Month: June 2014

by

My report for Business for Britain on the dynamics of the debate over the EU, and a small but telling process point on the EU

[NB. An op-ed I wrote for the Times on this subject (26/6/14) is added at the bottom of this post.]

My new company, North Wood, was hired by Business for Britain to do some market research on what swing voters think about arguments over the EU. The report is here. I do not work for or speak for BfB. If you want to know their views on things, ask them, and do not interpret what I say as their view or what they say as my view.

Please note that in this report I do not analyse any policy issues concerning the EU or immigration. I have written a lot about policy aspects of the EU (e.g. p.103-33 of my essay touches on EU issues, this blog gives a long view on UK foreign policy) but this report is purely about public opinion and the dynamics of political conflict. If you don’t like the comments reported, don’t get mad with me – ask yourself why people say the same things all over the country, and why their views are different to your views.

A few points on immigration and an EU referendum that are discussed in the Conclusions (p.16ff) and are often misreported / misunderstood….

1. The official OUT campaign does not need to focus on immigration. The main thing it needs to say on immigration is ‘if you are happy with the status quo on immigration, then vote to stay IN’.

2. The OUT campaign has one essential task – to neutralise the fear that leaving may be bad for jobs and living standards. This requires a grassroots movement based on small businesses. If when voting comes on a referendum, people think ‘all the local businesses are voting IN and they say they’ll be firing people and going bust if there’s an OUT vote’, then the IN campaign will win. If people think ‘small businesses are clearly in favour of OUT’, then OUT will win easily. If people think ‘business seems divided’, then OUT should win.

Immigration is now such a powerful dynamic in public opinion that a) no existing political force can stop people being so worried about it and, contra many hacks I speak to, it wouldn’t matter if the Tories and Mail shut up about it – people’s actual experience and conversation with friends, family, and colleagues is the most important thing driving opinion, not the media; b) it is therefore not necessary for the main campaign to focus on it in a referendum (others will anyway) and focusing on it would alienate other crucial parts of the electorate.

There are some other points about immigration and the Conservative Party which are not directly relevant to the EU issue and I do not discuss in the report but which may be of interest.

A. Many Tory MPs think that if Cameron gives more speeches on immigration and stresses ‘the government’s achievements’ this would be a big help for the Party in the next election. This is deluded. Swing voters do do not think the government has achieved anything – they think the government has ‘kept the floodgates open’ and ‘made the problem worse’. (They do not blame Theresa May for it – she is never mentioned spontaneously.) Trying to persuade the public they are wrong is futile. CCHQ couldn’t do it if they spent £50m on TV ads just on this issue.

B. Much of the commentariat, in my opinion, is also wrong on this issue. The reason for the error is a widespread false model of swing voter psychology (cf. p.18) in which people think that swing voters occupy an average point equidistant between a Right pole and a Left pole. Swing voters, however, are more anti-immigration and anti-free market than the centre of gravity in Westminster.

The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it is seen as ‘the party of the rich, they don’t care about public services’. This is supported by all serious market research. Another problem that all parties have is that their promises are not believed. This includes Conservative promises on immigration since 1997 which have not been credible. Now, people have four years experience of a Conservative prime minister and they can see that he has not stopped hundreds of thousands entering the country despite promising to do so.

Over the past year or so, the government has tried to project a ‘tough’ message on immigration. The polls have not moved in favour of the Tories. The commentariat then conclude ‘the public don’t like this, it’s too nasty party’ etc. This is wrong. The reason the polls do not move is that nobody believes a word they say! Why would the polls move?!

Before the 2001 and 2005 elections, immigration was less of a worry than it is now and people concluded ‘I don’t believe the Tories promises on immigration and tax and they don’t care about public services because they’re the party of the rich’. Because of the experience of the past four years, they still think the same about the party now. Promises of tax cuts and action on immigration after the next election will not be persuasive because people will think ‘it’s all talk, they’ve had five years and taxes and immigration have gone up’. This does not mean that ‘swing voters don’t really care that much about immigration and lower taxes’ as many pundits will claim. It means the Tories continue to have a disastrous brand, Cameron has confirmed its worst elements (‘party of the rich’ (50p tax) and ‘don’t care about services’ (‘they cut the wrong things because Cameron has bad priorities’)), and the public doesn’t trust promises. (NB. Swing voters do not think the Government has ‘protected’ spending on the NHS and schools.)

