The Machine that goes Ping

Despite the best efforts of Nigel "immigration" Farage, and irrational scaremongering about the Caledonian horde, the dominant theme of the general election campaign has been public spending. Unfortunately, the discussion has focused largely on quantity not quality. From deficit levels through welfare to increases in the tax-free allowance, the assumption is that numbers matters more than what they represent and that context is irrelevant. This gives rise to the paradox of a Conservative party that espouses individualism while advocating one-size-fits-all policies, such as the benefits cap and the spare bedroom tax. Whereas once their argument was means-testing, now they dabble with arbitrary cut-offs: no child benefit for larger families. But Labour are similarly conflicted, too often reducing an argument about values (what is right) to mere accountancy (what we can supposedly "afford"), and still prone to beasting the poor. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the NHS.

According to The Guardian, we have only "6.8 computerised tomography scanners per million people, which is less than half the OECD average". This rather precious fact was culled from a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit that compared the NHS with other national health systems. Though the report looked at a number of dimensions (employing the "balanced scorecard" paradigm beloved of neoliberal thinktanks), the media coverage focused on resources, particularly staffing and hardware, with the general implication that these are inadequate. This material inadequacy was then linked to insufficient funding (the Guardian article echoed Labour's claim of a prospective £2bn NHS deficit), with the further implication that an increase in expenditure would lead to an improvement in at least some of these ratios.

As summarised by the BBC, "The UK is in the lower half of a league table of 30 nations for health staffing. In 2012, the UK had 2.8 doctors and 8.2 nurses per 10,000 people, compared with averages across the OECD of 3.2 and 8.9, respectively. The EIU argues that the starkest differences are apparent when it comes to physical resources ,with the UK sitting near the bottom of the OECD league table. The UK has just 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people against an OECD average of 4.8. For equipment such as CT and MRI scanners, availability is less than half the average". The problem is that this tells us nothing about the structural factors that influence the ratios (i.e. context), nor anything about the efficiency of capital utilisation (i.e. what these numbers represent).

The EIU report itself has this to say about resources: "Hospital beds, admittedly, are in decline nearly everywhere: many countries have been steadily closing wards and consolidating hospitals. This is partly to reduce inefficiency and fixed overheads, but also reflects the fact that modern medical techniques—such as keyhole surgery—have cut the length of hospital stays." In other words, the lower ratio of beds per capita could indicate a number of positive developments, from more effective preventative care through more efficient resource management. I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily the case (though there is plenty of evidence that the NHS is efficient in managing its resources relative to other health systems), but that trying to assess performance using isolated data like this is foolish.

The biggest structural factor influencing resource ratios is the extent of private enterprise. Though the traditional critique of centrally-managed institutions is that they create waste due to the dispersed knowledge problem, markets typically produce over-capacity. This is partly by design, the aim being to provide headroom for peaks in demand, but also partly the result of market churn: as providers enter and exit the market, some capacity will be temporarily duplicated. In theory, this overhead is offset as better, more efficient providers compete the weaker out of the market, however there are problems when this theory is applied to inelastic public goods. An example is the way that free schools open in areas that aren't short of school places. The same number of pupils is now spread over a larger capital base, so the capital/pupil ratio is higher, but you also have higher running costs because of fixed charges (e.g. building maintenance). In terms of capital allocation efficiency, the situation has got worse.

Similarly, the lower ratios of doctors and nurses could point to greater efficiency, not less. If we invest in preventative care and better social care for the elderly and disabled, we'll end up with fewer hospital beds. Hospital consolidations will also reduce staffing and equipment ratios. Though they often face local opposition, mergers are more likely to occur in a nationally-coordinated system than in a free market where you have to rely on provider exit. In terms of high-tech equipment (the modern equivalent of the "machine that goes ping"), the distribution of this is heavily influenced by commercialisation. Hospitals used by the rich tend to have more kit than they need (over-capacity to avoid waiting times and meet peak demand), while hospitals used by the poor tend to have less. The UK's greater equality of access, relative to the OECD norm, means that the "average" the UK falls short of will include a degree of structural waste that we have avoided.

