we have the surplus, we will be blocked without major concessions. Unless the Government has found some miraculous way round the Dilemma, they will probably try to emulate the December Northern Ireland ‘agreement’ and have some general headings – more aspiration than detail - with a lot to negotiate after March 2019 during the transitional period where Britain will continue to abide by the rules of the Single Market.

The Government will then say it is this deal or no deal and Labour will be left arguing that they would be better negotiators. This isn't credible.

And here Labour has its own ‘cake and eat it’ phrases. The Shadow Chancellor says we will not be in ‘the’ Single Market but ‘a’ Single Market.

The Shadow Industry Minister talks of keeping the benefits of the Customs Union agreements but still being free to negotiate our own trade deals.

This is confusing terrain on which to fight.

Far better to fight for the right for the country to re-think, demand that we know the full details of the new relationship before we quit the old one, go to the high ground on opposing Brexit and go after the Tories for their failures to tackle the country’s real challenges.

Make Brexit the Tory Brexit.

Make them own it 100%.


Show people why Brexit isn't and never was the answer.

Open up the dialogue with European leaders about reforming Europe, a dialogue they're more than willing to have now because they realise Brexit also damages Europe economically and politically.

At every PMQs nail each myth of the Brexit campaign, say why the Tory divisions are weakening our country - something only credible if we are opposed to Brexit not advocating a different Brexit, and challenge the whole farce head on of a Prime Minister leading our nation in a direction which even today she can't bring herself to say she would vote for.

If we do leave Europe, the governing mind will have been that of the Tory right. But, if Labour continues to go along with Brexit and insists on leaving the Single Market, the handmaiden of Brexit will have been the timidity of Labour.

Saturday 30 December 2017

How British politics rediscovered Tony Benn and Enoch Powell

John McTernan in the Financial Times

All political lives . . . end in failure”. Enoch Powell’s memorable line resonates 40 years on not only because it seems so true, but because it was underscored by his own career. A brilliant academic, a decorated soldier and a reforming health minister, Powell was set for the highest office until the racist “Rivers of Blood” speech exiled him to the Commons backbenches and eventually to Northern Ireland as an Ulster Unionist MP. 

Yet despite the well-known arc of triumph to tragedy, the time has surely come to revisit his dictum — for Powell is the politician who dominates our age as no other does. The arguments that he articulated in the 1960s and 1970s resonate across the world. On the one hand, the seemingly unstoppable rise of the populist right, from France’s Marine Le Pen to Hungary’s Viktor Orban. On the other, the abiding split on Europe within the Conservative party that no leader has ever healed. The age of Brexit is the age of Powell. 

Why? First, British politics is dominated by immigration, a discussion conducted in terms that could have been drawn straight from the book of Powell. His infamous 1968 speech is still deeply disturbing to read but its tropes are all too recognisable. 

There is the obsession with numbers. Powell asks that since “it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited?” — a view that has its echo in the current Tory government’s fixation on cutting net migration to tens of thousands. There is the argument, too, of the pressure on public services. And there is the acceptance that UK residents are the victims of immigration: “The . . . sense of alarm and resentment lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.” The eugenicist strand is all that is missing from contemporary politics. 

Arguments which were so repellent and unacceptable that Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet have become mainstream. Paradoxically, it was the migration of white Christians from eastern Europe after 2004 that proved the political tipping point in the UK, legitimising a discourse about immigration that claimed to be about culture rather than race, but had clear roots in Powell’s racism. All this despite the fact that the apocalyptic visions of Powell were refuted by the reality of modern Britain. When Prince Harry marries Meghan Markle next year, the Royal Family will, like so many families, have a mixed race member. That success is a measure of just how wrong Powell got his predictions. 

Yet, arguments are one of the great political legacies — and while Powell lost in fact, he has won in rhetoric. The Brexit Leave vote was not just due to his argument but also to the cowardice of leaders of both main political parties in not challenging outright untruths about migration. Powellite arguments were marshalled against one of the institutions he most strongly opposed, the EU. It was Enoch wot won it. 

Finally, Powell would appreciate the irony that his once mighty Conservative party is being propped up in power by the Ulster Unionist’s usurpers, the Democratic Unionist party. The narrow views of a political party from Northern Ireland hold the whip hand in the most important peace time negotiations ever undertaken by the UK. 

The observation that all political careers do not end in failure is not restricted to the right of British politics. It is not merely that Jeremy Corbyn spent decades in the wilderness before increasing votes for the Labour party in this year’s snap election, depriving Theresa May of both a majority and a mandate. Take a look at his policies and his politics. They are routinely assaulted as coming from the 1970s. Nationalisation, council house building and government-planned industrial strategy. 

But they come from a very specific source in the 1970s: Tony Benn, another grand politician whose career ended in apparent failure. A successful technocratic minister in Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s, after Labour’s surprise defeat in the 1970 general election Benn turned sharply to the left. He shaped the Labour governments of the 1970s, with their increase in nationalisation and state investment in industry. He was the architect of Labour’s 1983 manifesto — the so-called “longest suicide note in history” — which led the party to a historic defeat. Benn’s state-sponsored companies collapsed, his bid for deputy leader of the Labour party failed, the Alternative Economic Strategy — the siege economy which was his great ideological project — abandoned. 

And finally, under Tony Blair the party became New Labour, accepting much of the Thatcherite settlement. It embraced the market, celebrated business and was an unprecedented success electorally. Benn and Bennism was over. 

Or so it was thought. Now Benn and Powell — whose careers ended so badly in the 1970s — dominate the ideas of British politics. The Tory party is riven by a divide over Europe deeper than it has been at any time since Powell and Benn led the campaign against common market membership in the 1975 referendum. With the migration target, and a majority sustained only by DUP MPs, Mrs May’s government cannot escape Powell’s long shadow. Meanwhile, in Mr Corbyn’s Labour party, state planning is back. With promises of tax rises targeted on corporations and the wealthy, this is the return of Old Labour with a vengeance. In British politics there has rarely been such successful second acts.

Saturday 2 September 2017

On Tory attempts to Activate British youth

Skepta will make a video on a skateboard park with his crew, singing ‘I’d do anything to please her, my Theresa, got a smile like Mona Lisa, as strong as Julius Caesar, as long as DUP get money to appease her’


Mark Steel in The Independent


This is a wonderful development: a youth group has spontaneously erupted to support the Conservatives, and calls itself Activate. It’s surprising this has taken so long, as you often hear young people in nightclub queues saying: “Listen up blud, a man Hammond getting bare fiscal growth yu get me, him one sick chancellor bruv.”

The plan must be for Chris Grayling to appear on Radio 1, interviewed about Brexit by Jameela Jamil, who says: “Wow, your riff with the Danes about butter tariffs was like totally AWESOME.”

At their conference, Conservative members will be told to wander into random locations chanting “Oooo Andrea Leadsom”, as this will result in young people joining in until it’s a Christmas number one featuring Stormzy in a duet with Amber Rudd.

Skepta will make a video on a skateboard park with his crew, singing: “I’d do anything to please her, my Theresa, got a smile like Mona Lisa, as strong as Julius Caesar, as long as DUP get money to appease her.”

Or the Conservatives may concede that the grime scene has committed itself to Labour, so they’ll have to co-opt a different style of youth music – such as thrash metal.

Then at fundraising garden fetes, the local Conservative MP can announce: “Thank you so much to Thomas and Frances Diddlesbury for such generous use of their grounds as ever, and for Lady Spiglington who surpassed herself this year with her delightful vol-au-vents and exquisite cranberry salad, and now I’m sure you’ll all join me in welcoming our special guest band to see us through the evening – let’s hear it for ‘Skull-crushing Death’.”