Many pundits write about the Tory 2001 and 2005 campaigns as if they were models of brilliant campaigning – ‘they tested X to destruction’, ‘if they didn’t work, what could?’ But the failures of 2001 and 2005 were merely proofs that the Party was led by people who did not understand the country’s priorities or effective political action and the campaigns were very poor (2001 was appalling, 2005 less so). Promises to cut immigration or taxes fail because those making them are not believed and, in 2001 and 2005, because neither issue was as important as public services which Labour led on – not because swing voters are ‘really’ happy with uncontrolled immigration and higher taxes.

A wrong model of swing voter psychology plus false logic about the 2001 and 2005 campaigns has led to false conclusions and false dichotomies about Conservative strategy. So-called ‘traditionalists’ wrongly concluded that if the Party shouts louder on the same subjects it would finally be persuasive. Some (not all) so-called ‘modernisers’ wrongly concluded that promises to cut immigration were unpopular with swing voters. Both sides in this conflict underestimated – and often still underestimate – the general anti-Westminster dynamic.

A small but telling process point about  Whitehall and Europe

A huge amount of what goes into a Cabinet Minister’s box should not be there – it is a measure of the system’s failure (not Private Office’s failure) – so I usually ignored a large amount of what went in MG’s box but now and then I would go through all of it, particularly on a Friday.

One of the things that is most striking is how much of a Cabinet Minister’s box is filled with EU papers. Here the process is simpler than for Clegg’s appalling Home Affairs Committee, where at least there can be disagreements about policy. In order to continue the pretence that Cabinet Government exists, all these EU papers are circulated in the red boxes. Nominally, these are ‘for approval’. They have a little form attached for the Secretary of State to tick. However, because they are EU papers, this ‘approval’ process is pure Potemkin village. If a Cabinet Minister replies saying – ‘I do not approve, this EU rule is stupid and will cost a fortune’ – then someone from the Cabinet Office calls their Private Office and says, ‘Did your Minister get pissed last night, he appears to have withheld approval on this EU regulation.’ If the Private Office replies saying ‘No, the minister actually thinks this is barmy and he is withholding consent’, then Llewellyn calls them to say ‘ahem, old boy, the PM would prefer it if you lie doggo on this one’. In the very rare cases where a Minister is so infuriated that he ignores Llewellyn, then Heywood calls to explain to them that they have no choice but to approve, so please tick your box and send in your form, pronto. Game over.

It’s the sort of thing you read in history books about how a capital city operated just before the regime collapsed. Like many aspects of contemporary Whitehall, if one put it in a satire, nobody would believe it. It also shows how persistent the form of constitutions can be long after the reality has changed. It seemed to me a bad tactic for officials to to do this as it is a weekly reminder of the ministers’ impotence / irrelevance, and if I were a standard official in Cabinet Office I’d probably knock it on the head – out of sight, out of mind. But as I type these words another thought occurs – perhaps they are behaviourists and they think that if they get the Cabinet into the mindset of just ticking things without reading them, then Whitehall’s interests are well served. Maybe that explains why so few ministers ever complain about it. However, I think that it has also polarised people. A few will be confirmed in their view that ‘there is no alternative to the EU, keep the mechanisms hidden’ but there are certainly others who increasingly think ‘this is a joke, we can’t go on like this’. [No, I am not implying anything about MG’s views – I am talking about an observable radicalisation of Tory ministers in general.]

Ps. Whenever you read ‘the CBI said…’, remember they also said 1997-1999 that we HAD to join the euro or else inward investment would flood out. Also, remember that many of the companies who keep the CBI afloat have vital legal interests in Brussels (e.g. BA and landing slots). Remember that many of their members do NOT agree with the leadership. When Business for Sterling polled CBI members in 1999, we discovered that the CBI leadership had been lying about the views of their own members. Within a year, the CBI had fled from the euro battle. The same can be done again…

 

Cameron’s hollow euroscepticism, The Times, 26 June 2014 

[The printed version was very slightly edited.]

Recently I ran focus groups in marginal seats with people who voted for Cameron in 2010 but think they’re unlikely to again in 2015.

They think Cameron ‘cut the wrong things’ and is ‘just for the rich’ (the 50p tax cut was a disaster), Miliband is ‘weak, not a proper leader’, ‘everything’s gone up except my wages’, and ‘I don’t feel a recovery’. They think ‘I’m desperate for change’ but ‘they’re all the same’.

The combination of immigration, benefits, and human rights dominates all discussion of politics and Europe. People think that immigration is ‘out of control’, puts public services under intolerable strain (‘my doctor’s appointment was delayed’), and ‘stupid benefit rules’ allow immigrants to claim ‘without contributing anything’ then ‘they send the money home’ and ‘sometimes claim for kids back home’.