Tellingly, the media coverage of the EIU report ignored the section on staff costs. This was because the NHS pays pretty low wages, relative to its international peers, with one notable exception: "Although figures are scarce, OECD data for 2011 suggested that self-employed GPs in the UK are the highest-paid in the OECD, earning 3.6 times the average wage. This includes most family doctors. The figures for salaried GPs (which may be employed by a GP practice) and hospital doctors are far more modest ... To solve the growing problems in A&E, for example, there needs to be better access to out-of-hours care elsewhere. Nevertheless, asking GPs to take on extra responsibilities fits poorly with efforts to restrain their wages." The significance of this is that GPs represent the largest (and longest-established) incursion of private business into the NHS.

The EIU report adds to a growing body of international health system comparisons, such as the US-based Commonwealth Fund (their latest ranking puts the NHS well out in front). Though there are variations in the way that rankings are arrived at, the broad consensus is that the NHS is the most cost efficient (because it is a nationwide system with minimal charging) and equitable (high levels of access and lower levels of inequality of treatment) but has limitations in terms of overall patient outcomes, though this last is more broadly the product of public health policy (i.e. including factors such as diet, poverty, housing, alcohol consumption etc).

In short, the challenge for the NHS is one of management (the efficient allocation of resources), not just an issue of more money to boost resource ratios, though I'm sure a few more computerised tomography scanners per million people would not come amiss, particularly if they go "ping". This raises difficult questions for those tired of "constant top-down reform", but it also highlights a further risk associated with privatisation and outsourcing, namely the fragmentation of strategy and the capacity inefficiencies inherent in markets.

She's Lost Control Again

As the UK general election campaign wends its weary way to the inevitable, squalid conclusion of a hung parliament, I have been diverted by two recent foreign films that seem to capture the global sense of defeat and frustration that mark our age. Despite that less than cheerful recommendation, both are a hoot. While Avengers: Age of Ultron objectifies our terror of technology and disappointment with the neoliberal state (aka Tony Stark), Force Majeure and Wild Tales focus on matters closer to home: bourgeois hypocrisy and the joys of revenge. The first takes a Lockean view of the world, in which property relations substitute for emotional engagement, while the latter is relentlessly Hobbesian, homo homini lupus est, but at least carries a small torch for honesty.

Ruben Ostlund's Force Majeure is all about systems of control, from the nuclear family engaged in emotional blackmail to the manipulation of the natural world. It is set in an Alpine resort that might as easily be on Hoth as on Earth, where sinister-looking technology is used to create controlled avalanches. The Alpine retreat has served as a stagey microcosm of bourgeois society from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain onwards, but it also stands as a rather laboured metaphor for emotional frigidity and social isolation (even in that modern classic, Dumb and Dumber). The film is a series of vignettes of control mediated by property: the snowploughs at night, the clanking ski-lifts, even a remote-controlled toy drone. The recurrent bathroom rituals are exercises in self-control centred on electric tootbrushes, while the social gatherings, all superficial bonhomie and good taste in wine, are struggles for control of the narrative.



The film quickly sets the scene and then introduces the moment of crisis: a family of smug Swedes on a restaurant terrace take fright at an approaching mini-avalanche. Tomas, the father, reveals his true colours by grabbing his smartphone and fleeing, leaving Ebba, the mother, to protect their son and daughter under the table. The event is trivial - just a shower of powdered snow that passes in a couple of minutes - but the long aftermath proves corrosive as Tomas seeks to excuse his behaviour as Ebba's misunderstanding in the confusion of the moment. This is a power struggle, not just between husband and wife, but between the husband's self-image (hard-working provider and protector) and his true nature. His negotiations and evasions are finally undermined by the video-footage on his own smartphone.

