The mystery of the three million

One of the central concerns about Britain leaving the European Union is that it will put British jobs at risk. How many jobs, precisely? Or, if not precisely, then at least roughly?

For clarification on this burning issue of our time, naturally I turned to the acknowledged expert on economics in modern politics, the man who spent ten years as chancellor of the exchequer before becoming prime minister.

During the 1997 election campaign, Gordon Brown warned that divisions and uncertainty in the Conservative Party threatened 'the three-and-a-half million jobs that relied on Europe'. But that seems to have been an over-estimate, because four years later he was arguing that 'over three quarters of a million UK companies trade with the rest of the European Union - half our total trade - with three million jobs affected'.

So it's three million? Yes, that must be right. Because that was the figure Brown was still citing in 2005, and then again in the 2010 election campaign: 'Three million jobs depend on our membership of the European Union.'

And in March this year, Brown made the same point: 'We must tell the truth about the three million jobs, 25,000 companies, £200 billion of annual exports and the £450 billion of inward investment linked to Europe.'

(Incidentally, that '25,000 companies' is a bit worrying, don't you think? In 2001 it was 'over three quarters of a million companies'. What on earth has happened to our economy?)

Coming back to those three million jobs, though. It's not just Gordon Brown who quotes this figure. It's bandied around all the time by those who support British membership of the EU. It was quoted, for example, by Tim Farron on Question Time last night.

But I'm no economist, and there's something I don't fully understand. We had, we were told, the longest period of uninterrupted growth in our history, followed by the worst recession in living memory, and then a recovery that's either the envy of the developed world or a fragile property-fuelled bubble (depending on taste).

Things have changed so much. Back in 1997 we had around 26 million people employed in Britain. Now it's over 30 million.

And yet somehow, inexplicably, the number of jobs dependent on the EU doesn't seem to have moved an inch in all that time. It didn't go up in the good times; it hasn't come down with all the problems in the Euro-zone.

It just sits there, unchanging and - perhaps more to the point - unchallenged. Puzzling, isn't it?

A tale of some minor parties

A week or so back, I predicted that one consequence of the election would be the resignations of Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg as the leaders of, respectively, Ukip and the Liberal Democrats. I also predicted that Natalie Bennett would not resign as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.

These things having now come to pass, it's time to evaluate them.

Starting with the last first, Bennett should have the decency to go immediately. She has proved herself to be completely useless as a leader. The Greens had a dreadful election, and much of the blame for that rests with her.

The party achieved less than 4 per cent of the vote. Under most sensible forms of proportional representation, the bar for securing seats is set at 5 per cent. Frankly they're fortunate that first-past-the-post came to their rescue and gave them an MP.

Yet the opportunity was unquestionably there for the Greens: lots of airtime and visibility, a weak Labour leadership, a widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream politics. A breakthrough of sorts was possible. Obviously not in terms of winning large numbers of seats, but even without representation, a minor party can still have an influence, can help to shape the political agenda.

You only need look to Ukip. At a time when they had no MPs at all, they were still capable of scaring the British prime minister into promising a referendum when he didn't want one, and panicking the Labour Party into saying they'd 'get tough' on immigration, when we knew they wouldn't.

So what did Bennett do? She joined in the chorus of 'the Tories are mean and nasty'. Well, if you believed that, then you should have done the sensible thing and voted for a party capable of removing the Conservatives from office. Which is, indeed, what the vast majority of those opposed to the Tories actually did.

At a constituency level, things may have been different, but on the national stage Bennett offered nothing at all that was distinctive. One brief mention in a leaders' debate of climate change and vanishing species, and that was it. At a time when fracking offers a perfect way of linking the local with the global, there was only silence.

It is, of course, more difficult to get attention for environmental issues at a time of economic hardship, but this is far from a new problem. I wrote about it in Crisis? What Crisis?, my book on the 1970s. There's been plenty of time to work out a strategy for such a situation.

The Greens are one of the few parties who actually have a USP. Yet they didn't exploit it. Instead there was a manifesto and a platform full of policies on an absurd range of issues that were entirely irrelevant, including the stupidity over copyright, to which I drew attention a while back. (And which subsequently annoyed the hell out of a lot of creative people who were sympathetic to the party.)

Why? Where's the benefit in burying your brand? Why allow your core message to be lost amidst a welter of questions about a tax policy you will never have a chance to implement?

One other point, which most people are (quite rightly) too polite and decent to say out loud: the voice was wrong. The British public didn't warm to being waffled at in an Australian accent. Obviously it shouldn't matter, but it does.

In short, Bennett should go.

So too should Farage. He's left open the possibility of coming back from his holidays and standing again for the Ukip leadership, but he should resist the temptation. The party is better off without him now.

He has been an extraordinary figure who has over-achieved on a spectacular scale. In many ways, he was the story of the Coalition years, conducting a brilliant guerrilla campaign against Westminster. (Do I need to point out that I'm talking about technique not policies? I do hope not.) I went to one of his EU debates with Nick Clegg and he was a superb performer - committed Europhiles were coming out of the hall saying how good he was.

But he still has to go.

