Markets fail – isn’t it obvious?

The fate of the freesheet market in London is a lesson in how markets generally go wrong sooner or later, and should not be relied on to produce an unambiguous good. What free-market dogma insists should be healthy competition, in which competitors provide consumer choice and ensure ongoing increases in quality and reductions in cost, is in fact usually competition in which there is a winner and a loser, and in which quality ultimately falls and prices can be dictated by the victors.

So it was that as soon as News International threw in the towel with thelondonpaper, its rival London Lite was marked for closure, having done its job by securing a monopoly for its owners, who are now able to dominate the market with the new freesheet Evening Standard, the Lite itself being dispensed with. Nobody else will go near the London freesheet market for years: for advertisers wanting to hit that demographic the Standard will be the only option, and there will be no competition to keep the quality of journalism high (or, at least, stop it sliding even further). 

See also supermarkets, where in any given locality there is usually only one big store, our deregulated energy utilities, which the Public Accounts Committee observed were not giving rise to effective competition, our dereguated buses where the profitable routes are milked and the unprofitable ones left to languish, public good be damned…

There are, to be fair, some decent examples of where competition is working OK: online CD and DVD reatilers offer significant discounts compared to shops. But remember how in 2006 HMV had to drop its ludicrously high prices for CDs? As soon as Fopp and CD Zone went belly-up, they were back up to their old prices again. In the world of downloads, there is clearly inadequate competition also: £7.99 is enough to buy a CD online, and so is plainly too much for a download, yet it’s the standard price for download albums.

But you can probably find your own examples. The dogma that markets inevitably produce competition, and consequently benefits for consumers, is manfestly unreliable. Policy-makers must think carefully before applying it in any given policy context, rather than slapping market around like paint as they have done for the last few decades. The changes to the cast of free papers being thrust into Londoners’ hands should serve as a daily reminder of this basic truth. But probably won’t.

Filed under: Bloggeration , competition, markets

A good conference for Labour #lab09

One of the things about Labour’s conference being in Brighton this year is that you can easily commute to it from London for a day. And that’s exactly what I had to do yesterday at short notice after a change of plans at work. To my amazement, applying for a pass at less than 24 hours’ notice, and the collecting it at the Conference Services office immediately before heading into the conference itself, was extremely strightforward given the amount of security involved. After the day-long queues of 2006 I had feared a hellish experience, but in fact I got from Victoria Station to inside the secure area within 90 minutes. Impressive.

Once in there I took a little while to feel I was at conference properly, and my assessment of the mood of the conference is based only on the few hours either side of Brown’s speech (I had reached home by the time the Sun story broke). So with that caveat, let me say that it didn’t seem quite as desperate as I had expected, in a funny kind of way. I asked earlier whether Labour secretly or subconsciously wants to lose; in some ways, it seems they do.

Since the financial crisis and Labour’s collapse in the polls, the party seems to have moved back on to territory where they feel more comfortable, more akin to a sort of social democracy. Some of this has been desperate popularism – the curbs on bankers’ bonuses, the rash spending commitments – of the kind that politicians only attempt when they’re deeply unpopular. But overall there is the sense that Labour’s response to the recession is comforting to the grass roots: they can talk the talk of not leaving people to languish as the Tories did in the 1980s, and of trying to take steps to cushion the blows.

The trouble is that the party’s record in office prior to the crisis is disastrously at odds with this admittedly vague narrative: it was Labour who let the markets run away with the nation’s best interests; it was Labour who left the public finances ill-equipped to respond fully to the woes of the resession; it was Labour who… well, we all know what Labour did and didn’t do.

Many in Labour therefore seem to be contemplating the general election in the same way as a man with a gangrenous limb contemplates its amputation: it won’t be pleasant, and they’ll miss being in power, but it’s got to be done. Labour needs to be separated from its catastrophic record in office in order to find it way as a party again. It is not simply Gordon Brown that must be given the chop:  “New Labour” itself has to be cleaved away by drastic electoral surgery.

There is a chance, therefore, that Labour in Opposition may just become a home for rational progressive politics again. There is a danger, of course, that it might swing out to the wild and savage left, and that the damage inflicted at the election will be less than surgical, and enough to keep Labour out of office for so long that it turns in desperation to another New Labour style clique to pervert its instincts for the sake of winning power. But Labour is a party – arguably the party, above all others – with a keen sense of its own past: the lessons of both Foot and Blair will no doubt be preying on the minds of many members. There is a chance that they might be able to steer between the extremes this time round.

