I’ve not published any graphs for some time as public opinion was pretty constant for most of last year. People obsess over short term changes in voting intention, but these are often due to the natural variability in any survey or represent a short-term response to whatever is in the news. The truth is that not much happened on the opinion front for most of last year.

But there are some signs of a slight move. Unfortunately it goes in the wrong direction. But it’s not huge, and the government are still losing important parts of their argument, while still ahead on the need for cuts.People are still directly affected by the cuts, but slightly less than a few months ago.

This charts “Thinking about the way the government is cutting spending to reduce the government’s deficit, do you think this is having an impact on your own life, or not having an impact on your own life?”

It shows the net result – that is those saying “having an impact” less those who say “not having an impact”. (All the following charts plot net measures unless I say otherwise.) It goes back to the general election and includes one 2012 result.

It does not show a huge movement, but is consistent with a trend that we will see more strongly in other charts – a shift away from the government at the end of 2010 with a slight recovery since.

However every result shows a substantial majority who say that the cuts are having an impact on them.

The next chart plots a net fairness measure – those who think the cuts are being done fairly less those who think they are being done unfairly.

This shows a much stronger shift in sentiment away from the government into 2011, and the same small recovery.

This charts whether the cuts are good or bad for the economy.

This chart needs some caution. Many people will agree that the cuts are damaging in the short-term but will still say they are needed for long term economic success. This chart is very similar to the previous one.

This is probably the most significant chart. It is a net measure of whether people think the cuts are necessary. YouGov only started to ask this question at the start of 2011, so we do not know whether this measure showed a shift after the election (as the charts above all do.)

The government have a consistent lead on this. Economic news got worse in the closing months of the year, but this does not seem to have led to people moving away from the government. Rather it looks as if people think that bad economic news makes nasty medicine more necessary.

Looking at the detailed figures, the percentage thinking cuts were necessary has risen from 55 per cent to 60 per cent between last February and today, while those who think they are unnecessary has fallen from 33 per cent to 21 per cent.

Of course thinking some cuts are necessary is not the same as thinking all the cuts are necessary now. The next two charts provide some insight into this.

This chart – which also only dates from the start of 2011 – shows the proportion of the electorate who think the cuts are too deep.

and this one shows those who think the cuts are too quick.

These two graphs are not net measures. As respondents were given three choices, “too quick”, “about right” or “too slow” for the latter one, I’ve only plotted those choosing “too quick” or “too deep”.

While the trend is the same in both graphs, there is slightly more opposition to the speed of the cuts than their depth. Again we see some movement helpful to the government in both graphs.

I have a mental map of attitudes to cuts that tries to make sense of this data. On one side of the argument are those think the cuts are unnecessary and are opposed to them. On the other side are those fully supportive of rapid cuts and probably don’t care very much whether they are fair or not.

In the middle are a range of views including a lot of people who agree that the cuts are necessary but don’t like them very much. They worry that they are unfair and may well think they are too fast and/or too deep, but do not see an alternative. People do not always have consistent attitudes, and – hard as this may be for some I know – often do not think much about such issues.

Polls are simply one bit of evidence that must be considered in thinking through campaign strategies, though an important one. They show you the your starting point and your challenge, but not what you need to do or what you should aim to do.

I’ve also been round long enough to know that most people read polls to look for the evidence that confirms what they already think. So those who think that you can’t fight the worst cuts without supporting others will take comfort from these charts. But so will those who say that what is needed is clear leadership and political campaigning for an alternative.

Actually these charts ‘prove’ neither approach. That is not how anyone should approach this kind of polling.

Argument between those advocating different approaches can be interesting, though also energy absorbing. In practice though the task is to shift opinion away from the government’s current approach. Different tactics, issues and techniques will work with different audiences.Getting more people to think the cuts are too deep and too fast is progress just as much as getting more people to say they are unnecessary.

But whatever strategy people endorse this polling (and others) suggest to me a number of starting points:

1. There is very wide acceptance that the deficit is a big problem. Unless you acknowledge this, people will not listen.
2. It is hard to get people to see the deficit as anything other than a function of how much government spends.
3. The important difference between the cyclical and structural deficits is not widely appreciated.
4. Those (like me) who said opinion would move once people saw the effect of the cuts in their own lives do not have evidence for this in the last twelve months.

And of course good campaigns never accept your opponents’ framing of the issues, and work at the emotional and psychological levels, not through rarefied rationalist argument (though people quickly spot if you can’t win those too).

work with other countries to establish new sources of development financing, including bringing forward urgent proposals for a financial transaction tax

Nick Clegg himself had gone on record in February, just two months earlier, saying of the Robin Hood Tax (six minutes in):

It’s a great idea in theory….We should push for it internationally. I’m glad to see it now finally being considered by IMF and other international bodies. But aiming for the best which would be a Tobin tax across the world shouldn’t prevent us doing something now here at home.

Now, instead, he is telling the EU to forget a Robin Hood Tax, echoing everything George Osborne has said. We would welcome him back in Sherwood Forest whenever he decides to abandon his new rich friends in the City and return to backing the poor.

Without naming names, Barack Obama does much the same thing in today’s FT. Obama writes:

“When we met in London two years ago … we forged a response that pulled the global economy back from the bring of catastrophe. That’s the leadership we’ve demonstrated before. That’s the leadership we need now…”

Remind me who was in the Chair at the London G20 summit?

