After the Budget: Two parties in search of a log-line
In the movie business they teach you to hone your film proposals down to a "log-line" - how your movie be described in the TV listings?
I think Wednesday's Budget, beyond all the stats and credibility issues, is best read as part of Labour's search for a new log-line; a new narrative.
As I suggested on Newsnight last night, the essence of that new narrative is state intervention and it has been assembled in three recent interventions by Labour politicians.
First, Peter Mandelson has adopted an overt policy of using government money and influence to try and save and modernise UK manufacturing.
Reversing a decade in which giant British firms were sold off, asset stripped and then closed under the indifferent nose of the DTI, Lord Mandelson has piled in verbally over Kraft, put serious money up to help Sheffield Forgemasters build a new press, pulled new investment from Ford and Nissan into the UK using taxpayer-funded incentives.
You can tell this is something new because he is already being ticked off by the gurus of market orthodoxy at the Financial Times for "picking winners".
Lord Mandelson used to deride "picking winners" - ie the state choosing key firms to promote in the global marketplace - on the grounds that "it's usually losers picking the government" but on Newsnight, on Monday, he gave an explanation of why that's changed.
With the global financial crisis, other countries have poured billions into state aid for their own companies and simply to stand still the UK has to do the same. I think we are likely to see very imminently another example of this if the Corus plant at Redcar can be saved.
Second you had the Budget. A green investment bank, incentives aimed at creating a wind-turbine industry in the UK (10 years too late, of course), all the tax moves designed to boost manufacturers and Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) at the expense of service industries. And repeated, overt calls for manufacturing to assume a higher proportion of GDP.
Third, and probably most important, the under-reported Ed Miliband gave the Guardian with regard to the manifesto.
If the briefings are right we are probably going to see proposals like capping interest rates, a reformed minimum wage along the lines of the London Citizens "Living Wage" campaign and even more rhetorical emphasis on manufacturing, social entrepreneurship and eco-business.
So what's the Labour log-line?
If I were to write it now it would be: "Traumatised by war, a party goes back to its old home town to rediscover the youthful ideals it had thrown aside are actually relevant in a changed world."
Fans of Joseph Campbell's would have no problem kitting such a movie out with Jungian archetypes.
The protagonists are probably the Miliband brothers; Tony Blair is the "complex villain" (flanked by a Norn-like trio of recently humiliated cash-hungry former aides); Lord Mandelson is the mentor - the wizard character whose wisdom was earned through trauma ("I cleaned my mind," said the Lord of Foy in a recent ). I will not bother you with the temptress, the trickster etc.
Of course not all Labour people are fully signed up to this plotline and it has tended to fray around the edges.
Now here's the challenge: how would you write the Conservatives' log-line as they go into the election?
The reason this is now an issue is the growingly ideological nature of the economics debate. Labour's preparedness to re-embrace state intervention has bigger philosophical overtones.
The argument is, as Alistair Darling put it on Wednesday, that the markets cannot alone drive an economy like the UK out of recession. The state sometimes has to play a leading role.
Now for years there has been a rising theme in centre-left thinking that says something called "Fabianism" - ie top down statism - is a dead end, and a preparedness to embrace bottom-up, co-operative and social entrepreneurial politics.
James Purnell was the most coherent proponent of this, though Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn kicked it all off. But the Brownites never bought it and as the political balance has tipped inside Labour, and you now have the beginnings of a philosophical defence of (an albeit renewed) statism.
On the political right there is also a newly ideological flavour to the discourse. You've got the Institute of Directors calling for the state to be cut to 35% of GDP over the next 10 years, you've got right-leaning think tanks pushing the Swedish or Canadian solution to public spending - across the board cuts, leading to hard paring back of key public services.
Here the philosophical argument is: reduce the size of the state and, instead of depressing economic activity, as Labour argues, you will unleash it. This is backed by evidence from the Swedish, Canadian and other anti-crisis budgets in the 1990s.
What the think tanks, business groups and a broad majority of City types want the Tories to do is to embrace not just the philosophical idea of shrinking the state, but actually using the crisis as an opportunity to shrink the public sector rapidly.
