When local isn't local - Bradford's UKIP story

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This isn't a post about policies. It's not a post about whether Ukip are good, bad or the spawn of Beelzebub. Nor is it a post-mortem on this year's local council elections in Bradford. Elections that saw Labour (just) take overall control of the Council.

It's an observation on the nature of local campaigning and the exploitation - without the offer of solution - of people's worries and concerns.

In Bingley Rural and the Worth Valley the massed troops of Ukip's 'People's Army' are few in number. Judging by attendance at the count, they are no better served for activists than Conservatives or Labour. In truth there are probably fewer.

Yet they managed to deliver four different pieces of literature to some parts of Bingley Rural, similar numbers of different leaflets in Worth Valley, and have the time to fold, stuff and mail up to two personalised letters for some residents. Trust me, dear reader, I know how much time and effort this takes.

Plus of course, Ukip took advantage of the Yorkshire wide free delivery available to all political parties for the European elections.

I'm saying all this because the reality, of course, is that Ukip didn't deliver all those leaflets. They - quite legally and legitimately - paid private delivery companies to do it for them. Lots of nice, hard-working people (quite a few of them from assorted parts of Eastern Europe) earning a few quid an hour tromping along the streets delivering. I followed one such deliverer while getting out the leaflets in Cullingworth for Bingley Rural's now re-elected Cllr Ellis and my Worth Valley colleagues met similar in Oxenhope.

Nothing wrong (assuming the election expenses allowed are not exceeded) with all this of course. But think how much it costs. And compare this to how most of those wicked 'mainstream party' local candidates get their literature out. We do it the old fashioned way - either ourselves by plodding up and down dropping each leaflet in a letterbox or by asking other local residents very nicely whether they'd mind delivering a hundred or so leaflets for us. For all the criticisms of us, the reality at the local level is that our campaigning is absolutely local and dependent on the availability of volunteers to do the leg work.

If we replace legs with money (which is what Ukip did in Bingley Rural and Worth Valley) the nature of local politics changes. In the simplest of terms it stops being local. For sure, you need to have a local candidate and ten electors. But that's it - the rest is done centrally using targeted leaflets, mailings and so forth. And the message is no longer one about campaigns for a new village hall or the options for traffic calming along a dangerous stretch of highway. Instead it becomes a more general appeal based on national or international issues - a negative camapaign, anonymous and exploitative.

This might be the future of local elections especially if the numbers of activists dwindle. But, if it is that future, we will be poorer for it and will expose ourselves to the buying of elections. The good news is that, for this time at least, Ukip's attempt to buy its way into Bradford politics failed - all that effort and just one seat. Nevertheless, there will be a future attempt by Ukip - or some other party - to do likewise.

One thing I do know is that my election address next year will include the words - "written in Cullingworth, printed in Bradford and delivered to you by volunteers from your village."

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Organising for the long term and a unilateral cap on donations - how to restore Conservative 'grassroots'

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We all know that the two big UK political parties are, in terms of membership, shadows of what they were in times past. At its peak the Conservative Party had over 3 million members and the Young Conservatives were perhaps the biggest political youth movement in the democratic world.

When I joined the YCs in 1976 the cracks were already showing, the membership was declining year on year, and the national party seemed uninterested in anything but the next general election (although that election did elect Margaret Thatcher so perhaps I shouldn't complain too much). However, back then the Beckenham constituency had three separate YC branches. The main Party branch that my mum was active in was called Lawrie Park 'A' - just one polling district of a larger ward.

So when we talk about the Party's grassroots, this should be what we are thinking about. Not self-appointed campaign groups that adopt the word Grassroots to make out that somehow they're in touch with the soul of the Party. Or even groups that use words like 'Mainstream' or 'Way Forward' to try and suggest their particular faction is somehow representative of the real Party.

In truth the grassroots of the Party are no longer the membership. When I talk to Conservative voters (something I do try to do as often as possible) I get no sense that they feel part of a movement, that they belong to something. Yet these people will troop out in election after election and put their cross next to the Conservative candidate. Their motivation is less tribal than was the case when the Party had those millions of members and more self-interested: they believe that the Conservatives represent them better.

The Bow Group has become the latest in a long line of folk that have had their four-pennorth on how to restore the fortunes of the Party organisation. Thankfully, the Bow Group start with absolutely rejecting state funding for political parties, and state in stark terms the scale of the problem:

...the Conservative Party should not go down the road of state-funding for political parties, but instead should take urgent measures to reconnect with its electoral base and grassroots members. 

The Group set out '11 Steps' that the Party needs to take ranging from more dialogue through rejecting 'open primaries' and electing the Party Chairman to more tactical matters such as ending the Coalition sooner rather than later. There is, from the perspective of someone with nearly 40 years active membership, much to commend in the proposals.

However, the bit that the Bow Group miss is that, to turn round the Party as an organisation, there has to be two further things done:

1. The Party needs to invest in the long term, to have people whose job it is to think about what the organisation will look like in 20 years time and to set resources aside to put professional organisers on the ground in places where the Party needs to develop.

2. The Party should announce its intention (unilaterally if agreement with Labour can't be achieved) to stop taking donations above a certain size (say £5,000) - this would provide the incentive for the leadership to look for lots of smaller donations rather than finding a couple of billionaires to hand over a few million.

I believe that these two actions would break the grip of London on the Party, would make us pay attention outside election time to the ordinary men and women who actually plod down to the polling station to vote Conservative.

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On the marketing of politics...

In the 1950s, with the expansion of television into every household, mass marketing was born. Clever blokes at companies making what became known as fmcg (fast moving consumer goods) found that they could pull customers into demanding brands using TV to advertise bold, brash and colourful brands.