Given the abuse that’s been hurled at him in recent years, I’d imagine that Gordon is past caring one way or the other, but Coalition arguments that Labour created this mighty mess, a mess which they must now clear up, must continue to be challenged. Memories are short and its easy to forget how close we came to a world economic collapse during the downturn.

Neither do I mention this simply for posterity. Barack Obama is right to say in the FT that when the G20 meets in Cannes next week, we need “the same sense of common purpose that allowed us to rescue the global economy two years ago”. In other words, the situation remains critical.

With the eurozone in crisis, and a Coalition Government still refusing to acknowledge the damage of its spending cuts, in spite or rising unemployment and non-existent economic growth, we need political leadership as badly as ever. Let’s hope we get some.

The numbers involved have not of course been huge (although 950 separate events on a single weekend does suggest some zeitgeist-style expression of shared concerns) and the almost studied reluctance to adopt a manifesto leaves a vacuum that many seek to fill, usually claiming that the demonstrators share the commentator’s concerns. But here are some first thoughts.

The global nature of the protest is undoubtedly an issue of itself, as Paul Mason has suggested on the BBC website: and as he says, it at least suggests the common understanding that if you set up tents in an urban area and express discontent, you will get media attention. There is at least a commonality of some of the concerns expressed – and more clearly than at almost any time since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the big banks are in the frame as the main culprit or target for anger.  Of course, as anyone who has organised a mass protests knows, the broader the annoyance people feel, the easier it is to get them to protest, so it is almost as unlikely that people will protest this widely on one issue as it would be unlikely that they could coalesce around a single demand.

The avoidance of a manifesto is, I think, more than merely clever ambiguity or vagueness. This is not a revolutionary movement aiming either to overthrow a specific elite (despite the clarity about the target for the anger), nor to achieve anything more specific than a society where equality is accorded higher priority, and where the future is remade as something to be looked forward to. It may, of course, develop into either, or fizzle out as winter hits the predominantly northern hemisphere.

But what the Occupy movement does by its very avoidance of concrete demands is that it poses a very direct question to politicians. And trade unionists. It asks what we are going to do to sort out the problems that the protesters are raising. And in the case of those who have set up tent cities, it gives concrete form to the otherwise unavoidable point that the protesters are ‘not going away’ until those answers are provided.

Since the banks are a key focus of the protests, solutions such as a Robin Hood Tax are a useful example of what might be offered up. It would not only release funding for the sort of issues that protesters are concerned about – public sector cuts (whatever William Hague pretends he thinks they’re after), global poverty and climate change. It would, increasingly saliently, redress the balance in the finance sector between the legalised gambling of high frequency, algorithm-driven speculation and the more popular function of providing finance for investment and housing. The EU draft directive on a financial transaction tax and the Gates report to the G20 summit on innovative financing for development mean this offer is already (almost) on the table.

But politicians and trade unions will need to go much further before the ‘Occupiers’ and their close cousins, the ‘Indignados’, ‘go away’. Wages need to increase rather than profits, so that ordinary people catch up with the rich elite (the 1%/99% divide that Occupy Wall Street drew attention to). Decent work needs to be on offer for future school-leavers and university graduates, as it so often isn’t in the wageless internships of the developed economies and the empty shops and full cafes of the MENA region. And people need the confidence that they can abandon public squares and return to the ballot box as the most effective venue for making decisions about the future of society and the economy.

I can’t think of a time that a major political leader has ever stood up and essentially argued – ‘we face a renewed risk of recession – therefore you should probably spent less’,  if an opposition figure made the same case they would undoubtedly be accused of talking the economy down’.

But what makes this call doubly odd is that the Office of Budget Responsibility’s forecasts are premised on a large rise in personal debt. They forecast household borrowings to rise from £1,560bn in 2010 to £2,126bn by 2015, an increase of 36.3%.

Whilst the government is keen to talk of ‘rebalancing’ and ‘export and investment’ being the drivers of growth, there is no getting away from the fact that household consumption is still the largest part of the UK economy and a vital component of growth.

Indeed over this Parliament the OBR expects consumption to be a major driver of growth.  The table below shows they forecast that consumption will contribute around one quarter of growth this year, one third next year and half of all growth by 2015.

The problem of course is that real wages are falling and household income is going through its largest squeeze since the 1920s. It is a simple fact that if incomes are falling then the only way household spending can grow is by increased borrowing.

The OBR is very open about this, as they wrote in their last economic forecast:

“This subdued consumption outlook requires households to dip into their savings again in 2011, so the saving ratio continues to fall back from its post recession peak. Thereafter, the saving ratio stabilises at around 3½ per cent in our forecast (much the same as forecast in November), which is around half its average over the last 50 years.”

In other words they expect the savings ratio (the amount of their income that households save) to fall this year and then stay low.

Yesterday the OBR released details of its forecasting methodology. It includes the following, rather illuminating, note on how they go about forecasting consumption:

“large but temporary shocks to the economy (such as a fiscal consolidation) may be consistent with households reducing their saving for an extended period, until incomes recover.”

Basically they believe that if household income is squeezed by a combination of government spending cuts and tax rises (as now) then households will increase their borrowings to maintain their spending.

Cameron apparently doesn’t want this happen, in fact he seems to be going further and calling for households to not only to not increase their borrowings but to actually pay them off.

According to the Bank of England credit card debt in the UK currently stands at £66bn (the total of all types of unsecured lending is much higher). Even if households were to repay just half of this that would a £33bn fall in demand in the UK economy, easily enough to push the UK back into recession.

