House of Comments - Episode 88 - Forever Autumn

Episode 88 of the House of Comments podcast "Forever Autumn" is out. I am joined by LabourList's Mark Ferguson and freelance journalist and Lib Dem activist Charlotte Henry to discuss Nelson Mandela's legacy, the aftermath of the Autumn Statement and whether MPs deserve an 11% pay rise.

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Incentives dear boy

Mark Ferguson has posted a call to arms on LabourList this morning urging his comrades to stop neglecting their heartlands and proclaiming that there is no such thing as a safe seat.

His case-study is Bradford West where George Galloway stormed to victory in last year's by-election partly due to the indifference shown to the constituency by the local Labour Party who had been allowed to get away with this because the seat was perceived as solid red.

Mark's argument sounds reasonable but let's consider an analogy.

Imagine that you run a team responsible for administering a number of small local shops, let's say 325 of them across the country. You know that 200 of them have turned a consistent solid profit for the last 50 years. You know that for a further 60 of them they have returned a decent profit for 45 of the last 50 years and are very likely to do so again in the next few years.

That leaves the remaining 65 stores which have historically been more inconsistent. 30 of them have about a 75% chance of returning a profit but the remaining 35 have a 50% chance of going bust without some significant investment and general corporate TLC. Also, there are another 50 stores currently run by a competitor that you would like to get your hands on but that will involve a lot of investment to acquire them and then keep them going.

So as CEO of this company, how do you allocate your resource? It seems pretty obvious to me that the 260 stores that have consistently turned a profit and are very likely to continue to do so should be left largely to their own devices. Sure you might want to send someone round to each of them to say hello, make sure there are no problems looming and tell them how well they're doing but beyond that, spending much more time and money than that would be wasteful and from a corporate perspective rather pointless. Where's the gain? The real focus would be on the 65 stores that are struggling and the attempted takeover of the 50 new stores. That's where the real gains lie in turning around stores that are struggling to make them profitable and adding new stores to the company.

Labour are in a very similar position. They have around 260 seats and most of them are likely to be pretty solid. They may want to put some central resource into some of the more marginal ones but really, to try and win a majority they need to focus on the 100 or so target seats that will get them a working majority. If they were to take their central resource and pour loads of it into seats where they already have big majorities, under our electoral system it would be a waste. The money and time is far better spent where it can likely make the difference between a seat won and lost, not a seat that is won with an even bigger majority than last time.

Mark is wrong when he says there are no safe seats. Yes there are. And Labour has at least 200 of them. Galloway was a "black swan". Yes, he has hit them twice (in 2005 in Bethnal Green and Bow as Mark rightly points out and in 2012 in Bradford West) but it is very unlikely anyone else is going to be able to do that to Labour in 2015. Even if they could it would be 1 or 2 seats maximum and cannot really be planned for. It still makes far more sense to focus on the marginals and maximise their chances of winning there.

Of course this does mean that over time people in the safe seats feel neglected and there is a long term risk that they will get tired of being taken for granted and look elsewhere. This is as true in "true blue" safe Tory seats as it is in safe Labour ones.

It is our electoral system that causes this. The safe seats stack up on either side and the main fight is for the 100 or so marginal seats that are up for grabs. The parties are simply responding to the electoral incentives in the same way as our shop manager is responding to the realities of the market. This cannot be changed by "urging" parties to stop taking people for granted. It will only change if the electoral incentives change to make it worth the while of the parties to focus on every single vote.

Until that happens calls to arms like this are essentially whistling in the political wind.

Here's a crazy idea: Maybe we should let the electorate decide who become PCCs

There has been a lot of noise in the last few days about how terrible it is that Bob Ashford has been barred from standing as a Labour candidate to become a Police and Crime Commissioner in Avon and Somerset due to a crime he was convicted of when he was 13 years old 46 years ago. This is because of a rule that was included in the bill that created the positions whereby a candidate cannot stand if they have ever been convicted of an offence that could have resulted in them being sent to prison (even if they weren't). There are also others who have stood down as a result of this rule include the decorated Falklands war hero Simon Weston due to an offence he was convicted for when he was also a child.

As Mark Pack has pointed out, this is not an "unintended consequence" of the legislation but very much intended as the parliamentary record shows. This very point (candidates being barred due to offences committed when they were children) was specifically debated and there appeared to be broad parliamentary consensus that this was "the right thing to do".

As an aside, I find it intensely depressing that such illiberal laws can be passed through our parliament without any real understanding of how ridiculous the consequences of said laws will actually be in practice from those who are supposed to be legislative experts. I really hope this episode will give the unthinking authoritarians (in all parties) pause for thought the next time they are debating legislation.

Mark Ferguson has done a sterling job on LabourList in recent days highlighting the absurdity of this rule and calling for an urgent change. The Home Office has already indicated that nothing can be done until after the first set of elections in November.

On that LabourList posting linked to above there is an interesting debate in the comments. Some commenters agree the rule is wrong but there are others who point out that it is going to be difficult to define precisely where the bar should be. They suggest that ruling on what would be an acceptable and unacceptable criminal conviction will be tricky. They are essentially saying that there will always be edge cases that seem to fall on the wrong side (either way) wherever the line is drawn.

I agree it would be tricky. But here is a radical idea. The entire point of having these Police and Crime Commissioners was in order to allow voters to choose them. So why not allow the electorate to decide? If they consider a youthful misdemeanor by Mr Ashford should prevent him from becoming a PCC then they won't vote for him. You can certainly bet your bottom dollar that if Mr Ashford's opponents think it will count against him the details of it will be plastered all over leaflets. The same would apply for any of the other candidates who have withdrawn (or may do so in the future).

Perhaps instead though what we will find is that people who have had dealings with the law from the other side as youngsters but have learned their lesson and gone on to be highly productive and trustworthy members of society might just have something very useful to contribute to the role.

Stranger things have happened.