It's not just the economy, stupid - a lesson from Alinsky for conservatives

Politics is about the economy. This truth has, for most of recent history, dominated the manner in which elections have been fought and to a large degree the outcomes of those elections have been determined by the economy. When James Carville hung that sign - "it's the economy, stupid" - on the wall of Bill Clinton's campaign office, he summed up this political certainty.

Because of this certainty, politicians and, perhaps more significantly, political campaign managers began to focus their attention on economics rather than marketing strategy. These folk assumed that if you got your message right on the economy and economic management and won the argument by undermining the other side's economic credibility then you win. Every time.

And is certainly seemed that way. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by remorselessly talking up recession (a recession caused by his predecessor, of course). John Major delivered a Conservative majority in that same year by positioning his government as trustworthy on economic policy and Kinnock's Labour as risky. The same goes in Germany, Japan and Canada - everywhere you looked the secret was to be boringly reliable and trustworthy on the economy. Do that and the mantle of office falls onto your shoulders.

It seems that our presumption - that the macroeconomy is what matters - may have been misplaced. Here's Graeme Archer looking over someone's shoulder on the train:

You don’t intend to read over the shoulder of the person next to you on the tube, do you, but it’s unavoidable. The well-dressed young woman on the Northern Line on Wednesday was scratching away in a very expensive notebook. The novel in my hands turned to dust, and I swivelled my eyes at her writing.

Top of the page: “Objective: financial security.” Then a new line: “Need: £20,000 to be debt free.”

I didn’t read any more. The thought of twenty grand’s worth of (I’d guess) credit card and student loan debt makes me feel sick, even experienced second-hand.

The economy isn't a thing separate from the real lives of ordinary people, yet this is precisely the manner in which we speak of it. The newspapers and self-important parts of broadcast media are filled with earnest people talking about 'charts' and 'models' and 'forecasts' as if these grand aggregations of ordinary decisions mean anything to the real lives of ordinary people.

In 2008 all this changed although we didn't notice at the time. We assumed that the election of Barak Obama was, like elections always are, determined by the US economy crashing into the wall under a Republican president. Here's a bit of a clue:

"I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."

Confirming that Obama was trained in Chicago by the Alinsky apparatus, David Alinsky wrote: "It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well."

Describing how the Democratic National Convention was a "perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style," David Alinsky wrote: "All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."

America had elected a 'community organiser', a campaigner. For sure, Obama was less of an outsider than some claimed but his election represented a change from the 'it's the economy, stupid' approach to campaigning. And remember, given the circumstances in the USA back then, the core victory for Obama wasn't the actual presidential election but was his win, from behind against a dominant and well-branded opponent, in the Democratic primaries.

Scroll forward a few years to 2016 and we witness two shocks - the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. In both cases that community organiser approach delivered - in the UK the Remain campaign was entirely old school: 'it's the economy, stupid' while those campaigning for Leave shifted the focus to that Alinsky-style human interest. There were rallies, debates, the use of social media and that on-the-ground spread of a message that made people believe they really could vote their lives better. And they did - Brexit won.

Now put aside your distaste and ignore what the BBC has told you. Donald Trump's campaign took all the lessons from Obama's 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination and applied them for a social media age. Read that letter from Alinsky's son again:

"...the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."

This describes Trump's campaign to the letter - add in social media which was in its infancy in 2008 and you have the recipe for his election. Despite him being a really weak candidate without an obvious base for support and without the financial resources available to the Clinton campaign.

All this brings us to 2017. A UK general election with the Conservatives out of sight in the polls and Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn, a leader who three-quarters of his MPs had no confidence in. The result was another shock as Labour climbed and the Conservative's lost their majority. Had it not been for the successful and different campaign by Scottish Conservtives the results would have been worse still.