Nobody wants to see households get into too much debt or a resumption of reckless pre-crisis lending but calling for households to focus on paying down debt whilst their incomes are being squeezed and the economy suffers from a lack of demand just isn’t serious policy making, it’s a sound bite and a dangerous one at that.

Maybe after today’s awful GDP figures the prime Minister will think again before making such a dangerous call?

Last month, as our cities burned amidst the worst rioting in decades, social divisions in modern Britain were laid bare. The violence and the criminality that we saw shocked us all, and none of us would seek to justify or condone it in any way.

And the victims were overwhelmingly frightened ordinary people in working class communities – with the police and emergency service workers called on to put their safety on the line to restore order.

The Prime Minister chose to describe these events as ‘criminality pure and simple’. But it isn’t so simple and what happened in August actually revealed deep fractures within our society.

A society that ranks among the most unequal anywhere in the developed world; where a super rich elite have been allowed to float free from the rest of us; where a generation of young people are growing up without work, without prospects, without hope. None harder hit than the black youngsters held back by an unemployment rate approaching 50 per cent.

The government’s response to the riots has been profoundly wrong. Rather than addressing the complex long-term factors that lie behind the alienation – the poverty, the lack of social mobility, young lives stunted by hope denied – they have instead reached for simplistic clichés about moral decay.

And yet as they have retreated to Victorian language about the undeserving poor, they have said nothing about moral disintegration among the rich: the financiers with huge assets sneakily channelled through the tax havens; the out-of-control traders and speculators who razed our economy to the ground; and the super rich tax cheats whose greed impoverishes our schools and hospitals.

Let’s be clear about this: high moral standards, yes of course, but not just for the poor and the ordinary, they must be for the rich and the privileged too.

And let’s also resist blatant double standards, so that someone who steals a bottle of water goes to jail while there are second chances aplenty in the corridors of power.

What happened in our cities last month has not just raised alarming questions about the country we have become, it has not just exposed the pernicious inequality bequeathed by neoliberalism, but it has also underlined the folly of coalition policy.

Withdrawing EMA help from disadvantaged teenagers. Cutting youth services by two thirds and more. Abolishing the Future Jobs Fund and the Youth Guarantee that gave new chances to young people previously in utter despair.

Of course I accept the riots were not caused by the cuts – but as any fair-minded person must see the cuts will undoubtedly make the underlying problems much worse.

Yet this simple narrative has worked for the government. A majority still believe cuts are necessary (even if they want them to be temporary and reject the small state ideology that drives a good part of the cuts/public service “reform” agenda).

We can summarise ministers’ arguments as:

Labour spent too much and left us with a huge bill called the deficit. The overwhelming priority must be to close that deficit and we will do that in four years. That is why we have to make painful decisions to cut spending and raise VAT and other taxes. If we don’t the economy will collapse as markets lose confidence.

The trick here is ignoring that tax income depends more on the level of economic activity than tax rates. This might be rather obvious as soon as you point it out but the success of the government narrative depends on most people thinking the deficit is defined by public spending and tax rates alone.

Yet policies that depress the economy will make the deficit worse as the tax take falls. Spending money can pay for itself if it results in greater economic activity that raises more in tax – what economists call the multiplier effect.

But the conditions for this sleight of hand to work are disappearing.

• The IMF and NIESR are warning that the government is unlikely to meet its deficit reduction target as the economy is too depressed.
• Increasing numbers of people – including many Conservatives – are calling for tax reductions to stimulate the economy.

But calling for a tax cut goes against the central simple plank that we have to cut spending or raise taxes as we have ‘maxed out the nation’s credit card bill’.

Conservatives make it even more difficult for the government’s narrative by concentrating on the 50p rate for those earning more than £150,000 thus breaching the already very tattered claim that ‘we are all in this together’. Employing an advocate of ending maternity rights as a key adviser hardly helps here either.

Narrative collapse is perhaps the most serious problem for any modern politician.

Superficially that might sound just a bit democratic, but the reality is that it is simply about erecting a hurdle that will make official strike action extremely hard to achieve.

Let us take a hypothetical workforce of 1,000. They ballot for strike action. 499 vote yes and nobody votes no. This fails to go over the Boris hurdle as the turn-out is 49.9%, and so the strike is not valid.

Down the road there is another workforce. Amazingly this consists of exactly 1,000 employees too.

They also ballot for strike action ( we must be in the midst of a season of discontent). This time 251 vote for strike action, and 250 vote against. This is a valid vote for strike action as the turn out exceeds 50%.

But the first ballot has an overwhelming majority. Any union would see that as a strong mandate for action. The second is so finely balanced that unions would think hard before calling their members out, even though this would be legal.

This is clearly not about democracy, but simply about making it difficult for unions to call strike action. The result will be an angry workforce and a much greater likelihood of messy unofficial action (with no notice to the employer).

In any case most strike ballots do not result in strikes. What almost always happens is that a further round of negotiations takes place.  The union has demonstrated that it has support from its members, and the employer makes enough of a concession to get agreement. Calling for negotiations to take place  without anyone ever striking – as many government supporters do – fails to understand that unless both sides have some power and some incentive to settle, negotiations are unlikely to produce agreement.

No-one can know what those members who do not vote would do so if they had returned their ballot. Assuming that they would all be on one side of the question seems to me extremely dubious. My guess is that they would not divide that differently from those that vote, but how differently must remain a mystery.