Then the singer will inform the crowd: “This first song is about the need for a tough stance on Brexit – sing along with the chorus that goes ‘They’re gonna crush your bones, crush your bones nnnnnygggggghaaaa vrrrrrr the European single market will lead us to Satan Satan Satan Luxembourg is run by Satan’.”

It’s typically astute that the spontaneous young Conservatives chose Activate as the name of their group, proving their sharp sense of youth culture, because like Momentum, this has the crucial quality of being three syllables.

They probably had lengthy discussions on which three-syllable word to choose, from a shortlist that included Caliphate, Urinate, Camper van, Rwanda and Wheelie-bin.

The next stage will be for Activate to collect millions of followers on Twitter, posting pithy youthful Tory tweets such as: “OMG! David Davis negotiation Gr8 massive love bro”, and “Bring back da hunt dem fox get merked proper lol.”

Because what the Conservatives have worked out, is that Jeremy Corbyn succeeded in appealing to millions of young people because he put stuff on Twitter.

No one was bothered about what he said on Twitter; it could be abolish tuition fees, or quadruple them – but the main thing is he said it on Twitter.

Then lots of young people said, “Oh look, like wow that old dude is on Twitter and shit”, and started singing his name.

So the Conservatives just have to copy the Corbyn image and they’ll win back the youth vote. Michael Fallon will grow a beard, and when he’s asked about Trident, he’ll say, “Talking of massive weapons, look at this beauty” – and display a prize-winning radish from his allotment.

This is why they’re promoting Jacob Rees-Mogg. Corbyn may be naïve enough to think he won popularity amongst the young by opposing zero-hour contracts, but the real reason was that young people are won over by anyone who seems a bit quirky.

So if Mogg doesn’t work, they’ll pick a leader from the people who go out on the first heats of Britain’s Got Talent, choosing someone who dresses as an ostrich and eats bees.

The Conservatives have a problem in trying to create an organisation that copies Momentum. It’s that Momentum didn’t just enrage the Tories – it also infuriated most Labour MPs, by backing someone who had spent his life on the edge of the Labour Party (usually in opposition to the leadership).

So it’s handy that they claim Activate has sprung up spontaneously, in a vast surge of natural youthful enthusiasm for working without a contract and having nowhere to live.

Amongst this energised adolescence is Activate’s National Chairman, Gary Markwell, who has suddenly decided to pull together these young forces who are crying out to be led.

He’s a reflection of how this is a grassroots movement, because up until now Gary has had no connection whatsoever with the hierarchy of the Conservative Party – except for being a campaign manager for Theresa May and Boris Johnson for ten years.


Now he’s suddenly decided to spontaneously set up Activate, in the same way that Nigel Farage might announce: “It’s never occurred to me before, but I think I might start campaigning to leave the EU.”

They’ve made an excellent start, because the way to win young people over, according to any faint study of the nation’s youth, must be to prove the Conservatives are the party of compassion and spirit and youthful energy.
So a Whatsapp group, described as a “precursor” to Activate, has been revealed to have had a fascinating discussion about the issue of “chavs”. An event in a working-class area is described as: “A fine opportunity to observe homo chav. And gas them all.”

It’s then suggested they could have medical experiments performed on them, to see how “they’re good at producing despite living rough”, and “substituted for animals for testing” and on and on.

That should do it. The Tories are already on 17 per cent of the under-24 vote, and Activate should guarantee it goes a long way down from there.

Sunday 28 May 2017

British voters support every point on it, but the public square echoes with summary dismissal - The mystery of Jeremy Corbyn

Tabish Khair in The Hindu




How does one account for the fact that most U.K. voters support every point of the Labour manifesto, but the Tories, despite fumbles, are still leading in opinion polls by about 10 percentage points?

It is two weeks since the Labour manifesto was ‘leaked’. Immediately all the tabloids and most of the broadsheets went to town decrying the manifesto. It is the “second-longest suicide note in history”, they scoffed.

The hara-kiri reference was to the disastrous and divisive Labour manifesto of 1983, dubbed the “longest suicide note in history”. It is not an accurate reference. This 2017 manifesto is not protectionist like the 1983 one, and it promotes very restrained nationalisation. Moreover, the 1983 Labour manifesto was anti-Europe, anti-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), and uncompromisingly pacifist.


Not quite a ‘suicide note’


The 2017 manifesto is not anti-NATO; it even endorses NATO’s defence requirements. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has repeatedly explained that sometimes collective military interventions can be justified, though he has also criticised the hasty wars of recent years.

Similarly, his plan to nationalise the railway services is not necessarily an ‘old-fashioned leftist idea’. It is a bid to bring government-controlled railways back onto a level playing field, thus undercutting the monopolies of private companies and providing commuters with more options. Most voters support this, as they do his plans to abolish education fees, provide more and cheaper housing, and improve the National Health Service. And yet Corbyn is expected to lose — narrowly by some sympathisers, hugely by his opponents. Why is that so?

Some of it has to do with Corbyn. He comes across as a severely honest but uncharismatic leader from the past, someone who engages with ideas (whether you agree or disagree with them) and not sound bites. The media does not like such politicians, as we know in India too. They provide boring copy.

The problem facing Labour is that of credibility: voters agree with their manifesto, but they do not believe it can be implemented. This is especially true of the ‘middle’ voters, who usually sway elections: many of them feel that Mr. Corbyn is idealistically leftist.


Deviating from core principles

It has to be said in Mr. Corbyn’s defence that for decades Labour has been diluting its pro-worker platform and the Tories increasing or sustaining their free-market platform.
This has not been held against the Tories by many in the ‘middle’, while Labour, because of its compromises, has lost ground to the far right, even when it has won elections.

It is also a morbid world in which many ‘middle’ voters feel that something absolutely necessary for citizens cannot be done for fear of offending capital!
Surely, a nation is not a corporation or an individual, both of which can go bankrupt, and a politician’s first responsibility is to citizens?

In that sense, Mr. Corbyn’s manifesto is a gamble — to attract more ordinary voters back into the folds of Labour, on the assumption that concrete policies will count for more than xenophobic rhetoric for many of them.

But are the policies outlined by Mr. Corbyn ‘sustainable’? Many papers and all tabloids seem to claim that they are not.

One way to answer this is to look at the general outline of what Mr. Corbyn is promising: he is promising to “transform” the lives of ordinary Britons. This, in effect, was also what Donald Trump had promised the Americans, and both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron had promised the French.

Interestingly, at least some of the tabloids that have dismissed Mr. Corbyn’s promise were far less critical of similar claims to shake the cart by Mr. Trump. As interestingly, Mr. Trump, Mr. Macron (at least until he got elected) and Ms. Le Pen, in very different ways, had offered less concrete policies to induce us to believe that they could make any significant dent in the status quo.

Mr. Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto has clearer ideas: a pledge not to increase middle class taxes but to tax the top 5% more heavily, action to shrink the growing wage gap between employees and top management, a better housing policy than the Tories, etc. Even his position on the European Union seems to be more concrete than Tory leader Theresa May’s vacuous statement, redolent of colonial hubris, that she will be a “bloody difficult woman” during Brexit negotiations!


The media’s role

It remains perfectly valid to ask whether these Labour measures are enough or fully ‘sustainable’, but that is not what is being done by much of the U.K. media. Instead, the very effort is being dismissed.