Why? Right now we're talking about how bad the Conservative campaign was (just as we've done when we talk about the 2016 US elections) - over-centralised, too leader-focused, a dreadful manifesto and a campaign seemingly without bite or passion. And all this may be true but it doesn't really explain - after all the Conservative vote and share of the vote went up. Most of us would have been chuffed to bits getting over 42% of the vote in a general election.

The big story isn't the Conservatives but Labour. The Corbyn phenomenon, just like Obama and just like Trump, leaps straight from the pages of Alinsky - it is the victory of a community organiser against the established 'it's the economy, stupid' strategy. The story is no longer who sounds most credible talking about those macroeconomic charts and models but rather who can offer hope and change to that woman on Graeme Archer's train. Plus a million other stories - about people's health, jobs, education, pension and benefits - that fit into an organiser's narrative and motivate women on trains to become women at rallies.

Obama, Trump, Brexit, Corbyn - Melenchon in France, Bernie Sanders in the US, even the sainted Juston Trudeau in Canada - all changed how we campaign whether from left, right or centre. The old certainties - 'it's the economy, stupid' - are broken down by it being millions of different and personal economies that matter. Yours, mine and that woman on the train.

The Conservative Party remains trapped in the model of campaigning that didn't work for Clinton, didn't work for Remain, and didn't work a few weeks ago for May. It's not about how many Facebook ads you buy - that's just astroturf - but about an actual campaign run by committed campaigners. One irony is that the bussing of campaigners around in the 2015 election that caused so much hoo-hah, is much closer to the sort of campaigning we need.

In the end though, I'm struck by two things. Firstly that typically conservative folk aren't all that interested in politics - which is why Leave and Trump looked to a very different demographic for their shock troops. And secondly that, despite the apparant triumph of these populist campaigns, just as many voters are not taken in by the 'hope' and 'change' message when it doesn't come with a coherent policy message.

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The EU's courtiers can't see the truth - their project is rotten to its core

The greatest of political scientists, S. E. Finer, wrote about how all polities have a court. And that those courts featured those closest to the king, those aspiring to get close to the king and those who formed a rival court. The threats to these courts are of two different types - ones that determine who is king and who are the courtiers closest to the king and ones that create a different order, that replace the king with a different king.

So when we analyse the European Union - important right now because we have to decide whether to be part of it - we should remember that it is a political thing not an economic thing and that many of the people seeking to influence your decision are, in one way or another, courtiers. We should also remember that those courtiers have no interest in there being a change of king because their career trajectory clings to the current rulers. To be more precise the courtiers adhere to the current system rather than to the specific people who form the central court of the European Union.

Tim Worstall describes the outlook in a comment on Visegrad 4 ( or rather some sort of conference thing in Prague recently under the aegis of the Visegrad 4 grouping):

The interesting bit was how scary it was in fact. The groupthink is strong in this arena. There is no questioning of the goal, even if it’s not clearly delineated. That ever closer union is just assumed: how to bring it about being the only difference anyone has. I was the only truly eurosceptic person there and I wasn’t on the panel discussing eurosceptics for example (Frances is reasonable on this subject where I am not).

At one stage I pointed out that fiscal union simply was not going to happen. Europeans just are not going to allow 15-20% of GDP to be distributed through Brussels, which is what would be needed for the automatic stabilisers to operate properly so that the eurozone comes even close to being an optimal currency area. To do that really does mean German taxes paying Greek pensions.

It. Will. Not. Happen.

Not this century at least.

Everyone was shocked: how could you say such a thing? And anyway, we need to work out how to make this happen not think of why it cannot.

What’s scary about this is that these are the people (the varied policy wonks, political aides and so on who made up the audience) who are actually deciding policy within that EU bureaucracy. and they’re simply off with the fairies.

Now Tim is an economist of sorts rather than a political scientist. This isn't to say that he doesn't understand how political systems work but rather that his answer (in this case about the Euro) is couched in terms of the economic consequences of one or other choice. Yet Tim has noticed that the European Union's court - the body round which these policy wonks, aides, advisors and so forth are clustered - is not making decisions based on the economic rightness or otherwise of that decision. Even were the careful deconstruction of the Eurozone to be the right policy, there is no way in which these courtiers could countenance that policy choice being pursued. This would be politically unacceptable.