But increasing turn-out is always a good thing to do. No union wants a yes vote with a tiny turn-out.

The law could be changed to boost turnout while maintaining a secret ballot if that’s what Ministers want. Letting people vote online – or even by text – has been trialled for council elections. It can be made secure. Giving people different ways to vote would be likely to get more people voting.

But don’t hold your breath.

Susanna Camusso, General Secretary of CGIL which endorsed the campaign for the referendum, said:

“there is no doubt that the government faces a political defeat. Italians have a different understanding about priorities and the policies Italy needs.”

The last time the 50% quorum for an Italian referendum was reached was in 1995, voter participation rate this time was 57% which makes its results binding. The ruling majority campaigned for abstention, but Italians voted in crowds and sent a very clear message.

The right-wing coalition was against the referendum because it directly questioned their laws and long-term political choices. They did their best to avoid the quorum being reached. They refused to hold the referendum on the same day as local elections in May (wasting hundreds of millions of euros); they approved a last-minute decree trying to nullify the nuclear energy referendum; and the national television channels owned or controlled by Berlusconi didn’t ensure proper coverage of the referendum. The news even gave the wrong date for the referendum twice!

The victory in this referendum is the result of the commitment of citizens. First they organised themselves in spontaneous committees to collect the necessary signatures to hold a referendum. Then they ran a mass awareness campaign and a big effort of information to make people familiar with what was a stake.

The outcome of the referendum is important not only for party politics, but even more in terms of policies. Italians refused the neoliberal dogma that everything has to be privatized; they rejected nuclear energy as an option (as they already had in a 1986 referendum) preferring alternative energies; and they firmly refused to allow the Prime Minister and others to avoid justice.

This referendum follows the defeat of the ruling majority in the recent local elections where Berlusconi’s party (the People of Freedom – PdL) lost control of important cities such as Milan (Berlusconi’s home city), Naples, Cagliari, etc. The coalition with the far-right xenophobic Northern League is weakening because, as the leaders of the latter said expressly, they don’t want to sink with the PdL. Tensions between the two parties are increasing day by day.

It is also wrong for judges to usurp the function of our elected representatives by effectively writing a privacy law of their own.

I agree, its a worrying sign when the judges invent new laws out of thin air. I’m looking forward to the Mail’s editorial condemning Torquay Hotel Co Ltd v Cousins (1969) and the Taff Vale Case (1901).

There’s sometimes a terrible fatalism about inequality – most people agree that Britain is unequal and that this is a problem, but many believe that  this  is inevitable. This sense that nothing can be done about inequality is encouraged by Ministers who like to emphasise the large sums spent by the last government, and then add “but it didn’t do any good.”

A good example was Iain Duncan Smith’s statement response last week to the annual Households Below Average Income report, when he made a point of the ”astonishing £150 billion injected into tax credits alone.”

But benefits and tax credits and the taxes that pay for them do make a difference to inequality – a massive difference. Today the Office for National Statistics published their annual report on The Effect of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income. This looks at the distribution of income before and after taxes and spending, looking at patterns of original, gross, disposable, post-tax and final income. Their summary of the figures includes a very useful diagram to show what these terms mean:

At each stage of this process this system reduces the level of inequality. If we look at original income – roughly, what you’d have if we didn’t have any taxes, benefits or services –  the poorest fifth of people had an average income in 2009/10 of £4,847 while the richest fifth had £77,896.

If you look at disposable income – how much money you’ve got to spend – the poorest had £10,535, the richest had £60,388.

And if you look at final income – roughly speaking, taking into account how much you’d have spend on the public services you use – the poorest have £15,125, the richest £58,070.

In other words, this country would be about four times as unequal without taxes and benefits:

There’s two really important lessons we ought to take from these figures. One is that fatalism about inequality is really an expression of ignorance: we already do a great deal to equalise incomes. The other is that if we want to do more, there are instruments to hand and we already know they work.

It’s a cruel irony that, after an economic crisis that cost the public purse hundreds of billions of dollars, our governments are rewarding those who caused the crisis with an expanded financial safety net and lower taxes, but making individual Canadians pay for it with higher taxes in other areas and reduced social services

But the TUC did produce a guide for trade unionists on electoral systems last year called Getting it in proportion. This came to no conclusion, but explained how different electoral systems work and tried to set out in a balanced way  arguments for and against not just first-past-the-post (fptp) and AV, but various proportional systems too.

If it has a conclusion, it is that there is no perfect electoral system. There are two reasons for this:

• People expect electoral systems to do different things which are not all compatible with each other. Therefore the system you choose will depend on the importance you give to these different objectives.
• In addition the politics of countries can vary and change over time.  So what works in one country at one particular moment, may not be appropriate in other countries or at other times. In particular a country like the USA, which has a very strong two party system, may well be happy with a first past the post system. A country with multiple parties on the other hand is much more likely to be happy with some kind of proportional system.

But while I find all this democratic theory fascinating, many people are simply judging the referendum on who they think will win or lose from either AV or the fptp status quo.

So for people on the left it often boils down to whether they dislike Nick Clegg or David Cameron the most – or perhaps a little more strategically whether they want to harm the Conservatives or the Lib Dems. Possibly in addition they might ask which is better for Labour. Over on the right, at least the Conservative Party bit of it, the issue has been much more clear cut, with only a very few Conservatives backing change.

