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Discuss.
I think most British people would think only an absolute majority of parliamentary seats a win, and whether the Tories have that is still unknown.
I just don't understand why the vicious cuts to public services and the deplorable treatment of the poor and disadvantaged that the Tories have perpetrated stands a chance of winning them more votes than they got five years ago.
Aside from the implications of 5 years of Tory rule, one thing that occurs to me is what the complete inaccuracy of the opinion polling before the election tells us about political debate in the UK.
For those outside the UK: the opinion polls suggested a very tight election, with Labour and the Conservatives having an equal number of seats between them. Several polls right before the election put Labour narrowly ahead. No one expected a Conservative majority in their wildest dreams. Relatedly, I spent time in Oxford, London and Bath in the weeks leading up to the election and saw tonnes of Labour (and some Lib Dem) placards, and not a single Conservative one.
Similarly, before the Scottish independence referendum, polls suggested a much tighter result than eventuated: the unionists did much better than expected.
I think this phenomenon is a symptom of the fact that the Left (Scottish nationalism is predominantly a movement of the left in Scotland) are far more vocal about their voting intentions than the Right, who are often too embarrassed/ashamed/scared/reserved (take your pick) to talk about who they want to vote for. I voted Green myself (the Greens are far to the left of Labour), but I think that if the Left in the UK are to recover then we need to be far more open to hearing and respecting the opinions of those we disagree with, in order to foster real debate. The British Left, as far as I can see, just talk to themselves: they congratulate each other on their 'right-on' stance, sneer at anyone who has a different perspective, and make no effort at all to empathise and understand how someone could come to a different point of view. It's a feel-good recipe for irrelevance.
fuckity fuck
Ours is a weird voting system: the Tories got around 3x the number of votes that the party UKIP did; yet they have 326x the number of seats in the House of Commons.
I'm no fan of UKIP but, to me, there is something very odd about such a system.
I'd be interested to hear analysis of the implications of this result for higher education in the UK, if anyone has any informed views.
Anon UK philosopher (#2): I've heard your comment ["the Left … are far more vocal about their voting intentions than the Right, who are often too embarrassed/ashamed/scared/reserved (take your pick) to talk about who they want to vote for"] expressed often, including in attempts today to explain why pre-election polling turned out to be so far off. But then how is it that the EXIT polling was so much more accurate? Did those voting Conservative somehow lose all this shame and embarrassment when it came to talking to exit pollers?
Anon 6, exit polls are conducted by literally re-voting outside the polling station – so you put a mark on a ballot paper and put it in a box.
I was genuinely shocked when I saw the exit polls, and perhaps even more so over the night as the reality of what had happened unfolded. I’ll provide a few comments (mostly confined to Labours ineptitude – much more could be said on other points) as to why I think a government that has presided over the most punitive and pernicious attack on the public sector and what was left of a sense of justice in the UK since Thatcher were re-elected with a majority
1. The political landscape: elections are not won in one night or even in the weeks and months before them, but in the years, sometimes even decades in which the political landscape is shaped. The Labour Party in opposition has been absolutely feeble, not only failing to argue for a progressive alternative to neo liberal austerity but in fact actually endorsing it (Milliband having signed of on over 30billion worth of new Austerity cuts only months before the campaigns started). This has allowed the Tories in the last four years to shape the political agenda, at least in England, in such a way that any alternative to austerity is presented as some kind of frothing Bolshevism. So when in the final few weeks Labour made a few vague gestures in the centre-left direction (largely, I think, an opportunistic move on the basis of the leverage they saw the SNP getting with a more progressive anti austerity line), the response was either confusion, disbelief or a misguided idea that Labour has suddenly moved to the left. Labour failed to win the argument because they had no coherent argument to make, and by the time they started to cobble one together it was too late and the political landscape has been shaped in such a way that they could never really come out on top.
