Austerity and Political Choice in Britain

H. Clarke, P. Kellner, M. Stewart, J. Twyman, P. Whiteley

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137524935
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is a comprehensive study of the 2015 general election in Britain designed not only for students and scholars of British politics, but also for the interested reader. It looks at the record of the Coalition government both in terms of its plans and performance, particularly in relation to the economy, as the starting point for understanding what happened. The authors go on to examine the campaign during the run-up to polling day and to explain why people voted the way they did. They also take a close look at the various constituency battlegrounds across the country showing how and why voting patterns varied across Britain. Finally, they discuss the implications of the election outcome for the future of the party system and British politics more generally. This book provides important insights into an electionwhich has permanently changed the political geography of Britain.

1

Setting the Scene for 2015

Abstract: Chapter 1 depicts the evolving political context preceding the 2015 general election and how prominent events and conditions influenced trends in public opinion. Most important was austerity, the organizing theme of the economic policies pursued by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government formed in May 2010. Other significant events include selecting Ed Miliband as Labour Leader, the national referendum on changing the electoral system, efforts to control immigration, NHS reform, Prime Minister Cameron’s promised referendum on continued EU membership, the 2014 EU parliamentary elections and the Scottish independence referendum. Widely publicized foreign policy decisions including the attack on Libya and the vote on military intervention in Syria also are discussed.

Keywords: austerity; economy; immigration; NHS Reform; referendums

Clarke, Harold D., Peter Kellner, Marianne Stewart, Joe Twyman and Paul Whiteley. Austerity and Political Choice in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137524935.0004.

Six days after the general election of 2010, David Cameron and Nick Clegg appeared together before the media in the garden of 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. With 364 MPs (307 Conservative, 57 Liberal Democrat), the Coalition had a majority of 78 in the new House of Commons. Despite predictions to the contrary, the Coalition Government survived a full five-year term, and its performance provides the background for understanding the results of the 2015 general election.

New governments generally enjoy a honeymoon with the electorate and the Coalition was no exception. For the first few weeks both Cameron and Clegg enjoyed strong approval ratings, with net scores (percentage saying they were doing well minus percentage saying badly) of up to plus 40. Afterwards their ratings declined, though Clegg and the Liberal Democrats lost support faster than Cameron and the Conservatives. By September 2010, Clegg’s rating turned negative, and the Liberal Democrats, down to 13 per cent in voting intentions had lost almost half of the 24 per cent vote share the party had obtained in the election. So the demise of Liberal Democrat support, one of the big surprises of the 2015 election, had its origins in the party’s early experiences of coalition government politics.

In contrast to their junior partners in the government, Cameron’s rating in September 2010 was plus 18, while Conservative support, at 41 per cent, was still four points higher than the 37 per cent the party had won in the election. Cameron’s net rating did not turn negative until January 2011, and Tory support did not fall significantly below its general election share until April 2012, almost two years after the Coalition was formed. This set the pattern for the rest of the Parliament. The fortunes of the two Coalition partners varied, but Cameron and the Conservatives always enjoyed much more resilient polling numbers than Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.

As for the Coalition agreement itself, voters liked the idea initially. At the height of ‘Cleggmania’ during the 2010 election campaign, YouGov found that 53 per cent agreed that ‘a hung parliament with the Liberal democrats holding the balance of power could be a good thing’ and just 37 per cent disagreed. Four weeks after the agreement was signed, it was backed by a ratio of 60 to 30 per cent. Net support turned negative in December of that year and it never subsequently recovered. For most of the Parliament, opponents of the agreement outnumbered supporters by between 20 and 30 per cent. By the end of the Parliament, most voters heartily disliked the thought of the Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power with less than one in three agreeing it would be a good thing. So in the minds of the public the coalition government experience was not a positive one.

In this introductory chapter we tell the story of the run-up to the 2015 general election by examining the political events during the period of Britain’s first official coalition government since World War II. The 2015 election result has its origins in the politics of the period from 2010 to 2015, and we take the reader through a chronology of the events during this period to set the scene. The chapter emphasizes key events that occurred during the five years of the coalition government and examines how the public reacted to them using a wealth of data from the many YouGov surveys conducted during this period. We begin with George Osborne’s first budget, implemented just after the new government was formed.

Osborne’s first budget – the age of austerity

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s first Budget announced on 22 June 2010 set out the Coalition’s plans to tackle the government deficit. During the 2010 election campaign, the Conservatives had identified the deficit as the key problem for the next government. In the budget Osborne raised VAT from 17.5 to 20 per cent, froze child benefit for three years, curbed housing benefit, reduced tax credits for better-off families and froze the pay of public sector workers earning more than £21,000 a year. He also introduced a bank levy and raised capital gains tax for higher rate taxpayers. On public spending Osborne said that the health and overseas aid budgets would be protected, but otherwise departments would face overall cuts of 25 per cent on average in their current budgets over the next four years. Capital spending would not be cut overall. The era of austerity politics had arrived.