Tomas is a middle-class professional for whom masculinity is about charming manipulation, from the passive-aggressive treatment of his wife to his ability to turn on the man-tears. He doesn't get angry so much as peeved. When he is manipulated - a scene in which a girl mistakenly passes on a compliment and then admits her error is both excrutiating and hilarious - he is shown to be cluelessly vulnerable. This is an ancient trope in which traditional, manly virtues (loyalty, self-sacrifice, self-possession) have been undermined by soft living. The Alpine setting offers a stock contrast: the natural sublime against the man-made, civilisation wilting in the face of the wild, the need to prove oneself in a hostile environment (Ken Russell's Women in Love, with Oliver Reed expiring melodramatically in the snow, came to mind).

Much of the fun of the film comes from Ostlund ridiculing this trope in a carefully curated and commercialised corner of the Alps. In the depths of his self-pity, Tomas is overwhelmed by a boisterous stag party reduced to testosterone howling. The hotel is reminiscent of an ocean liner: a Titanic trapped in a sea of ice, with the servant class occasionally intruding to the frustration of Tomas and Ebba who try to conduct their rows in the corridor outside their room to spare the kids. The music hints at dread and foreboding, which makes the actual disaster - the loss of face by a middle-aged solipsist - all the more amusing. To make sure we get the point, Ostlund repeats the bathos with Tomas's mate Mats, a middle-aged man-child who thinks that possession of a hipster beard and a young girlfriend is enough to convince the world of his worth.

Tomas finally recovers his self-esteem when he saves Ebba on the last day of their holiday, though it looks like a setup on her part: she goes missing in the mist, calls for help and is carried back in his arms, without skies and without any visible injury. I found myself thinking of Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, in which the "ambisexual" inhabitants of a snow-covered planet oscillate between their two genders. Ebba has previously flirted with the idea of having an affair, perhaps more as an act of autonomy than revenge, but decides to save her marriage instead, if only for the kids (the emotional blackmail never ends). Tomas's indulgence of her fear in the poorly-driven coach that takes them away from the resort re-establishes their middle-class bond - safety first, don't take chances - but also allows them to share in their defeat. His decision to smoke a cigarette, as they walk down the mountain having abandoned the bus, suggests a loosening of their hitherto tight control. Whether this points to a more relaxed and honest relationship, or just another form of self-indulgence, is left open.

Damian Szifron's Wild Tales is a portmanteau of revenge and surrender set in Argentina. It opens with a plane crash, engineered by an absent member of the cabin crew who has arranged for almost everyone who ever did him harm to be on the flight. The punchline is that the plane is hurtling towards his parents' house as they sit by their pool. We then move to a mini-epic of road rage, pitting a middle-class executive in an Audi against a working-class truck driver, that quickly spirals into mutually-assured destruction. In the third tale, a young woman is tempted to take revenge by poisoning her family's tormentor in the restaurant where she works, but when she balks, as she realises the act will harm the innocent as well, her workmate takes over and dispatches the tormentor with a knife. The fourth tale is the most overtly political, as a demolition expert takes revenge on the parasitical state, represented by a ruthless car-pound, after his car has been towed and he has had to pay through the nose, triggering a sequence in which he loses his job and marriage. He puts explosives in his car, let's them tow it again, and watches in satisfaction as the pound is blown up.

The penultimate tale sees a rich family bribe a servant to take the rap for their son's hit-and-run killing of a pregnant woman. The price escalates, as first the family lawyer and the investigating prosecutor demand their cut and then the servant ups his fee, tempting the father to cancel the arrangement and let his son face the music. In the end, after his wife's pleas and his own affronted haggling, the contract is sealed, but as the servant is led away in cuffs, the husband of the victim appears bent on deadly revenge. The final tale is of a wedding reception during which the bride suddenly realises that her husband is having an affair with one of the guests. She flees to a rooftop terrace where she screws one of the hotel staff and is found in the act by her husband. She says she will do as she pleases in future and threatens to financially ruin him if he tries to divorce her. Returning to the party, she semi-accidentally hurls the other woman into a mirror. Amid the mayhem, and fortified by the wedding cake, the husband and wife decide that the arrangement is not so bad after all and start to make love on a table as the guests depart (a Bunuelian touch).

