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Refugees and integration in the UK: the role of gender

Posted:Mon, 21 Nov 2016 07:00:05 +0000

The population of refugees in the UK is growing, yet our understanding of the process of integration is limited. Jenny Phillimore and Sin Yi Cheung break new ground and explain how gender impacts on the process. They offer unique insights drawing on areas including language proficiency, health, employment, and housing, and outline key recommendations that the government must consider in order to enable those individuals to thrive.

A combination of conflict and environmental catastrophe, together with improved transport and communication have prompted high levels of displacement, and enabled asylum seeking beyond national borders. While the majority of the world’s refugees are internally displaced or live in countries adjacent to their countries of origin, millions seek asylum in developed countries. The years 2015 and 2016 experienced an increase in this trend as well over a million refugees undertook perilous journeys into Europe to escape conflict and civil war.

The large-scale movements of forced migrants is increasingly being problematized despite the arrival of highly vulnerable women and children who now constitute around half of all arrivals. Many countries have introduced measures intended to reduce numbers offering support to those who make it into Europe against the odds. Others, such as the UK, have introduced resettlement programmes aimed at bringing the most vulnerable, frequently women and children, from conflict zones or camps, directly to the country of refuge.

There are now 1.5 million recognised refugees in Europe with 149,765 residing in the UK in 2013 (UNHCR 2013). Around 30 per cent are women but frequently their numbers are obscured by the tendency to report UK asylum data by the gender of the lead applicant – who is often male. The United Nations Population Fund has stressed the importance of a gender analysis in developing an understanding of refugee integration highlighting the importance of women’s role supporting family integration, as well as their vulnerability to social and structural inequalities.

Many academics and policymakers recognise that integration is multi-dimensional, processual and non-linear with the overall goal being “acceptance into society” (Pennix 2003). Despite the complexity of integration processes and the acknowledged importance of gender there has been a lack of research that looks at the multi-dimensionality of integration. There is an almost complete absence of work looking at the role of gender in integration processes. Some research has considered the experiences of women largely investigating small groups of women, in a single locality, often from a single country of origin. Such analysis does not allow for a nuanced understanding of how men and women’s experiences of integration vary. In order to try to examine the ways in which gender impacts upon integration across multiple integration indicators, we turned to the UK’s Survey of New Refugees (SNR).

The SNR, implemented in 2005-2007, was the only large-scale quantitative survey of refugees’ integration outcomes undertaken in the UK (Cebolla et al 2010). The large sample size and wide array of questions asked, and the fact that it has not been repeated, means that it offers the best insight available into refugee integration in the UK. The survey is useful in that it is a longitudinal study and followed new refugees from grant of leave to remain with three follow-ups after 6, 15 and 21 months.

Some 5,678 valid responses were received in the first wave of the survey reducing to 939 refugees in the final wave. From the survey questions, we created key variables covering the presence and frequency of social networks (personal, ethno-religious & formal), language fluency and literacy, housing and state-provided (NASS) accommodation. We also controlled analyses by age, partner, dependent children, time in UK, place of origin, pre-arrival education and religion enabling us to isolate the impact of gender. The main questions asked concerned what are key gender differences in social networks, language proficiency, self-reported health, education and employment, and housing. We undertook a series of multivariate analyses and binary logistic regressions (see Cheung and Phillimore 2016).

We found that women were likely to have more types of networks than men but men had higher levels of fluency and literacy with women not catching up until 21 months. Women were less likely to attend ESOL classes, or to attend later than men. Some 23 per cent more men were employed than women; on the whole it appeared that women fared worse than men, were more likely to have difficulty budgeting, and were more likely to have difficulty paying bills. Fewer women were in problem-free housing. Most worrying was strong evidence that women report poorer health than men and these reports increased over time.

Using a range of analyses we sought to predict integration outcomes. We found that language proficiency, length of time in UK, women having dependent children, and men with higher levels of education all increased social networks. Residing in the accommodation allocated by the-then National Asylum Seeker Support Service (NASS) on a no-choice basis was associated with reduced networks and poorer language proficiency in the early stages of life as a refugee. Possessing personal and informal networks were also associated with language proficiency in the early stages of life as a refugee.

Good English proficiency was associated with ability to access quality housing for men, and with access to stable housing for women. Length of residence also increased odds of finding stable housing for women. Men were three times more likely that women to report better health. Without further detailed qualitative research it is hard to understand why women’s health declines over time in the UK. We know from our analyses that language proficiency is important for men’s health and years of education for women’s health. NASS housing, which appears to be highly problematic for refugee health, is perhaps a reflection of poor housing conditions which have been widely reported but also the no-choice allocation of housing, the expectation that individuals share with strangers and that they can be re-dispersed with little notice.

We have clear evidence that there are gender differences in integration particularly in terms of social networks, housing, health, language and access to education, training and work. We know that, as we would expect given that integration is a set of processes, individuals’ integration outcomes do change over time. Women on the whole catch up with men but there is not a full equalisation of outcomes; most concerning of all, women’s health actually declines over time. Perhaps the effect of sexual violence (Pittaway & Bartolemei 2001) and delayed onset post-traumatic stress disorder (Koyama 2014) affected the women respondents in the SNR. Given the tendency for men to be lead applicants we might speculate that those women who appeared in this survey as lead applicants had particularly intense experiences of persecution.

The findings of our analysis can help us to understand the kinds of integration policy and practice that might support more equitable refugee integration. Given that women’s progress in integration is slower than men’s, gender sensitive integration policy and practice is required. Free language classes should be offered to asylum seekers so that they can begin to make progress before they gain status and classes offered for women close to National Asylum Seeker Support Service housing with childcare provision on site (Koyama 2014; Phillimore 2012). Further provision of mentors for women would help them to more effectively navigate complicated housing and benefits systems. Mentors can help in the search for better quality housing, registration on language classes and aid rapid social network expansion.

Such demands are perhaps unrealistic given the Conservative Government’s pre-occupation with austerity yet with plans to bring 20,000 refugees to the UK – the majority of them likely to be women and children – and the ongoing arrival of spontaneous asylum seekers, we do have a responsibility to ensure that individuals given sanctuary can thrive.

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Note: the full article on which the above draws was published in the Journal of Social Policy and is available here.

About the Authors

Jenny Phillimore is Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity and Professor of Migration and Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham.

Sin Yi Cheung is Reader in Sociology at Cardiff University.
Book Review: The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman

Posted:Sun, 20 Nov 2016 08:40:52 +0000

In The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, Gabriel Zucman makes a provocative argument about the large-scale evasion of taxes as well as how to tackle this global issue. Antonio De Vito highly recommends this concise, nontechnical and clearly argued book to everyone interested in understanding how the international financial system is making illegal use of tax havens.

If you are interested in this book review, you may also like to listen to a recording of Dr Gabriel Zucman’s lecture, ‘The Hidden Wealth of Nations’, recorded at LSE on 30 June 2016.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. Gabriel Zucman. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Find this book:

Tax havens are low-tax jurisdictions that provide individuals and multinational companies with opportunities to escape taxes. They undermine the global market and cause the world’s governments to lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Since the financial turmoil of 2008, this worrisome issue has dominated the political agenda around the world, and it has given rise to tensions over austerity and wealth inequality.