Then again, I have a feeling that I was, uncharacteristically, the only person to walk away from this year’s Labour conference with any sense of optimism.

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences, Politics

Do Labour want to lose?

The Parliamentary Labour Party certainly seems indifferent to the prospect of defeat. Subconsciously, or even just secretly, some MPs must be feeling gleeful at the thought. How else does one explain their failure to make every effort to turn their fortunes around, and get themselves a new leader? The Tories did it in 1990, after all…

Perhaps some feel that actually, after twelve years in government, the time is right for Labour to take a breather, refresh itself and regroup. While there may never exactly be a good time for the country to be governed by the Tories, the reasoning might go, there might be some merit in lumbering them with the current mess.

But perhaps it goes a bit deeper than that. After all, never before has a party spent twelve years in office without doing what its rank and file wanted it to do. Many of the Labour Party members of 1997 will indeed have been fundamentally unhappy with what Blair and Brown went on to do. How many people in 1997 were crying out for an over-complicated tax system, the Private Finance Initiative, reform of the gambling laws and an overly adventurous foreign policy? Far fewer than would have liked to see the renationalisation of the railways, a transparent resdistribution of wealth and a structural reform of the economy that genuinely reduced the gap between rich and poor. Still, never mind, eh?

The big question for Labour now is whether the New Labour elite will survive post-defeat, or whether the mainstream of progressive thought can re-take control of the party (without swinging out wildly to the crazy excesses of the left). I wouldn’t blame anyone at this week’s conference for being more focused on that fight than the tedious formality of the general election.

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences, Politics

There are no Gods and Monsters #ldconf

Twitter has, as I expected, added a bit of an extra dimension to conferences this year. Even if you don’t use it for anything else, I commend it to you as a source of immediate information, for instance on how different speeches have gone down with the party faithful (Davey and Huhne badly, Farron very well, it seemed to me). You may have seen the tweets I occasionally wrote from Bournemouth, and if so, some of the below may be familiar to you…

Shouty Nutter, on box, haranguing trad jazz duo, sadly out of shot. Liberal Democrats look on in bemusement.

Still, along with the new there is the old: the nutter who usually stands on a box outside conferences shouting about tobacco sales was present and correct (indeed, I’m not sure he usually does the Lib Dems). At one point I heard him from my hotel room, which was very near the BIC; I feared my working time might be disrupted by his impressive lung power, but he shut up again after ten minutes or so. I can only assume someone persuaded him to remain quiet, as he was still there much later, holding up his banners but not hollering. Later the following day he succumbed to temptation, however, having been provoked by a trad jazz duo. Understandable – anyone would have reacted the same. Although few people could have competed with them so successfully for volume.

In fact the clarinet and (I think) tuba were being played in aid of a fringe event promoting reform to the smoking ban as a way of supporting pubs and bars in the face of the recession. Shouty Nutter lost it at them, accusing them of all manner of evil, asking how they could live with themselves – amazing. I got a pic, but didn’t manage to get the jazz duo in shot, to my regret. I later heard of other attendees having attempted to engage Shouty Nutter in conversation; apparently, he’s a bit difficult to reason with. I wish I could remember his name – I was told it by a former colleague who claimed to have pushed him into the sea once, but can’t recall it now.

Turning to more conventional oratory, I saw Lembit Opik speak at a fringe meeting on whether the railways should be renationalised. He completely outclassed the party spokesman who defended the official policy of retaining privatisation. I won’t name the spokesman (you can look it up if you like), as I’m not sure the policy he was defending was exactly what he’d prefer to see happen, but even so Lembit’s command of his facts, construction of his argument and engagement of the audience was well beyond that of his opponent in the debate. For all his success in persuading the fringe meeting, however, an amendment to a motion on the issue in the main conference hall, supported by Lembit, failed to get passed a couple of days later.

