New Labour And Delivery

Introduction

Received political wisdom is that modern governments, especially the present British government, are and will be judged by the public on whether they have "delivered". So "Has New Labour delivered?" will, it is suggested, be the key question on which the outcome of the next general election may turn (assuming, of course, that the opposition has regained a sufficient degree of political credibility for anybody to take them seriously as an alternative). This is a question on which a great deal of public opinion data exists. But we must not put the cart before the horse. What do we mean by "delivery" in this sense? And how clear is the evidence that this issue really is closely tied to the public's voting behaviour, or voting intentions?

Maurice Saatchi, now reinstalled as the Conservative Party's marketing guru, has expressed the fundamental relationship as "Satisfaction equals Performance minus Expectation" [1]. While this is an important insight it omits a crucial factor — more accurately, satisfaction equals perceived performance minus expectations. Objective measurements of policy achievement are in themselves irrelevant to a government's prospect of re-election — the public will only be moved by their own perceptions of what the government has done, which may or may not be accurate. Further, achieving politically-effective "delivery" is specifically concerned with meeting the expectations that the government raised in the people that voted for it — most significantly in New Labour's case over improvement of standards in public services. Taking these two points together, we can state a general principle (which is intended not as a comment on New Labour, but on the concept of "delivery"):

Proposition 1: "Delivery" is not keeping your promises, it is convincing the public that you have kept your promises

This means that objective success in meeting promises may still constitute a failure to deliver if the public does not believe in it (or does not know about it) — communication of success is politically as important as the policy success itself. Conversely, even objective failure may constitute success if it satisfies the public — hence the importance of "spin" in the presentation of policy outcomes, which may be able successfully to portray failure as success. Note that this means it is possible to "deliver" even on unattainable promises, not by keeping the promise but by making it appear that it has been kept.

There are two possible ways in which a promise which has not been kept might seem to have been kept. The first, obviously, is through misunderstanding or falsification of the result. But perhaps less obvious is that the same result can occur when it is not the outcome but the promise itself that is altered: if the public comes to believe that what was promised coincides with what in fact has been achieved, then they will believe the promise has been kept.

This might seem merely an invitation to the cynicism of politicians and their spin doctors. But in fact they are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of this "false delivery syndrome", for few spin doctors are half as good at deluding the public as the public are at deluding themselves. If there is a discrepancy between the promise as made and the promise as understood by the voters at the next election, this may well be because the voters themselves chose not to interpret the promise as the politician who made it intended.

Proposition 2: What matters is not what you promise, but what the public understands by those promises, and what expectations they arouse. Corollary: A government may not have full control over what it is held to have promised.

This clearly poses a potential problem for governments. Even realistic promises may create unrealistic expectations; and worse, the public may move the goalposts. We frequently find in polling in many different subjects a sort of "nostalgia" effect, by which the public's tendency is to consider that things have got worse, even when their own levels of satisfaction (as compared with earlier comparable measures) are higher. Of course this will happen especially where no easy objective measurement is possible — for example, in the standard of service delivered by the NHS. But even where a more objective measurement is available, expectations may rise as conditions improve, as is the case with standards of living and other economic measures. (The government would surely be punished by voters today if it were to allow a sharp rise in the mortgage rate, even if only to levels that would have been perfectly acceptable a few years ago.)

This may mean that almost any reforming government is fighting a losing battle. No matter how specific the details of New Labour's policy pledges on, say, the NHS, if the public simply interprets it as meaning "a Labour government will improve the NHS sufficiently to meet with my approval", can it hope to do it? Clearly not if the standards necessary to secure public approval are unattainable.

And how does the public judge those standards? Not, apparently, by their own experiences but by a general impression derived from many sources which paints a much gloomier picture. It is in this context that we must view measures of the government's current performance, and its potential political and electoral impact.

Is New Labour delivering?

As Abraham Lincoln remarked long before scientific measurements of public opinion were developed, "What I want to get done is what the people want to have done", so "delivery" as a political factor is driven not by the government's order of priorities but the public's. As such, the first consideration must be to discover what the public most wants the government to achieve. Tracking of MORI's monthly "most important issues facing the country" surveys [2] shows that over the years the public's concerns can change dramatically. In February 1979 as the Callaghan government was dying, the public's overwhelming concerns were trade unions/strikes (named by 73% as important) and prices/inflation (66%); no other issue was named by even a third. In March 1984, twenty years ago, they came even nearer unanimity: 81% were concerned about unemployment, with nuclear weapons/disarmament in second place on just 29%. Now the cold war is over and inflation, unemployment and industrial unrest are all much lower than in those days. No single issue now consistently dominates the public mind, though events can bring particular issues briefly to the fore (defence/foreign affairs, for example, after the September 11 attacks and again at the time of the Iraq invasion, and foot and mouth disease in early 2001). Throughout the seven year life of the present government, though, the NHS has remained near the top of the public's mind, never falling below a 30% rating and averaging a steady 45%. Education and crime/law and order, too, the other two "big" public service issues, maintain their place in the rankings. The state of public services, it is clear, is one of the criteria by which the public can be expected to judge the government's success — not unreasonably since it has been a central plank of their election manifestos.