Gabriel Zucman, assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, has written a provocative and lively book on the origins, importance and fast-growing threat of tax havens for the world economy. The Hidden Wealth of Nationsmakes three different yet equally important contributions to economic studies of tax havens and sheds new light on the world’s money held in offshore centres.

First, it offers a fascinating historical review of how tax havens came into existence in the aftermath of World War I (i.e. the so-called ‘Swiss Big Bang’), and of the hegemony of Switzerland over the international wealth management market after the end of the Bretton Woods era. Second, it provides an extensive and rigorous quantitative estimate of the world’s financial assets currently hidden in tax havens. Finally, it suggests possible remedies.

Whilst the first part of the book takes the reader on a fabulous historical journey from the birth of tax havens through to their current state, the major contribution of Zucman’s book lies in undertaking creative work to quantify the size and dynamics of offshore wealth in today’s global economy. In doing so, Zucman focuses on systematic inconsistencies in international aggregated statistics (i.e. unexplainable ‘anomalies’) to map hidden wealth. He uses data from the Swiss National Bank to compare financial assets and liabilities in the financial centres, and shows that there are always more liabilities than assets – metaphorically ‘as if planet Earth were in part held by Mars’ (37). This difference is exactly the measure of the world’s wealth hidden in offshore bank accounts.

Image Credit: (Rojer CC BY 2.0)

According to his estimates, the hidden wealth amounts to about 8 per cent of the global financial assets of households, equivalent to at least $7.6 trillion. These overall figures are shocking and could be even more problematic when considering developing and emerging countries. In Africa, Zucman calculates that the financial wealth accounted for in tax havens is around 30 per cent. More dramatically, Russia and the Middle East countries lose above 50 per cent of their wealth to notorious low-tax jurisdictions.

In addition to quantifying the amount of hidden wealth, the book moves a step forward to propose several solutions to address the issue. One would be to enhance transparency by creating a world financial register, recording the ownership of stocks and bonds of all households. Admittedly, such private registers already exist and are maintained by the Depository Trust Company in the US and by Clearstream in Luxembourg. The idea is to combine them and to transfer the authority of data to national tax authorities or international organisations like the International Monetary Fund. With such a system in place, it would be much easier to apply a version of Thomas Piketty’s wealth tax on capital income and to fight tax evasion.

This remedy builds on the idea that the system for exchanging financial information instituted by the OECD in 2009 has not produced any effect as Zucman’s findings document that the wealth held in tax havens has increased since then. Whilst these results are well-founded and cast no doubt about the failure of the information-sharing agreements against tax evasion at the aggregate level, this could not be always true at the country level. Indeed, recent research on offshore finance suggests that engaging in Tax Information Exchange Agreements with tax havens has decreased the use of tax haven countries by US investors because of the increased risk of detection for tax evaders. Nevertheless, Zucman’s results are still informative as they provide the reader with a broader picture and, most importantly, call for more research to reconcile previous findings.

In the final part of the book, Zucman devotes his efforts to shedding light on tax avoidance perpetrated by multinational companies. This is a completely different problem from tax evasion, because it is done within the letter, but with complete disregard for the spirit, of the law. Zucman argues that the corporate tax system as it was conceived by the League of Nations in the 1920s is no longer viable because multinationals have become increasingly mobile and can easily rout their profits to tax havens. According to his estimate, US multinational corporations are reducing their tax liabilities by about $130 billion a year.

Consistent with his argument, there is plenty of empirical evidence documenting multinationals’ profit shifting, but important questions remain unanswered. A recent studyprovides new evidence that is contrary to conventional wisdom: the decline in effective tax rates is not concentrated in multinational companies; it has declined at approximately the same rate for both multinational and domestic firms. Nonetheless, Zucman’s effort to estimate the revenues lost by the US government is paramount to understanding the problem, and he puts forth a number of ideas for future research.

Overall, The Hidden Wealth of Nations makes an important contribution to prior literature on tax havens and provides an innovative and comprehensive empirical approach to the measurement of hidden wealth. Furthermore, it informs the public debate on tax avoidance by multinational companies. Hence, it is to be considered a ‘must-read’ book for all those interested in wealth inequality and the scourge of tax havens.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, the LSE British Politics and Policy blog or of the London School of Economics.

Antonio De Vito is a doctoral student in the Finance & Accounting Group at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management (Germany). You can follow him on LinkedIn or visit his SSRN page. Antonio’s primary research interests lie in the fields of corporate taxation and tax avoidance, especially in relation to profit shifting, corporate finance and governance.
The political and legal headaches caused by Brexit have only just begun

Posted:Sat, 19 Nov 2016 07:00:03 +0000

If the recent high court ruling on Brexit is upheld, then MPs in the UK Parliament will have to approve the decision to trigger Article 50 and begin the process for leaving the European Union. But how would this vote actually take place and what influence will Parliament have over the negotiations? Based on a recent report, Sara Hagemann assesses Parliament’s role in Brexit, noting that with Westminster also obliged to transpose into domestic law all the EU law which currently has direct effect in the UK, the political and legal headaches caused by Brexit have only just begun.

What are the implications of the court ruling that parliamentary approval is required for triggering the UK’s departure from the European Union? The story dominated media headlines for several days – with the frightening suggestion by some of the tabloids that the judges proved to be ‘enemies of the people’ since the court ruling will doubtless complicate the government’s plans for withdrawal from the EU.

The case is now pending a further decision by the Supreme Court, and much depends on what is concluded at that stage – with the hearing taking place around 8-9 December and an outcome expected in early January. In the meantime, an important report by UK in a Changing Europe investigates in detail the way Brexit might happen, and considers the role and influence Parliament can have on the negotiations – both with regards to the approval of the Article 50 text if the ruling from the High Court last week is upheld by the Supreme Court, and with regards to the vast volume of legislation that will follow.

Parliament’s approval of Article 50 could tie the government’s hands from the outset

As we argue in the report, it really cannot be overstated how important this case will be for the Brexit negotiations but also for the UK constitutional order more broadly. At the core of the court’s decision will be a decision about whether simply opening negotiations under Article 50 alters existing statutory obligations and responsibilities or compromises individual rights granted by statute. If it does, parliamentary assent will be required. Otherwise, it will not.

If the arguments against the government are successful and parliamentary assent is required at the outset, Parliament may be able to tie the Government’s hands in the negotiations – requiring it to commit to certain legal arrangements or instruments and demanding powers of oversight for parliamentary committees during the negotiations. If the challenge is unsuccessful, none of this will happen.

Image credit: Sebastian Galiano(CC-BY-SA-2.0)

But even if the court case comes out in favour of parliamentary assent, MPs will need to carefully consider that any demands imposed on the government from the outset will have to also be acceptable to its EU partners – parliamentary approval of Article 50 cannot lead to an open battle in Parliament with no consideration of the EU’s priorities and interests in finding a deal. After all, the Article 50 text and subsequent agreement of a UK-EU relationship will be negotiated between the UK government and the remaining EU countries, and the UK’s negotiation hand is already very weak in this game!

Moreover, all parties should keep in mind that the triggering of Article 50 is only the beginning of a longer process: actual withdrawal will require several steps, and parliamentary approval of the Article 50 text would no doubt influence the government’s current dilemma regarding how specific the Article 50 notification should be regarding subsequent negotiations.

