Would it be foolish to topple Brown now?

I’ve had a number of conversations about the pending Fall of Brown with a wide variety of political types over the last week or two, and so from the outset I’d like to acknowledge that some of the genesis of this article belongs to them as much as to my own musing.*

David Herdson’s excellent article last week asked whether the election ‘campaign’ for Speaker might be just enough to deter the Labour Party from seeking to run a parallel election for Leader (assuming they harbour the desire to topple Gordon Brown in the wake of disastrous European and Local election results). I think there is much sense to that idea, but I am concerned that sense is not the dominant force in the tumult of overthrowing a sitting Prime Minister.

Mike has written that the Labour Party is polling somewhat better than Gordon Brown personally. It will be interesting to see (should it occur) how the Labour Party would fare (in this Parliament) if they chose to face Cameron with a different Leader. Certainly every Conservative I speak to thinks that loss of the current PM would be a set-back to their plans for the General Election. In line with the old chessplayers’ maxim that you should always do what your opponent least wants you to do, it would seem that there is some sense to using the June 2009 election results as a means to replace Brown.

But I’m not sure that such a revolution in the PLP would be optimal for their chances of holding onto power. Any new Labour leader would instantly be under pressure to call a General Election, and refusing to do so would likely deflate the ‘honeymoon’ that most political leaders get to enjoy in their first month or two in role. To avoid this problem, there are only two options.

Firstly, a new leader could simply assent to a snap General Election, knowing that unless they got extremely lucky, they would within weeks make history as the PM with the shortest term in history. Whilst it would be nice to be remembered for something, I suspect that actively assenting to calling an optional election within weeks of moving into Number 10 would prove a little beyond the strength of all but the least ambitious candidate.

So what is the other option? I think it is to accede to the office of Prime Minister, but without the pressure of having to make that decision at all. If Brown was toppled in, say, February or March of next year then the calls for a snap election would not be as intense, given that the media, the public, and the Opposition would recognise that Parliament was almost at its end anyhow.

A new Prime Minister would be able to put the matter to rest by immediately saying that the election was scheduled for May as planned, and would have the chance to make new policy without the pressure of making the decision that Brown flunked in October 2007. With that freedom, and the chance of a reasonable honeymoon, a Labour PM would have the best chance possible of preventing a Conservative overall majority.

So should Labour overthrow Brown after the June 2009 election results are confirmed? I would suggest not. A drawn out contest (perhaps running up to Party Conference in September) would not do the party too much good, and a new leader would have to sustain a long honeymoon to make it to the Spring. By leaving Brown in post until February or March 2010, I’d suggest a new leader would prove much more successful in the subsequent General Election.

Morus

*If those concerned would like credit, they can contact me, but as several conversations were held under Chatham House Rules, I have taken the path of anonymous credit in the first instance. I would have waited to contact them, but it seems that if Alan Johnson or David Milliband have their wicked way, this might be the last weekend to write this article, so the idea must be released forthwith.

What does my screen-shot say about Gord?

What a day but I suppose it’s only to be expected given how close we are to Thursday’s elections.

Everybody seems to have been on the telly this morning - the biggest of them all, I suppose, being Gordon Brown with Andrew Marr.

So what do we make of it all? Has anybody helped their case - has anybody done the opposite.

For what it’s worth I thought Marr did well against Brown and Adam Boulton was good against Cameron.

Mike Smithson

Will Primaries be how the big parties strike back?

In and amongst the big political stories of the week one potentially very significant event has received scant attention. This was the speech given by David Cameron at the Open University which set-out a series of ideas and policies that would bring about one of the biggest changes to political life this country has seen for decades.
 
The scope of the proposed changes is vast: they run across the whole gamut of the relationship between the individual and the state, from reform of parliament to an end to the use of local government as an agent of Whitehall, from reform of the ‘human rights’ agenda to elected police chiefs, from consideration of fixed-term parliaments to public-initiated referenda.

However, one procedure which has already been trialled on a small number of occasions may be in for much greater use: open primaries in parliamentary. So far, these have been relatively small-scale events, essentially no more than the traditional party selection open to party members within the constituency, except that those who could attend wasn’t restricted.

That’s all well and good but if the fixed-term parliaments proposal is acted upon, that opens up the opportunity for more structured primaries, similar to those in the United States because with the (at least much greater) certainty of knowing when the election will be, there’s much less chance that a snap election will interfere with the process.