2. The SNP: building on the points above Labour’s failure to provide a progressive alternative from the get go allowed what is a nationalist party whose primary aim is independence to situate itself to the left of them. This had a double effect against Labour. Firstly they got absolutely wiped out in Scotland, the SNP claiming all but 3 seats. However there is a deeper sense in which the SNP inhibited Labour. Precisely because Labour failed to present themselves as a real alternative to the Tories to people in Scotland this meant that the SNP ‘threat’ was much more tangible, having the knock on effect that those voting in England swung towards the Tories to try and block the SNP influence. Oddly enough if Labour has been able to, over the course of the last parliament, situate themselves as a genuine alternative to neo liberal austerity rather that in agreement with it the SNP influence would have been tempered in Scotland, meaning in fact that ‘the fear factor’ (which was central to the Tory campaign) would have had less leverage and the swing to Labour in England would have been more marked. As it happened their failure to do so resulted in something of a double hit.
I think Jonathan just about nails it: Miliband bought into a narrative of austerity ultimately straining under his mildly social democratic pretensions. I think it is important to register that the results were largely an internal rebalancing of the the Coalition such that its majority markedly declined. Labour's vote-share increased more than did the Conservative's. The Lib Dem collapse largely fed into the Conservatives in Conservative-Labour marginals. Alongside the wipe-out of Labour in Scotland, that creates a startling Labour-Conservative gap, but the Left-Right bloc in the Common's is relatively even. It's at least within a margin of twenty-seats.
It's true that UKIP hurt Labour more than the Conservatives, weakening them in some key marginals. That's exactly how Ed Balls was ousted. That's a real threat in 2015. Labour need to reinvent themselves and create a distinctive platform if they hope to achieve a majority ever again, be into a centrist Blairism by another name, or into a genuinely anti-austerity platform akin to the SNP. If it's the former, it's almost inconceivable that what remains of its support in the North will not defect; there are dozens of substantial UKIP second-place vote-shares in what will come to be marginals in the region which will only be aggravated by New Labour revanchism. If it's the latter, they have a lot of work ahead of them reshaping the narrative they have sown. In any case, I doubt the union will survive until 2015. The Conservatives have pitted English against Scottish nationalism – that was their core campaigning strategy for the last month – in a way that I doubt can be undone. If that's right, I find it difficult to believe that an anti-austerity platform could ever gain a majority in England, Wales and North Ireland. All that given, I really do think this could be the death of Labour.
Alternatively, people just have different conceptions of justice to you and vote accordingly.
I should have prefixed my use of 'justice' with the term 'social', as in 'social justice'. Undoubtedly some people perhaps do vote according to a different sense of what constitutes social justice than as represented by a broadly leftist perspective. However, my sense is also that people's voting habits are more often than not the product of habit, self-interest and tribalism rather than some particularly well developed idea of the 'good', 'social justice' or even justice more broadly (a point that may well apply to people on the 'left' in the UK as it does to people on the 'right'). Nevertheless, just mooting that people have different ideas about how society should be run, or what constitutes justice, and therefore vote accordingly, whilst true does not add up to political analysis. If you want to understand election results and the way the political landscape is shaped more broadly i think you might need to avail yourself of more than just that, to my mind, fairly flippant and trivial statement. More pointedly, if you in fact have a different conception of what constitutes social justice than the one you think was implicit in my comments then please articulate such a conception and your reasons for holding it.
Flippant it was. But it's a response to the general presumption rolling about the place that the Conservatives only won because something went wrong (whether that be Labour's strategy, the SNP, etc). Lots of people, I imagine, voted Conservative because they share the same (or similar) conceptions of justice, social or otherwise.
"But it's a response to the general presumption rolling about the place that the Conservatives only won because something went wrong"
But I thought that was obvious. If they won, something must have gone wrong (whether that be Labour's strategy, the SNP, lots of people sharing similar conceptions of justice, etc.).
Have to go with James here: the case that something went wrong is itself a 'tribal' (your word, Jonathan) conclusion. And, to suggest an even less abstract reason for voting against Labour (i.e, other than adherence to a rival concept of social justice), let's please consider the possibility that the UK result is simply a judgement on economic competence. That motive doesn't need to entertain a charge of "habit, self-interest and tribalism".
The current Labour leadership is thoroughly associated with the failure, pre-crisis, to 'fix the roof when the sun was shining' – and they had been in power a full decade, all in senior Cabinet posts, so it's a hard charge to refute. (The usual excuse is: the rot started in the USA. But the first 3 banks to go under, in the summer of 2007, were one UK and two German banks.)