The reason for this situation - why, in Tim's terms, the assorted folk at this summit are 'away with the fairies' - is that their personal interest, career and future income is tied to the interests of the EU's central court. To challenge the fundamental policy premise of that polity - to point out that Brussels is naked - would be to threaten those interests, that career and the good income to be gained from clustering round the EU's court. So what the courtiers offer is the classic response of such people when faced with an existential threat - reform. We're told that the EU can be reformed, which means that a different set of courtiers sit at the centre of a slightly reconfigured court (with the gamble from the courtiers proposing 'reform' that they will be closer to that centre - and a little richer, a tad more powerful - than at present).

Everything that these courtiers do is Laputan in its distance from the real world of the people who those courtiers like to pretend are the real drivers of their world. For all the talk of elections, voting and democracy, the world of our courtiers is - for the most part - unchanging. This goes some way, perhaps to explaining why there is so much fret about neo-reactionary trends in European politics - it's not just that the Free Democrats, National Front, AfD or UKIP are right wing but rather that they position themselves away from the comfort of the EU's court. This trend is a threat to the EU and therefore incomprehensible, frightening and to be stopped at all costs.

So when those courtiers tell us we're 'blind' or wave their arms and exclaim in exasperation 'wake up, wake up', what they're doing is telling us we should come in from the cold, join their cosy world. We should accept the core ideology of the EU court - 'ever closer union' and so forth - and work with them on 'reform'. At one time I'd have been inclined to take this offer - the EU was a positive force in the world (or so we thought) - but having been close enough to what it does, I know differently. Far from buying the old lie about economic benefit, I now realise it is a political project that seeks the end of those things I value as important. It is only superficially democratic, specifically supranational and founded in List's old ideas of state directed, corporate capitalism (the same ideas borrowed by Mussolini in trying to hammer some sort of intellectual structure onto Fascism).

In one respect it is quite sweet that so many very clever people cluster around the EU's court. Like every other bunch of courtiers throughout history, these people mostly believe (when they've finished chasing consultancy contracts, speaking engagements, advisor positions and policy jobs) that there really is no alternative to the world in which they live, they develop a sort of strabimus with one eye gazing into their narrow little world while the other swivels frantically searching for ever grander ideas of union, collaboration and co-operation. We're told these people are the bright ones, the 'experts', yet they are - quite literally - ignorant of the lives, loves, aspirations and hopes of the people who are supposed to be their bosses.

What scares these courtiers is that a unruly rabble of people they've been told to dislike (and, as with all revolutions, some will actually be dislikeable) will pull down their comfortable castle and expose it to the light of truth and reality. There is a world beyond the EU. We can have a different king. There is - as there always is, whatever Maggie said - an alternative.

The argument for the EU is presented to us as an economic one - we'll be better off as a member, as art of a process of papering over genuine differences with euro-pap. What you should remember is that this is a political project. As Michael Portillo put it:

It has created hardship, unemployment and division on a dangerous scale. It is the result of an ideology; and the ideologues who pursue the goal of union do not count the cost in human misery. Why should they, since it is paid by others? Europe’s political elite is so self-satisfied with its self-proclaimed virtue in uniting Europe that it never doubts itself nor tolerates those who point out the damage that it does and its sheer incompetence.

The EU's courtiers don't see the truth - their project is rotten, dying and it it risks, as we've seen in Greece, pulling down the lives of ordinary people to satisfy its hubris.

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Those aren't giants, they're windmills - how the EU deal makes the case for leaving

As a Conservative it's always right to exercise doubt. Which is what most of us have been doing over the progress and direction of the European Union for some time. It's also important to understand that the true believers - in the EU's mission or in the need to escape from its clutches - do not understand the nature of doubt or, as we more regularly call it, scepticism. So when, faced with the need to decide, a sceptic lands on the "wrong" side of the fence it is always a traitorous denial of principle according to those true believers.