Lembit’s career within the party seems to have ground to a halt, and while some of his judgments can perhaps be questioned regarding how he has presented himself, or causes with which he has associated himself, I can’t help but think the Lib Dems are wasting a valuable resource by keeping him out of the shadow ministerial team. Perhaps his engaging off-the-cuff asides get him into trouble; “I hope nobody’s recording this… Take it to Clegg and I’ll have to sit in the front row for his speech,” he “quipped”… There’s more depth to Opik than many realise, and it’s a great pity this isn’t more widely recognised.

Elsewhere on the fringe, a British Humanist Association event with Richard Dawkins was absolutely rammed. The chair of the Lib Dem Humanists and Secularists Groups made a Freudian slip by very nearly referring to it as the “Humanists and Socialists” group. Dawkins himself gave a reading from his new book – really the event was part of his book-plugging tour – and it was all very enjoyable. It did rather remind me of why I’ve never read any of Dawkins’ books though: much as he makes a persuasive argument against God and for evolution, it all feels rather like stating the obvious to me, and twenty quid for even a signed copy of the bleedin’ obvious is a bit steep.

Also at that meeting, a question was asked by a chap who introduced himself as “Mark Thompson”. “Hm, could that be the blogger Mark Reckons?” I wondered. A check on Twitter ten minutes later revealed a message along the lines of “Oh my God [sic], I just asked Richard Dawkins a question!” Quite whether it’s amazingly cool that I picked this up from the other side of the same room, or just ridiculous, I’m unsure. A more startling aspect of the event was when a woman a few rows in front of me collapsed; chairs were cleared, first aid was administered, and inexpert lip-reading suggested to me she had stopped breathing. That may or may not have been the case, but she eventually recovered sufficiently to walk out with the assistance of paramedics. Dawkins continued with his reading – probably quite rightly.

I’m not sure I have much more to tell. I encountered some superb stories about Ken Clarke and Michael Howard, but they’re not really mine to tell (note to self for future memory-jogging purposes: Ferrari, two Howards, bird-watching… tantalising, eh?). I’ve a horrible feeling I might have lingered conspicuously in the back of Laura Kuenssberg’s shot yesterday afternoon – I had thought initially she was just chatting to her producer, but then rather got the impression she was doing a live two-way, presumably for the BBC News Channel, and got out of the way sharpish. I should know better really, but my mum does always say she looks out for me in the background of the TV coverage, so who knows, maybe she saw me at last…

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences, Politics , Liberal Democrats, humanism, Lembit Opik

Liberal Review #ldconf

It’s not been a good week for the Lib Dems. The party seems to have been fighting on too many fronts: attacking the Tories; attacking the Greens; playing up to the politics of envy with the “mansion tax”; trying to get in on the cuts discourse with the tuition fees gambit and Clegg’s ill-advised talk of “savage cuts”. None of the various efforts seemed to be terribly successful, and the “ready to win” slogan has been explored here already.

The party seems to be coming round to the idea that it needs to present itself as a potential governing party, which is quite different to being a small party that grubs around for seats wherever it gets a sniff of one. In the latter guise, they have been able to nick odd seats all over the place, and present themselves in different guises to different sets of constituents. But to be a credible national party one cannot do that: flitting tactically between the liberal and social democratic legacies within the party, depending on the audience, does not work on a national scale.

The Lib Dems are now firmly impaled on the horns of this dilemma. The relentless attacks on the Tories suggest the Lib Dems are terrified of being squeezed: they hold a lot of seats by close margins ahead of the Conservatives, and it would only take very small swings to deprive extremely capable and well-regarded MPs, including Lorely Burt, Tim Farron and Sandra Gidley of their seats. Susan Kramer is also under threat in this way. So, tactically, to defend against this, they must counter the suggestion from the Tories that you may as well vote blue as yellow – but will this help them to take seats off Labour, which must surely be a more promising avenue than just defending past gains from the Tories?

All told, I’ve seen nothing to make me think the party isn’t in for a tough election, and nothing to make me think they will be able to respond to it with any sort of strategic purpose afterwards. Next year they will reach 100 years since they last won a general election – it’s the sort of consistency which no party wants. Some members will doubtless ask why they haven’t benefited from Labour’s decline; I doubt anyone in the party will have the answer unless they’ve been reading this blog – God knows I’ve gone on about it enough.

