Should Labour shift right? Or speak for the "left behind", and the 20m+ who, again, didn’t vote at all

The Tory majority hides what happened when you count individual votes. The Tory rise of 0.8% was less (apart from the LibDems, of course!) than any of the other major parties. UKIP were up by 9.5%, followed by the SNP at 3.1% and the Greens at 2.8%. Even the Labour vote rose by 1.5%. The Big Question is how many of UKIP's votes were for its rightist policies and how many for its leftist, given a lot of their support came from the "left behind", on low incomes, who had previously voted Labour.

Election 2015 results for the UK: BBC NEWS

The Labour vote rose by 1.5% across the UK, despite losing so many votes to the SNP in Scotland. But looking at England alone, Labour's vote rose by 3.6%, the Tory's by 1.4%.

Election 2015 results for England: BBC NEWS

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First-past-the-post doesn't work

Fee, Chris and KJ do the maths...

SOURCE BBC NEWS

SOURCE GUARDIAN: Election result is ‘nail in the coffin’ of first-past-the-post voting system

Britain’s’s first-past-the-post voting system has been declared broken and unfit for an era of multiparty politics as analysis of general election figures showed that it had delivered the least proportional result in the country’s history. Analysis by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) showed that, of almost 31 million people who voted, 19 million (63% of the total) did so for losing candidates. Out of 650 winning candidates, 322 (49%) won less than 50% of the vote. Katie Ghose, chief executive of the ERS, said: “This election is the nail in the coffin for our voting system. First past the post was designed for a time when nearly everyone voted for one of the two biggest parties. But people have changed and our system cannot cope.” She added: “One of the features of our broken voting system is that it accentuates divides. For instance, those who vote Conservative in Scotland have gone almost unrepresented, as have Labour voters in rural southern constituencies or Conservative voters in northern urban seats. The UK is at a constitutional crossroads, so the last thing we need is a voting system that pits nations and regions against each other. Ukip received 3.86m votes for the one MP it had elected to the Commons. The Greens got 1.2m votes and only one seat. This compared with an average of 26,000 votes for every SNP MP, 34,000 for every Conservative, 40,000 for every Labour MP and 299,000 for every Liberal Democrat.

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After the Scottish referendum: Will Westminster renege on its devolution pledges?

Fee and Chris try to guess what happens next...

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Is a vote for UKIP a vote for its policies? Or is it a protest vote?

 

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Graphs at a glance - British Social Attitudes Survey shows Tories and Labour have lost swathes of their core supporters. Politicians should be very afraid of us. Don't let them forget it! Make sure you Vote!

[Updated Aug 2016]

Whatever you think of Jeremy Corbyn, one thing he's done that all the others in the Labour or Tory parties haven't, is get hundreds of thousands to join the party.

Corbyn's strongest card is his promise to go much further than this. To get a significant portion of the millions who never vote, to vote Labour. Can he do it? Who knows. But getting non-voters to vote is no longer crazy talk. Think UKIP. Think Brexit. 

It matters because, for decades, UK elections have been decided as much by who doesn't vote as by who does. 


In politics how high you reach depends less on how tall you stand and more on who you stand on. For decades political parties have gained power standing on people who don't vote.

In the twilight weeks of the electoral cycle, like little children at bedtime, politicians see terrors lurking on every sofa across the land. Millions of zombie voters who might be roused if they get annoyed enough. Not to vote for what they are for, but to vote against what they are against.

Consider the sudden ejection of Maria Miller from her role as the Secretary of State for Culture. Miller was given the boot in the month before the May 2014 local and European elections. When Jeremy Hunt, the previous Secretary of State for culture (what is it about that ministry?), was caught up in far more serious allegations David Cameron rescued Hunt by promoting him to Secretary of State for Health. Luckily for Hunt there were no key elections in sight then. What ultimately did for Miller wasn’t her sin but her timing - getting caught during the witching hours that run for the few weeks before the Local and the European elections.

This is a lesson you must remember dear voter. It is a lesson you must not let our politicians forget you remember. You must keep them afraid of you.

Once the dark electoral hours have passed, politicians of all parties forget about us electors. For example the key strategy of successive Tory governments is to appear to cut taxes and spending. A graph from the 2013 British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey shows fewer than 1 in 10 Britons have wanted this in the 30 years since 1983. More than 90% have consistently wanted the level of tax & spend to remain the same or to increase.