The biggest change in the EU debate since the the euro battle is that people now spontaneously connect the issue of immigration and the EU. The policy that they raise and discuss most is ‘the Australian points system for immigration’ and many realise that membership of the EU makes this impossible. People also repeatedly mention ‘the guy with the hook’, Hamza, who combines immigration, benefits, Europe, and ‘human rights’ in one striking story.

The second strongest argument for leaving is that ‘we can save a fortune and spend that money on the NHS or whatever we want’. They think that the EU’s ‘costs outweigh its benefits’, ‘we stick to the rules while the others cheat them’ and on issue after issue they side with ‘let’s take back control’ over ‘we gain more by sharing power’.

While a fifth of the electorate is strongly pro-EU and a third are strongly hostile, about a third is up for grabs. While most of these people would like to leave, what holds some back is fear: ‘if we leave they’ll shaft us, businesses will close, jobs will be lost’. The Foreign Office’s belief that EU membership brings more global influence cuts no ice.

The focus of any future referendum choice will therefore be: do you fear economic disaster? If the answer is Yes, then they would reluctantly vote to stay. However, if not then the prize of controlling immigration and ‘saving all the cash’ mean that they would vote to leave.

Significantly, people no longer see the EU like the German football team – more advanced and successful than us. The post-2008 euro crisis has changed this long-term factor and provides an opportunity to argue ‘closer integration with the euro basket cases will cost you a fortune’.

Many Tories hoped that a promise of a referendum would swing the election but this is misguided as the pledge is not believed, and the greater the hostility to the EU the greater the disbelief. People believe that ‘Cameron and Miliband want to stay in’ therefore ‘they won’t risk a referendum’, and recent promises are ‘just because UKIP’s on the up and the election is coming’ – ‘just a typical lie’ because ‘nobody will do anything about immigration’. The fact that Cameron won’t threaten to leave confirms that he is ‘not serious’.

If there were to be a renegotiation, the two things they most want are ‘control of immigration’ and ‘send less money’. If the EU remains in control of immigration, renegotiation would be seen as a failure and would make people more likely to vote ‘out’, as renegotiation would raise expectations then increase anger. While the status quo in a referendum usually has a structural advantage, in an EU referendum this advantage could be lost as the ‘out’ campaign could say ‘this is your chance to change immigration policy’.

Cameron hoped that the referendum promise would push the EU issue beyond the election and he would not have to infuriate people by revealing how little he wants to change. Wrong. People have already concluded he doesn’t want to change much. Picking fights over Juncker won’t fool people.

He bungled into a promise he never liked that commits him to something he never wanted to do yet doesn’t even achieve his aim of persuading people to vote for him.

Because his policy lurches in response to pressure, it never solves his problems. His MPs do not trust him and may soon set their own red lines for a new relationship that does require major treaty changes. He rages that his party is making his position untenable. As they say in Moscow, ‘everybody’s right and everybody’s unhappy’.

If Miliband hires a proper chief of staff and campaigns on the message ‘I won’t put up your taxes and you can’t afford another five years of Cameron so vote for change’, Cameron is finished. If Miliband doesn’t, Cameron will soon face an awful dilemma: the country wants more back from Europe than he wants to ask for, or Europe wants to give.

Meanwhile, many ‘eurosceptics’ have defined their goal as winning a dicey and distant referendum. But even if people vote ‘out’, who thinks Cameron could negotiate the details, and who doubts that powerful forces that want us to remain may try to force a second vote?

It is unlikely that we will remove the supremacy of EU law and negotiate a new treaty until there is a prime minister who can articulate inspiring goals in a completely different way to the petulant and hollow euroscepticism of Cameron, who is supported by an unprecedented grassroots movement mobilising small businesses, and who can exploit what they call in Brussels ‘beneficial crises’, just as Monnet exploited them to build the EEC. We cannot conjure leaders from thin air but we can build the movement as we await the crises.

 

by

A few responses to comments, misconceptions etc about my Times interview

On Monday, I wrote a blog: The Hollow Men (Part I). I will finish Part Two shortly but in the meantime here are a few comments regarding responses to my interview.

1. The silliest error is to think MG knew about or ‘approved’ my interview. Michael’s a friend of mine but since I left I don’t work for the DfE. I make my own judgements and have my own priorities. I did not tell him what I was planning. MG is an old friend of DC. Obviously he does not agree with my views on Cameron. The issue of Cameron’s qualities is probably the thing we most disagreed about over the years.