But even these party interest considerations are not simple questions. Short-term interests may not be the same as long-term interests. And one thing that the TUC has argued in our rare forays into politics is that what benefits Labour voters (or union members) may not be the same as what benefits the Labour Party as an institution. For example a very right wing Conservative Party will do more damage to the things we value, but may be easier for Labour to beat.

Few think the referendum campaign has taken off – although this is as much a criticism of the media  for not treating the issue very seriously. Neither of the organised campaigns seems to have impressed commentators much either. Even though there is substantial union support for a no vote, the no campaign appears to have been largely devised from a mix of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the (over-lapping) people who defeated the regional referendum in the North East and certainly does not resonate with me.

On the other hand the yes campaign has, in my view, overclaimed the difference that AV will make – though I suppose that is true of all political campaigns. No-one gets much excited by the prospect of making a modest change to anything.

But while it is easy to criticise the campaigns, the depressing conclusion is probably that both have spent quite some time working out what arguments work best with voters.

As the electorate is probably as unenthusiastic about politicians as it has ever been, high-minded arguments simply won’t engage the majority of voters. Both campaigns have therefore ended up having strong anti-politics messages. This is not good for progessives, as while the right want things to be decided by markets and individual choice, we believe in the collective, and the power of the state and public institutions to do good.

As I want to discuss two particular issues that have been raised in the debate, I should probably declare that I will vote yes on May 5th (with all the disclaimers at the start of this post re-emphasised and in the knowledge that other Touchstone contributors may well be voting no).

However this post is not written as a polemical case for a yes vote – even a subtle one that pretends not to be – but a discussion of two of the issues raised in the original TUC document. Neither should be decisive in deciding how anyone votes, but they are important considerations for many.

Would AV benefit far-right extremists?

There is not a straightforward answer to this question. AV is not a proportional system so does not make it likely that a party that can get, say, 10 per cent of the vote will also get 10 per cent of the seats up for election.

Indeed AV makes it harder for a party that has significant minority support, but is hated by everybody else to get elected. Under first-past-the-post a far right party that gets 40 per cent of the votes in a constituency will win if three other parties – get 19, 20 and 21 per cent respectively. But if they are all united by a strong dislike of far-right extremism then the second and third preferences of the supporters of the parties eliminated as the AV ballot progresses will eventually ensure that a non-far-right party wins.

This is analagous to the French presidential election where Chirac and Le Pen ended up in the final round – and Socialist voters turned out in large numbers to ensure that Le Pen was defeated. (France’s two rounds of voting is rather similar to AV).

But on the other hand, AV allows people to express their real party preferences, while fptp encourages tactical voting.  Many people today vote for the party most likely to beat the big party they dislike the most. Lib Dems, UKIP Greens and other smaller parties inevitably lose out from this in traditional races between the two big parties, although Lib Dems, unlike the others. also gain from tactical voting in many seats where they get more votes than one of the two big parties.  Tactical voting probably leads far-right parties to under-perform as well, so AV may reveal somewhat more support than we see now for parties like the BNP – although my hunch would be that UKIP would be a bigger winner – and mostly at the expense of the Conservatives.

So AV probably makes it harder for the BNP to win seats, but may reveal more support for it.

Would AV make coalitions more likely?

The answer to this is also far from straightforward.

For a start no-one knows how a change in the electoral system might change the way people vote. Even a modest change will produce a somewhat different political culture within which people decide their vote, so even clever polling cannot really reproduce previous elections under AV.

As AV is not proportional it certainly doesn’t make a coalition likely in any situation where the winning party does not get close to half the vote or more. When parties have landslides – such as Labour in 1997 – or the Conservatives in 1983 – AV is likely to produce even bigger majorities for the winners. This is explained in Getting it in proportion.

Nor is it the case that fptp prevents coalitions or minority governments. That of course is obvious as we currently have such a government, but they have also frequently occurred in the past particularly in the early 20th century.

What stops coalitions is two-party politics. But since the end of the second world war, there has been a growth in support for other parties. Graphs on page 10 of  Getting it in proportion chart the growth in support for other parties and the decline in backing for the winning party.

So whether we have AV or stick with fptp we are more likely to have coalitions or minority goverenments in future, unless we get back to a strong two-party system as the US still has and we had in the 1950s.

AV probably makes it harder for a party in a small lead over its rivals to form a government on its own (although both  AV and fptp can produce quirky results), but the effect is probably less than some partisans seem to think.

And of course  even those simply using a partisan measure may think that making it harder for the Conservatives to govern on their own is more important that making it easier for Labour to do so.

A conclusion

As Vernon Bogdanow writes the differences between fptp and AV in practice are not that big.

As I argue above, many of the arguments deployed in the debate are much less certain than some suggest.

But this does not mean that it is unimportant. What should unite trade unionists and progressives however they intend to vote on May 5th is deep support for democracy as the best alternative to either authoritarianism or market fundamentalism running every aspects of our lives.

Even small changes in our democratic system are therefore important, and should be taken seriously.

So either yes or no, but please not the fashionable, but cynical, meh to AV.

That’s why the abortion-related amendments to the Health and Social Care bill recently tabled by Nadine Dorries and Frank Field are more problematic – because superficially they sound reasonable.

The amendments propose that women seeking abortion should receive counselling from an organisation that does not itself provide terminations, and that the body charged with drawing up clinical guidelines for abortion care should not itself be linked to abortion-providers.  Counselling for women with unplanned pregnancy? Good idea.  Unbiased clinical guidelines? Of course.