Is it the case that, being paid huge salaries by the neo-liberal dream, which is becoming a nightmare for many, British media leaders (who are not necessarily editors) do not wish to question its myths. Especially the cardinal myth that ‘national bankruptcy’ can be avoided only by passing on public debts to individuals, as private debts, while nationally subsidising banks and corporations.

Tuesday 9 May 2017

​Enemies of the state​:​ the 40-year Tory project to shrink public services

Polly Toynbee and David Walker in The Guardian

Just as he reaches the end of his inspection, the environmental health officer spots the meat pies. A stack of them have tumbled on to a shelf on the floor of the storeroom, not in the chiller. A flicker of alarm crosses the transport cafe owner’s face. Pies are big on his menu. He sighs. “Well, it’s complicated,” and the story unfolds. The pies used to be made by so-and-so but the company owners split acrimoniously and it’s all a bit chaotic now.

“Ah, yes,” says the inspector. “I know this one.” He has the local background and, as he probes and prods, the cafe proprietor admits sheepishly that the pies arrive with a scrappy piece of paper, no official invoice, dubiously labelled “organic” with no list of contents, paid for in cash to an old chap called Gramps off the back of a lorry.

Here in Huntingdonshire, the number of environmental health officers has been cut by a third over the past five years. “But the number of food outlets grows, 1,300 on our patch, with a high churn in ownership,” says the chief officer.

These public servants are a quiet lot, meticulous, precise; just another workaday arm of the state that goes unnoticed. It’s the taken-for-granted state. If a waiter swears the chicken tikka masala contains no peanuts, we expect someone to have checked, as the wellbeing of those with severe allergies depends on it.

But austerity is sweeping all this away. Local knowledge and expertise dissipate. Who remembers, before new building starts, the location of contaminated land, industrial waste, disused gas works? Pest control is on the wane. There is no out-of-hours anti-noise service.


A boy plays on an iPad at an early-learning centre. The idea of the state and what it provides has been systematically derided. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The fast-disappearing environmental health officer – in England, their numbers down by 25% over five years – is just one example of how the state is shrinking, its capacities dwindling and its fabric stretching thin. This is not just a regrettable deficit-reducing necessity, but a long-term political project to return us to a pre-second world war dominance of the private realm. And so far, that seems to have worked, with relatively little complaint from a public that has widely accepted the story of the exchequer’s “maxed-out credit card”. Opinion polls suggest a sense of resignation that has allowed the functions of the state to be dismembered, fragmented and degraded as deliberate policy.

Diminished trust in the public realm is part of the explanation for the Brexit vote. “Take back control” was a perverse slogan that cleverly captured a feeling of things falling apart. That is because the idea of the state has been systematically disrespected and derided as a concept to be regarded with suspicion. People may rely in their daily lives on myriad unseen state services, yet they are encouraged to despise the bureaucrats who keep everything running.

The shrinkage was no emergency operation to balance the books: it was the realisation of a 40-year rightwing project to downgrade, downsize and disparage the public realm. David Cameron and George Osborne committed to push the state down to 36% of GDP or less, for ever, and Philip Hammond repeated that target in the March budget. Current spending is now just under 38%, with the target of 36% to be reached in 2020. Getting there means a volume of public services greatly smaller than in equivalent European countries. People ask why German roads, health services and civic environments are so superior: the answer is that their state is larger than ours, at 44% of GDP. Why is Danish wellbeing so much higher than ours? Their state provides more comfort, being in receipt of 50% of GDP.

In the general election, Brexit occludes the question, which ultimately every election has to be about: are we willing to pay for a state that secures wellbeing? The Tories won’t admit that Brexit demands more not less government. Theresa May has talked of the good that government does, but has declined to face the fiscal consequences. For its part, Labour (and the Scottish Nationalists) won’t acknowledge that soaking “the rich” and raking in more from uncollected taxes won’t provide enough revenue: median earners and all of us have to pay more.

Meanwhile, the NHS is now squeezed more harshly than ever in its history. Schools are losing staff in the latest cuts. This April’s removal of an epic £12bn in credits and benefitswill cause inequality to take off as steeply as it did in the 1980s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, with a 50% rise in child poverty by 2020.

What is less reported is how the thinning of public services weakens bonds of community as the emblems of orderliness disappear – the vanishing park keepers, estate caretakers, station masters, guards, crown post office counters, district nurses, health visitors, local police on the beat and community support officers.

When she was home secretary May cut police numbers by a fifth. Crime is falling across the western world, but the work of the police is increasingly about reassurance and social order. The thinning blue line fills the gaps left as other services stretch and snap: it is the last resort. On a typical night shift in Bedford and Luton, police hear the cries of distress, the suicide attempts, the terrified, the psychotic and the shrieking family rows that remind us that people will always need help; the police are often the only ones left to respond.


School are losing staff in the latest round of cuts. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

What is the social glue that binds us to Britishness if not the things we share collectively? Government underpins pride in who we are. When fine old town halls from Sheffield to Hornsey, north London, are sold off as boutique hotels, when councils sell slices of parks, when libraries and local museums close, we lose what defines us. Contracts with Capita, Virgin, Sodexo and the rest are written on water. The sale of everything from power stations, property and basic transport systems to foreign powers is a form of treason other countries resist.

Marketisers, outsourcers, asset-strippers and state-shrinkers are not patriots: they surf the world on seas of money, undermining community and nationality. The NHS and the BBC stand as last bastions, but under constant assault from anti-statists affronted by their very success.

Part of the dismembering has been the deliberate complexification of services and blurred lines of responsibility. Successive governments’ attitude to services has been to cut bits off, chop them up and, bizarrely, force their limbs to compete with one another, trying to portray them as commercial. Schools must be academies in chains with reassuringly market-oriented names – Enterprise, Oasis, Reach or Harris (named after the carpets magnate). The NHS must be broken into trusts vying with each other for business. The frail must hold individual budgets to purchase their own care privately. Some of these services may be good – but this approach indicates a flight from the idea that the state itself does good.

Outsourcing, offloading and privatising leaves less of the state and less that is ostensibly ours, even though it is still paid for by our taxes. Gigantic, mainly overseas companies and often foreign governments own slabs of utilities, land, property and infrastructure that were once ours.

Not even our sewage belongs to us. The government created a company called Tideway, comfortably underpinned by Treasury guarantees, to work on behalf of privately owned Thames Water to construct a £4.2bn tunnel to carry sewagealongside the river. Thames Water is owned by shifting international investors, whose sealed, ambiguous contracts include Chinese corporations supervised by the Communist party, although cheaper finance could be raised by the British state. The National Audit Office is rightly anxious about the taxpayer’s huge liabilities, but Tideway managed to frighten ministers with warnings of raw sewage spilling into the Thames. So who gains?

Sir Ian Byatt, a former Treasury official who was the first head of Ofwat, the water regulator, gives a forthright answer: neither the fish in the Thames nor households will benefit. “Thames Water is an incredibly complicated company. There will be an array of extra dividends sliced and diced into the pockets of all these different interests along the way.” The state could do simpler, smaller schemes more cheaply. Paying needlessly high interest rates, the cost of the super sewer will be added to all Thames Water customers’ bills, who have no choice but to pay. Digging has just begun.


