Thoughts Upon UK General Election Day 2015

With the last general election in 2010 fought in the midst of the financial crisis, after five years of ideologically-driven austerity the UK general election of 2015 ought to have focused first and foremost on the issues of living standards – narrowly conceived as indicating real wages, which immediately implicates employment opportunities, tax rates, and welfare payments – and housing. Real wages have fallen considerably, by between 8-10% since 2008: one of the worst showings among OECD countries, and bearing few signs of improvement. Though unemployment stands at its lowest for six years, economic growth slowed markedly in the first quarter of 2015, and productivity remains low.

The housing market meanwhile is entirely out of hand. This is significantly a legacy of Margaret Thatcher, whose ‘Right to Buy’ policy, implemented with the Housing Act 1980, saw the government sell 1.34 million council properties between 1980 and 1990, while fewer than half a million new council homes were built in their place. Restrictions upon local councils prevented their spending the £17.6 billion proceeds of house sales on new builds. As house prices rose, the Housing Act 1988 encouraged the rapid growth of the private rental sector. While successive governments have failed to rectify the various problems in the realm of housing, the market continues to be skewed today by unfettered foreign investment and the ready availability of buy-to-let mortgages. Young people – for whom home owning is so distant – struggle with high rents; and the spiralling housing benefit paid out to landlords is one of numerous instances whereby average taxpayers subsidise the rich.

The Conservatives’ solution, arrived at late in the day, is more ‘Right to Buy’: on 14 April David Cameron pledged to allow 1.3 million housing association tenants to buy their homes, should the Conservatives win re-election. These plans have been roundly condemned. They broadly reshape the Conservatives’ previously announced housing policy, of extending ‘Help to Buy’, and offering up to 200,000 new homes on brownfield sites to first-time buyers for a discount of 20%. This discount would be paid for by exempting house builders from the taxes they presently owe to local authorities. Together, these policies do too little to increase the housing stock and to affect the cost of housing. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have focused on spurring house building: respectively promising 200,000 and 300,000 new homes a year by 2020. Labour have also vowed to peg private rental rises to inflation, and to ban estate agents from charging tenants letting fees.

In the months leading up to today’s general election, and on the campaign trail, the economy, and issues of wages and housing, have come to the fore. Parties have still failed to offer a compelling cultural vision beyond contesting economic diagnoses. However, much of the past five years have been taken up by extended – and frequently nasty and divisive – debates on immigration, the European Union, and the welfare state, interspersed by phone hacking and mass surveillance scandals, the Scottish independence referendum, and brief diversions into foreign affairs and defence.

Labour under the leadership of Ed Miliband have proven neither creative, assertive, nor consistent enough to change the terms of this political debate. Understandably, they have been reluctant to attack the banking sector which their predecessors deregulated; and it is also true that Miliband’s shadow cabinet appears thoroughly mediocre, and too often content to carp. Better this than conceited or corrupt: epithets which apply variously to George Osborne, Theresa May, Michael Gove, Philip Hammond, Jeremy Hunt, Liam Fox, and even William Hague given his recent underhand attack on Speaker John Bercow. Still Miliband’s own efforts have lacked vigour and coherence, insufficient when the language against immigration and welfare is so easily persuasive, and when David Cameron – seemingly aided by the contrast with the worst elements of his party – remains relatively appreciated by the public. On immigration, welfare, and education, Labour have fiddled within the margins of an agenda set by their opponents.

UKIP have played a suggestive numbers game devoid of actual numbers: because they ignore the figures which show that European Economic Area immigrants make a net contribution to the UK economy, paying in where UK citizens and non-EEA immigrants take out; ignore that EU immigrants to the UK comprise a smaller number than non-EU immigrants, whose numbers in the context of UKIP rhetoric can be ‘controlled’; and ignore besides the various contributions immigrants make which can’t only be defined monetarily, including to the NHS.

Nigel Farage spews in jocular soundbites a thin set of principles that implicitly value northern Europeans over their southern and eastern counterparts – but fail to think through the consequences to our relationships across Europe and beyond should the UK split from the European Union. He anachronistically invokes the Commonwealth as though Britain’s former colonies are itching to make the country their premier trading partner, happy to eschew other links to European and emerging economies. Most vulgar is the stated aim to slash foreign aid: immoral, dismissing any notion of our shared humanity, and failing to realise the extent to which we impact one another. Farage’s world does not exist in the present moment, and is less conceivable with each passing day.

