Category Archives: Governments and parties

Margins of error

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The election of 2010 really came to life towards the end of the campaign, most observers noted as Labour closed the gap, ‘winning the campaign’. However it was said the whole month was a fascinating battle, with with each party winning on some issues and days and losing on others.

The most accurate pollster YouICMMoriulus had tabulated the ups and downs of each party’s fortunes and the narrative of key events was reasonably clear.

This was especially the case when one examined the Tories’ volatile lead over Labour.

The campaign started with the Tories on 40%, 10% clear of Labour on 30%, with the Liberal Democrats on 20%, and others, mainly the nationalist parties and UKIP, on about 10%. The Tories had the best start, gaining support from business leaders on their policy to scrap an increase in National Insurance, and by day 3 they had taken an 11% lead, easily enough for a Commons majority. This increased to 12% by day 5, as Labour struggled to defend their economic record (the blip on day 4 taking the lead to just 7% seemed attributable to a fleeting reaction to a gaffe by Boris Johnson on plans for a new runway at Heathrow).

Between day 5 and day 14 the main campaign story was a surge higher by the Liberal Democrats on day 11, and a move higher by the BNP (counted in others) on day 12, taking votes from the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems rise, to 24%, was short-lived and sowed the seeds of its own destruction. That day Nick Clegg announced he would work only with certain members of other parties in (what then seemed likely) a hung parliament. This seemed to backfire and the Lib Dems were back down to 19% the following day. The BNP’s rise in the polls was nipped in the bud by a hastily arranged ‘Rock against racism’ concert. Both parties flatlined after that.

By day 14, the Tories had kept their 12% lead and Labour were getting increasingly desperate. Yet that day is what the history books will term “Mandelson Monday”. Labour’s veteran campaigner produced pictures of a member of the Shadow Cabinet in a compromising position with women and drugs. That no-one had heard of the Tory didn’t seem to matter – next day’s polls showed the Tories down at 37% from 42%, Labour up to 34% from 29%, and the lead slashed to just 3% – enough to see Labour home with a majority.

The mood of euphoria didn’t last long, however. On Tuesday (day 15) the Tories showed that the pictures were a crude forgery. Their bounce was immediate and sustained, taking them up to 43% and a 13% lead by day 18, leading to talks of a 1997 or 1983 style majority. This too went down badly with voters, and the Tory lead subsided to 7% by day 22, although a wave of strikes on the railways and at the airports saw the lead back to 13% by day 26, May Day, with the Labour vote share down to just 28%, its worst of the campaign.

That was to be the Tories’ high point, however. It had been little noticed but economic optimism had been rising significantly since the release of initial Q1 2010 GDP data, and the Bank Holiday weekend was the busiest in the nation’s shops on record. Why this suddenly showed up in the polls remains a mystery, but by Tuesday, the Tories were down at 38%, Labour on 32% and the lead slashed to 5%. David Cameron’s advisers told him that Labour might even scrape a majority, especially given the marginals were looking less good.

Cameron consulted former leader Michael Howard, who argued that the Tories needed to put clear blue water between them and Labour. He was thinking about a crackdown on immigration. Cameron’s speech initially went down well, with the Wednesday morning polls showing the gap returning to 9%.

The impact was, however, short-lived. The Tories hastily arranged poster campaign, “Are you thinking what Michael is thinking” reminded voters of what they didn’t like about the old Conservative party, and by polling day the polls were showing just a 3% lead for the Tories, 37% to 34%, with Labour gaining directly and from the smaller parties, whose share fell to 9%. On that basis Labour would have a working majority.

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Unfortunately for the pollsters the final result was Tories 40%, Labour 30%, Lib Dems 20%, and Others 10% and Cameron got his big majority. Everyone blamed the polls, but it was pointed out that such a volatile race was bound to be difficult. Academics argued over whether Cameron’s immigration appeal had worked, but people were too ashamed to admit it to pollsters. It was agreed the economic news had benefitted Labour, but not enough.

In fact, unbeknown to the pollsters, US search giant Giggle had developed a system which allowed them to know everyone in the country’s voting intention on each day of the campaign. The chart below shows this and their remarkable finding – the campaign made zero difference. Throughout 40% supported the Tories, 30% Labour, 20% the Lib Dems and 10% others. No-one changed their mind at any point.

——–

Apologies for the Andrew Roberts style fantasy, but I expect we’ll get a lot of this kind of ‘explanation’ of poll movements, and yet voting intentions are probably quite rigid (if not as rigid as in this example). The movement in the polls discussed was entirely a function of polling error, I simply ran an opinion poll on a UK electorate whose views were entirely fixed. As
Anthony Wells says:

Party support from a single pollster should randomly vary a couple of points in either direction from poll to poll (the lead will be even more volatile, since you’ve got random variation on two numbers).