Anti-choice campaigners aren’t stupid.  They know from the experience of their American counterparts that hardline anti-abortion measures couched in moderate language have greater resonance with the public.  Later term abortion in the US? Re-christened ‘partial-birth abortion’ and promptly banned.

So Nadine Dorries tells us she is neither pro-choice nor ‘pro-life’ but simply ‘pro-woman’.  Her campaign around these amendments is called Right to Know.  Women have a right to know the ‘real risks’, both physical and mental, associated with abortion which, it is claimed, are currently being deliberately withheld from them by the abortion-industry.  The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ clinical guidelines on the care of women seeking abortion cannot be trusted because it too is part of this ‘industry’. Everyone, it seems, has a vested interest in encouraging more women to have more abortions.

But the boring fact of the matter is that none of this is actually true. Informed consent from the patient is required before any medical procedure, including abortion, can be carried out.  Clinicians are required to discuss all potential risks and complications, both physical and psychological.  Abortion in the UK is already thoroughly regulated – let’s not forget, it’s the only procedure that requires the permission of two doctors before it can go ahead.

Bpas (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service), which is one of the UK’s largest abortion-providers and therefore the main target of Ms Dorries ire, reports that around 20% of women decide not to go ahead with termination following the counselling they receive.  It’s also a registered charity which carries out 90% of its procedures under contract to the NHS, and is licensed by the Secretary of State for Health to do so.

The problem facing anti-choice campaigners such as Dorries is that the clinical facts about the ‘real risks’ of abortion do not accord with their view of what women should be told about the procedure.  When carried out legally in a clinical setting, as it is the in the UK, abortion is a very safe procedure; the risks of complication are small, but women are still informed about them, as they should be.  In terms of mental health, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists finds (in its new draft guidelines) that “the great majority of women who have abortions do not experience adverse psychological [consequences]”.

It is not unreasonable to trust the members of the RCOG to have used the most up-to-date evidence at their disposal and to have the best interests of their patients at heart.  Nor is it unreasonable for those drawing up such guidelines to themselves be involved with the provision of abortion.  In fact, I rather hope that they would be involved.

Advice provided by medical bodies about other types of procedure does not attract this kind of criticism.  Private healthcare providers in other areas of medicine are accepted as offering unbiased opinion, although they most certainly do so in a for-profit capacity (in fact the Conservative Party actually seems quite keen on seeing more of this).

Requiring women to undergo further mandatory counselling, is both unnecessary and insulting to women.  It presumes that women are incapable of making up their own minds when presented with the clinically relevant facts and ultimately seeks to delay and deter women from having abortion.

What does ‘independent advice and counselling’ as sought by Dorries et al actually mean? Where will it come from? In the United States, compulsory counselling means that in some areas women are given grossly inaccurate information about abortion’s links to breast cancer and infertility, some are required to listen to a detailed description of the foetus or view ultrasound pictures before they are allowed to proceed.  Counselling at the hands of anti-choice Crisis Pregnancy Centres most certainly will not result in genuinely ‘informed’ consent.

Debate on abortion is not solely driven by scientific evidence on either side.  The pro-choice movement deals with human and gender rights, bodily autonomy, need and circumstance. But here we are talking simply about what women should be told before having an abortion, and if we ignore mainstream medical opinion because it does not tally with our personal ideological viewpoint, and then seek to enact those views into law, then we are in dangerous, and not at all reasonable, territory.

The questions give respondents the opportunity to choose betwen the kind of argument we would put and on the government would put. That can be a good polling technique as it means that youy are not trying to devise a neutral non-leading question, but giving people the choice between two clearly partial statements.

Both points are true. We are still going to lose one of the most progressive programmes introduced by the last government, but we have forced the government to cut by less than they wanted.

Does anyone imagine that today’s change of heart would have happened if the abolition of EMAs had not contributed to the government’s loss of support among young people? That is an achievement that everyone who has argued and lobbied to defend EMAs (especially campaigns like Save EMA) can take pride in.

After the March for the Alternative, Vince Cable said “no government – coalition, Labour or any other – would change its fundamental economic policy simply in response to a demonstration of that kind.” (Curiously echoing “this march won’t stop a single cut” arguments from people with very different political allegiances.)

But today’s news shows that it is possible to get governments to change their minds. It is still a long way short of what we want, but it shows that campaigning does make a difference and it is worth keeping up the effort.

The TUC is no deficit denier. We know that borrowing one pound in every four we spend is unsustainable, and we agree that spending more on servicing debt interest than on educating our children is just plain wrong. What we need is a Plan B.

My concern is that the government’s answer – to slash public spending with reckless speed – is based not on a sound reading of the evidence, but on an ideological zeal to shrink the size of the state. The so-called reforms in the NHS and education threaten the fundamental character of our public realm.

This brutal austerity is being implemented on the back of a series of myths – half truths and distortions that have poisoned our public debate:

Myth one: the deficit was caused by out of control public spending.

Not true. Now I accept that after 2001, Labour began running larger deficits – though these fell during 2006 and 2007. Indeed when the credit crunch began in 2007, overall UK debt as a proportion of GDP was 37%, the lowest of any G7 country.

Myth two: without drastic cuts, Britain would become the next Greece.

This is a familiar ministerial refrain, often heard just after the coalition came to power, and it is completely wrong. Britain can finance its debt at affordable rates: 10-year bold yields are around 3.5%, compared to over 12% in Greece. With two-thirds of our sovereign debt underwritten by UK investors and an average maturation period of 14 years, refinancing is far less of a problem than even for the likes of France or Germany.