Less than a revolution or an insurgency instigated by UKIP, the time devoted to immigration and the EU has been coerced by the Conservatives, as a populist move and a means of relieving attention from their cuts and rising wealth inequality. But especially after UKIP’s by-election victories late last year in Clacton and Rochester and Strood, the other parties have sought to move on: immigration has played a reduced role in the campaigning of the past month, as well as in the series of televised leaders’ debates. Now Nigel Farage appears uncertain of winning his selected seat of South Thanet – and he has said he will resign as leader of UKIP should he fail to become an MP.

Over the last week and a half, David Cameron has made two pledges which are palpably meaningless: that he will impose upon his own government a law against tax rises; and that a referendum on EU membership by 2017 constitutes a ‘red line’, which he would not bargain away in any coalition talks. His commitment to a referendum by 2017 has already been stated on numerous occasions; but it remains amorphous because he is equally committed to attempting to secure EU reforms between now and then. It is surely plausible that the course of any reforms over the next two years could preclude a referendum.

Elsewhere George Osborne’s plan to impose £30 billion of spending cuts in the next parliament has continued to cause much consternation, as it is unclear how a further £12 billion can be shorn from welfare. But not to be outdone, Labour too have stalled towards the closing stages of the election campaign. Initially appearing to accept the extent of the Conservatives’ proposed cuts – arguing that they would reach the same sort of goal in a different way, safeguarding health and education spending, and raising taxes rather than tearing more money away from welfare – Ed Miliband has since retreated, overwhelmingly on television in the face of the leaders of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and Green Party, and thrown Labour’s spending plans into the mud.

Where he has been clear, it has been over his absolute refusal to contemplate any deal with the SNP. This appears foolish, scarcely believable, and pandering to the English vote: the Scottish National Party are set to rout Labour in Scotland, but beyond the infantile cries of treason, it seems sensible to contemplate working with a party who – the state of the union aside – share many of the same ideals. Senior Labour figures have urged a rethink, and whether or not Miliband’s remarks have been mere posturing, if the figures add up surely Labour will look to the SNP.

The Liberal Democrats have been too vehemently abused for becoming the Conservatives’ coalition partners in 2010. Their decision to back the Conservatives was more than a grab for power: it reflected the right-leaning perspective of some of the party’s leading figures, but was also rooted in a genuine sense that, having won the most seats of any individual party by some margin, the Conservatives had earned a mandate to form government. And by joining a coalition, the Liberal Democrats prevented gridlock and a hastily called second election, which could well have seen the Conservatives attain a majority.

The Liberal Democrats remain defined by their choice, in their role as junior coalition partners, to forego their promise not to raise tuition fees. But they have achieved good things in raising the personal allowance from £6,475 to £10,000; securing same-sex marriage rights; and fighting against the right-wing attack on civil liberties. The country has been better for their share in government. They have managed a quiet and efficient campaign this time round; but there is the sense that they would prefer to enter again into a coalition with the Conservatives, even appearing willing to back an EU referendum.

A Labour supporter in the past, I favour the party’s policies when it comes to housing, raising and protecting the minimum wage, tax rises for the rich, stricter tax avoidance measures, tackling energy bills, and spending on the NHS. I am strongly opposed to any referendum on Britain’s EU membership. During the sequence of leaders’ debates, Ed Miliband utterly refuted the media’s portrayal of him as some inanely bumbling, brazenly incompetent left-wing oddity: sometimes too staged and constrained, reciting by verse rather than holding to his own set of values, he still emerged as a man with earnest convictions, and he spoke with sense, warmth, and humour. Yet after casting aside its principles to chase the Conservatives through the mire of the immigration and welfare debates, the petulance of Miliband’s remarks regarding the SNP have caused me to question anew a vote for Labour.

I do not agree with the full scope of the Green Party’s policies – I am far from convinced, for instance, when it comes to their stances on air travel and tuition fees. And of course there lingers the traditional argument that the Greens are not a prospective party of government, and that their policy offering ought therefore to be taken with a pinch of salt. But I share the majority of their beliefs, their perspectives on life, work, and diversity; a sense of the value of a policy offering which would implement a living wage, curb executive pay, control rents, embrace immigration, reconstitute rail travel, and change the way we move and connect within our immediate environments. The Green Party leader Natalie Bennett – after receiving unanimous criticism for an earlier radio interview – impressed across the televised debates, on an equal footing with the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon. 

I head in the next hour to vote knowing that York Central is a safe Labour seat, held for the last twenty-three years by Hugh Bayley, who is standing down at this election with Rachael Maskell his replacement candidate. The Fishergate ward meanwhile was the only ward in York which elected Green councillors to the 47-strong council in 2011. Dave Taylor and Andy D’Agorne stand today for re-election.