The Miliband offering was (a handful of crowd-pleasing one-liners aside) a fixation with 'pre-distribution' – which probably sounds OK in a university economics seminar, but makes no impression whatever on an average UK voter.
(Recall also – and now we are moving onto second-order considerations – that the Tories had UKIP defections to contend with, an historical legacy of having almost no representation in Scotland, a continuing upsurge in immigration on the outgoing Tory-led coalition's watch, and systematically adverse voting-district boundaries in England that alone are worth a material number of seats to Labour. It is arguably a bigger Conservative victory than it looks.)
This will be my last reply (i certainly don't want to dominate the discussion here with too many replies).
In terms of the idea that the chief explanation for the UK result is, as you put it Nick 'simply a judgement on economic competence" and that this motive "doesn't need to entertain a charge of "habit, self-interest and tribalism" (or indeed really require much further explanation at all) I am skeptical. To my mind most voters so called 'judgement' on issues of economics in fact does come down to a question of perceived financial self-interest, i.e, "i'll vote for whoever puts more money in my pocket". The Tories were successful undoubtedly in managing to convince large swathes of the English public that they would be literally better off under a Tory government.
I certainly agree that the perceived economic incompetence of Labour was a significant factor, yet this is a perception that to my mind was not some reasoned conclusion arrived at independently by voters, but rather was constantly agitated for by the Tories and the right wing media over the course of the last 4 years. This narrative was so dominant that large swathes of people in fact came to believe that Labour somehow actually caused the financial crisis in the UK through increasing public spending and borrowing. Whilst the issues surrounding Labour's role/response to the financial crisis would require much more detailed commentary and analysis, the Tory narrative that 'they created they this mess" is to my mind highly problematic and tribalistic, appealing to a habitual and to my mind simply pig-headed assumption that "lefty's dont understand the economy" and that whats exemplary of economic competence is unabashed acceptance of austerity, privatization and unregulated markets.
Given that the Tories, Cameron specifically, have promised to abolish the Human Rights Act, I wonder if any Cameron fans here could say which Human Right they find so repugnant to Britishness as to have Cameron want to get rid of the whole lot, and draft a British Bill of Rights?
Right to life
Freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment
Right to liberty and security
Freedom from slavery and forced labour
Right to a fair trial
No punishment without law
Respect for your private and family life, home and correspondence
Freedom of thought, belief and religion
Freedom of expression
Freedom of assembly and association
Right to marry and start a family
Protection from discrimination in respect of these rights and freedoms
Right to peaceful enjoyment of your property
Right to education
Right to participate in free elections
The Conservatives victory is probably good news for universities. Labour planned to cut tuition fees from £9000 to £6000 and is highly unlikely to have made up the shortfall through increasing general taxation.
The Conservatives promise to maintain spending on schools in cash terms but not real terms. This is wrong, they should have pledged to maintain funding in real terms as Labour and the LibDems did. However, provided inflation stays low it should not be too much of a problem provided they find efficiencies. And the Conservative-LibDem coalition had a successful school policy, substantially increasing the number of children taught in schools that the independent inspectorate rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’.
Clearly education should be a priority – only the LibDems gave it the prominence it deserves in the election campaign and made a commitment to funding it as well as it should be funded: much good it did them.
Conservatives in the UK are very different to American Conservatives
1) The Conservatives and LibDems together increased state overseas aid to the highest percentage of any country in the world.
2) Most Conservative voters support an NHS free to all, and the successive Conservative governments have consistently supported this. The Conservative Lib-Dem government maintained NHS spending in real terms, and the Conservatives are promising to spend £8billion over and above this in this parliament, where Labour were promising only £2.5billion.
3) Most Conservative voters support a welfare system which provides the necessities (housing, food, water, gas, electricity, clothing plus a few creature comforts) to those unable to work. Successive Conservative governments have consistently provided this. The Conservative LibDem government provided this, only tinkering at the edges to prevent some of the worst excesses. The welfare budget is now static – not shrinking – whereas previously it was expanding at 2% per year.
4) The Conservative LibDem government significantly cut income tax for low paid workers. The new Conservative government are committed to extending this.