2. The second silliest error is to think that it is connected to a plot by me to make Gove leader. I’ve said hundreds of times off and on the record – MG would be a bad leader, he knows it, and so do his best friends. People in Westminster are (understandably given the extreme vanity everywhere) so hardwired to think of everything through the prism of leadership struggles that if I published photos of Gove in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, someone would write ‘Cummings launches pre-emptive strike to lower expectations as part of secret Gove leadership plot…’

3. A misconception. ‘Cummings has gone mad dog and he’ll keep going until the election.’ Wrong. My motives are in my essay. I told MG I was leaving in September 2013 and I left in January 2014 partly because I did not want to be involved with the election. I dislike gangs and I am not a club joiner (‘nobody would have you!’ I hear echoing across Westminster). I make judgements about people and ideas individually – for me parties are just a vehicle of convenience, not something that define my choices, likes, and ideas. I’m not saying this is better than being a committed party member, I’m just explaining motives.

I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action. I also want to discourage No10 from their habit (growing since summer 2013 as Clegg sank more and more rapidly) of seeing the DfE as a piggy bank from which they can buy off Clegg. If No10 gets serious and stops trying to force DfE to do stupid things, I’ll go back to my history books and rocking chair.

As I explained in my essay, I think the answer to Dean Acheson’s famous challenge is to make our national goal: to be the best place in the world for education and science. Obviously, I do not expect Cameron to think deeply about such a subject. But he will think hard about his own survival. And he may think: ‘NHS – got to keep quiet, bloody Lansley. Universal Credit –  not happening, bloody IDS. Schools. Mmm. Only thing that the Right is happy about. Only thing I can claim to be a mega big bang public service reform. Sort of fits with the long-term economic plan gizmo from Lynton. Fed up of people saying Tories don’t care about poor people, need something for the election. Mmm. Promising a load more cuts for schools won’t go down too well Lynton says. Ok, well I’ve got to make some cuts somewhere but I won’t force the DfE to make more cuts to the wrong things [e.g. 16-19] because of Cleggy’s dopey priorities.’

The most worrying words in the DfE were ‘No10 is interested in doing something on schools’. Without exception, this meant trouble – never progress. All I ever wanted from No10 was for Cameron to say to Heywood ‘I agree with Gove’ and keep his trap shut. Sadly, he wouldn’t do it. But one can hope…

4. The Macmillan issue. In the Times interview there are little dots after my Macmillan reference because my original quote was something like ‘… picture of Macmillan on the wall and he gave that Keith Joseph speech in 2004, that’s all you need to know’. My point was the combination, not just Macmillan. (I’m not blaming The Times, they had to make some cuts and that was an obvious cut.) A few people such as Tim Bale have suggested Macmillan was quite a good prime minister. While I don’t think he was ‘good’, I do think he was a more serious character than Cameron – he was actually a prime minster whereas as far as one can tell Cameron seems to regard his role as the nation’s uber-pundit. (This is particularly odd since Osborne brought in Crosby to provide a focus for Cameron that Cameron cannot provide for himself and Cameron agreed to this, yet he continues with his uber-pundit role anyway.) Anyway, I can see why some people think ‘just saying Macmillan doesn’t mean he’s terrible’ and I agree, but read the 2004 speech too – when read in the context of how he mismanages No10, what I mean will be clearer. (The CPS do not have it on their website so I can’t quote from it but my memory is it was awful.)

5. My job. Understandably, the media story about spads is that they are ‘spin doctors’. However, my role in DfE was not this. Less than one percent of my time was spent dealing with journalists. The vast majority of my time was spent a) thinking about how to operationalise our core goals (reversing the devaluation of exams, simplifying funding, stripping bureaucracy, improving teacher training, building Academy chains, getting a functioning Free School process etc), b) managing officials and processes by hour, week, month, and quarter to achieve these priorities, and c) reducing local entropy (e.g. every financial model being wrong) and squeezing time scales (no this won’t start in 2014 it will start in September 2011, here’s how etc). I focused on priorities, keeping a weather eye on the umpteen mini-disasters per day, trying to stop them becoming big problems, while spending most of my time on (b). (NB. Zoete was the media spad yet he also spent a huge amount of time doing a similar role.)

Formally, spads are not supposed to manage processes and operations. In practice, if you do not do this you may as well be on the beach because government departments are so dysfunctional that even the great officials who could manage things properly are seldom allowed to by the system. At the start of 2011 there was massive resistance to this. By September 2012, it was normal. (Also, we were greatly helped by exponential improvements in the Private Office – the unsung heroes, often women 25-35 working in the early hours to fix errors made by middle-aged men (on 2-3 times PO salaries) who left at 4 not caring if something works or doesn’t.)