Overall, we spend just over 3% of our annual GDP servicing our debt – compared to 12% in Greece. To quote the distinguished FT columnist Sir Sam Brittan: “Don’t talk to me about Greece or Ireland. We can disregard the bogey of the government not being able to sell its securities at an acceptable price”.

Myth three: Britain is like a household that has “maxed out” on its credit card.

It’s a great soundbite, and one that the public can easily relate to. But again, it has one simple flaw: it is just not accurate. Unlike households, sovereign nations can print money, raise taxes and fund debt over many decades. Had they been in power in 1945, coalition ministers would have doubtless used their credit card analogy – yet within a decade we had got the economy back on track, built the NHS, extended the welfare state, and constructed millions of council homes. And through growth and full employment, Britain also got its deficit down.

Myth four: there is no alternative.

Once again, that is playing hard and fast with the truth, because there is a different way forward. A more sustainable, more gradual, more robust deficit reduction plan based on jobs, growth and tax justice. And in four days’ time the TUC will be taking this message to the people of Britain as we stage our national demonstration against the cuts: what we have dubbed the March for the Alternative.

So what does our alternative look like?

Well, I’ve mentioned the need to make jobs and growth the priority, keeping people in work, keeping tax revenues flowing, limiting the huge social costs of unemployment. And rather than swingeing cuts, we need a much more prominent role for progressive taxes – not least on the City and the bankers who caused this mess. The TUC believes this is the fairest and most sustainable way of tackling the deficit.

So far, so good, you might say: but where’s the evidence to support this argument?

Well, the case for jobs and growth is overwhelming. The lesson of economic history is clear: this is the best way of getting the public finances under control in the long run. Massive cuts are a false economy. As we saw in the 1930s, austerity begets more austerity – more unemployment, more misery for working people, and yes, more national debt.

Just as the case for pro-growth policies is compelling, so too are the arguments for fair tax. The coalition government has made the decision to make £4 of spending cuts for every £1 of tax rises – the bulk of which is coming from higher VAT, the most regressive tax of all. We believe this balance needs to change, with the tax burden falling on those most responsible for the crisis we now face. That’s why we’re calling for a determined clamp down on the £25 billion of tax avoidance committed by the City, UK plc and the super rich, why we want to see a much bolder banking levy and more robust taxes on bankers’ bonuses, and why we want to see a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions, which would raise tens of billions if implemented unilaterally in the UK and much more if introduced either at EU or global level. Encouragingly, the European Parliament voted in favour of such a tax earlier this month.

So there is a genuine alternative with fair tax, growth and jobs at its heart. And these arguments are increasingly resonating with the public. After the election, a majority of voters said they were in favour of spending cuts, at least in principle. Now, a majority are against cuts of the speed and scale being proposed by the government. And with bankers paying themselves £7 billion in bonuses this spring, there is a growing public clamour for change – as I think we will see in London this Saturday. I hope you’ll join us.

Mansour Osanloo, who leads the bus workers union in Tehran, is in jail for his beliefs, for building a union which called on employers to provide better wages, proper work clothes and childcare facilities. The BBC Persian service regularly broadcasts in Farsi the truth about him and about the protests we run around the world so that he, his family and the workers of Iran know that they are not alone.

Quality journalism is a vital contribution to democracy and as TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has said: “the BBC World Service’s foreign language broadcasting is a crucial contribution to excellence in broadcasting, it improves people’s lives and at the same time acts as an ambassador for the UK. The BBC World Service speaks truth not just to power, but also to the people.”

The TUC, of course, supports the NUJ’s campaign because it is an example of solidarity with workers facing job losses and cuts – something all too many people face at the moment. But it is about more than that. The BBC World Service provides a lifeline for people living under dictatorship or in ignorance.

It provides the most expensive commodity – the tuth – and all it costs is money! Britain and the people of the world will be the losers if we don’t Save Our Service.

I like to think that the TUC has developed good relations with the Liberal Democrats in recent years – of course there have been disagreements but also mutual respect.

Charles Kennedy addressed our annual Congress when he was leader, as my predecessor John Monks spoke to your Assembly. Chris Huhne addressed the TUC environment conference last October – and in turn I’ve been delighted to speak at a number of your fringe events.

That mutual respect has been based on a recognition that we share some basic philosophical roots and approaches.

Social Liberalism was a driving force behind the creation of the post-war welfare state of Keynes and Beveridge, but it also drew on important work done by the TUC on social insurance.

The social democratic tradition that helped regalvanise your party in the 1980s was the UK’s main advocate of what I would call the social Europe bargain – a key belief in today’s trade unions.

On the one hand support for a dynamic economy, but on the other a recognition that prosperity should have a wider social purpose through progressive taxation and well-funded public services.

On the one hand the energy of markets, but on the other protection from their inevitable excesses and instability.

Above all a recognition that markets should not trump democracy – that some issues are just too important to be left to market forces to settle.

Now we can trace and identify the roots and philosophies behind those beliefs, but it might just be as easy to say that they come from the common-sense and deep support for fairness built into the British psyche. It’s the politicians who tap into that who command the centre ground.

But it has to be said that I am finding it increasingly hard to see how those core beliefs can be reconciled with important elements of coalition policy.