The salience of other issues, though, has been by no means static — again reflecting that what New Labour promised at the last General Election may not be the same as what the public at the next General Election expect it to have delivered. Both Europe and unemployment, frequently named as pressing problems back in 1997, have slid away until they have dropped off the political radar. On the other hand, the issue of race relations/asylum/immigration has relentlessly increased in importance, especially since the 2001 election, to the point where a third of Britons now mention it each month as one of the issues facing the country. New Labour will need to "deliver" on this issue, or be found wanting, even though it was a question that barely raised its head in the last two election campaigns and the party has made no manifesto promises that it could be held to. Defence/foreign affairs, as already mentioned, though only sporadically of concern has shown that it can temporarily push all other considerations into the background when the news agenda dictates — as was the case again in March this year when our poll was conducted a few days after the Madrid train bombings. It would be naive to suppose that public services will necessarily be the only, or even the primary, consideration in voters' minds when next they come to decide whether to renew the present government's mandate.

Which is, perhaps, just as well for New Labour. The public had high expectations of the government, perhaps dangerously high, even at the time of the 2001 election, and few of them seem to feel that those expectations are being met. In June 2001, 54% said that they thought "In the long-term, this government's policies will improve the state of Britain's public services"; only 32% disagreed. But few now feel it has been achieved: in February an ICM poll for the News of the World found only 14% thought that the NHS had improved since Labour came to power, 21% that schools had got better, 12% that there had been an improvement in law and order, and 9% that transport had improved.

Perhaps more worryingly for the government, nor do the majority feel, any more, that "delivery" will happen in the future. The March 2004 MORI Delivery Index [3] found only 37% now saying that the government's policies will bring about an improvement (55%), while on the individual services the figures are worse — 33% expect that "over the next few years" there will be an improvement in the NHS, 27% in public transport and 31% in "the way your area is policed"; only on education is there a gleam of light, 38% expecting improvement. It is true that the net figures, comparing the numbers who expect things to get better with those who expect them to get worse are less gloomy — positive on education and police and breaking even on the NHS. Furthermore, the figures seem to be improving a little, having bottomed out in mid 2003 when the public, perhaps, felt that the government was being distracted from its real priorities by Iraq. But, in the final reckoning, the government wasn't elected to keep the standard of services the same, and many voters will feel that "stay the same" is no more acceptable than "get worse". Delivery, from a government that promised (or was believed to have promised) improvement, must be improvement and nothing less.

It seems it is simply not enough to improve services in the knowledge that the public will recognise the improvement. Nor, even if the public recognises an improvement, will they necessarily give credit accordingly. All the signs are that public satisfaction is built up by a much more complex process, susceptible to many extraneous influences and in particular more prone to accept the message of negative second-hand reports than that of positive first-hand experience.

An illustration of the somewhat fragile nature of satisfaction measurements can be found in the regional patterns of MORI surveys across a wide range of services and functions. As reported in a paper earlier this year [4], citizens in the North-East of England are persistently more likely to express themselves satisfied than people almost anywhere else in the country. The pattern is so consistent in so many different areas — policing, the NHS, local water services, High Street banks — as to preclude its being a reflection of any real higher standard of service in the region. The same is found when comparing the BVPI (Best Value Performance Indicator) scores of councils in the North-East with the levels of deprivation in their council areas; again, North-Eastern councils are doing far better than expected, given their local circumstances, in satisfying their residents. It is clear that the people of the North East are simply of a sunnier disposition, or perhaps judge their services against less exacting expectations, than their counterparts elsewhere. Service providers in the North-East get a much easier ride, for reasons apparently quite outside their control.