There are parallels with Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, not just in the dynamic of the plane crash episode, but in the later plot significance of hit-and-run killings, poisoning and miscarriages of justice. But while Christie was concerned with moral failings and the inescapability of guilt in a world built on property (inheritance figures prominently as a motive), Szifron is more concerned with the social contagion of anger and the inadequacy of money as a social currency (cakes come out far better). The tales themselves are ancient, which means amusing nods to the canon. For example, the road rage incident echoes modern existential films such as Duel and The Hitcher but thereby harks back to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For all their gritty realism, these are also fairy-tales, most obviously the story of "Dynamite" who may end up in prison but is feted as a popular hero (no one was injured in the explosion and the towing company's corruption has been revealed) before being reconciled with his wife and kids.

The last tale, with its antagonistic but ultimately pragmatic couple, could have been entitled All's Well That Ends Well, a postscript that might even be applied to Force Majeure. Some critics of Wild Tales saw this as a cop-out, but I think it shows a humane understanding of the need to live in the world. Similarly, Tomas and Ebba may be shallow and self-obsessed, but at least they insist on making their own way down from the rarefied heights of their Alpine retreat to the messy world below, another resonant parallel with The Magic Mountain. In the end, it is the gender politics of both films that stick in the memory. The men are trapped in their roles and their attempts to live up to them result in a reversion to childhood fantasy: bare-faced lying, pumped-up violence, the magic wand of money. The women are more flexible, but that is both a strength and a weakness as they bounce between compromise and confrontation. I need hardly make the political parallels explicit.

Echoes of War

Reaction to last night's Question Time has revolved around two issues: Ed Miliband's failure to apologise for the last Labour government's profligacy, and the threat of a new Labour government being held hostage by the SNP. Both are based on false premises (the mediamacro mythos and the idea that the SNP would vote with the Tories), which means that the event did little to advance the BBC's mission to inform, educate and entertain, unless you consider the clash of cultivated ignorance and platitudinous managerialism to be entertaining. The BBC's structural bias (a tiresome deference to the views of small business owners) was so obvious on this occasion that even haters like Toby Young gave Auntie "top marx" for ideological soundness.

But it would be wrong to dismiss these two concerns simply because they are ill-informed and irrational. The myth of Labour profligacy, like the shift in blame from bankers to benefit claimants, is evidence that we want to take the blue pill. One of the QT audience even went so far as to insist that far from triggering and amplifying the 2008 crisis, financial services had been our nation's saving grace and that Gordon Brown had sold-off our gold cheaply. The guy may well have been a Tory stooge, but more striking is the evidence of self-delusion and an appetite for consoling myths. The reason why the "nation's credit card" trope resonates is because so many of us are (or have been) subject to the anxiety of debt. We want the state to take over that psychic burden. The reason why we have a housing crisis is because few of us can bear the thought of falling house prices, which would be the inevitable result of any effective solution. We want the state to relieve us of our ambivalence.

There had been some advance criticism of David Cameron over his refusal to participate in a genuine debate: an extraordinary insult to democracy that most of the media just shrugged off. The post-event coverage elided this by emphasising the ferocity of the audience, as if this were an old-style hustings and democracy was alive and kicking. But the depressing truth is that this was a curated crowd, with partisan statements and myth-peddling masquerading as questions. There was no debate: not between the party leaders; and not between the leaders and the public. Instead we had the neoliberal paradigm: quantification (alloted questions and time), simplification (policy as bullet-points), and the impossibility of autonomy (the audience failed to heckle or argue with each other). As I indulged my inner Nigel Farage while watching this unedifying display, my thoughts turned to the Putney Debates of 1647 (no, really). Not because that was a finer example of democratic practice or an "informed" public, but because the contemporary anxiety about the Scots started to trigger parallels in my mind.