I've no doubt that many sceptics will decide to, as a Polish politician suggested on the radio this morning, 'take a rain check'. This is on the basis that, if you leave the EU that's it, there really isn't any going back. If you don't leave then there's always the opportunity to leave at some later time. Now this isn't a view point I share - seems a bit of a cop out - but its appeal is considerable as it conforms to the advice given by Jim's Father after the lad's fatal encounter with a lion.

His Mother, as She dried her eyes,
Said, ``Well--it gives me no surprise,
He would not do as he was told!''
His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James's miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

Yesterday we saw the next iteration of the 'reform' that will somehow justify us staying in the EU. And it's fair to say that the package announced by Donald Tusk and presented to a panting press pack by the Prime Minister was somewhat underwhelming. As one wag (@taxbod as it happens) described it:

Dave's EU deal. The terms, in full:

1) Raindrops on roses;
2) Whiskers on kittens;
3) Bright copper kettles;
and 4) Warm woollen mittens.

I disagree with those who tell me that the process was all smoke and mirrors, an act of political legerdemain designed to hoodwink up into voting to remain a EU member. Rather, the exercise was similar to the brave actions of Don Quixote when faced with giants:

And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

And the result - bits and pieces of what we wanted but no treaty change - represents absolutely the best that could have been obtained under the circumstances. We have galloped out, charged the enemy and returned with our heads high having failed because without a threat to its existence the EU cannot change any more than Don Quixote's giants could stop being windmills. Part of the thinking - and it was sound - is that the very fact of a referendum on the UK leaving represented a significant enough threat to the EU's sustainability. It turns out that - especially given the UK's negotiators reassurances of their intent, come what may, to continue supporting membership - this threat was not a threat at all.

I am a genuine sceptic in all this. I don't really believe in ever more draconian immigration controls, I don't want a sort of pseudo-fascist isolationist approach to the economy for that is lunacy. And I absolutely believe that the EU has played a role (albeit a smaller one than its vanity permits) in securing peace and harmony on what was a divided continent. So I ought to be a supporter of the EU except for a couple of real problems.

The first is that the EU's economic and social policies act to make Europeans poorer - this is true of the Common Agricultural Policy, it's true of its policies on the environment, and its true of its restrictive approach to rules on labour, health and welfare. Above all the EU is inward-looking and concerned with protecting what is here now rather than looking forward to what might be there tomorrow. The result is corruption, sclerotic economic growth, misplaced intervention and a preference for managed trade (like the TTIP) rather than free trade.

Worse than all this is that there is no way in which the EU can change this approach, it has ossified into a rigid protectionist mindset and a defensiveness about external criticism that merely shows how weak the 'union' is in reality. The sorry tale of Greece and the Euro should remind us that the EU will watch citizens starve rather than give one inch of ground on its programme - even when that programme is demonstrably failing.

The EU has all the trappings of democracy - a parliament, elections, grand debates and a constant babble about 'citizens'. But it is not a democracy because none of the actions available to the demos are able to change the policies of the union - these policies are set in stone, immutable and unchanging. Vast libraries of impenetrable prose are churned out giving the impression of change but which, on close inspection, change little of any significance or substance.

So no, I don't give a fig about when or whether migrants from Poland can claim benefits - it's a pretty marginal issue to the challenge of reforming the benefits we give to our own citizens. Nor do I care much about net migration or about the essentially meaningless wibble that is national sovereignty. But I do care about my ability, along with my neighbours, to have a real say in the decisions made by governments that affect my life. And - as is shown by the conclusion of David Cameron's negotiations - there is no prospect of the EU permitting this to happen or for us to move towards a polity genuinely founded on the principles of free speech, free enterprise and free trade.

So I shall - and you should - vote to leave.

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