Parking that thought for a moment, let’s return to a theme from last week’s article, and continuing through the polls this last week: the rise of minor parties. Despite Britain’s First Part the Post electoral system being highly stacked against minor parties, even ones with a fair degree of regional focus, such as the SNP, they’ve continued to win larger and larger shares of the vote. Why has this happened? There are no doubt many contributory factors but to me three stand out: negative campaigning, increased centralised control within parties and an increase in the relative importance of individual issues against general ‘movements’.

The Conservatives and Labour have spent decades arguing how rubbish each other was and is, sometimes to the exclusion of promoting themselves (see numerous ppb’s for evidence). It would hardly be surprising if a proportion of the population agreed with both sides and didn’t vote for either.

That negative campaigning, combined with an increased focus by the media on negative stories, has impelled parties to keep candidates and MP’s on message, to avoid discussion and especially dissent, lest it be seen as ‘splits within the party’ and to demand increased central control in order to achieve these ends. While that’s produced more professional outfits, it’s also tended towards homogeneity, allowing fringe parties to fill in the gaps.

At the same time, the social and ideological bases of the parties has eroded. Today’s big political parties have far fewer members than they did fifty years ago. People are still willing to get involved in politics but not so much via the medium of mass-membership parties. Single-issue campaigns are on the other hand popular and perhaps off the back of that, single-issue parties have found greater support. At one time, it’s quite probable that members of some of these parties would have joined the mainstream machines and carved their niche within them, but with the lack of tolerance for such niches both by the public and the parties, that’s less possible these days.

Where does this fit into proposals for primaries? In essence, they are incompatible with the trends to centralisation and likely to undermine some of the purpose of single-issue parties.

It seems impossible to have open competition between candidates for a party’s nomination without disagreement between them and will make the drawing up of binding manifestoes more difficult. Parties - already losing some of their ideological purpose - could tend even more towards machines to enable election, within which individuals with specific interests could again work. It gives them a better opportunity to get elected without the necessity to compromise unacceptably their integrity to centralised goals.

That is largely what the American parties have become but here’s a crucial point: the American parties have proved extremely resilient. While parties have come and gone in some countries with bewildering frequency - especially some which operate systems that don’t particularly punish splits, such as PR or multiple-round voting, but even in some FPTP countries - the big parties in America, uniquely able to deliver results, have maintained their duopoly.

Could that be the route for the long-term survival of the big parties in Britain? For all the challengers they face, the Conservatives and Labour remain the only parties with the organisations to win general election victories. If open primaries were extended in their operation (and if one party went down that line, others would surely have to follow), might potential candidates who would currently be inclined to UKIP or the Greens try their luck with the Conservatives or Labour?

Although the reforms would strip the parties of even more ideological coherence by increasing the independence of members and the value of their local mandate, they could reinforce the parties’ place in the system. Could it be that one outcome of Cameron’s proposals for reform is a guarantee for the long-term survival of Labour?

David Herdson

WESTMINSTER:
CON 40(+1) LAB 22(-6) LD 25 (+5)

Desperate desperate figures for Brown as he faces June 4th

A sensational new ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph tonight has Labour down on 22% three points behind Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats who are at 25%.

This surely shows the affect that the MP expenses affair is having with Labour suffering much more than the other parties even though, during the fieldwork period, it was Tory miscreants who were dominating the headlines.

This is serious stuff for Brown as he faces what could be a disastrous Thursday with locals election in the English shire counties and, of course, the five yearly round of elections to the European parliament.

As I’ve argued here many times ICM has the most Lib Dem friendly methodology and the best record of all the firms in predicting the party’s eventual share from this far out. This is party down to its mathematics and party to its voting intention question which, uniquely, focuses on what will be going on in the respondents constituencies.

This, of course, comes after a high profile period for Nick Clegg and him being seen to have taken the lead over calling for Michael Martin to go.

There are Euro election numbers in the ICM poll which are markedly different to that which we saw from Populus last night.

EURO ELECTION:
CON 29 LAB 17 LD 20 UKIP 10 GRN 11 BNP 5

The marked differences are with UKIP and the Lib Dems. It’s hard coming up with an explanation until we have seen the detailed data.

My guess is that unlike Populus ICM did not prompt with the minor party names.

Mike Smithson