It's hardly novel to think of the Greens as a middle-class recuperation of the Diggers, or even to think of UKIP as the true inheritors of the not-quite-democratic Levellers (proto-libertarians rather than proto-socialists, with the "Norman Yoke" as a forerunner of the EU). The clearest parallel, however, is the SNP as latterday Covenanters. Though there seems to be little likelihood of a formal Labour-SNP coalition, the prospect of any kind of influence seems to worry the political establishment, presumably because it jeopardises existing power networks, while thrilling those who despise that establishment. Phil Burton-Cartledge thinks there is revolution afoot in Scotland, arising from the salutary effect of the referendum defeat: "The realignment of British politics from the emergence of Labour to supplanting the Liberals as one of the two main contenders took a generation. ... In Scotland however, time has sped up. What takes decades to accomplish has flipped in the course of a single Parliament. Such tends to happen when masses of politicised people enter the stage and find existing modes of political expression wanting".

Taking a longer view, Paul Cotterill, quoting Henry Drucker from 1979, thinks this was long-predicted and reflects the growth of national identity as the class identity of political parties weakens: "If Labour comes to be seen as an increasingly middle-class organisation, it could lose its support even if its supporters remained class-conscious. ... Class consciousness, as a historical fact, is obviously endangered by changes external to it. Gaitskell saw prosperity as one such threat. Nationalism is another - one whose power is more real in the 1970s than would have been foreseen in the late 1950s. As Scottish and Welsh working people have come to identify themselves as Scots or Welshmen first and workers second, Labour loses their support to nationalist parties".

In contrast, Robert Tombs sees party affiliation reflecting older, religious roots, which suggests that the SNP's "civic nationalism" is a cultural continuation of traditional Presbyterianism - i.e. an insistence on a qualitative Scottish difference based on moral superiority: "Scotland’s dynamic nationalism draws not only on modern discontents but also on ancient and deep-seated ideas of identity, rights and differences. This gives the SNP a protean quality that is able to appeal across conventional socio-economic and ideological divisions. Hence, it first absorbed much of the Scottish Conservative vote and most of its seats as an opponent of Labour during the 1990s and now is doing the same to Labour as an opponent of the Tories."

There is some truth in this. Scotland's much-vaunted "social democracy" is little more than "my ain folk" sentimentality in practice (SNP policies in government have been echt neoliberal), and there remains a strong cultural respect for probity, rectitude and prudence (famously channelled by Gordon Brown), as if such characteristics were rarely found elsewhere. What most English people fail to get is just how irritated many Scots are about a UK-level identity reduced over the last 50 years from Dr Findlay and John Knox to Rab C Nesbitt and Francis Begbie. It is this conservative temper that defeated the referendum (prudence won out), and it is the same temper that now feeds support for the SNP among the "solid majority" of Scotland.

As Rafael Behr notes, "The genius of nationalism lies in its mobilisation for political ends of emotions that people feel as more authentic, less negotiable than ordinary politics." This in turn suggests that the dominance of Labour in Scotland over the last 25 years was driven by the "negotiability" of centrists, tactically voting in Westminster elections, rather than a more progressive polity. Those centrists are now opting for nationalism of a particular kind: reluctant to embrace full independence (much as the Covenanters were reluctant to embrace republicanism), but keen to bring their moral superiority to bear for the benefit of the wider UK (an end to austerity being the equivalent of an end to bishops).