The problem is, as we're seeing from polling, the more the public associates the Conservatives with words like austerity, emergency and fiscal crisis, the more they take fright.
At its heart the Conservative election strategy has been so simple that it doesn't even need a log line - only a slogan: it's time for a change.
When Gordon Brown and his aides were reeling from one crisis to another, at the back end of last year, this seemed to be enough. But now, with the recession over, unemployment falling (even though many economists believe these phenomena to be temporary), I hear growing calls from within business, think-tank land etc for the Conservatives to be more conservative.
It's out there on the blogs, where Newsnight contributor Danny Finkelstein is getting regularly flayed over the strategy of pushing even further into the centre, in order to solidify the "soft" Conservative vote that is worrying the party's election strategists.
Tim Montgomerie, of Conservative ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, to be more of a "rescue" party than a "reassurance" party.
Louise Bagshawe, Conservative PPC for Corby, sums up the wider mood on her today:
"Now is the time for a bit of guts. For some self-belief. For some passion for what we are doing and what we stand for. For some fire to change this country, and, frankly, and I don't think this is an exaggeration, to rescue it."
However, the Cameron strategy remains to push into the centre, to battle for trust, and so - whatever the Conservatives plan to do in their emergency budget after the election, it would break their entire game plan to go ideological right now.
If I were to write the log line for David Cameron the movie now it would be:
"Traumatised by 13 years in the wilderness, party atones for the past, gets in touch with its liberal soul and captivates the hearts of decent people all over England (and a bit of Wales)."
Now, here's the thing. Go back and read the two log-lines I constructed (I will happily take your own versions in the comments section below).
Almost everybody inside the Labour party feels good about the Labour log-line. That's why all the bickering's stopped. Large parts of the Conservative party, and its base in the financial and service sectors and academia, would not really feel good about the one above. Hence the searing arguments raging in the Tory blogosphere.
There's still a battle going on inside British conservatism - and it has echoes of the one raging inside US Republicanism - over economic philosophy, even if it has been won at the top of the party itself.
Of course neither Labour nor the Conservatives is yet prepared to tell us about the £18 to £27bn cuts they'll need to make to balance the books.
Politicians and journalists will go hammer and tongs at this issue from now until the election but I doubt we'll hear much more detail.
But the electorate is also listening - maybe as in the movie business - to the narratives, the stories and the subtexts parties give off. To me what explains the narrowing of the polling gap, if it is any reflection of reality, is this issue of coherent "stories" rather than any economic feel good factor.
PS: If you want to have a go at spoof log-lines, you can't do better than begin with the one Richard Polito wrote for the Wizard of Oz:
"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to do it again."
Comment number 1.
At 25th Mar 2010, stevie wrote:Paul, I do wish you would have stayed on longer, when it got to the studio discussion chaired by Jeremy I lost the will to live, I really did want to stay awake but it was so boring, all trying to score points off each other so much so that even Jeremy was looking up at the gallery to stop. I even missed the three at the end who are usually combatative but in a nice way, can NN play a very loud national anthem over the NN credits for berks like me who fall asleep because of boring guests.....
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Comment number 2.
At 25th Mar 2010, Jericoa wrote:Hmmm.
Thanks Paul for the above journalistic equivalent of sticky toffee pudding with custard, a dollop of creme fraiche and topped with Belgian chocolate shavings.
I suspect many will be savouring and digesting it for a while.
I hate ego but nobody ever takes you seriously unless you allow yourself to indulge in it (as any politician knows).
Over a year ago I am pretty sure I said here that the solutions to the crisis were causing political paralysis as they were more left than Labour. The conservatives could never claim that ground and labour (at that time) risked looking even less credible than they did at that time by basically having to admit the utter folly of their policy over the last 10 years.
Yet look at where we are now a year down the track...
Labour are using and have used every last scrap of time available to them to do exactly that (admit the utter folly of past policy) just slow enough so as the people don't notice / cant attack them for reversing 10 years of policy in less than ayear.
In so doing they are slowly but surely pulling the rug out from under the Tories who are stuck with a one dimentional policy of attacking labours credibility as the main motivator for people to vote for them.
So where will this all lead?