Part of the reason No10 does not work is that senior people issue airy instructions (usually in response to a column rather than as part of a serious plan) but, not understanding management, they do not know how to follow through and ensure things are done. (Some of the junior people do do this and helped us.) By the time it realises its instructions have been ignored, months can pass. (I remember one very senior No10 person saying to MG and me one day ‘good job I fixed the planning law changes for you’. In fact, they had told their officials to do that, then forgot about it, their officials did nothing except say ‘the ECHR makes everything impossible’, and to the extent we made progress with DCLG it was despite No10 and because of help from Sheridan. But – thanks to Olive on TUPE!) Given Campbell and McBride et al it is a convenient media stereotype to assume I am some sort of crazy figure who spent all his time on the phone arguing with hacks – but it is not true. The media naturally focus on the media but the important lessons about the DfE for people who want to change things are about project managing priorities in dysfunctional bureaucracies.

Nothing I did from a management perspective would be regarded as special or interesting by anyone who really understands management. The only interesting thing about it is that it needed to be done, is unusual in Whitehall, and nobody senior does it in No10. (There are other aspects of ‘how we got things done in the DfE’ that were not conventional but they do not fall into the ‘management’ category and are for another day.)

6. Gaby Hinsliff and pragmatists v kamikazes. For Gaby, MG and I are ‘the Westminster kamikaze tendency, those so passionately convinced of their own rightness that they are willing to go down in flames for it, and if necessary to take others down with them… For the kamikaze tendency, there’s always something bigger at stake; always a burning reason to blow stuff up… People who don’t need to see the evidence to know they’re right… It’s just that occasionally, when considering the alternatives, you wonder if a little woolly pragmatism isn’t the main thing keeping politics sane.’

A few points…

A) After reading the physicist Richard Feynman’s famous speech on education research as ‘cargo cult science’, I got Ben Goldacre into the DfE to do a report a) to spark a debate about evidence-based policy, and b) revamp the DfE’s analysis division. All the people who write endlessly ‘Gove’s an ideologue who ignores evidence’ never mention or refer to this. It was attacked by many (inside and outside DfE) including the unions. Many are cross about it because the thought of randomised control trials proving that their pet theory is rubbish is not appealing. (Many of the social science academics who write letters attacking Gove – often Marxist economists still in the pre-1989 jungle, ‘literary theorists’, and others from the lowest ranks of academia – are appalled at the idea of techniques from the hard sciences invading their domains and exposing their frauds. For them ‘cargo cult science’ is a lucrative business.)

It is fashionable to say that we ‘ignored evidence’ but it is false. As Tim Oates, head of research for Cambridge Assessment said, ‘Michael Gove has been vilified for ignoring evidence, but I have never worked with a politician who listens to evidence as much as he does’. When I arrived, the DfE did not even subscribe to either Science or Nature – the two most prestigious scientific journals. It took me six months of fighting but that changed. The idea that we dislike ‘evidence’ while the pure civil service or our opponents love it is a comical caricature. We often invited into DfE people who disagreed – often random bloggers or twitterers who had made interesting arguments or pointed out mistakes. In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals). Large scale RCTs of Sure Start or the Pupil Premium would be excellent. Who do you think oppose them? Not me – bring them on! I wish we had gone further on the Goldacre stuff but like everything else it was a victim of our limited bandwidth in the face of determined resistance. Only a huge restructuring of the DfE – inconceivable on any plausible current trajectory – would enable genuine evidence-led policy to become the norm. Lots of people internally would like it to happen but the obstacles are too high and the incentives won’t push things that way. But at least Goldacre was a start…

B) My objection is not to pragmatism. Our team was pragmatic daily as one must be to get things done. Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism. It is a tendency of political columnists to polarise every column so Gaby polarises to ‘pragmatists’ and ‘kamikazes’ but I would suggest that if one wants to over-simplify it would be more accurate to label the two sides ‘focused planners’ and ‘unfocused pundits’, with Cameron being self-evidently in the latter category.

C) We were not just wondering around ‘blowing stuff up’. We have been trying to deal with a terrible system and helping many new institutions to grow. E.g. Teaching Schools and School Direct, to give good schools more control over training. Obviously the bureaucracy / Labour / unions hate this as it disrupts DfE central planning (which itself is based on data that is massively and consistently wrong, but who cares about that!). You can disagree with the policy but it is not just ‘blowing stuff up’ – it is an attempt to build healthier institutions bottom-up.