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences, Politics

Things I dislike about Bournemouth #ldconf

I’ve always regarded Bournemouth as my least favourite seaside conference venue, and while I’m mellowing towards it slightly, this week has pretty much confirmed my view.

The venues are not great. The Bournemouth International Centre is a confusing early 1980s building, which has too many windowless corridors and poky little rooms with inadequate air conditioning. The Winter Gardens in Blackpool is more easily navigable and much more characterful. The Marriott Highcliff Hotel isn’t a small hotel, but feels like it; the ceilings are low, the corridors low and the layout cramped and confusing when compared to the main hotels in either Brighton or Blackpool.

Bournemouth is also quite slopey: the hill atop which the Marriott sits is a real climb – I’ve been chatting to people as we ascend it, and the conversation stops as we hit the slope and have to breathe in, lean into the gradient and steel ourselves for the onslaught. Seriously. This is the gradient between the hotel and conference hall where John Prescott famously used an official car to travel 250 yards, supposedly to protect his wife’s hairdo from the blustery clifftop wind. If they had been going up the hill to the hotel, rather than down the hill from it, I’d have said it was completely fair enough.

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences

Three weeks of politics in the raw #ldconf

It can be easy to forget what a challenge a party conference can be. I’m no fan of this particular cliché, but just this once I’ll use it: they can indeed by an emotional rollercoaster. The lobbyist has to navigate around other lobbyists and companion organisations, plus politicians, engaging policy and networking skills to good effect. It can be the case that nearly and entire day goes by with nothing particular to do, then you have to turn it on at 8pm for three or four intense hours.

This can be stimulating and pleasant work when you find the right people to talk to, do a good job of getting your message across, and perhaps set up future work; but if it goes badly on any of those fronts, you’re suddenly stuck away from home, quite possibly on your own, and unable to leave. At its worst it can be a crushing and dispiriting experience, but at its best it seems ridiculous to call it work.

Depending on exactly what you’re doing, it can however involve a ferocious amount of work, either at the conference itself or, more often, in the weeks leading up to it, as meetings are arranged – from one-to-ones with politicians, to working breakfasts and long-anticipated fringe meetings. Some people will go for a single day, or maybe two; others will arrive on the Saturday, leave on the Thursday and have one day at home before it’s time to head to the next conference.

Much is made of the long hours culture at conferences; frankly, and allowing for the fact that some jobs require longer hours than others, I’m less than convinced by this – you can spend half the night in the bar if you like, but you don’t have to, and you’d have to be either a particular sort of person, or simply mad, to do it every night. I’m also sceptical that much of any use gets done there, certainly from a lobbying perspective. It’s priceless if you’re a journalist, I’ve no doubt, and party activists probably find it actively useful as well. Of course, if you work for a charity, the trick is to associate yourself with a group of private sector representatives who have decent expenses accounts.

Food is less focused on than drink, very often. A decent breakfast seems a pretty staple part of the day for most conference hacks, and after that it’s amazingly easy to get to 8pm and realise you’ve not eaten anything since. If things get desperate you can always duck into the nearest random fringe event to stock up on the grub there: standard fare is greasy nibbles of the onion bhaji / spring roll / mini samosa / plaice goujons variety; slightly more up-market buffets will have chicken or salmon on sticks with dips and crudites; a hot fork buffet occasionally crops up, but the bloody things are always a nuisance to eat I find; and then there are dedicated food fringes, like the NUT’s perennial fish ‘n’ chip supper, and a regular curry night – can’t recall who runs that one off the top of my head, but it’s always there. But the good ones tend to be invite only. The adrenalin / tedium of conference is often a remarkably good appetite suppressant.

The regular work challenges were magnified for me this year by a change of job: having been in post for five months now, I’ve picked up a reasonable overview of the new issues – to do with health and social care and research – but I can’t claim to have in-depth expertise in anything other than a few very niche issues. Health policy being what it is – complicated, and driven by regional and local delivery considerations – it might be another two years before I can hold my own comfortably.

The change of job also changes the conference experience in other ways. It’s an odd sensation to be in the familiar setting of a conference, but surrounded by no familiar faces at all – either fellow lobbyists or parliamentarians – because everyone I know of old is in a totally different set of events and meetings. The regular cast of faces that one gets to know – and often not see from one set of conferences to the next – can often make a conference more bearable.