What we do together through our taxes … is worth more than any private gain through market transactions


Since the Thatcher privatisations, the UK has been subject to a giant experiment in the ability of markets to sustain the common interest, with light-touch regulation. Over time, the failures have multiplied. The government itself now inveighs against the cartel grip of the big six energy companies. Markets dashed for gas, regardless of security of supply; they ditched nuclear and only turned to wind and solar with hefty state incentives, then stopped as soon as those were axed. However faltering, only the state can confront climate change – which is why the right clings to climate change denial.

Localism has often been another assault on the state, breaking up central government to cast chunks down to impoverished councils, handing over the axe. Cuts of a fifth in English council budgets between 2010 and 2015 have been grossly unfair, poor Liverpool cut hardest, rich Dorset least. Soon councils will keep their own business rates, worsening regional inequalities: Westminster makes so much it could pay its denizens a dividend, while Middlesbrough is left penniless.

Our ageing population needs more, not less state support. Take podiatry, an unglamorous backwater of the NHS, cut back by commissioners struggling to finance A&E or maternity. But feet matter, too, never more than with the rocketing cases of type 2 diabetes. Southampton is typical, where we found how cuts to NHS foot care have serious consequences for mobility: every week in England, 135 diabetics have gangrenous limbs amputated that could have been saved if foot ulcers had been caught sooner. Across the NHS, cuts in prevention lead to higher spending later.

In Shropshire, the sudden axing of the Link bus service connecting 5,000 people across a string of villages has wrecked many lives: those without cars who used to travel daily to Bridgnorth for work, shopping or doctor’s appointments are now left isolated with just one weekly bus, driven by a volunteer. Compare that with the borough of Reading, a rare council that clung to running its own buses when John Major privatised most: it makes £1m a year so efficiently that 93% of journeys are taken by its popular buses, not cars. That’s just one challenge to the prevailing politics that claims the state always does everything worse.

What confronts Britain in the 21st century is a class of problem that only collective action can solve. How to stop inequality being amplified generation after generation? The country’s 3,500 children’s centres were one of Labour’s best achievements, founded on all the evidence that helping children in their early years makes most difference. But many centres have shut, had vital services ripped out, leaving others no more than shells for skimpy private nurseries. But on a recent visit to Springfield children’s centre in the West Midlands district of Sandwell, we saw parents on the edge of despair rescued; listening to their stories should weaken the hardest anti-state heart.

Only the state can deal with looming problems in productivity, regional imbalance, energy, climate change, automation, reskilling. Take research and development. The Sheffield engineering startup Magnomatics is developing a magnetic gearbox for hybrid cars that was invented at Sheffield University in 2000 and cuts fuel consumption by 35%. Such projects take patience and funding, both in scarce qualities among short-termist venture capitalists; only state support with adequate research funds could see the gearbox through to use in cars for 2022. But Britain has a lot less R&D for these “catapult” schemes than competitor countries.

Take another case of creative state funding: the Royal Shakespeare Company took seven years to develop the worldwide hit Matilda the Musical, “the most difficult and expensive show”, according to the executive director and “nothing short of a miracle” according to reviewers. No commercial producer could invest that much for so long: now it yields great dividends for the RSC and the exchequer. But though the cultural sector, broadly, brings in £77bn a year, funding for Arts Council England has been reduced and the next generation of creators are being stymied by a Gradgrind curriculum with few schools able to afford art, design, drama, music and dance teaching.


  The A&E department at Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham. Public servants soldier on with swelling caseloads. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

The old anti-state canard pretends private enterprise creates national wealth, while governments spend and squander it. After 2010, the Conservatives claimed public employment “crowded out” private initiative, so they cut more than a million public sector jobs. Yet wealth creation depends on a strong state, not only for protection of property by the law, but for decent roads and railways, regulators ensuring fair markets, for the health and education of private enterprise staff, and for the same clean air we all breathe. The business world has a mistaken cultural reflex that pleads for low tax and less government, yet everything that makes commerce flourish relies on a strong state.

Public servants soldier on with swelling caseloads but less pay, keeping going, often heroically dedicated. Fixed to a 1% rise, by 2020 they will be earning no more than they were in 2004, according to the Resolution Foundation. Of course, not all are heroes: vigilant management has to ensure the public face of the state is kind, effective and innovative. Polls show great popular affection for public servants whom people know – their child’s teacher, their doctor, their local police. Yet they have imbibed the political poison that thinks the state is probably bad value, inefficient and extravagant. A few fat-cat chief executive stories die hard. Is that where their taxes go?

This is a hymn of praise to what should be blindingly obvious – the triumph of our collective endeavours. Years of chiselling away at the foundations of trust in good government mean it needs saying again and again: what we do together through paying our taxes and concerning ourselves with our common good is worth more than any private gain through market transactions.

Margaret Thatcher said you will always spend the pound in your pocket better than the state will; her political heirs believe it still. But they are profoundly wrong in fact and in principle. What we buy together is worth infinitely more than anything we can buy in a shop. In a renewed state lies strength and identity – and a reclaimed sense of lost nationhood.

Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All by Polly Toynbee and David Walker is published by Faber, £9.99.

Thursday 23 March 2017

The inside story of the Tory election scandal

Ed Howker and Guy Basnett in The Guardian


A few hours after dawn on 8 May 2015, the morning after his unexpected victory in the general election, David Cameron delivered a celebratory speech to the jubilant staff of Conservative campaign headquarters, at 4 Matthew Parker Street, Westminster. “I’m not an old man but I remember casting a vote in 1987 and that was a great victory,” he said. “I remember 2010, achieving that dream of getting Labour out and getting the Tories back in, and that was amazing. But I think this is the sweetest victory of them all.”

The assembled Tory campaign staffers cheered and whistled as Cameron declared: “We are on the brink of something so exciting.” The election result would indeed change British politics, although not in the way that Cameron intended: the obliteration of the Conservatives’ Liberal Democrat coalition partners cleared the way for the referendum that set Britain on a path to leave the EU and ended Cameron’s political career. As a result, Theresa May is now the prime minister, while Cameron is on a speaking tour of US universities and George Osborne is moonlighting as a newspaper editor.

Until recently, Britain thought it knew how the Conservative party had defied expectations to win the election. After the initial shock that predictions of a hung parliament had proved incorrect, a new narrative was soon established. Commentators explained that the Tories had prevailed by successfully emphasising the threat of a Labour coalition with the SNP and deploying the “pumped-up” prime minister for a spurt of decisive last-minute campaigning. Several newspapers reported that the Tories had spent less to win their 12-seat majority in 2015 than they did to win 24 fewer seats in 2010.

In truth, the victorious Conservative campaign was the most complex ever mounted in Britain, run by two of the world’s most successful campaign consultants. Warehouses of telephone pollsters were put to work for a year before the election, their task to track the views of undecided voters in key marginal seats. The party also distributed thousands of detailed surveys to voters in marginals, and merged all this polling data with information from electoral rolls and commercial market research to produce the most comprehensive picture yet of who might be persuaded to vote Conservative.

Armed with an unprecedented level of detail, the Conservatives began distributing leaflets and letters that directly addressed the hopes and fears of their target voters. And in the final weeks of the campaign, shock troops of volunteers were dispatched to the doorsteps of undecided voters with a mission to persuade and cajole on the party’s behalf. In the most high-profile fight, an elite squad of strategists moved from the London HQ to Kent, where the Ukip leader Nigel Farage was making his bid for parliament.

If the sophistication of the 2015 campaign was not widely known, that was by design: the Conservative Home website, a meeting place for party loyalists, called the victory a “stealth win”. But over the last few months, another story has emerged – an account that is told in a paper trail of hotel bills, emails and witness statements that has led to a year-long investigation by the Electoral Commission and the police.