D) Other pundits, encouraged by Clegg, have taken a similar line to Gaby – Gove has turned school reform into ‘an ideological battle’ etc. Let’s leave aside the word ‘ideological’ which often just means ‘different ideas to mine’. We have tried – within the severe constraints of Cameron’s nature, the Coalition, Whitehall dynamics – to take power out of Whitehall on the basis that nothing is worse than the dysfunctional central bureaucracy controlling things (a feeling strengthened exponentially by experience). E.g. When we gave power over A Levels back to Universities, everybody screamed (some Labour MPs were so confused by the sight of us giving power away they simply claimed we were lying – e.g. Barry Sheerman just said ‘I don’t believe it!’). When we tried to remove GCSEs from the accountability system in 2012 we were stopped by Cameron. (We did not try to bin GCSEs themselves – an important distinction.) Interestingly, all the people I have seen who complain about us being ‘ideological’ also opposed this move, as they like Whitehall controlling exams because they hope to capture control of Whitehall. When we got rid of ‘levels’ from the Curriculum – because great teachers told us they were rubbish and were used by Ofsted to enforce bad practices on schools – everybody with power in the school system complained. Why? Because few of those who are powerful in education really believes in decentralising power because they think that will lead to ‘a mess, chaos’.

The people who call us ‘ideological’ seem to me generally to have their own ideology – Whitehall knows best, keep power in the hands of the select few not the dopey parents or voters, aim to capture Whitehall to enforce your prejudices on schools.

E) One of the biggest misconceptions about Gove is ‘he doesn’t listen to argument’. His team argues with him non-stop. We say ‘you’re wrong’, ‘you cocked that up’ when we think it. I told every new person ‘in this team we are honest about our mistakes with each other and Michael’. In all the time I’ve known him, Michael has never said to me or anybody else in our team ‘don’t criticise me / you are wrong to argue with me’. Never. MG has various failings, as we all do, but being closed to criticism is not one of them.

F) Fundamentally, our message is an uncomfortable one. It is: ‘the exam system has been cheated, loads of schools that think they’re good aren’t, massive change is needed, Cameron won’t prioritise extra money.’ Even Reagan’s comms people would find this a challenge. Given Cameron’s team, it was obvious from the start that any sort of serious communication was impossible, which is one of the reasons the media was my bottom priority. (I never listened to the Today programme in my entire time in the DfE, other than occasionally in cars when someone had it on or specific interviews online. Its self-satisfied smugness is nauseating and ministers who change tune because of a bad morning on Today are idiots – it is a paper tiger that you can safely ignore as we did. Few things would do more to improve the quality of government than a mass switch-off of the Today programme and for MPs to spend the time on the Good Judgement Project instead.)

To avoid any confusion: the problem with Cameron is not that he is ‘pragmatic’, it is that he does not know how to get anything difficult done and his judgement of people is such that he cannot hire people to do this for him, so is at the mercy of the media and civil service.

7. Seldon. Seldon said something like – people like Cummings become advisers without ever having had proper jobs or having done anything then they criticise Cameron… Other defenders of DC have said similar things. This is ironic as I did have ‘proper jobs’ between Oxford and getting into the anti-euro campaign at the end of 1998. I’m not claiming I was good at anything but working in nightclubs and starting businesses in Russia counts as ‘the real world’. I also think that this experience was very useful in politics as I had an understanding of how large complex organisations work, both badly and well – something that Cameron has never had, his experience being limited to working in badly managed political organisations. This is one of the reasons he is genuinely baffled by criticism he gets. For Cameron, he’s dealing with an incredibly complex environment (true), in which some things are bound to go wrong (true), as well as could be expected (wrong!).

8. The Economist. It gets my job wrong (see above). Like quite a few pieces it wrongly says I’m a ‘libertarian’. As I make clear in my essay, I am not. (I don’t think libertarianism is consistent with evolutionary biology, for starters.) They think that because I think that a voucherised school system would be better, therefore I wanted Cameron to do this and am infuriated he did not. No no no! I very much opposed any talk in No10 of profits. Given my views of the competence of Cameron and his team, do you really think I wanted them to try to voucherise the school system and allow profits?! No way Jose. I think that if Cameron were to promise that his next government would allow profit-making schools (doubtless as an unthought out move to keep ‘the Right’ happy), it would be a disaster both for the Conservative Party and the idea of for-profit schools. The Economist also seems to think MG and I are ‘sound and fury’ while No10 is marked by ‘doggedness’!? Well, if they mean ‘dogged determination to switch course every time DC reads the papers’, we agree…

[Update. Clegg’s advisers, Reeves and Astle, did argue for profits. Clegg’s ‘I stopped Gove from doing profits’ speech was pure invention, dreamed up by Reeves in summer 2011, and was even more dishonest than a straight lie given his own and his advisers’ views.]