Parliament therefore needs to prepare its tactics for both the short- and longer term objectives regarding Brexit – but also for the role and influence it wishes to embody beyond current Brexit dilemmas: what lies ahead will no doubt test the UK’s constitutional and legal frameworks to their limits.

Parliament’s role beyond Article 50

The important question of what role Parliament should play in overseeing negotiations after Article 50 has been triggered is also still to be determined. Ministers, including David Davis, have made clear that Parliament will be consulted and allowed to engage with the negotiations. Yet, the nature of that process and the degree to which Parliament will be involved pre- or post-fact is a matter of dispute. So far, the impression is one of a marginalised Parliament if the government gets its way – but again, this may change if the Supreme Court ruling confirms the judgment from last week.

Nevertheless, even if Parliament does get to play a more prominent role, there is very little precedent on which it can base its work regarding scrutinising UK-EU negotiations as the two Houses of Parliament do not normally play a role in scrutinising treaty negotiations and are usually just involved in the ratification of treaties. Lack of timely access to negotiating texts has been a perennial parliamentary complaint in previous EU treaty renegotiation episodes, and the UK parliament enjoys fewer scrutiny powers in EU affairs than many of the member states on the continent.

Yet, pressure is mounting on the government for including Parliament more closely in the actual negotiations, in particular as a decision has been made on the EU side regarding the European Parliament’s role in scrutinising the Brexit negotiations handled by the European Commission and the EU Council. But it is important to stress that parliamentary scrutiny is not a matter of absolutes: parliamentary involvement can come in several forms and degrees depending on the issue – and whether it is of a legislative nature or general oversight. In terms of volume, the overarching Parliamentary measures are likely to be relatively few: passage of the ‘Great Repeal Bill’ to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act; ratification of the UK-EU withdrawal agreement required by Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union; and ratification of whatever UK-EU agreement or agreements may be reached to govern post-Brexit relations. The Article 50 text would be added to this list depending on the Supreme Court verdict.

Compared to these overarching measures, by far the bigger task will be transposing into domestic law all the EU law which currently has direct effect in the UK, and amending the body of UK legislation which gives effect to EU law so that it can stand independently. The planned ‘Great Repeal Bill’ may give only blanket authority for these tasks. Legislative amendments will also be required if there are to be policy changes made possible because the relevant policy area has been repatriated to the UK, although legally these changes could not be made before Brexit occurs.

Taken together, this body of work is widely regarded as the largest legislative task the UK Parliament has ever undertaken. The political and legal headaches caused by Brexit have only just begun.

—

Note: This article originally appeared on UK in a Changing Europe and EUROPP, it gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Brexit, nor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

About the author

Sara Hagemann is Assistant Professor at the European Institute and ESRC Senior Fellow for the UK in a Changing Europe. She has published extensively on European affairs, in particular on transparency and accountability in political systems, EU policy processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments, and the consequences of EU enlargements.
British politics in the Age of Uncertainty: the link between old, new, and anti-politics

Posted:Fri, 18 Nov 2016 07:00:25 +0000

Party leaders – from Tony Blair to David Cameron – have promised a new way of doing politics when campaigning for election, yet failed to deliver on such commitments when elected. Dave Richards writes that there is a link between such calls and the rising climate of anti-politics, yet there is no sign that the Westminster bubble will burst anytime soon.

In the midst of the Watergate Scandal, the BBC approached the eminent political economist J.K. Galbraith to make a television documentary reflecting on the tensions of that era. It led to both an acclaimed series and book – The Age of Uncertainty [with a discernible nod to Eric Hobsbawn] – in which Galbraith explored the rising challenges confronting a set of deeply embedded modernist certainties.

Four decades later and with the after-shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential victory freshly reverberating across two of the oldest, modern democracies, Galbraith’s title takes on a fresh resonance. These are undoubtedly times of uncertainty, no more so than in the way modern democratic politics conducts itself and for the traditional institutions of the liberal-democratic state which aggregate our individual political impulses.

An increasingly prominent feature in the current climate is the so-called rise of ‘anti-politics’. It is a somewhat slippery term covering a multitude of pathologies concerning power, democracy, legitimacy, participation, and accountability. One of its more popular caricatures is reflected in a perceived growing public disenchantment with the way politics is done, expressed for example in the disengagement with traditional forms of arena politics (voting, joining a mainstream party etc.). Another is in the depiction of the so-called ‘left behind’, of those who are: ‘on the wrong side of social change, are struggling on stagnant incomes, feel threatened by the way their communities and country are changing, and are furious at an established politics that appears not to understand or even care about their concerns’.

One response has been to vote [sometimes for the first-time] for the increasing number of ‘insurgent’ or ‘populist’ parties who seek to offer an alternative to the failings associated with traditional mainstream, party politics.

Part of Trump’s successful electoral campaign, mirrored somewhat in the strategy adopted by Brexiteers in the EU referendum campaign, can be explained by the effective use of populist and anti-establishment rhetorical appeals. An example, from which there are many, is Donald Trump’s call for the need ‘to drain the swamp in Washington’. It is a sentiment now echoed by the major UKIP financial donor Arron Banks. In the context of Westminster, he has offered to bank-roll candidates to challenge, Martin Bell[esque] style, what he regards as the 200 worst and most corrupt sitting M.P.s:

‘It’s a very simple agenda: to destroy the professional politician. I like the idea of clearing the place out, setting new rules, maybe reducing the number of MPs. Not a party from the left or right. Just to clear out the worst lot.’

Such calls are symbolic of an ever louder cacophony of voices being heard railing against a disconnected, out-of-touch, self-interested and self-serving set of elites, operating in their own bubble and who are seen as incapable of listening to the everyday needs of those who they purport to represent.

In the context of the UK, as elsewhere, studies have shown that anti-politics is by no means a new phenomenon, though it has gained fresh traction in more recent times. The political class are of course not immune to this live issue, given their reliance on claims to democratic legitimacy as the lodestone of the representative process. And it is here that an intriguing paradox has emerged in recent decades. A pattern of leaders of mainstream opposition parties calling for a ‘new politics’, but then when in office adhering to the established ways and means of governing.

In surveying the calls for change in the last twenty years, while the context behind them may vary, they are bound by a familiar ring in their rejection of the old ways of doing politics and the need for an alternative. In May 1997, Tony Blair argued his government: ‘…will govern in the interests of all our people…and restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralizes it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public.’

In April 2010, David Cameron observed that the UK electorate had been: ‘…betrayed by a generation of politicians, by an elite that thinks it knows best. People have lost control. The politicians have forgotten, the public are the master, we are the servant. That’s what needs to change in our system…Blow apart the old system. Overthrow the old ways. Put people in the driving seat.’

His Coalition partner, Nick Clegg in a similar vein mused: ‘This government is going to transform our politics so the state has far less control over you, and you have far more control over the state,…break up concentrations of power and hand power back to people…This government is going to persuade you to put your faith in politics once again.’

Fast-forward to the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and Alex Salmond asserted that: ‘Whatever else we can say about this referendum campaign, we have touched sections of the community who have never before been touched by politics….I don’t think that will ever be allowed to go back to business as usual in politics again.’