The startling evidence, first unearthed by Channel 4 News and confirmed in a condemnatory report released last week by the Electoral Commission – the independent body that oversees election law and regulates political finance in the UK – suggests that the Conservative party gained an advantage by breaching election spending laws during the 2015 election. This allowed the party to send its most dedicated volunteers into key seats, in which data had identified specific voters whose turnout could swing the contest. Some of this spending was not properly declared, and some of it was entirely off the books. The sums involved are deceptively small, but the impact may have been decisive.

At present, up to 20 sitting Conservative MPs are the subject of criminal investigation by 16 police forces. If any of the candidates are charged and found guilty of an election offence, they could be barred from political office for three years or spend up to a year in prison. The whole case is unprecedented: this is the largest number of MPs ever to be investigated for violations of electoral law. In the past, cases of alleged election fraud have usually focused on a single MP. This time, there are so many cases that police forces across England have taken the unusual step of coordinating their investigations.

The release of last week’s 38-page Electoral Commission report produced a minor political earthquake: as a result of the biggest investigation the commission has ever undertaken, it levied its largest-ever fine against the Conservative party and referred the case of the party’s treasurer, Simon Day, to the Metropolitan police for further criminal investigation. “There was a realistic prospect,” the report said, that the undeclared spending by the party had “enabled its candidates to gain a financial advantage over opponents.”

The party’s response to the report has been dismissive from the very start. During their investigation, the Electoral Commission was forced to file papers with the high court, demanding that the Conservative party disclose information about its election campaign, after the party had failed to fully comply with their requests for information for three months. Since the report was published, Conservative ministers and spokesmen have pointed out that the commission found only “a series of administrative errors” and that other parties have been fined for their activity in the 2015 election too. Conservatives also say that the missing money identified by the commission represents just 0.6% of the total spent by the party during the 2015 election.

It is true that the sums involved in this case are small: the Electoral Commission’s highest-ever fine turns out to be just £70,000, and it has been applied to punish undeclared and misdeclared Conservative spending totalling just £250,000. Most reports on the commission’s findings have echoed this defence, allowing that some criminal charges may indeed be filed, while overlooking the impact of the overspending on the result.

But British elections are designed to be cheap. Laws that date back to the 1880s limit campaign spending precisely so that people of all backgrounds, and not only the wealthy, have a fair chance to compete for votes. And if that egalitarian principle enhances our political culture, it has another less obvious consequence: even small sums of additional, illegal money, if shrewdly spent, can make a huge difference to results.

Thanks to the Electoral Commission report, we now know that some of the Conservative party’s central spending did benefit MPs in the tightest races, but it was not declared. It is possible even that this money helped to secure the victories from which the Conservative majority was derived. Slowly, a chilling prospect emerges that British politics, our relationship with Europe and the future of our economy, were all transformed following a contest that wasn’t a fair fight.

The Conservatives’ election worries were never financial. By the end of 2014, newspapers reported that the party had raised substantially more money than its rivals, assembling a £78m “war chest” that would allow it to “funnel huge amounts of cash into key seats”, according to the Observer. The campaign would be constrained only by two factors: the legal spending limits for each candidate and the number of volunteers the party could recruit to take its message to voters.

In fact, the scandal in which so many MPs now find themselves embroiled concerns precisely those limits. The spending that has been found to be in violation by the Electoral Commission was used to bring Conservative campaigners into the tightest marginal election battles. Separately, multiple police investigations are examining whether individual candidates and their election agents broke the law.

It is difficult to understand the election expenses scandal without understanding the election strategy that had been unveiled three years before the vote. At a closed session on the first day of the 2012 Conservative conference, the party’s campaign director, Stephen Gilbert, laid out a plan that would come to be known as the 40/40 strategy. For the 2015 election, the party would focus single-mindedly on holding 40 marginal seats and winning another 40. Candidates for these seats would be selected early, and full-time campaign managers – heavily subsidised by Conservative campaign headquarters (CCHQ) – would be appointed in every 40/40 seat.

The 40/40 campaign would be centrally controlled and would require two ingredients. The first was detailed information about every potential Conservative voter in each of the marginal seats. The second was a field team capable of making contact with them and persuading them to vote Tory.

To put the plan into action, the party turned to two men who have helped reshape the way elections are fought. The first, the Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, had overseen the Tories’ 2005 general election campaign and Boris Johnson’s two victories in London mayoral elections.

Crosby’s notoriety made him the subject of considerable press attention – but the second man behind the Conservative campaign may have been even more important. This was the American strategist Jim Messina, who was hired as a strategy adviser in August 2013. Senior Conservative staff had been awestruck by Barack Obama’s comfortable victories in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, crediting their relentless focus on data to Messina.


British elections are designed to be cheap: even small sums of additional money can make a huge difference to results


Using vast databases, commercial market research, complex questionnaires and phone banks, Messina had been able to map the fears and desires of swing voters, and design highly personalised messaging that would appeal to them. The Conservatives hired him to perform the same magic in Britain. To do so, Messina used commercial call centres to track the views of between 1,000 and 2,000 voters in all 80 of the seats targeted by the 40/40 strategy.

This data was crucial to the Conservative campaign: it determined which voters the party needed to contact and which messages they would hear. This began with direct mail – personally addressed to voters in each target seat, who were divided into 40 different categories, with a slightly different message for each one.

But the big-data strategy requires more than leaflets: once you have identified the voters who might be persuaded to switch, and fine-tuned what message to give them, you have to send campaigners to actually knock on their doors and urge them to go to the polls on election day. This requires an army of volunteers, spread across dozens of constituencies. It fell to the party’s co-chairman, Grant Shapps, to establish the necessary volunteer outreach program, which was dubbed Team2015.

Shapps had begun sending out recruitment emails to the party’s mailing list in the summer of 2013, hoping to build a centrally controlled base of activists who could be deployed to marginal constituencies. CCHQ demanded that Team2015 coordinators be established in every swing seat. It was an uphill struggle. Rallying enthusiastic volunteers to David Cameron’s cause turned out to be a harder task than attracting Obama supporters had been.

 
‘Under David Cameron’s leadership, the number of party members had further depleted, halving to fewer than 150,000.’ Photograph: Peter Nicholls/PA

Conservative membership had been in long-term decline from a peak of 2.8 million in 1952. Under David Cameron’s leadership, the number of party members had further depleted, halving to fewer than 150,000. Those remaining members tended to be older and less active – not the dynamic door-knocking volunteers that Team2015 wanted to recruit. While some local Conservative associations reported new members, most described numbers as “hit and miss”. One seat’s early Team2015 report records: “[Team2015] invited to party with MP – no one turned up!”

In some marginal seats, Team2015 was almost nonexistent. One campaign manager recalls: “Trying to get members to volunteer was practically impossible, so Team2015 volunteers were even worse. People would put their names down, generally via CCHQ, who would then pass the person’s details to the local campaign manager but, in my case, when I tried to contact them I never got any volunteers.”

As the election drew nearer, Shapps made upbeat reports on the growing volunteer force. But, according to Conservative Home, the party’s records indicate that only about 15,000 people ever turned up to campaign, and fewer than that did so regularly.

There was, however, another team at work. Unsupervised by CCHQ to start with, it would later be adopted as a critical element in the party’s “ground war” since – unlike Team2015 – it had managed to deliver platoons of committed Conservative activists to the places that needed them most in a series of crucial byelections the year before. It was called RoadTrip.