Before this time marketing was as much directed to the shopkeeper as to the consumer. What marketers did was get the shop to display the brand and, in many cases, provide a financial incentive for the store to push the brand to shoppers. If you want to understand how this works, look at how pharmaceuticals marketing works today - the company can't use direct-to-consumer brand marketing and relies instead on direct sales efforts targeted at doctors.

Brand marketing helped transform our society (for the better I would argue), contributed to better quality, greater choice and lower relative prices. And along the way, it also provided a load of pleasure - we reminisce as much about the ads of the '60s and '70s as we do about the TV programmes those ads were wrapped around. Promotion was broad, sweeping and general rather than precise and targeted - ads reached out to broad chunks of the population: "C1C2 women in the Granada TV area". The once dominant sales people became mere order takers as the heroes of fmcg became marketers.

Looking in awe and wonder at this brand marketing was the world of British politics. It's not stretching the metaphor to say that, until 1979, British politics was stuck with that pre-war model because the law wouldn't let political parties advertise on TV. Politics worked at the local level where professional agents organised local parties to push the party message - that familiar method of canvassing to identify support and 'get-out-the-vote' to make sure that support materialises. In 1979, two young ad men (and brothers) changed how we campaigned with one poster.

Today this approach - a big, bold brand message poured repeatedly into promotional channels - dominates our political campaigning. That old 'sales-led' approach has atrophied - we still canvass, we still ask people for voting intentions and we still knock up on the day but these activities are marginal to the outcome of a general election. And it is the general election that matters - it is to politics what Christmas is to turkey breeders and Easter is to chocolatiers.

So political parties have turned to the marketing men for inspiration - to get the message honed to perfection, to get that message constant and consistent in every promotional channel. The party machine has been replaced by a team of experts pulled together so as to direct those channels. The leadership doesn't put its effort into policies and ideas that would improve the nation but into enforcing the message.

Politics is beefing up its brand management just as brand marketing begins to falter, as marketers respond to the challenges of a fragmented media market, to aggregation and choice-making systems. We are watching political parties applying the ideas of a past marketing age - relying solely on the power of their brand to achieve success. And it will work (for one or other of the parties) since the heuristic of those big party brands (we often call it 'tribalism' but it's essentially the same as always buying Persil) means that most people will vote for one or the other. Plus, of course, Britain's electoral system makes it hard for new parties - there hasn't been a successful, sustained new party since the Labour Party overtook the Liberals in the 1920s.

The problem (and people from all sides and none in politics have noted this) is that the fastest growing 'brand' in the market isn't a political party but what we might call 'anti-politics'. We watch as brand marketing is used to promote what are essentially hollow shells - things painted to look like large, thoughtful and ideological political organisations but in reality contain little but but ambition.

This isn't to say that there aren't thoughtful, creative and ideological people in politics or to suggest that there isn't a critical and fundamental difference between the politics of 'centre-right' and 'centre-left'. Rather it's to point out that the marketing of politics remains a child of 1950s mass marketing, something done to the public not with the public. And, as Douglas Carswell quite bluntly points out, 'anti-politics' is here to stay:

It's just a phase, many MPs think. Voters are angry over expenses or Iraq or more expenses. But the mood, they presume, will pass.

No, my friends, colleagues and opponents. This anti-politics thingy is not just a phase. It will not abate. We are witnessing a permanent change in the relationship between the governed and the governing.

The big brand politics will carry on for a while - our electoral system guarantees that - but at what moment do we start to worry? When turn out in a general election falls below 50% maybe? In 2010 that already happened in Glasgow NE, Leeds Central and Manchester Central - plus there are another 120 constituencies with turnout below 60%. And none of this accounts for the estimated 20% of the population that don't even bother registering to vote in the first place. Or do we wait until other parties and independents soak up a third or more of the vote in return for a handful of seats? In 2010 in England the two big parties got less than 68% of the vote and all but 57 of the 616 seats.

When I learnt about marketing all those years ago, they told about the 4Ps - promotion, price, place and product. Our political marketers - fresh from running campaigns in Australia or America - seem to have lost sight of these fundamentals and especially any attention to the politcal product. Marketing has become mere promotion leaving behind an etiolated, weak political product. Sound and fury has replaced the idea that politics is a shared enterprise between politicians and the people they represent.

For now nothing will change except that a few more disillusioned folk will turn away from politics. But something will give in the end. With luck what will emerge from that change will be a more conversational politics, one not shaped by the demands of a big brand and its message but by a desire to create the best possible political product.

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Less policy, more poetry please.

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"Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies in a box on Beasley Street"

John Cooper Clarke is a great poet. I don't share his politics but I appreciate the poetry of his passion, an almost anger captured by the quote above. And, unlike too much modern poetry, Clarke's is accessible and appealing beyond the usual pretentious circles of the literary world. It's a reminder that, like a great song, a poem cuts right to the very core of something. It communicates.

So I was struck by Clarke's comments about today's politics:

 

I suppose if I had to I would vote Labour but only out of blind class hatred, nothing else. That's what keeps these bastards coming back. To be honest, the only one whose language I even remotely understand is Nige [Farage]. Shoot me down in flames. Everyone else: they talk about nothing that seems to matter. It's beyond satire. And even satire has become PR, you know, since someone told politicians they will get more votes if they join in with the piss-taking themselves.

This comment from Clarke isn't an endorsement of UKIP but rather a recognition that most of our political leaderships fail to break through to the audience, to get them to pay attention, to really listen. Take a few minutes and read the tweets of politicians - with just a couple of exceptions these are boring, banal and entirely forgettable. All wrapped up in caveats, conditions and the avoidance of confrontation, today's political communication mostly fails to communicate. Or rather it communicates the message that we are patronising, out-of-touch and unable to hold a conversation with a voter.