Finally, and most recently, there is Labour’s own careerist insurgent turned Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who saw his elevation to Leader of the Opposition as: ‘…a vote for change in the way we do politics…Kinder, more inclusive. Bottom up, not top down. In every community and workplace, not just at Westminster…Something new and invigorating, popular and authentic, has exploded.’

What binds all these leaders’ narratives together is the way in which they are implicitly seeking out a position not wholly removed from that of an anti-establishment platform. One that is committed to taking on vested powers and interests, challenging the status quo and in so doing, changing the way politics is done. Theirs is an offer of a new, more devolved, deliberative, bottom-up and participatory approach, one that is capable of listening and being receptive to the needs of the electorate. It is hard not to ignore the obvious link between such calls being made and a rising climate of anti-politics. It is ostensibly a search by an elite wishing to burst its own bubble by offering a new social contract of renewal and re-legitimation for the governing class.

Yet, if we survey the political landscape of reform in the UK during these same two decades, reform has been limited and where it has occurred, for example Scottish devolution and more recently Brexit, it appears more as an unintended consequence, rather than the culmination of government strategy, even less so a new politics. It is at most, an ad hoc approach, the grafting on of reform to the existing Westminster system, which remains an elitist model based on weak, limited principles of representation and an electoral system that privileges stability over proportionality and participation.

The British approach to governance has of course long-been recognised for its centralising and top-down tendencies – what has been called elsewhere a ‘power-hoarding’ approach. It is difficult then to see how a circle can be squared between the old politics of the Westminster model and the pressures building for a less elitist, more de-centralised and responsive polity evidenced in the persistent calls for a new politics to address the pathologies within the rising tide of anti-politics.

There is an emerging post-Brexit irony that should be lost on no one. As the government maps out a new political settlement for the UK, its attempts to reconstitute the Westminster model as part of a simple, zero-sum game in sovereignty grab-back from Brussels [which appears its current position in the scant pronouncements so far made], is the very antithesis of previous calls for a more devolved and deliberative approach to politics required to address the serious discontents revealed by some in the run-up to the Brexit vote.

Douglas Jay’s euphemistic observation that ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’ was understandable in 1937; it is not a mode of governing fit-for-purpose in the twenty-first century. As Tony King observes, it is an approach organised round a set of principles that do not: ‘…so much disdain deliberation as ignore it altogether…[and is] not concerned with promoting the value or principle of citizen participation.’ The May Government needs to explain how ‘taking back control’ by a Whitehall-driven, centralising strategy will resolve the U.K.’s longer-term democratic incongruities? Brexit presents a unique, if uncertain, opportunity for change, yet there is no sign that the Westminster bubble is about to be burst by a self-inflicted, pin-prick.

Elsewhere, the question that has not been put to the political class, but is one that needs answering is why for two decades they have persistently called for a new politics when in opposition, and yet patently failed to deliver on such a commitment when holding the reins of power.

The answer one suspects can be found in the comfortable blanket of power and control afforded by the Westminster model. In an age of uncertainty, it is hard for minsters to once again resist being enveloped by this protective metaphorical blanket of power provided by Whitehall, rather than being left exposed to the risks involved in pursuing a real form of new politics.

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About the Author

Dave Richards is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Manchester.
Brexit and the Gordian knot of the UK productivity puzzle

Posted:Thu, 17 Nov 2016 12:25:12 +0000

Economic uncertainty following the EU referendum, as well as additional political uncertainty stemming from the recent High Court decision to allow Parliament to vote on the deal, might delay the government’s preferred timing for triggering Article 50 by March 2017. There is therefore potential for fuelling investment uncertainty and delaying a steady recovery in UK productivity, explain Michael Ellington and Costas Milas.

The ongoing productivity puzzle – very weak productivity growth in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial crisis – leaves little room for strong wage increases. Consequently, tax revenues are weaker than otherwise leading to a persistent budget deficit. In fact, as Chris Giles, Economics Editor of The Financial Times, noted, “solving [the] productivity puzzle is key to public finances”. At the same time, rising inflation (expected by the Bank of England to reach 2.7 per cent in 2017) will put under rising pressure household expenditure and therefore undermine UK economic growth.

Much of the discussion about the productivity “puzzle” focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between productivity growth and real wage growth. This, however, ignores the potential impact of investment uncertainty. David Smith, Economics Editor of The Sunday Times, briefly focussed on this issue by noting that “there is the impact of uncertainty on investment…With businesses nervous about what the future will bring, this does not look like the climate for strong investment.”

In general, periods of economic stress are associated with elevated uncertainty. Consequently, firms pause hiring and investment. In the latter case, productivity growth takes a hit because the drop in hiring and investment reduces the rate of reallocation from low to high productivity firms; the negative effect also (arguably) transfers to wage growth.

Using the Bank of England’s historical dataset, we plot together annual productivity (per head) growth, real wage growth and our measure of investment uncertainty. Productivity growth and real wage growth are 5-year moving averages. We construct investment uncertainty by taking the 5-year moving standard deviation of gross fixed capital formation growth (see Data Appendix).

Figure 1 plots together productivity (per head) growth, real wage growth and investment uncertainty over 1839-2015. From Figure 2, which zooms into the 1997-2015 period, we see that low investment uncertainty coincides with steady productivity growth and real wage growth. Nevertheless, elevated uncertainty during the financial crisis in 2008-2009, takes a hit both on productivity and real wage growth.

Figure 1: productivity (per head) growth, real wage growth and investment uncertainty, 1839-2015

Figure 2: productivity (per head) growth, real wage growth and investment uncertainty, 1997-2015

Figure 3 plots the posterior median (together with the 16^th and 84^th percentiles; dotted lines) response of productivity growth and real wage growth to a 1-standard deviation investment uncertainty shock in 2008. From Figure 3, investment uncertainty exerts a negative and statistically significant impact on productivity growth and real wage growth for up to 5 years. Our calculations are done within a 3-variate Time-Varying Parameter Bayesian Vector Autoregressive model (using a Minnesota prior) which is conditional on exogenous World War I and World War II effects.

Figure 3: Time Paths of Labour Productivity and Real Wages in the UK in response to a shock in Investment Uncertainty in 2008

What are the implications of Figure 3? Our model goes some way towards explaining why productivity and real wages have not fully recovered yet following from the big investment uncertainty shock during the financial crisis of the late 2000s. We therefore argue that investment uncertainty is a valuable missing piece of the productivity “puzzle” and has to be considered by econometric models.

From a policy point of view, economic uncertainty following from the recent Brexit vote as well as additional political uncertainty stemming from the recent decision of the High Court to allow Parliament to vote on Brexit (unless, of course, the Supreme Court decides otherwise) might delay Ms May’s preferred timing of triggering Article 50 by March 2017. All this has the potential of fuelling investment uncertainty and therefore delaying a steady recovery in UK productivity. In such a grim scenario, it will definitely be a challenge, as David Smith noted, to “survive in a post-Brexit world”.

Data Appendix

Labour productivity per head: We then construct annual growth and its 5-year moving average.

Wage index (spliced) and Consumer price index-original measure. We deflate the wage index by the consumer price index. We then construct the annual real wage growth and its 5-year moving average.

Gross fixed capital formation, composite measure, volume. We then constructed the annual growth and its 5-year moving standard deviation. This is our measure of investment uncertainty. All variables come from Bank of England’s “three centuries of data” (available here).