RoadTrip2015 was the brainchild of Mark Clarke, who would become infamous after the election as “the Tatler Tory”, pilloried in the press over accusations that he bullied a young Conservative who later killed himself, and made unwanted sexual advances towards female members of the party – allegations he has always denied. But in 2014, as a failed parliamentary candidate desperate to get back into the party’s good graces, he launched a grassroots volunteer scheme that sent party members into marginal seats to distribute leaflets, knock on doors, and work the voters.

RoadTrip2015’s work began with a March 2014 trip to Cannock Chase, a West Midlands Labour marginal where 50 volunteers battled through a hailstorm to the doorsteps of swing voters. In the months that followed there were trips to Harlow, Chester and Cheadle. In Enfield, Team2015 marshalled 130 volunteers and party co-chair Grant Shapps attended too. But what put the scheme on the map, and drew the admiration of Conservative commentators and MPs, was the Newark bylection in early June 2014.

On 31 May, the Saturday before the byelection, Clarke successfully marshalled 500 volunteers to Nottinghamshire to campaign for the Conservative candidate, Robert Jenrick. Clarke posted his invitation across social media and on the Conservative Home website: “Join us, Grant Shapps and the hundreds of people signed up this Saturday to come to Newark. Afterwards, join Eric Pickles for the inaugural annual RoadTrip2015 dinner (a free curry) in nearby Nottingham. We will take care of your travel from cities like London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and York.”

The Newark campaign was the first major stress test for the Conservatives’ parliamentary election team. By polling day, 5 June, they were feeling intense pressure from Ukip, which had triumphed in the European elections two weeks earlier – showing they were more than capable of stealing support away from the Conservatives.

Before Clarke’s RoadTrip arrived in Newark, a small team of senior Conservative staff – including Stephen Gilbert and a “campaign specialist” named Marion Little – had quietly taken position on the outskirts of the town at the Kelham House country manor hotel. In Newark itself, many more junior party employees – some of them campaign managers from other 40/40 seats – worked from temporary offices during the day and, at night, stayed in a Premier Inn.

The well-resourced Tory campaign turned out to be decisive and Robert Jenrick was returned with a 7,403 majority – rather smaller than his predecessor, but still substantial. But, on the evening of the count an exasperated Nigel Farage, interviewed by Channel 4 News political correspondent Michael Crick, raised the first concerns about Conservative election expenses – which, he suggested, might have breached the £100,000 limit for campaign spending in a byelection.

“Given the number of paid professional people from the Conservative party here, it is difficult to believe that their returns are going to come in below the figure,” Farage said, referring to the documents every candidate must file to detail their campaign costs. “I’d love to see what their returns are. Because it seems to me the scale of the campaign they fought here is so vast … There will certainly be some questions.”

The rules in a byelection contest are simple. All costs incurred in promoting the candidate in parliamentary elections – advertising, staff costs, unsolicited leaflets and letters, transport for campaigners, hotels that volunteers do not pay for themselves, and administrative costs such as phone bills and stationery – must be declared. Deliberate overspending can be a criminal offence, and it may also lead to an election being declared void.

Robert Jenrick’s campaign in Newark had declared expenses of £96,191. But the Electoral Commission later found that his return did not include the hotel bills for 54 nights of accommodation for senior Conservative staff, or 125 nights of hotel rooms for junior Conservative staff at the Premier Inn. Those costs totalled more than £10,000; had they been declared, the campaign would have breached the spending limits. Farage had been correct. (When questioned by Channel 4 News in 2016, Jenrick denied all wrongdoing. In response to questions about by-election hotel expenses, the party responded that “all byelection spending has been correctly recorded in accordance with the law”.)

At the time, however, these details remained unknown – and Channel 4 News reporters did not discover the undeclared hotel bills until long after the one-year time limit for the imnvestigation and prosecution of election crimes had passed. As a result, there was little attention to increasing Conservative spending in two more crucial byelections.

In October 2014, another huge team of Conservatives descended on Clacton-on-Sea, where Douglas Carswell had defected from the Conservatives to stand as a Ukip candidate. Again, hotels were booked for visiting campaign staff, and a return of £84,049 was filed – which did not mention all the party’s hotel costs of 290 nights at the Lifehouse Spa & Hotel, and 71 nights at the Premier Inn, worth at least £22,000. Had they been declared, the overspending would have been more than £8,000.

In Rochester and Strood, where the defection to Ukip of yet another Tory candidate, Mark Reckless, prompted another byelection in November 2014, the Conservatives could have breached the spending limit by a far larger amount – more than £51,096. As detailed in the Electoral Commission report, their candidate did not declare hotel costs of at least £54,304 against expenses of £96,793. The Conservatives still lost both contests. (Neither of the Conservative candidates responded to requests for comment. The party replied on their behalf that all spending was filed in accordance with the law.)

In these byelections, RoadTrip2015 – which was now supported by CCHQ and endorsed by Shapps – became an increasingly important influence. When the campaign launched a Facebook page advertising for a “Clacton Volunteer Force”, 1,300 people signed up to take part. In Rochester and Strood, it offered volunteers who turned out on Saturday 8 November “FREE transport there and back, FREE drinks and access to the FREE RoadTrip2015 Disraeli Dinner with a very special guest speaker!” The guest speaker was Theresa May, who was filmed celebrating with volunteers. She said: “What you do matters so much because, although what the politicians do has got a role to play, in terms of election campaigning, it’s the people who go out on the doorsteps, who knock on those doors, who make those telephone calls, who put those leaflets through the door, that make a real difference to the results we have.”

By the time of the 2015 general election, the tactics that the party had used to saturate all three byelection constituencies with activists and workers would all come together: there would be more buses of volunteers, more undeclared hotel bookings, and more senior advisers moved out of London into crucial seats. But this time, it would be discovered.

Today, two pieces of rather antiquated legislation exist to tame the influence of money on our elections. The first law governs spending by constituency candidates in the run-up to a general election during two time periods: the “long campaign” runs from about six months before polling day until parliament is dissolved; what follows is the “short campaign”, a final frenzied push for votes that lasted for 38 days in 2015.

The spending limits in each period are tight, with exact values depending on the type of constituency (borough or county) and the number of voters. For the “long campaign” in 2015, the totals were typically around £35,000 to £45,000. While in the short campaign, the most crucial campaign period, the limits were tighter still, set at £8,700 plus 6p or 9p per elector, giving a limit of around £10,000 to £16,000.

The limits are low, theoretically allowing as many people as possible to mount a viable campaign for election. Any costs incurred promoting the candidate in the constituency – from advertising, administration and public meetings, to party-paid transport for campaigners, staff costs and accommodation – must be honestly declared. At the end of the campaign, every penny spent must be declared in an official spending return submitted soon after the end of the campaign. Each spending return includes a declaration that certifies it is “complete and accurate … as required by law”. This must be signed by both the candidate and their election agent – a member of the local party that they appoint to manage their spending. Failing to declare spending, and spending over the limit, are criminal offences.

The second election spending law applies to political parties, and sets much higher limits for their spending on national campaigning during a specified period – roughly a year – before the election. The precise limit is derived by multiplying the number of constituencies being contested by £30,000. For the Conservatives in 2015, this gave the party a national limit of £18.9m to spend promoting David Cameron and his plan for the country through advertisements, billboards and direct mail. As it turned out, the party ended up declaring a figure well below the limit – around £15.6m. It is the responsibility of the national party treasurers to ensure that these national returns are correct, and again they commit an offence if they are found not to be.