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Cutting for cuts sake: What was the government thinking when it came to power and cut £100m from the flood defence budget?

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MP pay to rise while everyone else's is falling? There's more than one reason why their timing is damn stupid

Fee explains it all to KJ...

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The cost of infrastructure: Big Corporate has become the government's tax collector

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Russell Brand has never voted. He has a point

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A quarter of all MPs give parliamentary office jobs to their family members, costing taxpayers £4m

KJ and Fee try to look on the bright side of nepotism...

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Should MPs get a pay rise to attract talented top executives?

Fee and KJ state the obvious...

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The nation's wage bill falls £52bn in five years while top exec pay keeps rising

Fee, Chris and KJ - if not the mainstream political parties - see the problem...

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In one week, three Lords and one MP are caught agreeing to payment from lobbyists

Cameron promises rapid new laws to stop dodgy lobbying...

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One in three businesses is losing money

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg needs all the good news he can get. But maybe not from Cameron...

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Inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

KJ, Chris and Fee know what the problem is...

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As Osborne's Austerity (Os-terity) pushed Britain towards a triple-dip recession, differing unemployment rates around Britain show we are not all in it together.

As official GDP data showed Britain flirting with a 'triple dip recession', we take yet another look at whether we are really 'all in this together'. 

For this post our focus is on how the Tory party's policy of 'austerity' is reflected in the unemployment rates in parliamentary constituencies around the country. Data from a report by the House of Commons Library, released in January 2013, shows that vast swathes of the country have low unemployment. Austerity is not so hard if you have a job. A wage freeze is far less austere than moving from a salary to the dole. So with all the vast swathes of low unemployment, where is the high unemployment and who is actually paying the price of austerity?

The data in this report reveals the unemployment rates in each parliamentary constituency. This shows just 10 Tory MPs and 4 Lib-Dem MPs have unemployment rates higher than 5%. While the unemployment rate is higher than 5% in 137 Labour MPs' constituencies.

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Key political fibs, and some tips on how to refute them

Money has been devalued. I do not refer to inflation here. Money has been devalued because people don't value the things they can get too easily. 

The people who control our economy - the top politicians and businessmen - have served themselves extremely generously over the last few decades, and now for them money is commonplace. Because it is of little value they carelessly give it to some (themselves and their associates) and thoughtlessly take it away from others (the rest of us Britons). They do this with no more concern than casting a shadow.

People with vast amounts of money think people with merely lots of money are poor. In a campaign speech Mitt Romney, an American presidential candidate, said he thought the average American earned a quarter of a million dollars. Presumably he regards $250,000 a year as a very modest amount. Thus he and his ilk blindfold themselves to the consequences of their actions with the assumption that the poor only have lots of money, rather than pots of it, allowing their consciences to let them rip off an extra few hundred pounds with an increase in ticket prices and utility bills. And rip off another extra few hundred pounds with freezes in pay and cuts in benefits and pensions. Money isn’t important, they tell themselves, therefore it isn’t important if I help myself to some more of it.

http://g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/topincomes/#Database:

But just as people don’t value the things they have in plenty, they do value what they have little of. For 90% of Britons, whose income has stagnated in real terms for decades, money does have value. And when it goes, it hurts.

Britain is going through some painful changes. One of which is a public intolerance of lying and cheating. Vilification is everywhere: bankers (for a compendium of dodgy activities that have come to be known generically as ‘banking’); media moguls (phone hacking, bribing officials, etc.); suppliers ripping off the government (MOD paying £22 for 65p lightbulb, etc.); insurers (inflating repair costs to hike premiums, etc.); MPs (fiddling expenses; lying about anything including swearing at cops; providing commercial favours; complicity in kidnapping and rendition, etc.). Pity the banker/MP/mogul who now find themselves in deep doo-doo for doing precisely the same thing they were openly doing when they were fêted as ‘leading citizens’. Pity? Perhaps not.

Bankers have been manipulating LIBOR for years, an open secret that was shouted across trading floors with bankers offering one another a choice of rates like sweets from a tin of Quality Street. Strawberry Delight or Orange Crunch, up a little or down a lot? Fabulous profits tumbled in from the Payment Protection Insurance scam, insider trading, grotesque charges on pensions and investments. All these scams were hardly a secret to an insider or an insider’s friends or his friends’ friends, their spouses, paramours and personal trainers. The perpetrators of these scams were not just quietly indulged, but were proudly trumpeted as the jewels in the British industrial crown. To keep them, we are told, we must pay them generously and regulate them pusillanimously.