5) Finally, as Nick Perry indicates, considering the circumstances pertaining when they took power, the Conservatives have done a good job of sorting out the economy, and boosting employment by 2 million jobs. The sort of polices advocated by Labour three or four years ago were adopted by the socialist French government, and their economy has performed significantly worse than the UK.
The problem going forward is that the Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner. Labour had a couple of good policies to raise money for the government: the mansion tax and taking benefits from rich pensioners. Greens had the excellent policy of a land tax. Conservative rejected the Labour plans (well politically they had to because they target their voters) and have no plans for raising significant sums. They have a couple of bad policies – increasing the inheritance tax threshold to £1m and subsidising the sell off of House Association properties – which will reduce income. And they have a good policy, further cutting tax for the low paid, which will also reduce income. Couple this with the promise to increase NHS spending by £8billion and eliminate the deficit (ie make government income from taxes etc equal to or greater than government expenditure) and it is difficult to see how they will square the circle without making cuts of the sort that most Conservative voters would object to. How they get on will depend on the rate of economic growth….
I've worked a lot advising on parts of Labour's general election manifesto and I ran press and comms for my local MP, Phil Wilson (whose predecessor was Tony Blair). My reading is that Tory voters were more motivated to vote than Labour's. Pro-Tory voters were concerned about a feared Lab-SNP pack and turned up at the polls to stop it. They were also motivated by the need to see off a perceived challenge from UKIP. Labour was more complacent assuming Lib Dem voters would flock to us – they did not – I regularly heard pro-Labour voters expressing doubts about Miliband as PM. (These doubts disappointed me because I've always been impressed by Miliband each time I met him.) A further issue was Labour focused too much on its core vote and not enough on winning over other voters in the kind of widespread appeal enjoyed under Blair. The situation leaves major challenges ahead in expanding the party's appeal and better motivating voters to select Labour at the polls. No doubt it's what I'll be working on for much of the next five years…
A vote for economic competence is, obviously, consistent with self-interest. But surely it can also qualify as 'enlightened' even if, with your dim view of electors, you suspect this is rare. (Do you propose an altruism test?)
The macro type of things that are at stake in national elections can often be both near-universal in scope and impactful at the individual level.
Suppose the issue of the hour was a military threat (e.g. UK 1939): votes could well be motivated by perceptions of military competence. That individuals have a self-interest in not wishing to suffer the personal impact of an invasion is clear enough; and they may also (selfishly?) assess that only collective-level military defence is any defence at all: but would we really attribute such a vote to "self-interest and tribalism"?
Conversely, if a system of justice must be both collective in structure but also beneficial to individuals, would you accept the charge that votes motivated by the percieved attractions of a justice system must be based on self-interest and tribalism?
It is trivial to point out that a thriving economy is a pre-requisite for a very wide range of policy desiderata to be pursued effectively and sustainedly – and not just economic ones: the economic sphere is as fundamental and pervasive as those of security and justice. I suggest many people know this to be the case (though not all, since belief in the tooth-fairy and the magic money-tree is widespread). I am not sure why you consider most of them as voting with a suspect degree of altruism.
This is No. 2 again. Rebecca Roache in the link posted by no. 19 nicely exemplifies what I was talking about. 'Keeping debate open [with conservatives] is somewhat optimistic, and perhaps even deluded', she says. Her self-congratulatory moralising is nauseating.
'[I]n much of British culture, people are uncomfortable with debate about politics. It would, in some circles, be rude to raise the topic of politics over dinner, and to try to change someone’s mind about their political views—well, that’s frankly out of order', she laments. But, hang on… if her reaction to people who express support for the Tories is simply to 'unfriend' them online (and, she implies, in real life too) and disengage, then who's fault is it that people are uncomfortable with political debate?
On Roache's blog post: "Then there is the fact that ‘engaging in political debate’ and ‘revising one’s political views in the light of rational argument’ are themselves hallmarks of liberal thinking, but not of conservative thinking. Conservatives, traditionally, base much of their politics on gut feelings or intuitions—what Edmund Burke in the 18th century called ‘prejudice’, and what Leon Kass has more recently termed the ‘wisdom of repugnance’. Far from viewing it as desirable to subject their political beliefs to reasoned evaluation and criticism, many conservatives view reason as a corrupting influence."