One thing Nigel Farage seems to understand is that it's perfectly fine to attack your opponents - there's no chance of getting 100% support so spending time trying not to alienate people who will never vote for you is a thoroughly stupid idea. Yet politicians do this, carefully crafting their words to be inclusive and the views to be moderate. We peer down our noses at the likes of Farage, talking of extremism and division - as if it's impossible to present a moderate view in polemic.


If the public simply don't grasp our language then all those hours of policy wonkery, the backroom chats and the market research will be wasted. We fail if we think it's enough for our political tribe to like, retweet or forward the latest banality. We don't breakthrough if our policies are presented in press releases with all the wit and charm of one explaining a vending machine. Or where those policies trickle out in speeches to selected audiences and are couched in the language of those chosen few not words a shop assistant or sales rep would use. No-one cares, no-one's listening.

Clarke's Beasley Street captures a place and the idea of a place in a few sharp words - you've an image of that Salford street instantly as he delivers the words. And politics can do this too:

It's morning again in America.

It didn't matter much about the words that came after this opener in Hal Riney's ad - he'd got your attention with that image, those few words said more than all the statistics we politicians play our games with. And it worked.

Our words are guided by audience analysis, filtered through focus groups and derived from the policy brief not the benefit on offer. We list initiatives and policies with each one design to tick a communications box. Speeches and announcements are made according to a framework rather than because we've anything to say. And we make the grand assumption that it's the detail of policy that matters rather than the positive image of the place we're in or the place we want to get to.

Here's the opening paragraph of the 1945 Labour Manifesto - this is how it's done:

Victory is assured for us and our allies in the European war. The war in the East goes the same way. The British Labour Party is firmly resolved that Japanese barbarism shall be defeated just as decisively as Nazi aggression and tyranny. The people will have won both struggles. The gallant men and women in the Fighting Services, in the Merchant Navy, Home Guard and Civil Defence, in the factories and in the bombed areas - they deserve and must be assured a happier future than faced so many of them after the last war. Labour regards their welfare as a sacred trust. 

Bang - straight to the point. We've won the war, now let's make the country a great place for the men who did the winning for us. If you read that manifesto - and for good or ill it changed the country forever - it's not filled with statistics or analysis, just a narrative describing the Britain a Labour government would create.

For balance read the 1979 Conservative Manifesto - again it makes a clear call from the start:

THIS ELECTION is about the future of Britain - a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands. It is rich, too, in human resources, with professional and managerial skills of the highest calibre, with great industries and firms whose workers can be the equal of any in the world. We are the inheritors of a long tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

Yet today, this country is faced with its most serious problems since the Second World War. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? 

Today's politics with its media and message management does not allow for great narrative, let alone poetry. The popular response to most of our words is 'so what'. We don't paint pictures with words or tell stories, we relate a barrage of 'facts' and a torrent of policy hoping some of it sticks.

So let's remember that, come the day that matters, the politicians aren't in charge - we are. Election day as John Greenleaf Whittier put it is everyone's day and politicians should remember this:

The proudest now is but my peer,
The highest not more high;
To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known
My palace is the people’s hall,
The ballot-box my throne!

Who serves to-day upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;

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Steamrollers for cracking nuts - on demanding ID at polling stations

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The Electoral Commission is suggesting that we should have to show identification in order to vote:

"Looking ahead, the time has come for England, Scotland and Wales to move towards a requirement for voters to produce ID at polling stations. This would strengthen the system and bring Great Britain into line with Northern Ireland and many  countries where this is already in place."

This proposal isn't made because the Electoral Commission has any substantive evidence that personation is a real problem in UK elections merely that there have been lots of complaints and lots of stories about allegations of possible personation (mostly in places with big immigrant populations and especially Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim populations).

That there is fraud in our elections is a fact that no-one disputes. However, the real problems don't lie with personation but with voter registration and postal voting - yet the Commission refuses to tighten up postal voting systems. Instead we get demands for ID - another example of how we are no longer a place where the default position is to trust someone, to assume he is telling the truth.

In Bradford we get these complaints of personation at every elections. Typically the anecdotes tell of a young campaigner going to houses of people he knows and having a conversation something like this:

"Hi Auntie, where's uncle?" "He's at the mosque."

"Has he voted yet?" "I don't know - his polling card is on the table"

"I'll take it."

The cards are gathered up and handed over to others to vote - "vote early, vote often" as the saying goes.

I suspect that something like this - or variations on it - does happen but that it is less common than the stories make out. What is interesting is that there hasn't been a prosecution for this sort of personation (as far as I know). There have been prosecutions - some successful - for mishandling postal votes and for abuse of voter registration but these are also rare.

This seems to me a proposal more in response to the cries of foul that political parties in some places routinely throw out when they lose elections. We have a small nut in the form of problems in a few places (and these are about allegations of wrongdoing rather than actual evidence of wrongdoing) to which - for its own convenience - the Electoral Commission proposes to employ a large steamroller in the form of requiring ID.

In the end the truth about voting fraud is this - as the Chair of the Electoral Commission says:

"Proven cases of electoral fraud are rare..."

The response should be for local councils and police in areas where there might be a problem not for national legislation. And certainly not for legislation that institutionalises an assumption of mistrust and especially mistrust based on someone being from an immigrant population.

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The Metis project won't solve the Conservatives' campaigning problem...

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There's a belief that Barak Obama won two presidential elections because his team were super slick with the on-line campaigning. All those voter demographics and behavioural metrics were the thing that meant Republicans stood no chance.

So it's no surprise that this things are now all the rage here in the UK - here's Sebastian Payne drooling over one such system in the Spectator:

... an alternative is revealed with the Metis project. Headed up by four of Westminster’s sharpest minds, Metis is destined to become the largest and most sophisticated voter database ever built in the UK. The power of a 20 million strong list of voters has the potential to revolutionise campaigning.