Of course, the existence of two different laws setting out two different spending limits – one for local spending and one for national spending – is a source of potential confusion. In the real world of campaigning, there are bound to be expenses that do not fit neatly into one category or the other. For example, leaflets may contain a national message on one page – promoting the party’s leader or policies – and a local message, from the constituency candidate, on another page. When this happens, both the party and the candidates are required to make an “honest assessment”, in the words of law, about how much of the cost of the leaflet should be declared on both returns, before “splitting” the value accordingly. To aid transparency, election material must, by law, carry an “imprint” that shows whether it was produced for the local candidate or for the national campaign.

But the presence of two separate spending laws also presents an opportunity for abuse. Much of the scandal surrounding the Conservative party’s 2015 election spending relates to evidence that suggests spending declared as “national” – where limits are much higher – was, in reality, used to promote local candidates, who face much tighter spending limits.

In fact, it is the enormous difference between the national limits, in the millions, and the local limits, in the tens of thousands, that makes these allegations so significant. Even small amounts of candidate overspending – easily buried in the multimillion-pound national accounts – could have a significant impact on a local campaign, and even shift the result.

Following Ukip’s triumph in the Clacton and Rochester byelections in late 2014, the Conservative campaign faced a miserable winter. Labour led the polls for a few months, and by April 2015, pollsters and pundits were predicting a hung parliament.

The Conservatives made two moves that helped to turn the tables. The first was a new message – to stoke fear that without a clear Conservative majority, Britain would be run by a coalition between Labour and the Scottish National Party.

The second was a new tactic, based on RoadTrip2015. Mark Clarke’s day-long campaign events in the run-up to the general election had given the Conservatives a taste of what the party desperately needed – enthusiastic volunteers knocking on doors in areas that mattered. Historically, Labour had better form bringing activists into marginal battlegrounds, largely thanks to its more active membership drawn from the unions. The Conservative party, with its dwindling and increasingly inactive membership, often found it had no response.


The Conservative party insists that the BattleBus was only intended to conduct national campaigning


But a new plan grew from the seeds of RoadTrip, one that involved busloads of activists and block-booked hotel rooms. BattleBus2015 would send a fleet of coaches to three regions of the UK – the south-west, the Midlands and the north – for the final 10 days of the election campaign. These mobile units, each with around 40 party activists, would stay in hotels in each region, from where they would be loaded onto coaches and driven into different marginals to campaign each day. This would allow the party to flood 29 key seats with much-needed support: nine in the south-west, 10 in the Midlands and 10 in the north.

Receipts for the hotels and coaches, obtained later by Channel 4 News, would prove the operation was expensive. The Electoral Commission later calculated that the BattleBus operation cost £102,483, which works out to around £3,500 for each seat it visited. But while the national party could easily absorb the cost before hitting its spending cap, many of the local candidates were already cutting it fine. If they had to declare the extra costs associated with bringing in more campaigners, the majority would breach the limit.

In the event, £38,996 of the BattleBus costs were declared on the Conservative party’s national return, while the other £63,487, which included the hotels used by volunteers, was not declared at all. The Conservative party put this down to “human error”.

None of the 29 candidates visited by BattleBus declared any of its costs. Whether this should be categorised as national or local spending depends on what the activists did: if they promoted local candidates, even part of the time, then at least some costs associated in bringing them to the constituency should have been declared locally.

The Conservative party insists that BattleBus was only intended to conduct national campaigning. The Electoral Commission report states that it “has found no evidence to suggest that the party had funded the BattleBus2015 campaign with the intention that it would promote or procure the electoral success of candidates”. But, the report continues, “coaches of activists were transported to marginal constituencies to campaign alongside or in close proximity to local campaigners,” and “it is apparent that candidate campaigning did take place during the BattleBus2015 campaign”. It adds that, in the commission’s view, a proportion of the costs should have been declared in candidate campaign filings, “casting doubt” on whether these candidate spending returns were accurate.

The Conservative party has responded to these allegations by insisting that BattleBus volunteers did not promote local candidates. But on Twitter, in the weeks before the election, the BattleBus activists hailed their own efforts to win over voters for specific candidates. On 2 May, one volunteer wrote: “1,300 voters talked to on the doorstep in Amber Valley today for @VoteNigelMills!”. Another posted: “Nice homes in the beautiful Amber Valley – great reaction on the doorsteps in support of Nigel Mills.”

Photographs posted on social media add to the layers of evidence. One young female activist is pictured on a doorstep holding a leaflet bearing the name of Nigel Mills. In the north, a group of activists in Sherwood were photographed holding calling cards for the candidate Mark Spencer, carrying his name and image, and the words: “I called by today with my local team to hear your views.” Channel 4 News has spoken to a handful of volunteers who say their time on the BattleBus involved local campaigning.

Gregg and Louise Kinsell, a married couple from Market Drayton, Shropshire, joined the Conservative party in the run-up to the election, motivated by a mix of patriotic pride, shared values and a liking for David Cameron. They signed up to join BattleBus2015 for its final stretch in the south-west, visiting four constituencies over four days: Stroud; Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport; St Ives and North Cornwall. The aim of the south-west tour was to turn the nine yellow seats of the Liberal Democrats into a sea of blue for the Conservatives – and the Tories won all but one.

The BattleBus operation is still being investigated, but the Kinsells firmly believe that, contrary to claims of Conservative party HQ, they and their fellow volunteers did promote local candidates. “The coach would pull in”, Louise says, “and they’d all be cheering. Honestly, we were like the big hitters coming down to make sure that we win. That’s exactly how it was.”

The couple recall that senior activists gave them scripts about the local candidates to memorise on the bus, in order to be ready to sing their virtues on the doorsteps of undecided voters. Specially prepared briefing notes helped them absorb local issues. And they claim they were handed bundles of locally focused leaflets and calling cards to slip through the letterboxes of prospective voters. The voting intentions of the people they called upon were carefully logged. The couple are clear that they were used as a tactic to “sway marginal seats”, and are angry at the ongoing claim of the Conservative party and some MPs that the BattleBus operation only promoted the national message. “If people are saying – and the MPs concerned in these areas are saying that it was part of a greater expense nationally for the Conservatives, that’s an obvious falsehood,” Gregg says.

 
Nigel Farage, Al Murray and the winning Conservative candidate Craig Mackinlay at the count for the South Thanet seat, May 2015. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

But if there was one seat, among the 40/40 constituencies, that the Conservatives were most set upon winning, it was South Thanet in Kent. There, the Conservative party’s principal rival, Nigel Farage, would take on Craig Mackinlay in the most closely watched contest of the 2015 election.

Today the investigation into the Conservative victory in South Thanet is staffed by nine officers from the Kent police serious economic crime unit. The questions they are considering are familiar to those raised in the 2014 byelections. Were the hotel costs for visiting Conservative staffers in South Thanet – nearly £20,000 in total – properly declared?

After his election victory, Craig Mackinlay filed expenses of £14,838 for the short campaign – just £178 under the spending limit – but made no mention of the Royal Harbour hotel in Ramsgate where senior party workers had taken rooms. Was that an honest account of his expenses? And if not, who was responsible?

The search for answers has so far taken in boxes of internal Conservative documents, the testimony of campaigners, and a six-hour police interview earlier this month with Mackinlay. But a more basic question about the election remains disputed: who actually ran his South Thanet campaign? The list is longer than it should be.