The tories are getting panicky, with nothing palatable in the policy locker which fits their core ideals and with things (on the face of it) appearing to pick up in the economy, they are in a bit of a hole now.
I do not think they will turn this around now.
Nor do I think a large part of the population will forgive the labour party either for its excesses and its leader. The letter to the Chilcott inquiry was particularly damaging I think.
Voters will be in a bit of a quandry as expressed by the dilemma above.
Labours better policy and unpalatable leadership or the Tories offer of 'change' mixed with austerity.
Neither option is particularly appealing, I think that is the reason why the polls are getting so close.
Some kind of national crisis or scandal aside in the next few weeks I can not see anything on the horizon that will unlock labour and conservatives combined 'dance of death'.
I think many, at the last minute, may express this dilemma by not voting for either of them and go for the Lib dems.
We are heading for a hung parliament folks... 7/4 odds at various bookmakers and 5/6 for the lib dems to poll more than 20% looks like good value to me also.
You heard it here first but unlike financial institutions whom get bailed out (by us) remember the golden riule 'only bet what you can afford to lose'.
Which in my case is about £10.
Anybody out there know someone in the city supported by the taxpayer ( so they will not be allowed to lose) who fancies a flutter for a few million with a 350% return in 6 weeks??
Good luck everyone.
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Comment number 3.
At 25th Mar 2010, copperDolomite wrote:I totally trust David Cameron. Totally.
And if we have the misfortune to have him in No10 and Boy George in No11, I know I'll be alright in my old age. I've got a tent that performs really well in heavy rain.
Got walking boots too, so I could start heading to sunnier climes before the old bones finally pack in. I totally trust the pair of them.
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Comment number 4.
At 25th Mar 2010, watriler wrote:It takes more clicks to get to your blog these days but it is worth it. Excellent content and presentation. Is Labour rediscovering its true social democratic mettle well I am not sure - see Nick Robinson's interview with the Chancellor who appears little troubled by preparing to cut deeper than Thatcher. However the more Labour moves away from the wreckage of a derailed gravy train and the Blairite commercialisation of the public sector the more likely they will survive the General Election.
On the other hand one cant help thinking that Dave turns to his number two and says, "George how do we get out of this one?"
Meanwhile there is a new third way in the form of the LD's who at least seem prepared to outdo the others in the honesty if not the rational stakes.
The unexamined assumption is that cutting public sector budgets whether through bogus 'efficiency' savings or via cash limits or honest reductions ensures a cut in the deficit. Whether its lost contracts for the private sector or tax payers funding redundancy payments or reduced spending power of public servants there are inevitable consequences on the real economy that may lead to consequential demands on the state purse. The answer is clever debt management complemented by targeted state intervention. Labour is fumbling its way in that direction.
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Comment number 5.
At 25th Mar 2010, MrTweedy wrote:How long can a country run a large fiscal deficit alongside a constant trade deficit?
In this situation, our choices include:
(i) The British government can try to attract more inward investment from abroad, in order to boost UK employment, by offering tax incentives to foreign companies to expand their subsidiaries in the UK.
(ii) The government could increase taxes. This would tend to reduce consumer spending on imports, whilst funding government spending through increased tax revenues.
(iii) The government could aim to make the UK more self sufficient by giving state funded loans or tax incentives to those domestic businesses involved in the efficient production of necessities such as energy, food production, medical scientific research, etc.
(iv) The government could encourage its own domestic population to fund the fiscal deficit by offering decent tax free savings through NS&I
If we rely on foreign lenders to fund the fiscal deficit through gilts, we will have to contend with rising interest rates, imported price inflation due to a weak sterling, with British businesses being starved of credit due to the government taking all the available credit to fund its ever growing fiscal debt.
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Comment number 6.
At 25th Mar 2010, tawse57 wrote:Ditto other comments Paul - I thought you began to say some important things about the state of the economy, got interrupted and side-tracked by Paxman and, sadly, he never came back to you.
I think Newsnight had a lot of lightweights on last night basically blustering nothing and you were one of the few who had something interesting to say but were not allowed to say it.
Right, now that that is out of the way.