And it will do this by enabling:

...political parties to run highly targeted campaigns, focusing on individual voters whose support is vital to win key seats. More importantly, it will spare householders the sort of unwelcome attention that was lavished on them by over-enthusiastic (or desperate) campaigners in Eastleigh’

This is great - it reminds me of the Asimov short story, "Franchise", where

...the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.

Such speculation aside, this sophisticated and targeted approach is only half the story of Obama's success - the other have is the activist, the boots on the ground:

So it was that Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to ­expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon” strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains” were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains” were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be ­responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.

Here lies the other half of the secret - the database that Obama's team used wasn't some clever piece of geodemographics spliced with a lifestyle database and based on questionnaire data. What they were using was real information about real people - and the contact was direct, personal and on the doorstep (or the barber's chair).

If UK political parties think that the solution is to echo Howard Dean's campaign, they are wrong. That campaign failed because it thought that political engagement on-line was everything - it wasn't and it isn't. If we run campaigns on the basis of manipulating large data sets the result will be a worse politics. And for those campaigners the approach probably won't work. Indeed, as Vince-Wayne Mitchell demonstrated years ago, you can make a large data set say almost anything you want it to say:

Suggests that a prima facie case exists for the suitability of astrology as a segmentation variable with the potential to combine the measurement advantages of demographics with the psychological insights of psychographics and to create segments which are measurable, substantial, exhaustive, stable over time, and relatively accessible. Tests the premise empirically using results from a Government data set, the British General Household Survey. The analyses show that astrology does have a significant, and sometimes predictable, effect on behavior in the leisure, tobacco, and drinks markets.

If political parties want to win they need to put boots on the ground, to collect data on the doorstep - for sure the sort of information in Metis will be useful, just as geodemographics have always been useful. To profile, to assist in targeting and to select geographically. These are relevant to politics but, just as is the case with regular marketing, a list of previous buyers - or previous voters - is much more responsive.

The task is to build that list - that is what Obama did. He did use a clever marketing database but applied on-line techniques to the age old method - speak to the voter, look him in the eye and ass; "will you vote for me?"

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Representation...

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You hear the cries about politicians:

"We elect them to do what we say!"

And a host of variations on this theme.

These cries are wrong. And it is important that we understand why they are wrong - it's not because we aren't democratic or that it's anything to do with the modern idea of the political party. No, it's because we choose a representative - someone to go down to Westminster (or in my case Bradford City Hall) and make decisions on our behalves.

We don't instruct such a person (although he would be wise to listen and on occasion consult) nor is he a delegate, sent there with a limited mandate. What we have done is entrust the politician with our votes - the votes we would have had in some sort of 21st century agora. And we cannot know at the point of choosing our representative quite what all those votes will be, we are unable to predict every bill, every amendment and every committee debate or discussion. We have to trust that the person we choose will act in our interests - or in what he honourably sees as our interest.

None of this is about spending time in the constituency (although time spent there when parliament is in session is time the MP spends not doing his job), nor is it about the whip or the manifesto. It is quite simply that no system could be created that allowed all of us to "have our say" on every little item before MPs or to vote in every division. Even in these days of whizzing technology, of the Internet and the smart phone, the idea that all the thousands of votes - let alone the work on committees - could somehow involve us all is a nonsense.

In describing this situation - one that has been the case since Simon de Montford's first parliament - I have been careful to avoid the word democracy. Indeed, in the strictest of senses our system is not democratic, other than at the moment when we chose the men and women who will represent us. People try to pretend that democracy is about more than debating and deciding together - it is not, that is absolutely the whole point of democracy.

I am a representative. I vote firstly according to my conscience, then on what I understand to be the interests of those who chose me and lastly in consideration of the advice given me by my Party. And, when the day of democracy comes, those I represent have the chance to chose someone else should that be their wish.

In the meantime I will say what I think right and vote accordingly.

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Perhaps we should try some of this democracy stuff?

When I pitched successfully to be the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Keighley back in 1999, I made some observations about 'modern'. This was, after all, amidst the white heat of Blairite modernisation and the audience wanted to be reminded that simply changing things to be 'modern' didn't automatically make them better. As I pointed out a couple of days ago, Blair's 'modernisation' of local government resulted in the loss of transparency and the neutering of full council as a decision-making meeting.

Today Charles Moore speaks of modernising - this time exploring Cameron's take on the idea. And in doing so he captures an essential truth - all this modernising is undermining that most ancient of ideas: democracy:

The way we are governed today, by whichever party, increasingly resembles a coup. A small group brings in a new leader, and rules, rather unsuccessfully, from his Downing Street court. Party members, local councillors and even MPs have incredibly little influence on what is decided. In an age when we expect the democratic rights of the citizen to grow, they are diminishing. He or she knows that we are governed by rules issuing from Europe, from the demands of human rights judges, from regulations not properly legislated for, from quangos and officials, so he knows his vote does not count. Is this a situation, as modernisers like to put it, “fit for the 21st century”? 

The idea of the 'court' surrounding the leader (whether god emperor or prime minister) is a central theme in Finer's History of Government and is something that the enlightenment in government - the US constitution, the idea of human rights and the principle of universal suffrage - sought to reduce in power if not remove. Yet, as Charles Moore shows us, that court - the 'Westminster Bubble' - remains as powerful as ever. The interaction between people within this narrow clique determines the policies and debate of the age, which is why we're talking so much about gay marriage and so little about inflation and the cost of living. This is why the BBC's advert for the Radio5 Live "app" talks of "cars driven by renewable energy" and how the debate about energy has become dominated by the need to 'reduce carbon' rather than why the old lady round the corner can't afford to heat her house.