Still, having only had to do one conference this year, I can afford to be somewhat relaxed about it all. This is doubly so because the Lib Dem conference is always more laid-back than the others: it does not have as many delegates (not just a reflection of the relative sizes of the parties – most Labour delegates are financed by unions, and most Tory delegates can afford to fund themselves, but Lib Dem activists typically have neither luxury), and there is no big security cordon. Getting into the conference centre requires a polite bag search, rather than the airport-style scanners and associated massive queues at the big two. For those doing all three, it’s a pleasant and gentle opener to the season.

I was ambivalent about the whole business of going to conferences by the end of last year’s season. But even after one event this year, the down sides have been thrown into sharp relief for me, and I’m pleased it will be another twelve months before I have to contend with one again; I’d still be pleased if it turned out to be some multiple of that period.

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences

Tory crowd #ldconf

I’ve just come out of the worst fringe meeting I’ve ever attended. I’m furious at almost every single person who was in that room. [Obviously I’ve not just stepped out of a frine meeting – I wrote most of this last night and didn’t have chance to post it; I’ve left it as it was rather than re-writing.]

For starters, the sheer amount of bad manners on display was astonishing. Phones were left on, papers and clothes were noisily shuffled, food was eaten needlessly loudly (yes, I am being serious), and in some cases – not least, I was pretty appalled to observe, between two gentlemen apparently representing the RNID – entire conversations were had; in hushed tones, but conversations nonetheless. This is, frankly, and all joking aside, the sort of thing I am used to experiencing at Conservative Party fringe meetings – and the high average age of the audience was, I’m sad to say, probably not a coincidence. And it came after I had the pleasure of remarking to an MP that the quality of input from those present at another fringe earlier in the day had been commendably high: well-informed, considered, reasonably set forth and hugely informative. How sad the day should end with the opposite.

But this evening’s problems went beyond ill manners. It was an event run by the Dying Matters Coalition, a new body that is also an arm of the National Council for Palliative Care. I’m willing to cut new organisations some slack, but if they’re organised enough to arrange and fund a fringe meeting, and publicise it widely, they should be organised enough to have someone in the room to carry the microphone to those who want to ask questions. But they didn’t.

The low quality of those “questions” cannot, in fairness, be blamed on the hosts, however. I put “questions” in inverted commas because I don’t think a single question was asked all evening. All fringe meetings are susceptible to those who simply want to offer their own opinion, but this applied to all speakers this evening, and went as far as people turning their backs on the panel and addressing the room, having previously attempted to shout down previous contributors.

Another particularly worthless contribution was made by a lady who insisted she had a question for Vince Cable – even though he had to leave and time for asking him questions had run out – but who then simply stated her own views. Worse still, she accused previous speakers of confusing palliative care with assisted suicide, and insisted they were not the same thing. This would have been fair enough had she not herself then conflated assisted suicide with the withdrawal of treatment – they too are different things. After that she returned her attention to the massive plate of food she had collected from the buffet at the side.

What’s that? Oh yes – Vince Cable. After a long week, Vince deserves credit for steeping outside his portfolio to speak on this issue. As one expects from Vince, his contribution was thoughtful, balanced and clear, and by far the most valuable contribution of the evening; he was able to offer a deeply rational and worthwhile overview of a hugely difficult and contentious subject.

With Vince departed for another function, feelings later in the evening ran high – understandable, up to a point, given the nature of the subject. Some contributors wanted to raise the issue of assisted suicide – perhaps in a more forthright way than was really appropriate, but they certainly didn’t go beyond the behaviour of many other attendees. Nonetheless, given that the tagline used to advertised the meeting was, “A good life needs a good ending,” you’d have thought the subject was at least pertinent. Liberal Democrat health spokesman Greg Mulholland did not, however, and was strongly critical of the speakers who raised the issue. At the end, he returned to them, and said, “It’s a shame if you misunderstood what the event was about,” which struck me as astonishingly rude. I didn’t notice him shouting down Vince Cable when he addressed himself to that part of the end of life debate.

I’m now reflecting on whether it is actually fair to call this the worst fringe meeting I’ve ever attended. I’ve been to some where there were only two attendees other than the speakers and representatives of the sponsoring organisations. But even events like that have produced some worthwhile discussion – as an overall “worst” fringe, I’d have to say this is the strongest contender I can call to mind. It certainly did not do its subject, or its undoubtedly worthwhile intent, justice.