Now of course I accept that coalition government is difficult. Uncomfortable compromises have to be made – especially when you are the junior partner.

And I also recognise that you can point to real achievements – linking the state pension once again to earnings is one that sees success for a long campaign backed by unions. The referendum on AV is a big Lib Dem win for a party long committed to electoral reform.

Nor can anyone deny that the public finances remain in a very difficult state, and whoever had won the last election would have faced difficult choices after the damage done by such a deep and world-wide recession.

And while I’m not going to be able to resist a little political knockabout by quoting old speeches and manifesto pledges, I recognise that circumstances change and coalitions constrain choice – a certain amount of bilge water in the diet is inevitable.

But even allowing for all of this, people are now beginning to see a growing disconnect between what they thought your basic values to be and what is actually happening in reality.

And that can’t be a good thing for any party wanting to win votes.

I think there are two areas I want to draw out – not simple disagreements but policies that simply clash with what I always understood to be the basic principles of Liberal Democracy.

First, let me say a few words about the economy, growth and jobs.

As the Lib Dems said before the election: “If spending is cut too soon, it would undermine the much-needed recovery and cost jobs. We will base the timing of the cuts on an objective assessment of economic conditions, not political dogma.”

Yet what we’ve experienced since is the exact opposite.

We’ve been told that we have to eradicate the structural deficit in this parliament and that it has to be done by four pounds of cuts for every pound of tax increase – and that from VAT the unfairest tax of all.

The claim that without this we would become the next Greece is absurd. Our debt is manageable and lower than many comparable countries. It is not to deny the deficit to acknowledge that borrowing is relatively cheap and straightforward.

A four year timetable to undo all the fiscal damage done by decades of a mistaken economic model is not just arbitrary, but a very deliberate political choice. And one that runs the dangers of repeating the errors made in the 1930s.

Even before austerity really gets a grip, dole queues are lengthening with solid predictions of a million more unemployed. And alarmingly the economy contracted by 0.6 per cent in the last quarter of 2010.

Deep rapid front-loaded cuts are not the answer to our economic woes. As that great Liberal John Maynard Keynes rightly said – after seeing the damage done by similar policies, the best way to secure recovery and pay down the deficit is not through massive cuts – but through jobs and growth.

Keep people in work, keep tax revenues flowing, limit the costs of unemployment: that’s the social democratic response to the crisis we face, that’s the progressive approach. But even for those who disagree that there is room for an economic alternative and accept the government’s budget judgement however reluctantly, my second charge still needs answering.

Because my concern is that under cover of the fiscal deficit, public spending cuts are being used to fundamentally restructure the welfare state. The UK version of that Europe style social bargain is being decisively rolled back. The balance between markets and democracy is being fundamentally shifted away from people power.

This is what lies behind the most rapid reform of public services in living memory, with the Prime Minister promising to open up services to competition by “any willing provider” – code for privatisation on a huge scale.

“There is a kind of Maoist revolution happening in a lot of areas like the health service, local government, reform, all this kind of stuff, which is in danger of getting out of control.” Not my words, of course, but Vince Cable’s.

As many people here have realised already this weekend the changes are greatest and most dangerous in the health service.

The Health and Social Care Bill represents the biggest upheaval in the history of the NHS. Yet it wasn’t in the coalition agreement, nor was it put to the electorate last May by either coalition party. Indeed the Conservatives stressed the NHS was safe in their hands and that there would be no top-down reform. Some of us thought that went without saying for the Lib Dems.

There’s an old cliché about putting Count Dracula in charge of the blood bank. Now as a result of the planned privatisation of the National Blood Service it appears he will at least be able to bid for it.

But the damage being done to local government is just as damaging and just as much part of this revolution hidden by cuts. Being a local councillor has become one of the toughest jobs in Britain.

The scale of the cuts is bad enough, but it’s their front loading that is adding hugely to the damage. And it is the clear bias shown by imposing the biggest cuts on the most deprived areas that reveals the politics.

Scaling back ambitions and making planned savings when times are hard, knowing that they can be restored when times get better, is one thing. Deep cuts that destroy services and close community facilities for ever are another.

The new localism has turned out not to be about restoring respect, dignity and resources to local government, but by-passing town halls and leaving individuals to fend for themselves.

Even the Pupil Premium has come at a price – with Michael Gove admitting that funding is coming from cuts to welfare and cuts elsewhere in the schools budget.

Indeed after the Spending Review the IFS has calculated that 60 per cent of primary school pupils and 87 per cent of secondary students will see their school’s funding cut in real terms.

In any event, the Premium will be worth just £430 per pupil this year – not the £2,000 or so originally planned.

Even after making every allowance for the realities of coalition and an election result that closed down options, the Liberal Democrats risk ending up on the wrong side of the fundamental divide in British politics.

It is not just a difference of judgement about the state of the economy, but a move away from the basic principles of not just left-of-centre Britain but middle Britain.

Above the ebb and flow of party politics a big majority of the British share a basic support for fairness – and unlike many in the USA – support an active state providing services and countering deprivation and inequality. Call it the European mainstream, the British sense of fairplay, or basic civilised values – that doesn’t matter.

Detoxifying the Conservative brand was all about appearing to recognise that, even if we see that the conversion was not even skin-deep.

But my worry is that the Lib Dems show signs of leaving that space too – or at least that’s what voters now think.

That’s not just a bad place for your party to be, but it’s a setback for that very broad coalition that has secured so much of the social progress that we have seen in the last hundred years.