This government by dinner party - directions decided by chats between friends and through the prism of metropolitan ignorance rather than through the process of democracy - presents a huge problem. But we stumble around looking for an solution. For some it lies in the Internet - a sort of iDemocracy where engaged and empowered citizens interact via the web. Others want devolution and fragmentation - driving more decision-making down to regions, cities and borough. And others celebrate the bureaucratic state - disdainful of councillors and dismissive of MPs and political parties.

Democracy isn't a modern idea. I suspect that the idea of voting to help make decisions has been used since prehistory - competing with 'one potato, two potato' as a decision system. And we like it, we have confidence it and we are prepared (most of the time) to accept the decisions that it throws up. The problem with our modern state is that nearly all the decisions that matter to ordinary people aren't made using this tried and tested approach. Instead they're made by groups of "professionals" without reference to the people. The policies that determine whether someone's child is taken into care, if you can build an extension, whether you can set up a business and what your children are taught - these policies are decided without reference to democracy by those "professionals".

Indeed, us politicians are frequently told by the lawyers who guard the policies set by these "professionals", that we cannot change or overturn them. And we are further compromised by role confusion - not just being rebranded as "community leaders" but with our key role of making decisions on behalf of those we represent neutered. Under the new public health arrangements, we will have a "Health & Well-being Board". This will be a formal committee of Council but with officers given voting rights alongside councillors - in the cause of 'partnership' the principle of electing people to make decisions is compromised. Councillors are not expert enough to make those decisions and must be joined by the (unelected) professionals.

Right across government we see decision-making that should be done by people accountable to the public being done by the unelected - local enterprise partnerships, schools forums, probation boards, a veritable host of the unelected and unaccountable. This is post-democracy - consultation, partnership and the 'professional' have replaced the tried and tested process of electing people to make decisions on our behalf. We have decided that democracy - elections, MPs, councillors and so forth - are a bit of a pain. Or rather we haven't decided, the system has gradually sidelined politicians - the people's representatives - to the stage where the only way for us to effect any change is for us to join in the game, to play at post-democracy.

Democracy isn't modern and it runs counter to our cult of the expert, our obsession with that unreachable ideal of 'evidence-based policy'. So the powerful have emasculated democracy and replaced it with a pretty spectacle, a place of sound and fury. Great fun, as observers of parliament know, but ultimately pointless. The decisions are made somewhere else.

Maybe we should stop calling it "mob rule" and try that democracy stuff again. It might work, you know!

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There are some places where voting still matters...

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Ghana for example:

Here's the rest of a slide show from the BBC. And I hope that these people queuing to vote get the change they want and the growth they need.

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Campaign in the North...a message for the Conservative Party

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We often hear from London-based commentators that the Conservative Party has a problem in the North. Look, these men say, you have no councillors, no MPs and no organisation across the great cities of the North - Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle. How can you lay claim to being a national party when this pertains? And such wise men have a point.

Others tell the Party's leadership that they must have a plan for campaigning in the North. That the problem must be put right. And each time the psephological runes are read and Party managers decide that this isn't so - the solution (or rather the winning of an election) lies elsewhere.

The Tories have a 40:40 strategy for the next election. The aim is to defend their 40 most vulnerable seats and try and win 40 others to give the party a majority. So which 40 are in their sights? Normally, it’s an easy one to answer: you just look at the last election and count which seats have the most narrow Tory defeat.

If you’d done this, there would only be 9 Liberal Democrat MPs on the Tory hit list. But the Liberal Democrat vote has changed radically since the last election. So Stephen Gilbert, the PM’s political secretary,  has drawn up a new list, added in demographic factors, current polling data and consumer targeting. As a result, the  number of Liberal Democrat seats on the list more than doubled.

And of those 20 Liberal Democrat seats most aren't in the North of England - Solihull, Dorset Mid & Poole North, Wells, St Austell & Newquay, Somerton & Frome, Sutton & Cheam, St Ives, Chippenham, Cornwall North, Norwich South, Eastbourne, Taunton Deane, Eastleigh, Torbay, Cheltenham, Devon North, Carshalton & Wallington. Only Cheadle and Berwick-on-Tweed are in the North and neither are exactly typical.

There isn't going to be a plan for the North. There will be a few target seats - Bolton West, Wirral South, Halifax, maybe Morley & Outwood to annoy Ed Balls - but no plan looking beyond getting 316 MPs from anywhere. Right now the national Party's resource in the North consists of fewer than ten people working out of an office in Bradford. These people work hard and do a great job supporting campaigns from Carlisle to Grimsby and from Ellesmere Port to Ashington.

What there won't be is a strategy for the North or the redirecting of resource from London-based spin doctoring towards campaigning at the grassroots especially if those grassroots are a long way from nice London restaurants in places where people talk funny. The problem is that - as I'm sure Labour is in the South-West and Wessex - the Party is dying in the urban North. We are reaching the tipping point in Sheffield, Hull and Manchester where the situation is unrecoverable - as is undoubtedly the case in Liverpool. Worse still behind these barren places are a row of other places - Leeds, Bradford, Sunderland, Huddersfield, Salford - where only the efforts of a dedicated few folk (and the welcome collapse of Liberal Democrat aspirations) keeps the Party from the same oblivion as in those big cities.

We do need a plan but more than that we need some of the resources currently spent on sucking up to London-based journalists to be directed to the North, to supporting good quality campaign teams in these Northern cities. And this isn't just because it might help us win general elections in the future but because the alternative is to condemn Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and other Northern towns and cities to generations of corrupting single-party government from the Labour Party.