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences

In it to win… er, what, exactly?

I put an admittedly rather snipey tweet out earlier this evening, after watching Nick Clegg’s initial speech to the Lib Dem conference. Noting the conference’s slogan of ‘Ready to Win’ I wrote: ‘”ready to win” what, exactly? Not the general election, obviously. Shd I look out for an egg & spoon race in Bournemouth this week?’

There’s a serious point in here, though. It’s a very poorly selected slogan. The party may try to argue they are winning in lots of local elections, not unfairly, but attention is on the coming general election, and it is plain that the Liberal Democrats are not going to win it (by “win” I mean: achieve a plurality of the popular vote and form a majority government). Why the sudden hubris?

Clegg’s speech itself was very upbeat, frankly to the point of being smug, self-congratulatory and glib. Clegg’s smooth but contrived delivery – particularly his forced laughter to illustrate a selection of rich claims from the Tories among other things – seemed to me to be deeply unattractive, however fair the underlying points. It was, however, aimed at Lib Dem activists, so I’m not in the target audience. Perhaps the conference slogan too is aimed more inwardly than out, to reassure trembling grass roots that fear what the polls will bring?

The strategy is curious internally: whipping up expectations is, to say the least, a bold move in the face of what will be a very tricky election for the Lib Dems. Perhaps Clegg should be commended for taking a real balls-out approach. But the strategy externally seems curious as well: finally the party seems to have twigged that it must work to take seats off Labour, and not chase after Tory support. They should have reached this conclusion when Cameron started making the Tories look credible again in 2006 (and if you’d spoken to me at the time, I would have said the same thing), but never mind.

I’m still at home this evening, but will be heading off to Bournemouth tomorrow and look forward to assessing the mood. The coming election could offer the Lib Dems a modest boost or a massive setback, or indeed many things in between. But it seems unlikely to offer them any kind of breakthrough, despite one of its two rivals having comprehensively hit the reef. Are they nervous? They should be. Perhaps the messaging reflects that they know it’s a dangerous time, with much opportunity for disaster and little (but not none) for glory.

Filed under: 2009, Party conferences, Politics

The new politics of moaning

Fraser Nelson’s diagnosis of a “new politics of decline” has given me a few thoughts about how left and right perceive their opponents when they – the opponents – are at low ebb and ripe for a kicking.

His diagnosis is, in the immediate term, spot-on: the UK is in a terrible fix thanks to spectacular incompetence from the Government. Not only were we left exposed to a terrible recession by the total failure to regulate the financial markets, but the Government’s spending in the period prior to the collapse has left us unable to mount the response that would normally be apt – we cannot spend enough to mitigate the recession. Not that Nelson would agree we should be spending to this end, but he’d surely agree that even if we wanted to, we can’t, other than by upping our debt still further as Labour have done.

When those on the right see things as having gone wrong, they clearly frame their critique in terms of “the country” – the alleged decline that Nelson’s narrative is built on is implicitly but clearly a national decline. The response of the right is to roll their collective eyes, sigh heavily, and cast themselves in the role of rolling up their sleeves and sorting out the mess the left have inflicted on the nation.

The left’s response is very different: when a right-wing government stuffs things up, they lash out. They frame things in much more specific terms: certain people are responsible for the harm suffered by other people. Labour MPs are forever talking about the effects of a Tory government on “my constituents” and “our city centres”; the wealthy are immediate targets for crude and uncomprehending vengeance by sole virtue of their wealth, whether it was their fault or not.

There is truth in both versions, of course, but neither is wholly correct. Nelson’s contention that somehow Thatcher sorted things out in the 1980s by sending unemployment as high as Brown, but on several occasions not just one, is laughable. Her apologists call the first one “a necessary recession” – it may be that recessions cannot be staved off, but what rankled, and rankles still with many about Thatcher’s recessions, was the Tories’ response of letting them cut as deep as they possibly could, heedless of the consequences. Those consequences can still be seen by wandering only a short distance out of the regenerated city centres across the former industrial North. But in saying that, I suppose I’m taking sides, aren’t I? You can always judge a man by the quality of his moaning.

Filed under: Politics