Class of 2010

Who are the new MPs we are about to send to Westminster? What are their political beliefs? What backgrounds do they come from? Could they work together in the event of a hung parliament? Although the next parliament will see an exceptionally large number of newcomers, we still know relatively little about the ‘class of 2010’.

To help us answer some of these questions ippr has conducted an online poll of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates from across the different parties. This excluded sitting MPs and included only those who had a serious chance of winning – either in safe seats for their party or in marginal contests.

Our first finding was that if PR is the deal breaker in a hung parliament, both David Cameron and Gordon Brown will find it difficult to persuade their backbenchers to back electoral reform. All of the Conservative PPCs polled supported first past the post, while only 10 per cent of Labour PPCs backed PR or a mixed system as used in Scotland and Wales.

On the PPCs’ ideological positions the survey found that Labour and Lib Dem PPCs have much more in common with each other than either set of candidates do with the Conservatives. This confirms that a coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems would be much easier to hold together politically than an arrangement between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives.

Our survey found that:

• Most Labour and Lib Dem PPCs agree that government should redistribute income from the rich to the poor. Only 30 per cent of surveyed Conservative PPCs supported income redistribution and 47 per cent opposed it. Labour PPCs are slightly to the left of Lib Dem PPCs on questions of redistribution and the welfare state: 67 per cent of Labour PPCs against 33 per cent of Lib Dem PPCs agree strongly that government should redistribute income.
• Labour and Lib Dem PPCs are less in favour of tougher sentences for criminal offences than Conservative PPCs, with Lib Dem PPCs being the most liberal.
• 59 per cent of Conservative PPCs disagreed with the statement that too many people’s lives would be damaged by cutting benefits, compared to just 7 per cent of Labour and 17 per cent of Lib Dem PPCs.
• 70 per cent of Conservatives agreed that the welfare state ‘crowds out’ civic endeavour and community self-help, while most Labour and Lib Dem PPCs disagreed.
• 91 per cent of Lib Dem PPCs agreed that we have been too reliant on the City for growth and should curb its role, compared to 44 per cent of Labour PPCs. Most Conservative PPCs opposed action to reduce the role of the City in the economy.
• Lib Dem PPCs are the least interventionist on foreign policy, with 91 per cent wanting Britain to stop trying to be a major military force in the world, compared to just 27 per cent of Labour and 6 per cent of Tory PPCs.
• 59 per cent of Tory PPCs think the EU is a threat to the UK’s national sovereignty, whereas Labour and Lib Dem PPCs overwhelmingly reject this.
• Whereas all Labour and Lib Dem PPCs agree that climate change is real and man made and requires major social changes, only 53 per cent of Tory PPCs believe this.

Finally, in terms of how the candidates were selected, we found that in most cases the candidates were locally based or had some local roots. There was little evidence of lots of London-based candidates being parachuted into constituencies. What is more noticeable about the selection process is how few people are involved in it: 75 per cent of these PPCs were chosen by fewer than 200 party members and 28 per cent by fewer than 100. The only party to have broken out of those small numbers were the Conservatives – many of whom had been selected in primary contests.

The survey is here and the press release here.

Rick Muir

Cable wins the Chancellors’ debate – by a short-head

Mission accomplished – no gaffes. That was probably the initial reaction of Alistair Darling, Vince Cable and George Osborne to their live debate on Channel 4’s Ask the Chancellors programme. There will be no clips from this event being endlessly replayed on You Tube in coming days and weeks.

Unfortunately, the prospective Chancellors' safety-first approach also robbed the event of its drama. It was more like watching three academics debate economic issues than three senior politicians bidding for votes less than six weeks before a general election. Where were the fireworks? Where was the passion? It was all very civil and, therefore, somewhat flat.

Before the debate, Vince Cable was expected to emerge the winner and he did, though only by a narrow margin. He scored points for honesty - on several occasions he was the only one of the three men prepared to tell the audience just how bad things are. He was not attacked by the other two, though he was happy to round on both Alistair Darling and George Osborne. And he got the biggest rounds of applause, when calling bankers ‘pin-striped Scargills’ and accusing the Tories of wanting to get their ‘snouts back into the trough’.

Alistair Darling was, well, Alistair Darling. He said his main quality for the job was ‘tenacity’ and he did a dogged job of keeping the debate on the future, so avoiding having to explain why everything went wrong while Labour were in charge. But he was vulnerable to criticism about the lack of detail in his plans.

George Osborne came into the debate with a new pledge announced earlier in the day – to halt Labour’s planned rise in national insurance contributions in April 2011, a plan he will finance through government efficiency savings. While this has some electoral appeal, economists have already questioned how it can be squared with the Conservatives’ previous view that reducing the deficit was the number one economic priority and how it fits with previous Conservative descriptions of efficiency savings as fictitious. Alistair Darling and Vince Cable made these points, but neither landing a knock-out blow on Osborne.

So now it is on to the leaders’ debates. Will David Cameron make important policy announcements on the days of the debates, so he has something to focus on, as George Osborne did? Will Gordon Brown and David Cameron give Nick Clegg as easy a ride as Vince Cable enjoyed? If they do, the Liberal Democrats will emerge as winners from the debates and, assuming their target is a hung parliament, possibly in the election too.

Tony Dolphin