Unimpeded and celebrated dodgy behaviour became an open secret that spread like a flu virus infecting the upper echelons of Britain. Ripping off clients, customers and constituents was in order to harvest as much money as the bankers. Confusing rewards with merit, they proved their ‘excellence’ by the amount of money they could grab. And then justified the amount of money they could grab by their ‘excellence’. Even our sainted family doctors got in on the act with a 58% pay increase over 4 years for doing less work. British culture itself went through a sarcastic period, Sarc-Art, when unmade beds, stuffed sheep, lights going on and off, and crumpled pieces of paper were selling for ludicrous prices to people with too much money to value it. As soon as our Brit-Artists realised that their sarcasm was profitable, perhaps they too believed in their own excellence?

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Don’t be ripped off by a Parliamentary Inquiry into bankers. Only a full Judicial Inquiry will do

By Ann Pettifor 

Fellow of the New Economics Foundation.

[Click here to sign the e-Petition.]

Power corrupts, and financial market power has corrupted financial and other markets. It has done worse. It has corrupted politics. That is why Britain will be ripped off by a Parliamentary Inquiry into banking. It will go nowhere, lack both credibility and teeth, and will inevitably be discredited. Above all, it is most unlikely to rein in bankers.

That is why we launched our  e-Petition the very day the Barclays LIBOR scandal broke on 27^th June, and why we are still calling on Britons (and all UK residents) to sign this Peoples’ Petition here for a full Judicial Inquiry into...  

“the fraud, wrongdoing and ethics of British banks, their management and their staff, and the role of the British Bankers Association. The terms of reference of this inquiry should also include the manipulation of interest rates on about £225 trillion of assets. The inquiry must have full powers to compel witnesses to appear on oath, and to obtain all forms of evidence.”

Within a few days, over 10,000 had already signed the petition, and very soon others – including Ed Miliband and the Labour Party – joined in the call. 

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Monopoly comes quickly in ConDem Britain

KJ tells Fee about a new version of the famous board game Monopoly - the unregulated free market edition

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Stop Britain’s biggest rip-offs, and no budget cuts or tax rises are required. Make sure you ask your candidate about them before you vote

Next time they knock on your door, ask them what they will do about some of Britain’s biggest rip-offs: tax dodging, housing, the banks, gas & electricity bills, and MP's pay. We’ve given you a few ideas to start you off...

Tax evasion and avoidance: HMRC estimates that £35bn is dodged in tax. Nobody can know the actual figure, as so much secrecy surrounds tax dodging. Credible estimates put it at over £70bn. There is a huge and complex list of perfectly legal ways that corporations and the very rich can avoid tax – a bit like “claiming on expenses” but more sophisticated. Yet the ConDems are cutting the number of HMRC staff who investigate tax evasion and avoidance, and their efforts to “simplify” the tax system never include simplifying those loopholes. Labour never focussed on this when they were in power.

Suggest a policy: Increase HMRC staff, and monitor their performance. The cost will be peanuts compared to the sums involved. These loopholes must be closed, and the penalty for deliberate evasion should be a prison sentence.

Cut the cost of housing: The average tenant spends a fifth of their income on rent, and those costs are rising. More and more people are being priced out of the housing market because wages continue to fail to keep up with the rising cost of buying a house. The charity Shelter says 1.6 million children in Britain live in housing that is overcrowded, temporary, or run-down. Yet the government’s proposed building of 150,000 affordable homes over four years is less than a third of what is needed. This will leave millions of families stuck in limbo on housing waiting lists, and push house prices further out of the reach of those on ordinary incomes. Perfectly decent house-owners are genuinely afraid of what might happen if their property prices level off or even fall. But the less money everyone spends on housing, the more everyone spends on other parts of the economy that generate jobs, taxes and pensions for all. Cutting the cost of housing, just as cutting the cost of any other essential service (energy, telecoms, transport, health, pensions, banking) will directly benefit the whole economy. Since the early 1970s UK house prices have tripled in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. In Germany, the cost of residential property has barely budged in real terms in the past 40 years.

Suggest a policy: Build 600,000 affordable homes over the next 4 years.

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