Having failed to resource - or actively support - campaigns for elected mayors, the Party now has to get back onto the ground, survey its wreakage and begin to build. We need to start campaigning against the deadening hand of the North's establishment - public sector panjandrums, Labour council leaders, trade unions and the occasional lawyer or property developer badged as "business".

What I do know is that, if we don't, there won't be a generation of Tories in Bradford to follow on from my generation. And I'm prepared to bet that the same goes for Leeds, for Hull and for Greater Manchester. It really is time for the Party to act. Further delay will be fatal for the Party in the North.

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Apathy, elitism and bureaucracy - an ancient problem

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

So it’s that apathy thing again. You know, people who can’t or won’t be bothered to waddle down to the village hall to vote. Apparently this is “humiliating” for the Prime Minister – or at least that’s what the FT says:

David Cameron’s hopes that Britain would embrace his vision of US-style elected police chiefs lay in tatters as the public turned its back on his latest attempt to change the way the country is run.

An inquiry was launched on Friday by the Electoral Commission into a day of apathy at the ballot box, which saw only one-in-seven voters turn out in an election the prime minister insisted would transform Britain’s policing and which cost £100m to set up.

But it isn’t really as simple as that. And neither should we be as bothered about low turnout as us political sorts say. Don’t get me wrong, I do think we should vote – early and often as the saying goes – but I don’t have a problem with people who choose not to do so. Or indeed for the many folk whose lives are liberated enough for the act of voting not to cross their minds.

Last Thursday’s election saw record levels of apathy – mostly because the government (and the Electoral Commission) lost sight of some basic marketing principles. Police & Crime Commissioners may indeed by a better mousetrap but unless you tell people about this – repeatedly until you’re bored with the sound of it – they won’t avail themselves of your improved rodent catcher.

However, this still doesn’t matter. If people want to vote they will go out and vote. Take note that in Corby where 90% of the UK’s political class – not to mention the hordes of press and TV media folk – has been camped out for the past two months, the turnout was a measly 44%. Every house in Corby had a leaflet – probably a dozen leaflets, if by-election behaviour was normal – and despite this over half the registered electorate didn’t bother.

Why didn’t they bother? Probably because the outcome (and the act of voting itself) really doesn’t matter to them very much, if at all. And why should it unless we make it purposeful? A parliamentary by-election changes nothing, all it does is find a new representative to fill a set of vacated boots. Oddly enough the PCC elections were rather more significant – at least there we were picking someone to be in charge of something!

In an unusual departure the Daily Mail spots the problem:

The reality is that the public is hugely disillusioned with a gilded, out-of-touch political elite which seems incapable of connecting with the aspirations and anxieties of ordinary people.

People really are getting to believe that “it doesn’t matter how you vote, the government always gets in”.  And this is so true – that gilded elite the Mail describes will carry on in ‘power’ even though we vote some of them out and some of them in.

The really funny – or maybe depressing - thing about this is that it’s not new. Here’s S E Finer writing about the world’s first government, Sumer:

“Equally there was a contrast between the mass of artisans and rural labourers, and the ruling elite which comprised the rulers and their courts, the temples and their priesthoods, the scribes and accountants. This elite was very narrow; the more so since the keys to power...were so very difficult to acquire.”

Back then legitimacy – what we like to call “mandate” – didn’t come from those artisans and rural labourers but from the gods. Today, legitimacy in theory comes, via the act of voting, from the people. The thing that those apathetic Britons have spotted is that withdrawing that mandate by not voting exposes the elite for what it is – a self-selecting, self-supporting court surrounding the places where power is executed.

Thursday’s apathy isn’t a reflection on the current government but a consequence of government by the unaccountable gilded by the thinnest sheet of democracy. When I look at the areas where us Councillors are told we have no real jurisdiction (despite de jure responsibility) this becomes ever more clear – education, child protection, planning, licensing; all now so rules bound as to make the councillor’s role little more than a rubber stamp.

To give just one example – you thought, did you not, that the schools are under “council control”? After all there’s an Education Department filled with Directors and Assistant Directors. Think again. The funding goes straight from Whitehall to the schools via a formula set in London. And decisions about the management of those schools are made by a thing called the “School’s Forum” that (in Bradford) meets in private and contains representatives from the schools, council officers and so forth. Councillor’s – the folk you elect to make decisions on your behalf – have no role to play in this at all. Except to be blamed when the school’s fail.

This is where the apathy comes from – MPs and councillors stop being representatives and turn instead into guides through the castle. Our role is to handle ‘casework’ and to act as ‘community leaders’ rather than the idea of representative democracy – that we send someone to the place where the decisions are made so he or she can help make those decisions on our behalf. Today, a councillor or MP can sit on all sorts or panels, committees and boards while doing nothing other than accede to decisions made elsewhere by the bureaucracy.

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The Conservative Party needs to move the talent - and money - further than Millbank...

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The Spectator reports that my Party is onto full long election footing (good of you to tell me, Dave). And this means that the talent is moving apparently:

...I now hear that talent is being moved out of Whitehall and back to Millbank to beef up the team there. Giles Kenningham, one of the most effective Tory spin doctors, is taking leave from the Department of Communities and Local Government, to head up CCHQ’s media operation following Susie Squire’s secondment to Downing Street.

Sorry to pour cold water on all this excitement but, if we're to make a difference, the talent needs to be in Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester not 400 yards down the road from Whitehall. If the Party is serious about remaining in power, it needs to start to support the grassroots.

Why you ask? Simple really - those grass roots are dying faster than the ash trees. Instead of another spin doctor how about some member recruitment, funding some agents in target constituencies, providing support to hard-pressed conservative groups - spending some of that cash from those rich donors on stopping the Party from dying.

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Dedication to the cause...