9. The two pieces I thought most interesting were by Janan Ganesh (FT) and Alex Massie (Spectator). The former is close to Osborne’s team (which is significantly better than Cameron’s). I think I’ve answered most of the latter’s points here.

10. Cameron. At the PolEx party (18/6), Cameron said that I am a ‘career psychopath’.

A) No10’s first reaction was to decide not to react to my interview, then one of his friends pleaded with me to ‘leave him alone because Miliband would be even worse’ and another threatened me (incompetently). The fact that Cameron then blurts out an insult reviving the story four days later is an example of my point about the lack of focus in No10. If they can’t decide a consistent line on me, what chance on ISIS?!

B) For Cameron, someone who focuses on priorities and gets stuff done every day according to a long-term plan stretching over years, while ignoring orders from Heywood, doubtless looks like a psycho! I’m not sure which of us would come out ahead on the Hare test, but I know who is better at getting stuff done and it ain’t the guy in No10 watching Netflix with a glass of red in his paw…

Although I’ve been critical of Cameron, I also think he need not be so rubbish – he’s cleverer and tougher than most in Parliament (admittedly a low bar). If his judgement about people were not so bad and he hired a deadly serious chief of staff and did what they told him instead of being the nation’s uber-pundit, then he could beat Miliband easily as Miliband seems to have an even worse operation than No10 and is failing to take advantage of the extremely favourable landscape. But of course Cameron won’t do this because he really does not understand all the criticism of his operation. He doesn’t listen to billionaires who have run things very successfully because he thinks ‘they don’t understand politics’ and because his only experience in life is working in dysfunctional entities – he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know…

So we beat on, boats against the current, towards an election that will be defined by a single question: are swing voters more scared of Miliband’s tax policies than they are of another five years of Cameron? And whoever wins, we’ll have five more years of Hollow Men stumbling from cockup to cockup. Unless those with power and money get behind my essay, of course!

The Hollow Men Part II next week…

by

Gesture without motion from the hollow men in the bubble, and a free simple idea to improve things a lot which could be implemented in one day (Part I)

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.



A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men


We are the stuffed men


Leaning together


Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!


Our dried voices, when


We whisper together


Are quiet and meaningless


As wind in dry grass


Or rats’ feet over broken glass


In our dry cellar



Shape without form, shade without colour,


Paralysed force, gesture without motion…

… Between the idea


And the reality


Between the motion


And the act


Falls the Shadow…’

The Hollow Men, T.S. Elliot.

In the past few months, between days of wading in concrete (where I am today – no interviews I’m afraid) I’ve been pottering around the country talking to people about politics and our education reforms. The contrast between watching the commentariat and MPs discussing ‘what the euro election means’ while spending hours per day talking to the people who had voted – two very different worlds – prompted me to jot some thoughts as I drove around. Somewhere around Birmingham, listening to a radio discussion of the election and the three leaders’ responses then listening to the news about the black flags racing south while Hague posed with Angelina, a line from the poem above popped into my head and I thought, hollow, hollow, hollow.

The Times interview today prompts me to put those jottings on my blog to explain a bit better what I mean. I don’t have time to do all in one go so I’ll break them up. Part II shortly. It’s written in haste and please send corrections, comments etc to dmc2.cummings@gmail.com

The long view

In the summer of 1862, as he awaited the summons to become prime minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck had a wonderful summer flirting with a beautiful Russian princess in the south of France and travelling to London. There, he had dinner with many of the leading British politicians of the day. After one dinner, he wrote to his wife about how little our leaders understood of European politics: ‘[Palmerston] and, to an only slightly lesser degree, Lord Russell too were in a state of complete ignorance… The British ministers know less about Prussia than about Japan and Mongolia.’ Soon after this party, the fateful telegram arrived – ‘Periculum in mora. Depechez vouz‘ – and a profound nonlinearity hit world politics.

For the next 150 years, those at the apex of British politics made colossal error after error.

By 1870, eight years after that dinner party, Bismarck had isolated France and the revolutionary Prussian army (a force decentralised to an unprecedented degree, contra British stereotypes) prepared to smash Napoleon III. The records show Whitehall in chaos over what to do about our guarantees of Belgian neutrality and it watched in bewilderment as Bismarck changed the course of world history with the unification of Germany.