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About the Authors

Michael Ellington is Research Fellow, University of Liverpool

Costas Milas is Professor of Finance, University of Liverpool
Interview with Gareth Stedman Jones: Myth and reality in Karl Marx

Posted:Wed, 16 Nov 2016 08:00:20 +0000

In Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Gareth Stedman Jones historicises and deconstructs one of the most mythologised figures of the past 100 years. He discusses the intellectual history of Marx, the misconceptions around his thinking, and lessons for the 21st century with editor Artemis Photiadou.

The book sets out to separate Marx from Marxism. What is the difference between the two?

Usually Marxism is thought of as historical materialism, or materialist conception of history, or determinist conception of history. Marxism is also thought of as something which was jointly constructed by Marx and Engels – and the implication is that there isn’t much to choose between them: they are one voice. I want to show how very different the two are. I want to challenge the fetishisation of the word materialism and argue that some of the most creative bits of Marx derive from an idealist tradition.

Of course this Marx-ism also gets developed into a sort of an orthodoxy. First of all by Engels, from the time of Anti-Dühring in the 1870s – that’s the beginning of it. After Marx’s death it gets transferred to the Russians – you have Georgi Plekhanov saying what Marxism is. And then in the 1920s in the Soviet Union you get the Marx-Engels Institute and they construct the collected works, and some of that is a bit fraudulent – they construct something called The German Ideology which, as recent research has shown, never really existed in that form. As if there were one overarching system which combined both the thoughts of Marx and Engels.

What should we keep from Marx’s thinking then?

The one thing we should preserve from what he said is really the sense of the overpowering nature of capitalism; of its dynamism; of the way it undercuts hierarchies; something which is restless and never ceasing to ‘move’. The idea of something so volatile and unstable has been with us – and is as much with us now as it was then – that’s really something which I would want to credit him with above all.

The second point I think is where he came from in terms of an intellectual formation. He was part of the Young Hegelian movement and that involves a critique of religion, which ends up with the idea of reversal: that it’s not God who created man but man created God. Marx transfers that thought into the way we identify with commodity production, commercialist society, capitalism. Where we think of ourselves as the creatures of a system rather than those who create the system – and that I think is also an important insight.

Having lived in London, what did Marx think about England?

He is not a very good reader of what’s going on in England. He was convinced that Chartism was going to return, he thought that Palmerston was someone in the pay of the Russians, and that indeed all British foreign policy since 1707 had been a creature of Russian foreign policy…even the Crimean war was just a ‘pretence’. He is not necessarily a very reliable source of what’s happening in British history, even though he wrote regular reports on it in the New York Daily Tribune in the 1850s.

But I argue in the book that he eventually becomes more realistic – the atmosphere of the country gets to him. In the 1860s he can see this movement which climaxes in the Second Reform Bill. By being part of the International Working Men’s Association, he meets English working people for the first time (men, of course) and for 6-7 years he is their dutiful Secretary and he can tell them what’s going in Europe and vice versa and so they respect him. In the International Working Men’s Association, he is much less interested in party labels and slogans – if they are forming a class movement, that’s what he cares about.

The other part about England is that London gets to him in a glamorous sort of way. At the end of the 1850s Ferdinand Lassalle says we can get an amnesty for you in Prussia; he is quite tempted but by then his wife says no way, and that their daughters would lose their beloved land of Shakespeare. In the 1870s they are part of a play-reading group, they have front row seats in theatres, they are great fans of Henry Irving and so on. There is a sort of acclimatisation to Britain.

What is the value of studying Marx in the 21st century?

One thing we need to do – and this is partly for academic purposes – is to ask in what sense was he a great political thinker, or was he a great political thinker? But of course it is important too because we couldn’t understand the history of the last two centuries without trying to work out why he – justly or accidentally – becomes so iconic for all the movements that get formed in his name in the 20th century. We need to deconstruct that and find out what lies behind it, and what is the sort of endless covering and what is the real thing. At his best he could be a very good writer and that is also worth studying.

Marxism illustrates how entire movements form around myths. What is your take on what mobilises people today – in the age of Farage and Trump?

It partly comes back to the idea of what language can do. One of the things Donald Trump obviously found was a way of speaking the language of discontent of these particularly white male, unemployed or underemployed workers. Part of the difficulty is that for the liberal elite, it is very difficult to find what to say which could recuperate some of this constituency because the change in the international division of labour has been so profound – it’s very hard to know what one can say to reassure people. But one hopes that some form of language can pull them back from this populist upsurge.

I think what recent events also suggest is for historians to look back and show that a lot of what we call social history and labour movements is very provisional when you look under the surface.

What did Marx think of what we now call populism?

One of the people who springs to mind when we think of Trump would be Napoleon III. And it wasn’t just Marx – everybody thought this is ridiculous, how could this guy be so successful? How could he have got over five million votes when he is just a mediocrity? And Marx does try to work out why that is so. I don’t think he gets very far in explaining it, but he is intrigued by it because it seems to go against the idea of what political leaders do and represent, whereas this is somehow a maverick performance.

And in 1848 France this is the first time that you have something like universal male suffrage – so the beginnings of democratic politics in the modern sense. He can’t really come to terms with that at all either. These are the two things I think he finds very puzzling.

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Note: Gareth Stedman Jones was speaking at an event organised by the LSE Ralph Miliband Programme. A podcast is available here.

About the Interviewee

Gareth Stedman Jones is Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary University of London.
Explaining the pro-Corbyn surge in Labour’s membership

Posted:Wed, 16 Nov 2016 07:00:23 +0000

In the course of a year and a half, Labour Party membership has increased massively. The number of full members has moved from 190,000 in May 2015 to 515,000 in July 2016 – an influx of 325,000 new members. Monica Poletti, Tim Bale and Paul Webb explore how we can explain the pro-Corbyn surge in this growth.

As part of our ESRC-funded Party Members Project (PMP), we fielded a first survey with existing Labour members in May 2015 and a second one with post-election members in May 2016. We now know that at the most recent leadership election those who were members before May 2015 voted predominantly for Owen Smith, whereas the new members opted mainly for Jeremy Corbyn. This prompts a key question: in what respects did the ‘new’ members differ from the ‘old’ members?

In order to find out, we compare these two groups: older members (pre-GE2015) and newer members (who joined after May 2015 but before January 2016 and were therefore eligible to vote in the leadership election). A number of features stand out: gender; left-wing identity; social liberalism; campaign activism; feelings about the leadership; and the possibility that the ranks of the newer members, and those that support Jeremy Corbyn, may have been swollen by what we call ‘educated left-behinds’ – people who, given their qualifications, might have been expecting to earn more than they currently do.

Slightly less well off – and a lot more women

First up, we find that new members are not significantly younger or more working class – but they are more likely to be slightly less well-off and female. The average age of both old and new members is 51 and more than half of them are graduates (56% and 58% respectively). Whereas three quarters of them live in households in which the chief income earner (CIE) has a ‘middle class’ (ABC1) occupation (76% vs. 75%), a third (34%) of old members’ household gross income falls below the national average of around £35,000 –something that’s the case for 41% of new members. Moreover, women make up a greater proportion of the new members than of the older members (52% to 38%). Corbyn, then, does not seem to have attracted a very different type of crowd in many socio-demographic respects, except insofar as it is slightly less well-off and more gender-balanced.

