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Robert Colvile

21 Feb, 11 tweets, 3 min read

Have written my column today about Starmer and That Speech, and in particular the positioning difficulty he finds himself in. Full thing here but quick thread below thetimes.co.uk/article/keir-s…

One of the weird things about Starmer is that he is actually more popular among Lib Dem supporters than Labour supporters, and has been so fairly consistently.

He's almost certainly more popular than Ed Davey too, given that pretty much no one knows who he is - haven't got the crosstabs by party but this from YouGov gives a flavour

The thing is, this isn't a bug: it's a feature. As I say in the column, if the Lib Dem vote goes below approx 10%, Labour starts to rack up seats, because it starts winning all those seats where Con > Lab but (Lab + Lib) > Con

One of the big reasons that 2019 wasn't a straight 50/50 Leave/Remain, Tory/Labour fight/result was that Corbyn was toxic to just enough Remainers, who went with Tories/Lib Dems. Starmer neutralises that, which is a huge plus for Labour.

But there's a problem. The more you pitch to the centre-left (and the centre, and indeed to working-class Tory-Labour switchers who quite like Brexit and the National Anthem and that) the more the left gets huffy.

Hence the frankly weird discontent with Starmer's leadership, at a time - during a pandemic - where voters are paying even less attention to the Opposition than they usually do, which is very little attention indeed.

(As I say in the column, part of this is that a certain breed of Labour activist finds it so hard to understand why anyone can vote Tory that the fact Boris is still ahead in the polls despite [insert list of monstrous Tory crimes] can only be a product of Starmer's own failings)

You can already see support for the Greens ticking up - they've been level with the Lib Dems for the last few months and even ahead of them on occasion. If that swell of discontented left-wingers becomes a surge, then the left splits again...

Starmer's big problem, in other words, is that he has to win over Corbyn, Clegg, Sturgeon and Johnson voters, while running a party whose base are increasingly disconnected from the public but don't actually realise it (I cite David Shor's brilliant stuff on this in the piece)

Plenty more in the piece, anyway - please do read it thetimes.co.uk/article/keir-s…

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Robert Colvile

@rcolvile

23 Feb

Have tweeted this already but the fact that the pandemic has utterly slammed young people's prospects (pretty much exclusively) demands significantly more attention.

This is partly because they tend to work in the sectors that have been worst hit (all this via HMRC PAYE, via ONS)

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Robert Colvile

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20 Feb

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Fresh reports today that @RishiSunak wants to raise corporation tax, with the justification that even after it goes up we'll still have the lowest rate in the G7. But as @CPSThinkTank and our friends at @TaxFoundation have pointed out, this is deeply misleading.

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@TaxFoundation

.@TaxFoundation ran the numbers for us when they published their latest International Tax Competitiveness Index, and raising corporation tax from 19% to 24% drops our business tax regime down to 25th of 36 (@RishiSunak is reported to be targeting 23%) cps.org.uk/media/press-re…

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Robert Colvile

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The vaccine passports debate is a perfect illustration of my new working theory: that the most important part of modern government, and its most important limitation, is database management. Please stick with me on this - it's much more interesting than it sounds. (1/?)

Throughout the pandemic, to a rough approximation, every single UK policy success has been built on a good database. And every single policy failure has resulted from a bad/nonexistent one.

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Robert Colvile

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14 Feb

Because I love making myself popular, I’ve written my column today on why we need to stand up for the City thetimes.co.uk/article/the-ci…. A quick summary (1/?)

Even allowing for the impact of the financial crisis, and the Brexit vote, it’s pretty extraordinary how the City has moved from being central to our economic narrative to almost peripheral.

The Tories have barely mentioned financial services in recent years. Labour’s policy is essentially that brilliant Whitehouse/Enfield Question Time spoof: ‘If the bankers, the bonuses, the bankers, the bonuses, it’s disgusting.’

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Robert Colvile

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19 Jan

However it ends, the row over Universal Credit tells us some incredibly depressing things about politics and policy in this country. A quick thread.

First, the constituency for fiscal discipline within the Tory party is at its smallest for decades. Anecdotally, MPs telling govt to stand firm vastly outnumbered by those saying 'make the emails stop'

Second, the ratchet effect is in full swing. The temporary always becomes permanent. It is always far harder to cut spending than to increase it. (Many of us saw this coming - I even predicted the Rashford endorsement - but you didn't exactly need to be Nostradamus...)

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Robert Colvile

@rcolvile

24 Nov 20

@Independent

Another day, another sloppy, bad-faith piece from the @Independent's 'chief business commentator' @JimMooreJourno on public sector pay independent.co.uk/independentpre…

When he first wrote about this, he failed to address the disparity between private sector and public sector pay at all, or the disparity in terms of the impact of the pandemic.

If you read what he says this time, the implication is that the public sector have suffered disproportionately. There's no other charitable interpretation of this section.

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