Forty-four years later in 1914, the confusion over guarantees to Belgium, often expressed in almost identical language to 1870, resurfaced. Whitehall was overwhelmed by the crisis, the leading politicians had ignored the hard questions of exactly what we would and would not do in particular circumstances such as a German invasion of Belgium, and we tottered into a war which Asquith had confidently said to his mistress, only days earlier, that we would avoid. Despite 44 years to think about the crisis of 1870, we screwed up very similar questions. ‘Judge of the Nations, spare us yet / Lest we forget – lest we forget’, warned Kipling at the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, but Whitehall forgot 1870 and we were barely spared.

A quarter of a century later, for the third time our leadership was intellectually, psychologically, and institutionally unprepared to deal with the question of deterring Germany and we tottered into another world war for which we were unprepared.

Before both wars, our machinery for military and political planning was an abject failure. After August 1911, the Committee on Imperial Defence failed to have a single serious discussion with the prime minister about the main issues until the war broke out – an appalling failure by Asquith and others. During both wars, the tactical and operational superiority of German forces was eventually outweighed by their political leaders making more big mistakes than ours did, and, thankfully, Hitler would not appoint someone like von Manstein as supreme commander.

After 1945, the ‘Rolls Royce’ Foreign Office made a historic misjudgement about the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and arrogantly dismissed Monnet who understood better than them how to change the world.

Our economy stuttered, the empire shrank. We failed to formulate a new national policy – an answer to Acheson’s famous jibe that we had lost an empire but failed to find a new role. In area after area, we either consciously abandoned trying to be a serious player (e.g. satellites and space) or cocked it up and frittered away big advantages (e.g. aerospace, computing). (My essay is an attempt to answer Acheson’s challenge.)

After our next disaster – Suez – the Conservative Party made another grand historical error – it begged to join the European Community, seeking in membership a way to avoid thinking about hard problems. After botching the attempts to join, we gave France whatever it wanted as an entry fee then spent the next thirty years handing over more and more power because those in charge could not think of anything else to do. Thatcher too failed here and when she woke up she was chopped.

Having run the world’s monetary system pre-1914, we spent 1945-1992 botching monetary policy (unlike Germany and Switzerland), we lurched from crisis to crisis, and eventually threw ourselves into the ERM only to be ejected in ignominy shortly afterwards. Then we were told that we had to join the euro or we would be ruined.

Thatcher dealt with some of the worst excesses of accumulated errors and weakness. But she failed on monetary policy, Europe, health, education, and welfare. John Hoskyns’ book Just In Time is a brilliant explanation of why she failed, analysing the interconnected issues of MPs’ qualities and Whitehall’s dynamics. (It is telling how little discussed this book is in Westminster.) If she had taken his advice and gone for all-out civil service reform with a proper PM’s department and different people running it, as Hoskyns pressed her to do – i.e. if she had been much more revolutionary – then much more could have been done (though such a move would obviously be an all-or-nothing gamble for any prime minister who really tried it and one can see why she shied away). She thought Hoskyns’ plan was too radical and, trying to muddle through, she fell. Her successors have struggled with the same issues of pulling what appear to be ‘levers’ in No.10 only to find that they are connected to the wrong thing, or not connected to anything at all (see below).

Whatever one’s view of the right response to 9/11 and international terrorism, it is obvious that our leaders and institutions coped badly yet again and have not learned the lessons of recent failures. Our approach to the EU now – whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow – fits the pattern and the supposed ‘renegotiation’ will be the next bullet point on this list (if it’s tried), together with the next so-called National Security Strategy and the next Defence Review. Now, as the black flags of ISIS fly and Putin seeks to break NATO, Hague poses for the cameras with Angelina and Cameron’s closest two advisors stick with the only thing they know – a ten day planning horizon (at best) of feeding the lobby (badly) and changing tack to fit the babbling commentariat (while blaming juniors for their own failings).

Hollow, hollow, hollow…

The consequences of our inability to develop political institutions able to think wisely about the biggest problems in order to pre-empt some crises – ‘to win without fighting’ as Sun Tzu put it – are ever greater because scientific progress also brings ever greater destructive possibilities. Does anybody think our current system is thinking wisely about possible equivalents to the rise of Germany post-1870, such as autonomous robotics, synthetic biology, the rise of China, or the collision of Islam with modernity?

Markets and science show that some fields of human endeavour work much better than political decision-making. I think we could do much much better if we will face our problems honestly…

Coming soon, Part II – what does work, why Whitehall doesn’t work, and how we could do things better…