This budget was a nonsense and, apart from the bribe of no stamp duty to try and lure in the gullible home-buyers - is Labour really trying to say that 250K is the price of a home for a first-time buyer in the UK nowadays - which is just scandalous trying to get people into debt before a housing crash, no one will have any idea of how bad the cuts will be until after the election but...
I think the budget was a wake-up call to any bright 30-something and 40-something in the UK who has the skills and brain-power to go elsewhere to go, well, to go elsewhere. It is obvious that taxation will be crippling in the UK in the next 5 to 10 years and many young people are now going to not just be priced out of housing but they are going to be forced to pay, via taxation, not just for the greedy and feckless who ramped, drove up and were just lucky to ride the housing bubble... but also to continue to pay for the public sector pension pots whilst being unable to afford both a home and a pension for themselves.
I have been surprised today by just how many professional skilled people I know, from 30s to their early 50s, who have openly spoken of getting out of the UK for the reasons mentioned above. Some said that family circumstances - looking after elderly parents - will not allow them o go but go they would if circumstances would allow and others, without ties here, have openly said they will now plan to get out.
In the past 24 hours I have also resolved to get out of the UK in the coming years. I have skills in demand from the US to Oz and all in between, am still young enough to make a life elsewhere and, with my savings, can afford a really decent house in those countries whilst, here in the UK, I can only afford a run-down shoe-box.
No, yesterday was the wake-up call to the brightest and best in the UK to get out. The brain drain of the 1970s is about to return. It is not the millionaires that the UK should be worried about losing but all the working and middle class professionals below them who will be priced out of housing and taxed out of pensions - what is there for them to stay here for now?
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Comment number 7.
At 26th Mar 2010, Syzygy wrote:"But the electorate is also listening - maybe as in the movie business - to the narratives, the stories and the subtexts parties give off. To me what explains the narrowing of the polling gap, if it is any reflection of reality, is this issue of coherent "stories" rather than any economic feel good factor."
I agree ... and I would offer another way of describing the process... we are all attuned unconsciously to 'read' other people's non verbal messages...( that is intuition or intersubjectivity which arises from mirroring neurons in the brain) and Cameron, Osbourne et al just do not seem to be congruent... there is a sense of Cameron not being who he seems to be, and George Osbourne often 'feels' triumphalist in the way a small child is when they think they've been clever... I am not being very articulate because this is a feeling rather than an objective assessment. I suspect that others have the same discomforts, which are quite separate from any facts or figures ... and are exemplified by the lack of coherent narrative that you describe.
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Comment number 8.
At 26th Mar 2010, duvinrouge wrote:The message from labour is "we won't attack the workers quite as hard as the Tories".
But it's still a labour government attacking workers & supporting the bankers & big business.
World capitalism cannot afford social democracy in any country to improve the workers lot.
The 1950's & 60's are history.
The reason most people can't see this is that don't have a good understanding of how capitalism works.
They don't understand the importance of the rate of profit & why growth itself puts downward pressure on it.
The message needed by the workers is "an end to the profit system; people to take control of the means of production & true democracy to be established".
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Comment number 9.
At 26th Mar 2010, David_Kilpatrick wrote:Paul,
Truly excellent, as always.
An interesting insight that the Tories are uncomfortable with their chosen narrative, and that Labour are comfortable with theirs. It should be the other way round as we approach ten years of austerity, following (caused by?) the ten years of Blair/Brown boom. And yet it's not. Strange times!
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Comment number 10.
At 26th Mar 2010, gastrogeorge wrote:Interesting article, but you put to much credence behind Purnell, Clarke and Milburn - who, especially Purnell and Milburn, are more on the wingnut thinktankery side of Blairism. I'm all in favour of a bottom-up approach, but not if the main idea behind it is the comprehensive break-up of state institutions. Even if they are not neo-liberals (and they may be), they're just doing neo-liberals work for them.
And even if state reduction might lead to an "unleashing" of the private sector during the good times (which I doubt), state reduction at a time when private investment has crashed is insane.
The Tories' problem is that Labour's "steady as she goes" approach is showing them up as opportunists - using the crisis to pursue the policies that they believe in under any circumstances, and we know what pain that led to last time.