If the SNP supplant Labour as the largest party in Scotland, this will not be because of national consciousness-raising around the referendum, or a revived pride in a common identity (Scottish culture remains as fissiparous and internecine as ever), but because Labour is no longer perceived to be the champion of the working class. Or to put it another way, the Labour party is no longer managing labour in Scotland, which explains much of the anxiety in England as working class concerns have suddenly escaped from the party corral. The irony is that English small business owners have far less to fear from the nationalists (neoliberals in practice and Tartan Tories at root) than Cromwell ever had to fear from the Scots. There will be no Solemn League and Covenant between Labour and the SNP, because Labour has no need of such an arrangement, and the SNP will endorse austerity-lite at Westminster because it will be implementing the same policies at Holyrood.

The Modern Agora

Following Tesco's record loss, Paul Mason has indulged his romantic side by reimagining supermarkets: "what public benefit we could achieve if the selling expertise and data power of the supermarket were combined, in synergy, with the suppressed sociability of the buying public". He wishes to free "the untapped human potential" of these "modern agoras", repurposing them as "public benefit corporations" that "socialise the customer-relationship data". The root of his romanticism is a focus on the wasted potential of labour: "Everything in the physical architecture of a big supermarket is designed to make the workforce invisible ... So I would do something that rewarded the workforce for unleashing their wit, knowledge and expertise on the actual customers."

This is blinkered insofar as the visible shop-workers are just the tip of an iceberg that includes agricultural labour, manufacturers, packaging and distribution workers and backoffice staff. Turning shelf-stackers into "customer relationship managers" sounds like a humane strategy to preserve domestic roles as automation advances, but it hardly addresses the conditions of labour in the global alimentary sector. We also shouldn't forget that the layout of a supermarket is designed to get the customer to function as a warehouse picker and (increasingly) a checkout operator: providing free labour to the store. It is in that sense that the workforce is truly invisible. More significant is Mason's admission of the centrality of customer data. The key dynamic in the supermarket sector is selling customers to suppliers, rather than products to customers. The latter produces small margins, but the former produces volume, and that's where the profit lies.

This was the impetus behind the introduction of loyalty cards in the 90s, and also explains the notorious charges levied by supermarkets on suppliers for prominence and special campaigns. As dairy farmers know only too well, the distribution of profit is the result of a struggle between producers and retailers, not the operation of supply and customer demand. This is about more than just dominating access to the consumers (i.e. rent extraction): it's about having sufficient insight into customer expectations to be able to direct suppliers, both in terms of product price (e.g. insisting that certain lines are sold at a loss) and product quality (e.g. refusing "ugly" fruit and veg). Tesco's problem (admittedly one among many) was that it was simultaneously persisting with an older and more expensive form of customer domination and data-gathering, namely opening up new superstores in order to increase market share.

It would be easy to conclude from its property travails that Tesco should have been diverting capital away from bricks to clicks, but it is also worth bearing in mind that online shopping is still a minority habit while the decline of the superstore owes more to cannibalisation by the Big Four's own convenience stores and the advance of discount retailers who eschew online. That said, online is clearly the future because it offers the greatest potential for expanding customer data, which is what will allow supermarkets to secure a greater slice of the revenue pie from suppliers, particularly if they can start to isolate customers for higher-margin products. Though home deliveries and click-n-collect are currently more expensive for supermarkets, and will remain so until "dark stores" become common, they not only produce richer customer preference data but also provide opportunities for "push" marketing - i.e. email and customised Web or app offerings. This in turn increases the potential for customer lock-in, though there is a sting in the tail.

The decline in bonus card schemes (e.g. Sainsbury has just halved its Nectar points) shows the extent to which the lock-in dynamic is shifting from loyalty (i.e. customer familiarity with a retailer) to expectation (i.e. retailer knowledge of a customer). This in turn reflects the extent to which online also empowers the consumer. One of the reasons for the shift from the weekly big shop to a more "segmented" or "promiscuous" approach, where shoppers divide their purchases across multiple stores based on price and choice, is that both the Internet and the growth of convenience stores have lowered the transaction cost for shopper research. At the moment, many consumers are securing more value from the Internet in respect of groceries than the retailers are. Similarly, convenience stores (which supermarkets saw as offering growth at the expense of smaller chains as superstores reached saturation) have encouraged consumers to be more causal in their buying habits as top-ups of preferred products have become easier.