Osborne softened these blows for many voters by increasing the personal income tax allowance by £1,000 (a Liberal Democrat demand in the coalition negotiations) and introduced a ‘triple lock’ on state pensions, saying that they would increase in line with prices, earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever was highest. He also announced staged reductions in corporation tax. The Chancellor forecast that the economy would grow by 1.3 per cent in 2010, accelerating to between 2 and 3 per cent in subsequent years. He expected government borrowing to fall from £149 billion in 2009/10 to £20 billion in 2015/16, by which time the current budget deficit would be in balance.

The public’s initial verdict on this new economic policy was favourable, with a majority (53 per cent) thinking that Osborne’s plans for cutting the deficit would be good for the economy; just 28 per cent said they thought the plans were ‘bad’. Moreover, the cuts were considered fair by 45 per cent and unfair by 34 per cent. On the whole, voters sided with the Chancellor’s analysis of Britain’s problems, rather than with his critics: 48 per cent thought ‘it’s the right time to cut borrowing sharply, so Britain’s economy can recover’, whereas only 33 per cent said ‘it’s the wrong time: higher taxes and lower spending could drive Britain back into recession’. Asked who was more to blame for the cuts, fully 49 per cent said ‘the last Labour government’, while 18 per cent blamed the Coalition and an equal number said ‘both equally’. So the narrative that Labour was responsible for the ‘great recession’ and the Conservatives would concentrate on fixing it was established early during the new government.

However, as it became clear that Osborne’s economic forecasts had been too optimistic, voters began to lose faith in the government’s stewardship of the economy. In June 2010, 49 per cent thought it was managing the economy well, while 29 per cent said it was doing badly – a net score of plus 20. The net score went negative five months later, in November 2010 and declined to a low point of minus 41 in August 2012. Subsequently, as economic growth gathered pace, the government’s rating began to improve, returning (just) to positive territory in March 2015, a few weeks before the 2015 general election. The rebound in voters’ judgments about how Mr Osborne and his colleagues were managing the economy could not have been timed more effectively and, as we see in subsequent chapters, it was politically consequential.

Meanwhile, although the proportion of the public blaming Labour for spending cuts declined, and the numbers blaming the Conservatives rose, a gap persisted throughout the Parliament with more people always blaming Labour. In the early months of 2015, the average figures were 35 per cent blaming Labour more, 30 per cent blaming the Coalition Government more and 23 per cent blaming both sides equally.

Ed Miliband becomes Labour leader

In a closely fought contest in September 2010, Ed Miliband narrowly defeated his brother David for the party leadership (by 50.6 per cent to 49.4 per cent) in the fourth round of counting under Labour’s electoral college system. David had the backing of most MPs and local party members, but Ed’s strong support among members of trade unions proved decisive. Harriet Harman, elected deputy leader in 2007, retained her role. David declined the offer of a place in Ed’s shadow cabinet and in March 2013 he resigned as a Labour MP to take up a new role as the head of an international charity, the International Rescue Committee, based in New York.

Ed Miliband struggled throughout the Parliament to secure public confidence and respect. After a brief honeymoon with press and public, his net approval rating went negative in November 2010 and remained there until the 2015 election. For much of the time his ratings were dire, falling as low as minus 55 in November 2014, when the media reported attempts by a group of Labour MPs to replace him as leader with Alan Johnson, the former Home Secretary. These damaging stories died down when Johnson said there were no circumstances under which he would stand for party leader.

When YouGov asked the public which of the three main party leaders would make the best prime minister, Miliband always lagged behind Cameron, by margins of up to two-to-one. Very occasionally, Miliband reduced Cameron’s lead to single digits, for example, in July 2011 at the height of the phone-hacking scandal when Labour’s leader attacked Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of The Sun and News of the World. This happened again in September 2013, when Miliband announced that an incoming Labour government would freeze gas and electricity prices for 17 months as a prelude to reshaping the domestic energy market. But these modest recoveries never lasted.

The fundamental truth was that Miliband never managed to use his four years as opposition leader to persuade voters that he was up to the job of prime minister. YouGov regularly tracked the images of party leaders, by asking voters to say which of eight characteristics each leader had with respondents ticking all that they thought applied. Generally, Miliband achieved this on only one attribute, that he was ‘in touch with ordinary people’, and came close on two others, that he was ‘honest’ and ‘sticks to what he believes in’. However, he seldom reached even a very modest 10 per cent on three crucial characteristics: ‘strong’, ‘decisive’ and ‘a natural leader’. As we discuss in later chapters, leader images are very important and Miliband’s was not conducive to electoral success.

One of the intriguing questions is: would Labour have done better had it elected David Miliband instead? The polling evidence suggests that the answer is ‘Yes’! When David announced his resignation as an MP in 2013, 42 per cent told YouGov that Labour would have been better off had he been leader, and just 6 per cent said the party would have been worse off. In November 2014, at the height of media reports of Labour MPs grumbling about Ed’s leadership, YouGov found that Labour would have moved from three points behind the Conservatives to three points ahead, when the public were asked how they would vote with David Miliband as leader.