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I guess that the person who doesn't turn up can be expected to be run out of town on a rail:

At the stroke of midnight on November 6th, the 21 registered voters of Dixville Notch, gathering in the wood-panelled Ballot Room of the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel, will have just one minute to cast their vote. Speed is of the essence, if the tiny New Hampshire town is to uphold its reputation (est. 1960) as the first place to declare its results in the US presidential elections [1].

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Simple really...the case for elected mayors

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Tonight I will be (briefly - five minutes isn't very long) addressing an audience at Bradford's Midland Hotel about elected mayors. Do come along (starts at 7pm) if you've nothing better to do - such as watch the Manchester derby.

For those watching football, washing their hair, knitting blankets for the starving or playing croquet, this is the nub of my argument.

Right now there's a election afoot in Bradford. Across every inch of the District campaigners are thrusting leaflets through letterboxes, bashing posters into gardens, knocking on doors asking for votes and generally - in the manner of politicians - voter-bothering. We'll be electing 30 councillors who will join the remaining sixty in deciding who runs the city and how the city is run.

The lovingly crafted leaflets will feature fine profiles of the candidate in question, snappy slogans and killer criticisms of the other parties. There will be photos of the candidate stood with local residents, pointing at potholes and engaging in all kinds of what David Cameron calls "social action".

Nowhere in all this will there be any debate about the City and District. Nowhere will we see a manifesto - or even a list of action points - that will set out how Bradford would be run under a Labour, Tory or Liberal Democrat administration.

For a lot of voters they'll get just one leaflet from one political party - I know that's true of folk in Cullingworth. This isn't debate. This doesn't set out any basis on which leaders should be judged by the electorate. It simply reinforces the view of the national media that local elections are just a grand opinion poll showing how well - or badly - the national government is doing.

And when we've elected all those councillors, off they go into private meetings, behind closed doors, to decide who runs the city and how the city will be run. The manifesto for the City and District - the set of actions, the listing of priorities - will be written by officers, squeezed through some pretence of a "public consultation" and then published in an impenetrable 78 page "strategy" that no-one will ever read from cover to cover.

We have to do better. We have got to start having a public debate about the priorities for Bradford - the city centre, schools, jobs and the environment. Rather than those priorities being determined by whoever officer is most successful at scaring the councillors into action, they will emerge from a public debate. And will be owned by an elected mayor.

The Bradford people will choose that mayor

The Bradford people will hold that mayor to account

And the Bradford people can get rid of that mayor if that mayor fails.

Simple really.

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Top Liberal Democrat MP says don't vote for the bloke who works

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Absolutely - Liberal Democrat MP, Bob Russell said just that:

Now retired, Councillor Offen [the Lib Dem candidate] is able to devote the time to the role of Councillor which the Tory candidate simply cannot because of his employment situation.

Got that folks! This MP thinks you can't be an effective councillor if you work for a living! And he kept digging:

‘I stand by my comment that the Lib Dem candidate has more time at his disposal than the Tory candidate.’

So one guesses that Mr Russell wouldn't vote for any Liberal Democrat candidate who had less "time on his hands" that an alternative from another party?

Although that would be to expect consistency from the Liberal Democrats. Which would be a first!

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Councillor Ellis and the sheep...

One of those priceless moments for which cameras were invented. Shame then that I didn't have one with me!

We're putting up posters for Margaret Eaton's re-election campaign and pull up to a field gate on Keighley Road in Mike Ellis's big people carrier. The field beyond the gate is filled with sheep and lambs that, on hearing the van draw up and the hatch open come bounding, skipping and (in the case of one particularly ugly ram) marching down to the gate.

There's bleating in every possible tone from soprano to the deepest bass. These sheep clearly expect something and I'm prepared to bet that it isn't a 'Vote Conservative' poster - unless of course those have become edible recently.

So Mike enters the field - a little gingerly - clutching the poster and the string to attach it to the fence. The sheep close in, their bleating rising to a cacophonous crescendo - they are all but nibbling at Mike. The old ram is leaning hard against the gate - perhaps his aim is to stop the Councillor leaving the field until food is provided.

I'm stood there watching and trying not to laugh at the sight of a Tory councillor hemmed in on every side with sheep and lambs all yelling their heads off with the ovine equivalent of "where's our food then, mate!"

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Is there an election on already? Thoughts from the (sort of) campaign trail

Spent a fair old chunk of today traipsing round Bingley Rural banging in posters - around 40 put up today in assorted strategic (and not so strategic) locations. We've also got the deliveries more-or-less sorted for just over half the ward.

As ever, it was a real pleasure to go round the ward - everyone we met seemed pretty cheery. Lovely chat with a chap at The Bullfield in Harden - not about politics but about the seemingly endless task of sweeping up underneath trees and the testing of assorted different tools (those sucker-blower things are useless by the way) for this purpose.

Other subjects of conversation included Bradford Bulls - there were 24,000 plus at Odsal last night cheering on the Bulls and make their contributions to keeping the club going. It looks OK for a while but, as John (who I was speaking with) pointed out, "this doesn't solve the problem of bad management." And then there's the little gripes and grumbles - the latest one being flyposting. Or rather attaching advertising posters to lampposts without permission.

The thing with local campaigning is that you don't spend a whole lot of time engaged in serious debate about the great issues of the day. Not only do people not raise these things with you but there really isn't the time for such indulgence. When some politician pops up in parliament or (more likely) the council chamber and starts talking about what he is hearing on "the doorstep" don't believe a word. Most people tell answer your question - yes they'll vote for you, no they won't vote for you or, very, often something like:

"Er, is there an election?"

"I haven't thought about it"

"I'll read all the leaflets and then decide"

"I haven't spoken to my wife/husband yet so I don't know"

"I'm not interested"

Or maybe I've been asking the wrong questions "on the doorstep" for the past 35 years!