When Ukip won the elections for the European Parliament a year ago, I wrote that they'd reached their high-water mark. If they were ever to go any further, I suggested, they needed to thank Farage for all his work and ask him to step down. He'd taken them as far as he possibly could. My comparison was with Ian Holloway, a colourful, charming and competent manager who got Blackpool Football Club to the Premier League, but couldn't keep them there.

My argument was that if Ukip wanted to secure - let alone go beyond - the 4.4 million votes they achieved last year, they had to make serious inroads into Labour heartlands, and Farage was probably not the man for that. He did pretty well this week, but the party fell to 3.9 million votes on a far higher turnout. It could have been better if he'd gone last year. Now it's probably too late, and decline is (I think) inevitable.

Ukip are, as normal with third parties, an odd coalition of the disgruntled and the idealistic from all points of the political compass.

There are two broad bases of support: the Eurosceptic deserters from the Conservative Party and the disillusioned white working-class who feel abandoned by Labour. These are represented by Douglas Carswell and Paul Nuttall respectively, and I assume that they will be the two candidates in a leadership election. I also assume that Carswell will win, to the detriment of the party's electoral interests.

The alternative is Suzanne Evans, currently the acting leader, who would be their best choice of all. And since I think that, I don't expect her to get the job on a permanent basis.

Their moment has passed, but they leave behind an example of how to make a difference. Why is there no Left party that can do this?

And so, finally, to Nick Clegg.

What can one say? Well, firstly, that he made exactly the right decision in 2010. The Lib Dems, and before them the Liberals, had always banged on about coalition government being a good thing. They were offered it, and they accepted. To do otherwise would have been foolish.

Some people complained that Clegg would have sold his own mother to get power, but that judgement seemed a little harsh. After all, he did join the Lib Dems, which isn't traditionally the way to achieve high office. Given the state of modern politics, he could have fitted perfectly comfortably into the modern Conservative or Labour Parties, but he chose the road less travelled.

As the junior partner in the Coalition, the Lib Dems proved surprisingly effective at government. They got through key policies like the pupil premium and raising the threshold for income tax; even the tuition fees increase - damaging though it was - had a logic, if they'd only had the sense to call it a time-limited graduate tax.

Most of their members and (probably) their supporters would have preferred a coalition with Labour, but that wasn't available in 2010. In the circumstances, I thought they played a difficult hand rather well and could justifiably be proud of their record.

But over recent months, and particularly during the campaign itself, they decided to distance themselves from their Coalition partners and, in so doing, they thoroughly ruined the good story they had to tell.

The final straw came when Danny Alexander decided to reveal the contents of private government papers in an attack on the Tories. The effect was to make the party look incompetent and untrustworthy. Who would want to work with people who go telling tales out of school? The first rule of Coalition Club is you don't talk about what goes on behind the scenes at Coalition Club.

Before the election, it was widely assumed that Tim Farron would become the next leader. Now that looks like such a nailed-on certainty that the party's going to have to twist someone's arm to stand against him, so that it least has the formal structure of a contest. Norman Lamb, possibly; or that bloke up in Scotland, whose constituency is so remote that not even SNP canvassers could find it.

Farron is the obvious and correct choice. He's as close as they've got to an old-fashioned Liberal, and since the parliamentary party is down to the numbers last seen under Jeremy Thorpe, they might as well adopt an old-fashioned approach.

But it's an absurdly uphill struggle now. The thing is this: if the Lib Dems didn't exist, who would bother to invent them?

Election predictions

This is, according to David Cameron, the most important election in a generation. And, according to all commentators, it's the most unpredictable election since 1945.

The first claim is simply wrong, at least in the sense that Cameron means. The second is undeniably true. But that merely invites the making of predictions. There's no fun in predicting the inevitable; much more entertaining to commit oneself when there's every chance of being completely wrong. So, to launch this new incarnation of my blog, here is my prediction for the result of the forthcoming election:

There will be a Conservative government with a small majority.

And some more predictions... After the election, things get really interesting. That Conservative majority will wither on the vine in the heat of the EU referendum, and Ukip - having won fewer than five seats in the election - will blossom, fed by a steady stream of Tory defectors. And that will skew the balance of power within Ukip towards Douglas Carswell and away from Paul Nuttall, to the ultimate detriment of the party's fortunes. The defections will sufficiently panic the Conservatives that when Cameron steps down (having won the referendum), they will opt for Boris Johnson as leader, thereby ensuring that they lose the subsequent election.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party will decide it ought to have a woman as leader, and will choose Rachel Reeves over Yvette Cooper, thereby ensuring that they also lose the subsequent election.

Also choosing a new leader will be the Liberal Democrats. They won't perform disastrously in the election (though they'll win fewer seats than the SNP), but - finding they're not needed in government - they will go for a change anyway. The new leader will be Tim Farron, thereby ensuring that they do rather well in the subsequent election.

PS I would like to point out that on the day of the 2001 general election, I correctly predicted - against all conventional wisdom - that Iain Duncan Smith would take over as Tory leader. Since then, however, I've been wrong on almost every occasion. So if any of this turns out to be correct, I'll be trumpeting it for years to come.