However, two qualifications should be noted. The first is that the shift in voting intention was actually rather modest when the hypothesis of David being leader was tested. In the dying days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, the evidence was much stronger that the Conservatives would benefit from her departure than was true for Ed Miliband. The second point is that the questions asked people to imagine an alternative recent history for the Labour Party, and the reality might have been utterly unlike the imagination. David would have been a more centrist leader, and he would have challenged the party to continue the modernizing New Labour strategy that Tony Blair had championed. Nobody can be sure whether this would have divided the party or made it more electable by strengthening its appeal across the electorate as a whole. The case certainly can be argued that under David Miliband Labour would have won in 2015; but it is in the nature of such counterfactual theories that they cannot be proved.

The tuition fees row

In December 2010 the government’s decision to increase the maximum tuition fees for university students in England and Wales from £3,290 to £9,000 was one of the most sensitive and controversial that the Coalition made. The Liberal Democrats had fought the 2010 election on a manifesto commitment to abolish fees completely. When the new measure was put to the vote on 9 December, 28 Liberal Democrat MPs, most of them ministers, voted in favour, while 21 voted against and 8 abstained. Ahead of the announcement of the policy on 3 November, Nick Clegg’s rating had stabilized, with almost as many people saying he was doing well as the Liberal Democrat leader as saying he was doing badly. Afterwards, it declined rapidly, to a net score of minus 27 in December and minus 52 the following May, when local elections confirmed what the polls had been saying for some months: the Liberal Democrats’ brand was badly tarnished and much of their electoral support had evaporated.

Nowhere was this loss sharper than among students. In the general election they had given strong support (45 per cent) to the Liberal Democrats, with Labour, the Conservatives and other parties getting 21 per cent, 21 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively. After the tuition fees announcement, the figures were: Labour 42 per cent, Conservative 26 per cent, Lib Dem 15 per cent (down 30), others 17 per cent. Not surprisingly, a huge majority of students disliked the new policy (by 78 per cent to 14 per cent) and four in five thought the Liberal Democrats were wrong to renege on their election pledge. The general public also opposed the new policy, though by the narrower margin of 52 to 35 per cent, and a large majority judged that the Liberal Democrats were wrong to make their U-turn (by 62 per cent to 29 per cent). In the longer run, the policy probably did the Conservatives little harm; they could point to the continued increase in student numbers, including applicants from poorer families, after the new fees were introduced. However, Clegg and his party never recovered from having turned their backs on the policy that they had made central to their 2010 election campaign.

The attack on Libya

In early 2011, a civil war in Libya prompted the United Nations Security Council to debate measures to restrain the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. This debate culminated in a resolution, passed on 17 March, to impose a no-fly zone on Libya, followed two days later by a further resolution calling for ‘all necessary measures’ to enforce the no-fly zone and protect civilians. On 19 March, the United Kingdom joined France and the United States in bombing Gaddafi’s forces. The operation, taken over by NATO later that month, culminated in Gaddafi’s downfall in October 2011. However, Gaddafi’s departure did not lead to a new and stable government; rather, the country endured continuing conflict and subsequently it became a failed state.

British attitudes to UK forces going into action were conditioned by events in Iraq and also in Afghanistan. In both cases, British military intervention had been popular in the early stages, but before long opinion turned against UK involvement as troops failed to bring peace to either country. In the case of Iraq, the much discussed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ utilized by Tony Blair as a reason for intervening could not be found. As British missiles struck Libya, public opinion was divided, with 45 per cent in favour and 36 per cent against the intervention. As so often on matters of peace and war, there was a notable gender divide, with men backing action by 53 to 34 per cent and women dividing almost exactly, with 37 per cent in favour and 38 per cent against.

As the operation continued and Gaddafi’s regime clung to power, support for military action faded, touching a net score of minus 15 in mid-August, with 30 per cent in favour and 45 per cent against. Only when Gaddafi’s government imploded in October 2011 did net support for military action turn positive once more. By late October, when his regime finally collapsed in the week following Gaddafi’s death, 49 per cent thought military action had been right and 31 per cent judged it was wrong.

These fluctuations in opinion concern anyone who believed that Britain should be prepared to take action in support of shared international goals, rather than just to protect the country’s direct and immediate national interests. The risk to the lives of British troops in Libya was negligible, and there was never any question of ‘boots on the ground’ in the manner of Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet, at best, only half of the public supported UK involvement,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Setting the Scene for 2015
• 2  The Political Economy of Austerity
• 3  Policy Performance and Political Payoffs
• 4  The 2015 Campaign
• 5  Choosing to Vote and Choosing a Party
• 6  Explaining the Election Outcome
• 7  The Politics of Discontent: Britains Emerging Multi-Party Politics
• Appendix: Measurement of Key Variables
• Bibliography
• Index