Sunny Hundal on the deficit

Responding to my post from yesterday about the Labour leadership candidates and the deficit, Sunny tweets:

'there's little evidence to support that. Polling actually shows Labour started losing when they started accepting Tory args'

First and foremost, this merely repeats what I have stressed to be untrue, namely that DM's deficit plan relies on/replicates Tory arguments.  Sunny's repeated claims to this effect are not helpful to the cause of accurate analysis.

Leave that aside, though.  When did Labour start accepting Tory arguments on the deficit, according to Sunny?  Apparently in around March 2010 (i.e. around Darling's last budget).  Sunny points me to an older post of his on LabourList, in which he exhibits a graph, produced by Ipsos Mori, which shows a point in March 2010 when voters seem to have begun to agree in greater numbers that 'there is a real need to cut spending on public services in order to pay off the very high national debt we have now':

Sunny claims that, in March 2010, Labour's arguments on the deficit began to go 'haywire', in the sense that the party started to accept the need for cuts, and adopted the Darling deficit reduction plan.  Sunny's theory is that when Labour altered its stance to accept the need for cuts it 'started losing' because voters came to think that they should vote for the Tories, who had consistently demanded cuts, rather than Labour, which had changed its view.

Sunny forgets that the reason Labour changed its approach was that its refusal to discuss cuts, in the face of a media that was screaming from the top of its lungs that they were necessary, was becoming untenable.  The 'Labour investment versus Tory cuts' line was widely seen as a fabrication of Gordon Brown's, and castigated as such.  The media drumbeat on cuts was simply irresistible.  Sunny is rewriting history by pretending that, when Labour adopted a deficit reduction plan it did itself a needless, self-inflicted wound.

In addition, Sunny neglects polling that shows that, as I emphasised in my previous post, the public preferred Labour's approach to deficit reduction to the Tory plan by considerable margins.  To give some evidence of this, Sunny's chosen pollster, Ipsos Mori, shows that, in March 2010, when Labour's message started going 'haywire', the public actually preferred Labour's strategy on the deficit by 57% to 30%.  Labour seems to have lost the election in spite of its deficit reduction plan, not because of it.  So there is every reason to believe that, if a Labour leader seen as more credible than Brown were to make it now, it would be persuasive.

Most importantly, at risk of stating the obvious, Sunny's graph does not show any falling off of support for Labour as a result of its adoption of the Darling plan, because the graph does not record party vote shares, only public opinion on cuts.  If his argument were correct, one would expect to see a significant drop in support for Labour in March-April 2010, and a move towards the Tories, as the public grew disillusioned with the government's abrupt volte-face on the deficit.  That is not what happened, however.  Returning to Ipsos Mori again, their headline figures for Labour are remarkably static during this period.  Indeed, the biggest drop seen is in Tory support from March to April - exactly the point at which, according to Sunny, it should have taken off: 

2010	Con	Lab	LD

19-22 March 2010 (T)	35	30	21
18-19 April (T)	32	28	32
23 April (T)	36	30	23
5 May (T)	36	29	27
General election result (6 May)	36. 9	29.7	23.6

In short, the evidence isn't there to support Sunny's claim that the Darling/David Miliband deficit plan is a vote loser.

Finally, Sunny wants not merely to give a post mortem of the 2010 election, but to explain why Ed Balls' approach to the deficit is electorally most sound. (Though incidentally, it is not totally clear why he thinks that this is a point in favour of his own preferred candidate, Ed Miliband. Ed Miliband's policy on the deficit is not Ed Balls' [and is a good deal more ill-defined]).  But all Sunny has successfully shown is that the public now accept the need for cuts.  There is no reason to think that Labour could reverse this, and every reason to think that, if they suddenly decided to set their face against cuts, having previously supported them in an election campaign, they would be laughed out of court.  I continue to think, then, that the electorally smart approach is to accept the need to tackle the deficit whilst insisting that we adopt a slower, fairer, safer approach to doing so.