The gulf between personal experience and general impressions has a similar effect, distancing the achievement of public satisfaction from the direct process of service delivery. It is a problem of which the government is well aware. Tony Blair explained it to Labour's Spring Conference in March 2004: [5]

There is much scratching of the head in political circles over this apparent paradox: People who feel personally optimistic in Britain; but collectively pessimistic. They say their own health care in the NHS is good; but the NHS in general is bad. Their schools are good; but education is bad. They are safer; but the country is less safe. Their future is bright; but the nation's is dark.

Both MORI and other published surveys find this dichotomy, and its impact on the profile of public opinion is dramatic. A Populus survey for The Times in March 2004 asked the public whether their own experience of three public services was good or bad, and their perception of the service in general: only 20% claimed a personal bad experience of the NHS, but 30% had a bad general impression; for transport it was 42% and 51%; for schools 13% and 26%. In terms of net scores (good impression minus bad impression), the NHS scored +46 on personal experience and only +26 on general impression, the equivalent of a 10% swing; for transport it was 0 and -20 (again a 10% swing) and for schools +46 compared to + 29 (8.5%). Similarly, a MORI survey last year found that when the public were asked what they thought of "the way crime is dealt with", they gave the criminal justice system a net confidence score of +29 for the area where they lived, but -4 across England and Wales as a whole. Contrary to received wisdom, the grass always seems greener on our own side of the fence.

This disjunction is not confined to perceptions of public service delivery. The public are consistently more satisfied with the performance of their own MP than with MPs as a whole [6]; they are more optimistic about the financial prospects for their own household in the near future than for the economy as a whole. This mode of thinking seems to be built into the way public opinion is formed at the moment; but it gives New Labour a real problem in convincing the public that it is delivering improvement in public services. Nor are they helped by a lack of any public confidence in Official Statistics, recognised in the report of the Statistics Commission, just published [7]. Even if services are improving, the message, it seems, will not spread itself.

That's the bad news for the government; the better news comes when we look at how closely opinions on public services act as predictors of voting intentions, and vice versa. Overall, the MORI Delivery Index aggregate for 2003 found 32% of the public agreeing that "In the long term, this government's policies will improve the state of Britain's public services" and 56% disagreeing. But this seems to have no bearing on people's certainty of voting at the next general election — there is no significant difference between the opinions of those who are certain they will vote and those who are not (even though only around half of adults currently say they are certain to vote). However, the picture is different when we look at the supporters of each party in turn. Conservatives are, naturally, predominantly sceptical about the government's policies while Labour supporters are optimistic; but more importantly, the margin in each case is bigger among those certain to vote than those who are not — those most opposed to the government's policies are most likely to turn out and vote the government out, while those most convinced the policies will work are most likely to turn out and defend it. All much as we would expect. Intriguingly, though, there is no difference between Liberal Democrats who are certain they will vote and those who are not — both groups split five-to-two against the government's public services policy, but it doesn't look as if this has much effect on their determination to vote Liberal Democrat. Furthermore, the opinions of the don't knows and won't votes are very similar to those of the Lib Dems. It seems to be only on the Labour-Tory axis that public services are closely related to voting.

And even this relationship looks weaker when we turn from the overall question of "public services" to the specific services on which an election may be fought. True, the same general pattern holds for the public's view of the future of the NHS, transport, education and crime: Labour supporters are most optimistic, especially those certain to vote, Tories most pessimistic, especially those certain to vote, with Lib Dems and don't knows in the middle, and certainty of voting making far less difference in their case. But the differences between the parties are considerably less. On transport for example, those certain to vote Labour expect improvement only by a margin of 38% to 25% (net + 13), while certain Tory voters say it will get worse by 19% to 45%, (net -26), which gives a net score gap of 39. On public services as a whole, by contrast, the net scores were +45 and -75, a net score gap of 120.

But there's more. The single public services issue with which the Lib Dems are most identified, and which their supporters are most likely to name as important, is education. But current Lib Dem supporters are more likely to say they expect education to get better in the next few years than say the same of any of the other three services; indeed, those certain to vote Lib Dem split fractionally in the government's favour on education, 30% to 29%. Similarly, the public service issue most associated with the Tories and of most disproportionate interest to their supporters is crime/law and order, yet they are less pessimistic about policing than about the NHS, transport or education: even of those Tories who are certain to vote, 21% say they think the way their area is policed will improve, not many fewer than the 27% predicting it will deteriorate. In other words, the government has best succeeded in convincing precisely those groups who would be expected to be most sceptical about particular public services that it will deliver. This rather implies that whatever loss of support the government may have currently suffered, failure to deliver on public services is not the driving factor. The comparatively low margins by which those who say they will vote Labour proclaim their optimism suggests the same, but equally that Labour's public services policy is not pulling its weight in keeping the party's own supporters loyal. What the government really needs to do is to get its own supporters to think about "public services" as a general concept, but to get Tories and Lib Dems to think in terms of the individual services; but that would be quite a trick even for the best of spin-doctors.