No necessarily more left wing – although some of them think they are

New members are certainly not very different from the old members when it comes to their views on the state vs the market. The overwhelming majority of members are pretty left wing, whether they joined prior to the 2015 GE or after: they are pro-redistribution (91% vs 94%), believe that ordinary people do not get a fair share (94% vs. 96%), think that the management tries to get the better of employees (92% vs. 96%) and think that spending cuts have gone too far (92% vs. 99%).

They do, however, self-position differently on a left (0) – right (10) scale, with new members seeing themselves as significantly more left-wing (1.95) than older members (2.39). And if we isolate only Momentum members (10%), this difference is even more accentuated, given that they self-locate a full point further to the left than older members (1.39). Thus, in terms of subjective self-image, which probably embraces more than just state-market opinions, the new members see themselves as something of a leftist vanguard.

They are decidedly more socially liberal

New members are, in fact, decidedly more socially liberal than older ones on a few central issues: they are considerably less keen than old members on introducing censorship of films and magazines (16% vs. 21%), stiffer sentences (16% vs 27%) or teaching children to obey authority (23% vs 40%).

The two groups seem, however, to have similar positions on considering immigration a good thing for the economy (5.7 vs. 5.8 on a scale running from bad (1) to good (7)) and for the UK’s cultural life (5.6 vs. 5.8).

More likely to restrict their activism to online clicktivism

Old and new members tend to participate similarly in online political activity: (Facebook 51% vs. 53%; Twitter 37% vs 33%). When it comes to offline participation, however, there is a striking difference: new members are plainly not as keen to get stuck in. While a third (31%) of the old members attended a public meeting during the GE campaign, less than a sixth of new members did so during the campaign for the 2016 local/regional/mayoral elections (15%). Although less was presumably at stake in 2016 than 2015, an even wider gap is registered when looking at activities such as leafletting (42.5% vs. 16%), displaying election posters (51% vs 26%) or – most notably of all – canvassing voters (35.7% vs 9.3%). The preference for clicktivism over other forms of activity, however, is much less pronounced for those who are Momentum members. Although these people do tend to participate more in online activities than everybody else (Facebook 67%; Twitter 50%), the gap with older members’ participation in offline activities is much smaller (displaying election posters 38%, leafletting 35%, canvassing voters 29%); indeed, Momentum members were actually more likely than old members to have attended public meetings (35%).

Feel more respected by the leadership

Whereas the new members are more likely to believe in general terms that politicians don’t care what people like them think (42% vs. 31%), they are much happier with what they’re getting from the Labour leadership than members in 2015. Not only did three quarters of them join the party because of belief in the party leadership (76.5%), as opposed to only 42.5% of old members – the difference between Corbyn and Miliband (and his predecessors). They are also much more inclined to believe than those we surveyed back in 2015 that the Labour leadership respects ordinary members (40.3% vs. 16%).

They are more likely to be ‘educated left behinds’

Relative deprivation theory suggests that people tend to make comparisons between what they expect out of life and what they actually experience, looking at people who are rather similar to themselves for cues as to what to expect. Thus, university graduates tend to derive their expectations from looking at other graduates and risk frustration if these expectations are not met. Did a sense of relative deprivation trigger some graduates to join Labour in the hope that the Corbyn leadership would help render their actual economic conditions closer to their professional expectations? Possibly so. The proportion of graduates among Labour members earning less than the average salary (around £25,000) is 10 points higher among new members than among older ones (51% vs. 41%). And a considerable gap also exists between pro- (54%) and anti- (41%) Corbyn new members.

In short, the Corbyn leadership has attracted similar people in terms of age, education and occupational class to those who were Labour members in 2015, although new members are slightly less well-off and more gender balanced than the past. New members are similarly left-wing on the state-market dimension, although they are more likely to regard themselves as further left and are certainly somewhat more socially liberal than older members. Although they tend to participate mainly online and not so much offline, this is less true for those who are also members of Momentum. Clearly, the new members are confident that the new leadership respects them and this is something that distinguishes Corbyn from most other politicians in their eyes. Finally, there is some evidence that the educated left-behinds might have been particularly moved to place new hope in Corbyn. How long they keep the faith, and what that means for the Labour Party, remains to be seen.

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Note: This blog is based on research from the ESRC Party Members Project: https://esrcpartymembersproject.org/, @ESRCPtyMembers, partymembersproject@gmail.com

About the Authors:

Monica Poletti is an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow in Politics working on the ESRC Party Members Project (PMP) at Queen Mary University of London, a Guest Teacher at the London School of Economics and a Research Fellow of the COST-Action ‘True European Voter (TEV)‘ project.”

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London.

Paul Webb is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex.
Who speaks in a referendum? Scotland’s Indyref TV news coverage

Posted:Tue, 15 Nov 2016 07:00:18 +0000

The 2014 Scottish independence referendum saw unprecedented political engagement on a scale rarely seen of late in the UK. But, ask Alenka Jelen-Sanchez and Marina Dekavalla, was this broad engagement replicated in mainstream television coverage?

The 2014 Scottish independence referendum will be remembered as a key moment in the history of Scotland in the United Kingdom, but also as the vote that engaged the electorate like no other before or since: 84.6% of registered voters turned out on the day, which is the highest recorded participation in any referendum or election in the UK. At the time, some expressed hopes that this would mark a turning point in a long-standing trend of voter apathy, which is by no means unique to Scotland or the UK. Yet so far, no other electoral contest has captured people’s interest to the same extent, while the same level of turnout was not replicated in subsequent Westminster or Holyrood elections, nor in the 2016 EU referendum.

Many authors in journalism studies believe that we learn what being a citizen involves by reading and watching the mass media. They propose that the mainstream media can “teach” active citizenry by presenting the public with examples of citizens who are involved in political action, who have political opinions and can propose solutions for problems rather than just illustrate problems, which are then up to politicians to resolve. On the contrary, by presenting politicians as the central actors in public affairs, the citizenry “lesson” conveyed is that ordinary people don’t have a role in politics other than to choose between different politicians’ proposals. This mediated reproduction of a liberal understanding of democracy, which is the norm in most Western mainstream media, ensures that the power to make a difference in public affairs remains in the hands of elites, and has the potential to disengage voters by making them feel powerless. It is not always easy to care about something about which it appears you can have no active influence over.

Considering the great voter engagement in the Scottish referendum, both before and during the vote, one might expect that the media coverage reflected a different view of citizenry than usual. In our recently published article in British Politics, we show that this was not exactly the case. Through content analysis of the coverage of the 2014 campaign on BBC’s Reporting Scotland daily bulletin, we demonstrate that the main sources used – interviewed, paraphrased or openly referred to as the sources of what was being said – were politicians. These accounted for almost half of all the sources used in the final month of the coverage. Ordinary citizens came second and made up about twenty per cent of all the sources we found, which is higher than most similar studies in other contexts. Yet this is less than half the representation that political sources received. The organized grassroots campaigners who supported either outcome got even less coverage, and made up about six per cent of all sources.