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Comment number 11.
At 26th Mar 2010, stevie wrote:no I am not Freemason! I only walk like one and I would never join a club that would accept me as a member, I am not a member of any political party, group and I am an atheist! Wow I bet that one barrs me from most clubs...memo to dangfone
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Comment number 12.
At 26th Mar 2010, supersnapshot wrote:Socialist Gump - Odball blunders through life in search of long lost sweetheart Prudence, who left him to shack up with thrill addicted gangsters.Ends in tears.
Dead Poets Society - Public School Boy's dream of emulating liberal romantics from fantasy past. Ends in tears.
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Comment number 13.
At 26th Mar 2010, HM_The_Queen wrote:Tawse57 @ comment 6 is an odd case.
He claims taxation is/will be forcing him to leave the country, but from his comment it is quite clear that it is the absurd state of our housing market that is driving him out.
How is cutting Tawse's taxes going to help him get a better house? All that will do is drive up prices - effectively set by the maximum debt anyone can get themselves into at any particular time - by an exactly matching amount to his tax cut.
The way for Tawse to get a better house, and to make him feel better about staying here, is to build a hell of a lot more decent houses, and reform the financial system so that it works for the people rather than as a rip off.
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Comment number 14.
At 26th Mar 2010, Jericoa wrote:Labour log - line
A partial triumph of cynical manipulation over integrity.
Conservative log line
One dimentional backward gazing approach snatches partial defeat from the jaws of total victory.
Lib Dems Log Line
Nothing to lose everything to gain, untainted but unoticed...but for how long?
The peoples Log line.
A curse on all your houses.
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Comment number 15.
At 26th Mar 2010, stanilic wrote:The simple fact is that Mandy has taken up the burden of intervention that Michael Hesseltine had to drop in 1997. To an extent we can all be pleased with that as despite my fundamental dislike of Hesseltine I found his industrial policy generally constructive. Although we could have done with a broader energy policy than the dash for gas.
In that one is left comparing an interventionist Tory policy with an allegedly interventionist Labour policy, we are left asking whither Labour, whither Tory? Why not just have an interventionist industrial policy without the adjectives?
As one of those on the left who comes out from the News from Nowhere I never understood the Labour affection for the state. The state by definition is the expression of the ruling caste: in our current times this is the legal-bureaucratic apparat who in my view are the core of Labour support. But what would such an elite have in common with an interventionist industrial policy? Would they know what such a policy would be or even know what an industry is?
No: there is no way the modern Labour Party can change whilst in office. It has to go out into the political wastelands and redefine itself from the bottom up.
Now what is the Conservative Party looking for? We are hearing some faint echoes of the One Nation party which was always encapsulated in my mind by dear old Willie Whitelaw, of whom every government must have one. Yet the hard core on the ground remain unreconstructed Thatcherites which would not necessarily be a bad thing in the current environment if Thatcher had actually cut anything other than a few planning jobs, some hospital beds and a boat in the South Atlantic which had later to be changed into a Task Force and an airfield for jet-bombers.
This should be the time for the Conservatives but they are just not there. What is their line? Change? Yeah, we could do with a bit of that. Austerity? Is that really a Tory bag? Swingeing cuts? Perhaps some young Tories could go in for a bit of swingeing but not in front of the public. They might be able to dig up the Old Man and the shades of the Battle of Britain but I cannot see the figure of Tom Wintringham fitting into that format very well.
Neither party really understands the complex issues this country now faces. The pattern of policy has changed far too quickly for them to fully comprehend what needs to be done. Labour have fallen back on an old policy of interventionism, which was never solely theirs and the Tories have got out the Thatcher handbag. Neither are what we need so perhaps a hung parliament and a coalition government will help to redefine our country. We will still need that interventionist policy, though.
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Comment number 16.
At 27th Mar 2010, MrTweedy wrote:Lawyers with no experience of trade or industry get themselves into government, and pretend to run the country. Reading speeches written by others, they take no active part in managing the economy. When a financial crisis bursts around them, the lawyers blame international markets outside their control, and borrow big while trying to carry on as if nothing happened. To be continued.....
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