At the top is the name Nathan Gray, Mackinlay’s election agent. In common with many of the “campaign managers” employed as part of the 40/40 strategy, Gray’s enthusiasm for politics was not matched by his experience. Then 26, he had never done the job before. (Gray denies any wrongdoing.)

In the aftermath of the great victory against Nigel Farage in South Thanet, Gray was largely written out of the story and replaced by Nick Timothy, a long-time special advisor to Theresa May who is now the prime minister’s joint chief of staff. In his book Why the Tories Won, Tim Ross describes how Timothy “was sent to take charge of the party’s flagging campaign to stop Farage in Thanet”. Grant Shapps even said recently that Timothy was “front and centre” in South Thanet. But he was not responsible for filing the expenses return and, when contacted about his involvement, a spokesperson stated that he provided “assistance for the Conservative party’s national team and would have given advice to any candidate who asked for it and indeed did so”. There is no suggestion that Timothy is at fault.

An analysis of the campaign written afterwards for the South Thanet Conservative Association credits someone else entirely: “In February [2015] CCHQ sent a professional team to help us. Their leader, Marion Little, is a very experienced election ‘trouble shooter’, and from the moment she arrived she effectively took control of the whole campaign.”

A Conservative staffer since 1984, Little had held the previous title “battleground director” of the Conservative party. And just as she had a formidable presence in the byelections of Newark, Clacton and Rochester and Strood, so she transformed the South Thanet Conservative’s constituency office into a military command post. Little was also not responsible for filing the election spending for South Thanet but she worked long into the night, battle planning and deploying troops: “Dear Team ‘South Thanet’,” she wrote in an email on 23 March. “Just to confirm that this weeks’ [sic] meeting schedule is as follows …” When Nick Timothy did make suggestions, they were run by Little: “Are we not putting ‘two horse race’ on everything?” he asked her in one email sent on 29 March 2015, before adding: “don’t we need to?”

Little didn’t respond when asked whether her role in South Thanet involved local campaigning.

Buses of activists also descended from London. Volunteers were dubbed the “South Thanet Soldiers”. One Labour campaigner, Peter Wallace, recalled seeing hordes of well-dressed young Conservatives working the constituency week after week. “They were like Terminators,” he said, “straight out of GQ, out of London and on our patch. They blew us away.”

Photographs and videos taken by Conservatives in the final weeks of campaigning show the scale of the resources used to bolster the party. There were visits from Boris Johnson and George Osborne, and groups of campaigners arriving on liveried Conservative coaches ready to work for Craig Mackinlay. On the morning of the election, party co-chairs Grant Shapps and Lord Feldman arrived with Mark Clarke and a coach of last-minute campaigners.

In the end Mackinlay defeated Farage in some style. The problem is that when Timothy and Little stayed down in South Thanet, they lived in some style too. The local spending limit in the election was just £15,016, but the bill for rooms housing the troubleshooters from CCHQ at the Royal Harbour hotel ran to £15,641 alone. Mackinlay denies any wrongdoing.

“They had a few rooms block-booked, yeah,” James Thomas, the owner of the Royal Harbour, told Channel 4 News. “All hotels become headquarters, unofficially sometimes,” he added. “Mr Farage was going to be defeated by them, so they made sure they had the right brains to do that.”

More hotel receipts, uncovered by Channel 4 News, showed more party workersstaying at the Margate Premier Inn, some for 12 nights, with a total cost of £3,809. Little’s name was on the bill, but these costs were not declared in the local return or the party’s national expenses. It appeared to resemble the spending in the 2014 byelections – the money was off-the-books. The difference was that, this time, the Conservatives won.

The first report into the Conservative party’s election expenses was broadcast by Michael Crick on Channel 4 News in late January 2016. It was a short item on a slow news day, which simply asked why the cost of rooms at the Royal Harbour hotel in South Thanet had been declared as part of the Conservatives’ national – rather than local – campaign expenses. Why, Crick asked, would a team of top Conservatives be based at a small provincial hotel miles from anywhere if not to work on behalf of the Conservative candidate fighting Nigel Farage for the seat?

When investigative reporters at Channel Four News began to look at the threads connecting tactics in South Thanet to other high-profile Conservative campaigns, a tangle of receipts and emails revealed the party’s hidden spending elsewhere: undeclared hotels, busloads of activists on specialist missions, and senior CCHQ staff buried deep in provincial England.

For months, the Conservative party repeated that all their campaign spending was “in accordance with the law”. A member of the party’s governing body stepped in front of the cameras on 1 March to announce: “Channel 4 has got it wrong.” But eventually the Electoral Commission, which had been widely criticised as toothless, developed canines and sank them into the case. After pressing the party for three months, they were finally provided with seven boxes of papers in May 2016. The secrets they held would make police investigations inevitable but, even then, the Conservatives dug in.

One of the nation’s leading QCs was dispatched by Craig Mackinlay to Folkestone magistrates’ court to halt a Kent police investigation into election spending offences in South Thanet. He failed, and the detectives’ work continued. By the middle of June, 17 forces were conducting investigations into 27 sitting Conservative MPs. Since then, 12 police forces have passed files to the CPS to review, and up to 20 sitting MPs wait to discover if criminal charges will be brought, while other forces still sift through evidence.

In the meantime, the prime minister re-elected in 2015 has melted away, while the election expenses scandal continues to lap at the door of No 10 Downing Street. Theresa May’s chief of staff Nick Timothy and her political secretary Stephen Parkinson were both part of the team dispatched to South Thanet by CCHQ; both took rooms in the Royal Harbour hotel. Whether the reality of their work is reflected in the spending documents signed by Mackinlay is the essential question that Kent police must answer. The photograph in which May appears, walking with members of the senior campaign team on South Thanet’s seafront three weeks before election day, should also give the prime minister pause to consider her own party’s tactics.

Should the Conservative MPs still under investigation face trial and be convicted, May’s government will be imperilled. Her majority is just 17.

In deciding whether or not to prosecute, the CPS must consider two clear tests. The first concerns the public interest in pursuing prosecutions and is met easily: the integrity of our election process is at stake. The second test regards the chance of success at trial. This is harder to meet, because the law says that prosecutors would have to prove that the candidate or agent knowingly submitted a false return.

A likely defence is clear. In South Thanet, Mackinlay has told police that the senior Conservatives who came into his constituency to work on his campaign were not under his “direction or control”, so he is not accountable for their activity. Other MPs who enjoyed a visit from the BattleBus have said that they were told by party headquarters that it was a national scheme. While few of the MPs under investigation have publicly revealed what they knew of the real effect of BattleBus, some have stated publicly that they received an email from the RoadTrip founder and BattleBus organiser Mark Clarke, instructing them not to declare the costs. (Clarke declined our request for comment.)

After one year of investigation, the Electoral Commission has found categorically that at least some of the spending the party claimed was national spending was spent on “candidate campaigning” and therefore should have been declared by candidates on their local returns. They did not. This, the commission said, had potentially given them a “financial advantage over opponents”. It was the responsibility of the candidates and their agents to do so. According to the law, the responsibility for failing to do so lies only with the candidate and the agent.

It is too soon to say whether charges will be brought. Lancashire police recently told the BBC that it has dropped its investigation into one MP who received the BattleBus, David Morris. Press reports have cited police sources who suggest that prosecutors “might decide to make an example” of others.

But if prosecutors decide not to “make an example”, they may set a legal precedent instead. Future candidates will reasonably conclude that they can, with the assistance of their parties, circumvent the electoral laws intended to keep our democracy free and fair – and that parties and candidates alike may do so without facing any penalty.