There is nothing unusual about this picture – the reliance of the mainstream media on elite sources is well-documented and, as mentioned, in this case ordinary citizen sources were more present in the BBC coverage than many other studies in other contexts have found. However, as opposed to elections, which are the central political event of representative democracy, a referendum is about direct democracy, about ordinary citizens making a decision on a matter of public concern themselves and not through their representatives. If their representatives still dominate the debate in the media, this might suggest that there is not a great deal of difference in where power lies.

Clearly it is not easy to exclude politicians from a referendum debate. Issues are not put to the public vote because politicians are indifferent to them; on the contrary highly politically charged issues like independence, EU membership, EU treaties, immigration and abortion tend to be decided by referendums. Even if politicians had stayed out of the debate themselves, the grassroots campaigns promoting both sides of the argument in 2014 were still nurtured by the official political campaigns, so their influence would have remained.

Perhaps one of the few occasions of direct democracy that most citizens will experience in their lifetime, referendums offer an opportunity to reverse the usual order that puts elite media sources first and to provide more examples of citizens debating public affairs, from a partisan but also from a non-partisan perspective. One further finding from our study was that in the television coverage sources supporting a Yes and a No outcome (who were equal both in number and in relation to the time dedicated to them) were statistically more likely to respond to each other, while neutral sources introduced new points without responding to anyone. This meant that the debate was highly polarized.

A final point that emerged from our analysis of the coverage is that there were more male sources than female, and that they had more airtime to express their views. This represented one of the biggest gaps we found among the different types of sources we considered. Like other trends discussed earlier, this finding is not unique to the context we studied. However if, as argued above, the media teach audiences what being a citizen involves and who participates in democracy, the implication that politics is a man’s issue is rather concerning.

Arguably online media provide alternative public spheres where the same rules do not apply as in the old media, and a wider range of voices can be heard. Yet mainstream media still command large audiences that are less fragmented than those for online media, and still retain a lot of influence over what is talked about in all parts of the public sphere. How they represent political events still matters.

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About the author

Marina Dekavalla is Senior Lecturer in Journalism Studies at Stirling University. She holds an ESRC Future Research Leaders award for the project “Television framing of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum”, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/L010062/1).

Alenka Jelen-Sanchez is a Lecturer at the University of Stirling.
Why changes to the social construction of celebrity can explain Trump

Posted:Mon, 14 Nov 2016 07:00:01 +0000

Politicians increasingly appear on television shows in roles we wouldn’t ordinarily expect – dancing, cooking, firing prospective employees. Jack Corbett, Matt Wood and Matt Flinders, in a recent article, explore how the social construction of celebrity can help to explain the rise of the ‘celebrity politician’ – most notably President-elect Donald Trump.

Political leaders have always been confronted by a paradox: how to appear above us (i.e. the statesman-like image) so we trust them to govern, while also appearing ‘like us’ (i.e. as ‘normal’ people) so they can claim to represent us. One way they have sought to resolve this paradox, and thus appear both ordinary and apart, is to adopt strategies from within the world of entertainment. As the pioneering work of John Street highlights, historically, this process has tended to work either one of two ways: politicians would surround themselves with celebrities, basking in the glow of their popularity, or else celebrities would step outside the world of show business and become politicians.

Despite the increasingly professionalised nature of contemporary politics and the narrow careerism it has beget, both strategies persist. Indeed, on the surface the rise of Trump would appear to be an archetypal case of the latter move in which celebrity has directly translated into political popularity. It would also perhaps explain why he has been able to defy many of the norms and conventions that govern Presidential election campaigns. The problem is that we have had numerous celebrities who became politicians before (think Schwarzenegger or even Reagan) but none have done it quite like Trump.

Trump the reality celebrity

In a recent article that you can find here we attempted to make sense of this shift. Our argument in a nutshell is that Trump’s version of celebrity come politician stems from the unique combination of a pervasive anti-political climate and the rise of reality TV. In short, Trump is not just any old celebrity turned politician, he is a reality TV celebrity turned politician, and this distinction, made possible by broader shifts in the social construction of celebrity, can help explain why he has been elected in the manner that he has.

The reason why this mix of celebrity and politics, can, in the right hands, be so powerful for voters is that it allows Trump to perform democracy’s oldest trick: to better than us, so he can rule over us, but also like us, so he can understand us.

As a celebrity Trump trades on his wealth and fame which, in turn, allows him to foster an image of himself as a winner (i.e. we are going to win so much we will get sick of winning). It also allows him to claim he alone has a unique formula for success (i.e. the book that initially made him famous: The Art of the Deal) that sets him apart from other candidates.

This, in essence, is the conventional celebrity politician strategy. Those politicians who are not celebrities themselves can still trade on this form of celebrity – think Clinton and her cadre of endorsing singers and actors – but it’s not quite the same as being the real thing.

The problem with this strategy is that appearing apart can alienate the electorate. That is, politicians who pursue this strategy run the risk of being criticised for lacking the common touch, understanding ordinary people and their problems etc. Politicians who surround themselves with celebrities also run the risk of appearing fawning and pathetic (think Tony Blair).

Trump’s race to the bottom

Reality TV stars (or what in the article we term ‘everyday celebrity politicians’) don’t have the same problem because their fame isn’t just derived from their success, it is also built on their essential ordinariness. This means they can be brash, outspoken, make seemingly horrendous gaffs and insulting comments because this is how reality TV works.

It is unscripted and off the cuff. People don’t say what they mean or mean what they say. It has different rules and norms to regular entertainment that encourage people to display their worst virtues. Indeed, this is the main appeal of reality TV: it allows us to see people stoop to their lowest selves. This, in turn, is supposed to render them authentic.

Now, the obvious riposte is that no one actually believes reality TV is unscripted: people aren’t that stupid. We agree. In fact, that is what makes reality TV such a clever political tool in the right hands. Everyone knows there is a script for unscripted entertainment. The expectation is that the performers will do whatever it takes to grab attention. If the conventional celebrity strategy is a race to the top, the reality strategy is a race to the bottom.

The result is a type of anti-politician who stands out in a social context in which mainstream politics is increasingly despised and professional politicians vilified. It is populist in the sense that it panders to the crowd, but its stock in trade is bombast rather than flattery. The desired effect is to leave the audience – whether they are friend or foe – completely unsure of what the protagonist will do next. And, as a result, the worse it gets, the more we want to watch.

The importance of personality

The strategy doesn’t work for everyone. British MP George Galloway appeared on the 2006 version of Big Brother, a move that was met with hostility among sections of the public. Hostility intensified, however, once the show went to air, as the audience did not find his performance as an ordinary person authentic. Rather, his attempts to be more like his fellow contestants were deemed disingenuous and cringe worthy. So, the personality of the performer and the nature of the performance matters (and perhaps Galloway was slightly ahead of his time). And, the strategy seems to work best for those whose background, wealth and appearance marks them out as members of the vilified establishment but who want to distance themselves from it (think Farage and Johnson in the UK).

But, in the hands of a showman like Trump, the effect can be worryingly intoxicating. Indeed, as scary as the prospect of the White House being turned into the set of Presidential Big Brother might be, we defy anyone who isn’t at least slightly intrigued by whether that would make for good television.

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Note: this post is based on the authors’ article in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

About the Authors:

Jack Corbett is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton.