The aim now for retailers is to make buying so frictionless that the cost of research is once more unappealing to customers, hence Amazon's Dash button and the promise of the fridge that automatically orders more milk. The problem is that the genie of convenience cannot be put back in the bottle, which is a backhanded compliment to the power of the big supermarket brands, so the mixed mode of stores of different sizes and different methods of ordering and delivery will likely continue for the foreseeable future. In some ways, this is merely a return to the historical norm. The trend over the centuries has been towards more shops per head of the population, simply because of the profusion of commodities and the increase in living standards. Though we regret the loss of independents and pubs, we forget that there are a lot more retail outlets in total today, despite the advance of the "Big Four" supermarket oligopoly. It is the consolidation of car-centric, out-of-town superstores in the late twentieth century that now looks unusual.

With this in mind, turning supermarkets into "modern agoras", whether by incorporating pro-social activities or just more coffee shops and concessions, is serving a business model that requires customers to be corralled and coerced. Paul Mason's contention that "the average supermarket is a chilly, fluorescent-lit hell" is not necessarily a problem so long as there is a plurality of retail outlets and you can choose your preferred inferno. The current angst in the supermarket sector does not arise because we are spending less but because we are distributing our spending across more channels (we are less inclined to be corralled), which raises transaction costs in the short-term even if it promises to lower them in the long-term. But this means that the supermarkets must quicken the pace of their transformation (which explains Tesco's deck-clearing loss announcement) to highly-automated dark stores fronted by user-friendly online interfaces and sophisticated data analysis. What isn't going to happen is the revival of the agora.

So You Want To Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?

One of the odder features of this general election is that Ed Miliband may be the only party leader who actually wants to be Prime Minister. While there is still an element of "Go, nerd!" about it, the milifandom meme works because of his evident appetite for a role that other party leaders seem to be lukewarm about at best or disdain at worst. This could be simple naivety on his part, but I think it chimes with a popular assumption that candidates for Number 10 should at least display determination, which perhaps explains why Boris Johnson is now being wheeled out on the national stage. I always thought the Tories were making a mistake in caricaturing Miliband as Wallace, given that the stop-motion icon is an epitome of decency whose busy projects are well-meaning and human-scale. If the Labour leader had invested in a beagle five years ago, he'd surely be miles ahead in the popularity stakes now.

Cameron has already confirmed that he'll stand down as PM before the end of the next Parliament, if successful, without ever having convinced us that he really wanted the job in the first place (if Johnson consciously echoes Churchill, Cameron unconsciously echoes Halifax). He has always come across as someone who regarded it as an entitlement, rather than an achievement, with the inevitable result that his premiership has been marked by little principle and much opportunism, from the flip-flop on economic policy to the serial exploitation of Scotland. One of the unintended consequences of the resurrection of John Major this week was to remind us that the last Tory party leader to win an outright majority never gave in to the eurosceptic "bastards", whereas Cameron has conceded a referendum on the EU that will likely split the party in two, whatever the outcome.

I suspect the judgement of history will be that Cameron marked the decadence of the modern Conservative Party - i.e. the electoral legacy of Churchill and Macmillan. Though Thatcher is considered a "clean-break" by both supporters and critics, she was a traditionalist whose impact owed much to timing and her inability to imagine the consequences of globalisation and the resurgence of finance capital. Her admiration of Hayek and Friedman was philosophical, not technocratic ("economics is the method, the object is to change the soul"), which explained her romantic sympathy for her patrician predecessors and her dislike of Ted Heath. If Major marked an attempt by the Tories to reconnect with their inner Macmillan, he also revealed the impossibility of such nostalgia as the party started to fray under the social and economic tensions of the era, from sleaze to the ERM. The Cameron re-brand has been marked by one defeat after another, but none of them decisive: the waste of economic stagnation, marginalisation in Europe, the failure of deficit reduction. Same-sex marriage (trivial in historic terms, if you compare its impact to divorce or abortion) will probably be his only memorable achievement.