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Election 2012 - always a pleasure for the Baroness!

Once again we're campaigning for Margaret - one of the best councillors and a very caring, hard-working woman

 Roll on May 3rd!

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Not what anyone expected - thoughts on Bradford, Galloway and what might be done

I guess it had to happen one day. Not that we ever thought yesterday was that day. Nor indeed, that George Galloway would be the man to do it. But it happened – Labour’s inner-city machine lost its wheels as people, mostly young people, flocked to the polls so as to give the finger to Bradford’s political leadership.

This nearly happened once before – less dramatically to be fair but it happened. From 1995, Conservatives won previously safe Labour wards – Toller, University (now City), Bradford Moor – only to come unstuck in the postal vote election of 2004. From being new – perhaps not exciting but new – challengers to the Labour machine, the Conservatives became seen as just the same. Why vote for a different set of machine politicians playing games of clan, caste and religion when you can stick with Labour?

Stood outside City Hall this morning, I chanced to speak to a leading Labour activist. He told me:

 “The biraderi game is over. This is a terrible result for us but it had to happen.”

This was followed by some choice words about the Council leadership, the Labour Party and the prospect of losing seats – Toller and Manningham particularly – to a local Respect surge. 

Galloway didn’t offer any answers, just the promise to be loud about the things that matter to the constituency – or rather to that young, Asian demographic fed up with machine politics, with a local political class that appears not to care about them or their community. The young men and women look up their street at the Labour Councillor in the big house, see him drive off in a shiny sports car and say to themselves, “is he really on our side?”

Pick up one of the postcards that Galloway delivered across the City and read the headlines – oppose the war, sort out the City centre, do something about jobs, put an end to corruption. Are these not the same cries that those young people utter? Galloway offers no answers but plays the role of echo chamber making those cries louder, more strident, more urgent. For all his rhetoric, Galloway will never provide the answers but we – the politicians looking at rejection – can begin to consider what might be done.

• Take control of the regeneration agenda – rather than, as so many Council leaders (including me) have done, hiding in the smoke and mirrors that is our regeneration strategy. Use some of the war chest – the £180 million in reserves – to kick start work in the City. Perhaps a new central library in the former Odeon, maybe actually digging out that canal we promised and even demanding a ‘put up or go away’ from Westfield. 
•  Asking where tomorrow’s jobs will come from – those thousands of young Bradfordians face a choice right now. Stay in the City on benefits or working stupidly long hours for not much money driving a taxi or sitting in a take-away. Or leaving – heading south to London, to the Thames Valley, to the Home Counties where there’s a chance of a job with prospects.
• Ending the Council’s culture of venal navel-gazing – for the past few years the Council has been obsessed with its internal structures, operations and organisation. Rather than bothering about how good or bad the City’s schools were, we obsessed instead about closing down Education Bradford, about bringing it back “in house”. As if this would change anything about the educating of children in Girlington. And the same goes for everything else – for social care, for health, for planning – we paid attention to the structure and cared little for the outcome
• Protecting services – over the past two years, rather than admit that its change programme wasn’t delivering savings quickly enough, the Council’s leadership chose to cut services. Right now they’re crowing about how the 2011/12 budget will have a £5.7 million surplus – that’s money which could have kept open a swimming pool, provided much needed care for the elderly or helped a few of those young people into jobs

On Monday the Council will return to normal. Officers will plonk behind their desks and pick up where they left off before the Galloway whirlwind swept through Bradford. There’ll be some frantic debate and discussion behind those heavy doors in City Hall but will anything change? The Labour Party will do its electoral calculus – wins in working class white wards like Eccleshill, Keighley West, Windhill, and Clayton will take them across the line even if Galloway’s acolytes snatch a couple of inner city wards. And no elections then until 2014.

And in three years Galloway will be gone, the fires will have burned out and the venal, self-serving Labour machine can reassert its malign control over Bradford’s inner-city.

Unless of course Bradfordians choose to have an elected mayor. Now that might just be interesting!

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If we have to have Lords reform can we at least try to break the party stranglehold on politics?

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So the Lords Reform bandwagon is off and rolling as the Liberal Democrats return to their obsession with putting changes to our constitution ahead of less important things like sorting out the public finances, getting a balanced set of rules for the financial sector and improving those core services to the public – schools, hospitals, social care.

And the Liberal Democrats want what it says in the Coalition agreement:

...a 300-member hybrid house, of which 80% are elected. A further 20% would be appointed, and reserve space would be included for some Church of England bishops. Under the proposals, members would also serve single non-renewable terms of 15 years. Former MPs would be allowed to stand for election to the Upper House, but members of the Upper House would not be immediately allowed to become MPs.

This, we’re told by its advocates, is a ‘radical’ solution – quite why defeats me. We replace a wholly (more-or-less) appointed body with one where people are elected for a very long time by a partisan, party-driven system. Instead of a house filled with independent-minded folk bringing expertise from a host of different backgrounds, we get another load of politicians. With all the flaws that go with this – closed party selections, central campaigns, funding problems and a disconnection with the electorate.

If we want to change (and, as a conservative, I tend to subscribe to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of politics), let’s make a bigger change than just handing control of the Lords over to political party hacks. 

We could use a lottery to create an electoral college (or even to choose the members of the Lords).

We could get local councils to nominate members – perhaps proportionally across regions or sub-regions.

We could have elections without campaigning or party labels.

And we could relocate the House of Lords to Bradford.

These are radical changes. Simply electing the Lords – regardless of the system used but especially if it’s on some regional party list system – isn’t radical but is a retrograde step that gives power to dying political parties in preference to a real extension of democracy.

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