I'm wondering if this is a widely shared view, that liberals are more open to rational argument than conservatives. Or, something different, that liberals esteem (or, even weaker, pay lip service to) rational argument to a greater degree than conservatives.
It is a widely shared view that *I* am more open to rational argument and considered judgment than my opponents, who are emotionally driven ideologues. Change indexical content mutatis mutandis.
I'm skeptical of Roache's point that conservative political philosophers are less open to rational debate than liberal political philosophers. (I'm talking about philosophers rather than the average individual because she mentions philosophers — moreover, I'm not convinced that points about conservative political philosophers can be generalized to how conservative non-intellectuals reason.) It could be, for instance, that just about everyone is such that their reason follows their gut rather than their gut following their reason (Brian, isn't something like this your own view?). If so, then while conservative political philosophers might be more *aware* of this being how they operate, it doesn't follow that they operate in this way more than liberal political philosophers do. It could also be that conservative political philosophers aren't opposed to reasoning about politics, but rather that they take into account more factors than liberal political philosophers do (if Haidt is right, then liberals tend to take only care/harm and fairness/cheating as relevant to moral reasoning, whereas conservatives would also include loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation as relevant).
Anent opinion polls, which have been mentioned several times. I’m not being original—I think I read something about the the disparity between the outcome of the British General Election and what the opinion polls had led people to expect at Open Democracy—but it has come to strike me as odd that we tend to talk of such polls as if they were somehow neutral measuring devices. I understand that they would lose all credibilty should they come to be seen as lacking objectivity. But at the same time, since the manipulation of the consumer/citizen seems to continue its advance to ever greater heights, is it absurd to imagine that those with the capacity to do so might not already be engaged in the construction/(mis)use of opinion polls as just another tool in their manipulative arsenal?
As to the “weird” electoral system mentioned by 4, which I take to be a hint that proportional representation would be fairer (there’s actually a piece in today’s “Independent” newspaper showing what the make-up of the new Commons would be had the election been held under that different system): I cannot imagine that Scotland, Wales, or N. Ireland, or perhaps even parts of England would simply accept that the political unit to which proportionality should be applied should be the UK as a whole. Perhaps had proportional representation been put in place in Britain back in the 1950s, 60s, or maybe even 70s, treating the UK as a single unit would have been broadly accepted. But that is almost certainly no longer possible. There would surely have to be some approach to proportionality that respected the national/regional differences that are now so evident. It looks like the present weird system can only be replaced by another system that will for this reason or that strike many of the British electorate as equally and unacceptably weird.
Skepticism about the ability of social science to understand society well enough to come up with better social institutions or better prescriptions for dealing with social problems than those endorsed by tradition is a hallmark of conservative political philosophy. It is present in Burke, Oakeshott and Quinton (and if the latter two are correct about the history of conservative political thought, then this is a hallmark of every major English conservative thinker). But they are equally suspicious of any a priori argument for social change, as might come from a Kantian who is applying her ethical theory to some social problem. But those two views together just amount to skepticism about reason when applied to social issues.
This does not on its own imply that conservative political philosophers are immune to reasoned arguments. It might be that their self-conception says they should not take any appeal to social science or a priori ethical thought seriously, but that in fact they do (Conservatives in America do like to trot out social science when it agrees with them, so much so that they ignore how bad the science is – Charles Murray comes to mind). But it does mean that a conservative political philosopher is going to have recourse to general skepticism about reason as it applies to social issues, and that she will not be ashamed to make use of that skepticism when prima facie compelling arguments are made in favor of a policy they do not support, or against a policy which they do support. This does, it seems to me, make debating policy issues with a conservative political philosopher pointless. You will only make headway if you manage to overcome their skepticism about reason as applied to social issues, and it is implausible that you will do so. Even if you did change their mind, the time invested in doing so would make the whole exercise a waste.
Two more general points. I don't think we should get worked up about who is facebook friends with whom, and if we want to know what conservative political philosophers think it is best to consult the work of those political philosophers and not pop-psych.
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