Nick Clegg long ago gave up even the pretence of presenting himself as a clean-cut alternative PM, instead trying to recast the LibDems as the domestic political equivalent of the UN Blue Berets: a higher form of civilisation trying to pacify the antagonistic locals. This reveals the de haut en bas worldview of establishment liberals that is normally obscured by the voluble party membership with their fondness for dog-shit and the sort of gestural policies that have now found a home with the Greens. Nicola Sturgeon is getting plenty of air-time, despite not standing as an MP and already being First Minister of Scotland, but her whole raison d'etre is that she does not want to be Prime Minister of the UK. Despite the Tory scare-mongering to the contrary, the SNP (who are close readers of the history of Irish independence) will keep their distance from Westminster entanglements. Just as Labour haven't forgotten 1979, neither have the Nats.

Everyone agrees that Nigel Farage has lost his spark, which is variously attributed to illness (i.e. too much booze), tiredness (i.e. too much booze) or the lack of anything interesting to say other than "blame the immigrants". My favourite conspiracy theory is that he has been bought-off by a Tory promise of a peerage if he fails to win South Thanet. In fact, UKIP always knew that they would do well to keep their head above water in a general election. They're a cup-team, which means they thrive as a protest vote in by-elections and when they can maximise their core support in low-turnout European elections. We're now in the run-in of the league season, where attention shifts to the challengers for the title (Labour and Tories) and those in danger of the drop (the LibDems). Farage has understandably adopted a defensive, core-vote strategy, which is why insulting the BBC audience in the second leaders' debate was a calculated ploy rather than evidence he'd over-indulged in the green room.

Outside of general elections, UKIP provide a sharp stick with which the media can prod the main parties, not so much to advance a particular agenda (though there is a fair bit of that, given the prejudices of press barons) but to generate embarrassments and mini-outrages that will attract readers and viewers. UKIP give good clickbait. The drying-up of media attention does not reflect an establishment conspiracy so much as the temporary redundancy of the party as a goad and the surfeit of "wind-ups" provided by party media machines, both overtly and covertly, from "Scottish mayhem" to Grant Shapps's sock-puppetry. Once the election is over, and particularly if the Tories form a government and maintain the commitment to a referendum, UKIP will emerge from its burrow as Europe moves back up the agenda.

The media's focus on the the post-election negotiations to come is tedious, but its allows them to sneer at all the parties even-handedly and thus reinforce the ideological assumption that democracy is inadequate and that the will of the people, whether in Scotland or Greece, must be resisted if it steps beyond acceptable bounds. Though some centrist die-hards continue to extol the benefits of coalition, most UK commentators prefer to predict chaos and illegitimacy. This obviously serves the neoliberal agenda of arrogating more and more of the social sphere to the control of the market and its supra-democratic institutions. Naturally, if the Tories and LibDems can command a majority once more (with the help of the DUP, perhaps), this will instantly be presented as stability and continuity and thus "good news for the markets".

I think Ed Miliband's improving popularity (which, let's be honest is too little and too late) owes something to the apparent respect he has shown for democracy during the campaign, both in his love-bombing of the electorate (all those heartfelt straight-to-camera pitches) and his refusal to be drawn into pre-election stitch-ups (admittedly, this may just be tactical good sense rather than principle). While other party leaders casually alienate large blocs of the electorate (the Scots, non-Kippers), or simply write them off (all those ex-LibDems), Miliband seems determined to appeal to as many people as possible, rather than settle for the "35 per cent strategy" of recent myth (another early claim of impending illegitimacy). It may not work, but at least it means that someone is prepared to campaign in an open and inclusive manner. As Obama found (and Miliband, like most Labour wonks, is enamoured of Democrat Party practice), the "hopey-changey" thing can make a difference.