Matthew Wood is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Understanding of Politics.
Book Review: The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015 edited by Anthony Seldon & Mike Finn

Posted:Sun, 13 Nov 2016 09:00:19 +0000

In The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015, Anthony Seldon and Mike Finn offer a volume of essays examining the impact of the Coalition government of 2010-2015 on British politics. While the hindsight enabled by the 2015 General Election result and the recent Brexit vote means that the precise legacies of the Coalition are still unfolding, this is an indispensable text that provides intriguing, expert assessments of ‘the Coalition effect’ across all major policy areas, finds Jim McConalogue.

The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015. Anthony Seldon & Mike Finn (eds). Cambridge University Press. 2015.

Find this book:

Ahead of the 2015 General Election, Anthony Seldon wrote a clear introduction to this expert volume of essays, setting out the observation that David Cameron’s place in history was already secured: for holding the coalition itself together; significantly improving the economic outlook; overseeing some steady domestic reform; restoring dignity to the PM’s office; and winning the Scottish referendum (25). To those, further cementing Cameron’s place in history, we might now add the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

Yet, our judgement of the former PM will rest a great deal on the broader question of how history will judge the Coalition government. For a book that asks much more rigorous and specific questions, this volume, edited by Seldon and Mike Finn, helpfully comes very close to looking at that verdict. The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015 deserves serious recognition for setting out, and in many respects crystallising, the major and contemporary distinctive effects of the Coalition government on British politics. Its Herculean task is carefully pursued through 23 chapters of sober, analytically rigorous and critically evidenced observations which adhere to the final conclusions of Finn – that although Britain’s first peacetime Coalition government since the 1930s came into existence because of political necessity, this neither prevented it from setting high ambitions for itself nor inhibited its capacity to generate legislative, economic, governmental and political effects (601). This account and assessment of the ambitions, the visions and the ‘new politics’, including the Programme for Government, tell us much about the Coalition in terms of its history, its meaning and desirability.

For Finn, the Coalition was successful in some economic ambitions – notably, restoring the economy to growth (in terms of jobs and employment) – but that it failed in other significant areas e.g. eliminating the structural deficit, government borrowing and its position towards the ‘cost of living crisis’. It did not achieve its economic targets. As Paul Johnson and Daniel Chandler’s chapter on the Coalition and the economy expresses, the 2010-2015 government only endured Act One of a two-part process of fiscal consolidation in which Act Two may well have been tougher, albeit only now just unfolding (193).

Finn further concludes that the Big Society ‘failed emphatically as a unifying ideal’. And what is also notable about memorable figures such as Andrew Lansley, who ‘went rogue’, and Michael Gove in ‘carrying forward his personal agenda’, are their solo, independent and real effects – but that means they were not truly ‘Coalition effects’. The Coalition’s huge impact on the NHS and education was divisive. Furthermore, for all the debate, the government did not achieve much on constitutional reform. The relationship with Europe deteriorated significantly. It advocated intervention over Iraq and Libya, but could not carry the Commons or the country over Syria. Some of the most devastating Coalition effects were not on agendas as such, but on the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. And England, of course, still does not love coalitions.

Image Credit: (themostinept CC BY SA 2.0)

Finn’s observations also raise issues particularly germane to the 2015 General Election: that an unintended net Coalition effect is the genuine emergence of four-party politics at Westminster (at that stage envisaged as being Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and UKIP). The real ‘fourth party’ was, of course, the Scottish National Party (SNP), returning 56 MPs at that election. Yet, as a chapter by Neil McGarvey highlights, beyond Westminster, coalition and multi-party politics, fixed term parliaments and referenda were not truly novel since they had already become part of ‘normal’ politics in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (110).

While four-party politics could still potentially have far-reaching implications for Britain at home and abroad, as Finn argues, one is left with the niggling question of whether such an emergence could just as easily be viewed as a consequence arising from, for example, an absence of catch-all, cohesive and strong leadership within mainstream parties in a rapidly changing environment rather than stemming from a peculiar ‘Coalition effect’ as such. Peter Riddell, citing Robert Hazell, describes the essence of the broader problem in his own chapter that all the authors of this volume face: ‘It is important to try to distinguish what is a necessary consequence of coalition government and what is merely contingent’ (130). This volume, then, is a significant move towards identifying those distinctions and features from necessary but seismic fudges and the intricate but often unforeseeable complexities and promises-turned-compromises of coalition government.

Martin Loughlin and Cal Viney’s chapter on the Coalition and the constitution is supremely notable for its consideration of fixed term parliaments, voting and House of Lords reform, sovereignty and the EU, rights protection and Scotland and Wales in the UK. It is well justified in concluding that ‘the experience of the 2010-2015 coalition government highlights the dangers of a minority party [the Liberal Democrats] seeking to use its leverage to bring about basic constitutional reform on matters for which there is no cross party consensus’ (86). There is one proviso, however. The implicit division and tension of parliamentary and popular government, theorised by Vernon Bogdanor and which Loughlin and Viney adopt, does not explain precisely how coalitions preclude democratic government and principles. Most importantly, Parliament as a whole (as well as the electorate) did not endorse by any kind of mandate the Coalition arrangements, which in turn endorsed the Coalition Agreement. Their view, therefore, that the implication of the formation of coalitions between the parties is that Parliament, rather than the electorate, has the decisive role in determining who will form the government (84) is problematic in this case – neither Parliament as a whole nor the electorate directly endorsed the Coalition arrangement preceding the Agreement.

It seems more likely that the Coalition of 2010, as organised by a very small clique of political elites (probable ministers and senior party figures), required the bypassing of Westminster and the Coalition agreements, precluding formal democratic procedure and parliamentary government founded on accountability to the electorate. The Coalition Agreement itself was not a Westminster phenomenon, but a Whitehall one. As Seldon writes in his introductory essay, ‘the advice from Whitehall officials was that the national interest demanded stable government’ (2): thus, the Coalition was born. It is for this reason that Loughlin and Viney’s chapter provides and provokes a stimulating essay and debate on the key principles of coalition government.

There is also sometimes a point of caution, or perhaps reservation, towards supposing multi-party coalition arrangements are themselves a ‘Coalition effect’. Anthony King in The British Constitution (2007), for example, considered a line of argument that briefly came to the fore during the turbulent 1970s when adversarial politics and the extremism of party political rides on the ‘ideological big-dipper’ occurred, alleged to have led to economic stagnation, political chaos and a society at odds with itself (270). As a result, some began to see the solution as Proportional Representation and the essential formation of moderate, anti-extremist, inter-party, coalition governments. It bears some political resonance with the UK’s post-2008 wave of economic recession followed by tighter post-2010, Conservative-led, governmental austerity measures; it is possibly too soon for political analysts and scientists to predict again only a long future of coalition governments.

The wonderful hindsight of the 2015 General Election following the publication of this volume showed us that a wafer-thin majority Conservative government could be capably formed while coalition arrangements are rapidly, but with dignity, consigned to history. Yet, if anything, the indispensability of this text lies with the fact that five years after the first coalition government was formed since the Second World War, a wide variety of esteemed experts from Whitehall, Parliament, academia and think tanks have given their professional and intriguing assessments of the ‘Coalition effect’ across all major policy areas.

Jim McConalogue is a doctoral student pursuing a PhD at The Open University, examining UK parliamentary sovereignty in relation to European Union membership.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.