So, if it's not necessarily going to be all about public services after all, what might matter? Europe? Asylum? Iraq? The economy?

Europe is no longer a pressing matter of concern to the public. Indeed, despite John Major's and William Hague's determination to concentrate on it at the last two general elections, it wasn't then, either. Before Tony Blair's decision to concede a referendum on the new EU constitution, it was hardly a public talking point — indeed, in the first quarter of the year the group most likely to name Europe as an important issue were Guardian readers, hardly renowned as Eurosceptics! But the changed situation now that the referendum has been promised only makes surer that it will not be a decisive election issue. (Several commentators have described Mr Blair's referendum promise as having "shot the Tories' fox"; but as he has simply removed from the agenda the issue that has wasted more Tory time and more divided Conservative from Conservative than any other at the two elections he has won, whose fox is it that has really been shot?)

Iraq, by contrast, is likely to have more impact, and may already be showing in the voting intention figures — but, since the Tories were and are just as identified with support for the war as Labour, it may swing votes or keep voters at home without having much effect on the government's chances of a third landslide. The voting intention figures for the first quarter of 2004 suggest that, in fact, it may be the Tories who have suffered most, an appreciable part of their natural female support having switched to the Lib Dems. Traditionally, and fairly consistently since women first won the vote in 1918, Tory support has been higher among women than among men. The gap has been smaller in recent years, and dwindled briefly to zero at the 1987 election, but for women to be less likely than men to support the Conservatives is unprecedented; but, suddenly, it is happening. Each of MORI's four monthly Political Monitor polls this year have found the Tory share lower among women than men. Aggregating those from the first quarter of the year (to give a more robust sample size) we find men would vote 40% Labour, 33% Conservative and 20% Lib Dem, while women would vote 39% Labour, 30% Conservative and 24% Lib Dem. The difference is even more startling if we take only those who say they are absolutely certain to vote: Labour wins 35% among both sexes, but the Tories get 40% among men and only 32% among women, with all the eight-point discrepancy going to the Lib Dems' advantage. If this is a permanent change in the pattern, and if we are right to assume that Iraq is the cause, then opposition to the war may actually have left the government sitting more securely than before. [8]

Race relations/immigration is the issue which has most risen in prominence over the present government's period of office. Whereas the percentage naming it as one of the most important issues facing the country was invariably in (low) single figures in 1997 and 1998, it is now consistently named as a concern by between a quarter and a third of the public. There is no doubt that this is an issue on which public discontent with government policy is overwhelming (80% of the public said the government had been "unsuccessful" in tacking illegal immigration, and 85% that it "could do more … to ensure Britain is not seen as a soft touch for bogus asylum seekers or economic migrants", in an ICM poll in February for the News of the World). The Tories have a bigger lead over Labour on asylum than on any other issue (36% to 10% among those who name the issue as important), and the success of the BNP in recent local elections suggests that this is indeed an issue capable of swinging real votes as well as opinion polls. But respectable parties are rightly wary of "playing the race card", so it remains to be seen whether the opposition will feel able to make any capital out of this. It must also be borne in mind that the accession of ten new countries to the EU on 1 May has given millions of Eastern Europeans the right to work in Britain, and it is perfectly possible that the consequences of this will so affect the immigration debate for good or ill that by the time of the general election the political situation will be very different.

Traditionally, economic competence has been seen as one of Labour's weaknesses, an issue on which the Conservatives persistently have a better issue and can often swing general elections. But in recent years, the general impression is that the scene has changed in two respects: the economy is booming under a Labour government, making it an issue of strength rather than weakness, and — as a result, no doubt — the salience of economic issues have receded, seeming to make them of far less electoral moment. Voters, it seems, worry more about which party can get the country out of an economic mess than they do about which is least likely to create such a mess in the first place.

But is this impression really true? In terms of the relative image of the parties, it is certainly true that Labour moved ahead of the Tories in the late 1990s as the party with the best policy on managing the economy — whereas the Tories had previously had a clear lead, at the 1997 election the two were neck-and-neck, and Gordon Brown's stewardship of the Exchequer gave Labour a clear lead by 2001. On taxation, too, things swung Labour's way, although their lead on that issue has always been narrower since 1997 and the Tories briefly in 2000 clawed their way back to parity.

In the last couple of years, though, things have begun to slide for Labour. By last September the Labour lead on managing the economy had slipped to only 11 points (down from 26 as recently as February 2002), and on taxation the Tories were level again. In the latter case, this may well be another consequence of growing scepticism over delivery: tolerance of taxation policies is naturally to some extent dependent on the belief that the tax revenue is being usefully employed. This is a vulnerability for the government that the Tories exploited in their "You paid the taxes, so where are the nurses/trains/teachers?" advertising campaign before the last election, and may offer their most effective avenue for campaigning on Labour's perceived failure to deliver at the next one. (But only if they recognise that most of the public still want the government to deliver better public services, not lower taxes. Gordon Brown has so far managed to convince the public that his budgets are, on the whole, good for the country, even though generally people have felt they are bad for them personally.)

Yet Labour's lead does not seem to be slipping because the public feel they are suffering economically. Last year, 78% of the public said they were satisfied with their standard of living, 63% described the present state of the economy as "good" rather than "poor" and 54% predicted the same for the economy in five years' time. More were satisfied than dissatisfied with Gordon Brown's performance as Chancellor after this year's budget (slightly down on last year, but still much further ahead than any of his predecessors in the last 20 years), and 45% said they thought it would be good for the country while only 34% thought it would be bad.

So, where's the beef? Our standard tracking question (the economic optimism index or "consumer confidence") shows a gloomier picture than do the more specific questions, standing at -18 in April; this suggests an underlying current of dissatisfaction. By contrast, the MORI Financial Services measure of personal economic confidence has been much less volatile and much higher, consistently positive since the present government was elected and +9 in January. Again, the personal/general dichotomy seems to be acting to the government's disadvantage. Eurobarometer asks a similar pair of questions and finds the same contrast, not only in the UK but across the EU, so it is not just the British; and the British and European public are also optimistic about their own future employment prospects yet pessimistic about the future jobs situation in the country as a whole.

It may be, too, that fewer of those who accept that the economy is in a healthy state are prepared to give the government credit for it than was the case a couple of years ago: certainly, those who disagree that "In the long term, this government's policies will improve the state of Britain's economy" now outnumber those who agree by 48% to 37%, whereas before the last election it was 48% to 36% in the other direction. More dangerously for New Labour, a similar pattern can be seen in the attitudes of big business — MORI's Captains of Industry survey found a sharp increase in optimism for the economy between 2001 and 2003 yet coupled with a swing of almost 30% against the government on the effects of its policies on the economy. This, of course, threatens not only to reinforce and perhaps provide further grounds for the general public's swing against the government, but to disrupt the flow of donations from the City to Old Queen Street that Labour needs to fund its future election campaigns.

So it may not necessarily be true any more that the economy is New Labour's trump card. But does that matter anyway, if economic issues are dropping off the public's agenda? It is true that fewer of the public than used to be the case are mentioning the economy in general, or other economic issues such as unemployment, as among the most important facing the country. Even when prompted with a list, managing the economy stands only in seventh place in the list of issues which the public say will be very important in helping them decide how to vote. But whatever they say about their conscious motivations, comparison of their faith in the government's economic policies with their voting intentions shows a very clear relationship. Of those who say they would vote Labour if there were a general election tomorrow, 70% agree that "In the long term, this government's policies will improve the state of Britain's economy", and only 16% disagree; of Conservative voters, on the other hand, 77% disagree and only 16% agree. This is a very strong correlation — stronger, indeed, than that between voting intention and faith in the government's policies on public services, on which rather more Labour voters are prepared to express doubts. Maybe it's still the economy, stupid, after all?

1. Quoted in Nick Robinson's Notebook, The Times, 30 April 2004. Some other sources attribute the quotation to his brother Charles Saatchi.
2. For monthly trends since 1979 see www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=56&view=wide
3. See www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=56&view=wide
4. See www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/publications/publication.aspx?oItemId=396
5. Tony Blair, Speech to Labour's Spring Conference, Manchester, 13 March 2004
6. See www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId=898
7. Statistics Commission, "Legislation To Build Trust In Statistics", May 2004, (www.statscom.org.uk) argues that "the level of public trust [in statistics] is currently lower than is desirable in a modern democratic state in which so much of policy and operational decision-making rests on an evidence base largely composed of statistics".
8. A more detailed analysis of the recent gender gap in voting intentions is given in Sir Robert Worcester, "A Majority Of Over 100 With The Women's Vote? Or, No Overall Majority?", Parliamentary Monitor, April 2004

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