This is the margin of error, which typically says something like 95% of the time the figures will be within 2-3% (above or below) of the actual figure (depending on how large they are) where the actual figure is the whole population’s voting intention. So all the movement in the polls was because they are polls, and the final poll was clearly a rogue, i.e outside that range. Here’s the chart of true public opinion and the polls.

Vince gets it right

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Businessmen on inflated salaries lecturing the rest of Britain on how to run the country are "utterly nauseating" and "being used" by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, says today.

via.

Not that this is particularly hard to get right, and that the businessmen are probably more users than used. And note that this critique has now been delegated to the party that will definitely not form a government. The Guardian adds its own spin:

Cable's condemnation comes as study by the Guardian found that bosses at 10 of the largest companies to have endorsed Cameron's tax plans would be forced to take a combined £74m cut to their pay and bonus deals if they worked in the public sector, where the Conservative leader intends to impose stringent pay caps.

Good point. Except that it specifically refers to a comparison between public sector bosses and their private sector peers, rather than anyone lower down the totem pole – to the people who decide to spend their local authority’s recruitment budget in the Guardian rather than the people who execute the decision, for instance. Maybe Vince is making a head fake in that direction.

Was there something you needed from me before ten?

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The American NPR web site has a nice story about what happens when a company / organisation’s management stops caring about when employees come to work. And what happens is that employees not only get better lives, they up their output; at least, this seems to be the case for the organisation featured.

Coincidentally, the Guardian today carried piece about John Lewis; a large UK retail partnership. At John Lewis, as you’ll know, every employee gets a meaningful share of profit, and they do turn a profit. I remember similar pieces in the 90s about Cisco Systems, where lots of the staff (all?) have shares. Cisco are still doing pretty well, as far as I can see.

I’m going to go out on a (not very long) limb here, and say that if there’s a go-getting future in – ah – our future, it’s going to involve an increase in this sort of stuff. What it ain’t gonna be made of is this:

… challenges aren’t faced by Britain in isolation. Across the globe other nations are adapting to massive change. They are responding to the democratisation of knowledge through new technology, the increasing mobility of capital and labour, the entry of billions into the world economy, the liberating power of scientific breakthroughs, rapid improvements in education and the collapse of social rigidities which inhibited growth, opportunity and innovation.

Because that’s empty talk. If you’re going to say there’s change coming, you owe it to us to say what kind of change. From where to where is capital and labour going to move? Which social rigidities are going to collapse?

To help us fill in the blanks the way that we’re supposed to, Gove gives us, yet again, the theme of New Labour turning back into Old Labour; observe that they are “in bed” with the unions (again); there are strikes (again). Implicitly, various horrors will come to pass: perhaps you’ll miss your flight; perhaps there’ll be power cuts. And worse than that, owing to unionisation, British companies are going to fail. Relentless global competition (the white heat of it?) means only one thing: no jobs. And so on, with a scattering of “deep red”, “dinosaurs” and “class war”.

This is, um, a scratched record. Or a Stockhausen tape loop, perhaps.

Anyway, since we’ve been challenged to think of change and progress, may I just say that I don’t think it’ll work this time around. Frankly, the people who pick up faithfully on this message are getting on a bit.

Update: Justin notes (his reporting is a bit more accurate than mine) that what Gove thinks New Labour is “in bed” with is “the past”. They’ve been “recaptured” by “the spirit of Seventies socialist nostalgia”, apparently.

China’s Looming Demographic Problem Moves Steadily Up Over The Radar

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As Israeli blogger “Nobody” points out for us,the Economist has been giving increasing coverage to global demographic issues of late, and this week it is China’s problem that has caught their eye.

As the Economist point out, the impact of so many years of one child per family policy is going to be significant, and while changing it now will be too late to avoid short term damage, in the longer term such a change is essential, if the country ever wants to return to some kind of structural stability.

SINCE the 1970s China’s birth rate has plummeted while the number of elderly people has risen only gradually. As a result its “dependency ratio”—the proportion of dependents to people at work—is low. This has helped to fuel China’s prodigious growth. But this “demographic dividend” will peak in 2010. China’s one-child policy will keep birth rates low, but as life expectancy continues to increase, so will the dependency ratio, reducing the country’s potential for growth. The government could yet salvage the situation by loosening its one-child policy. More children would increase the dependency ratio until they were old enough to join the workforce, but reduce labour shortages in the long term.

Again, no one really knows what the present Chinese TFR actually is. The US census bureau have just revised down their estimate to 1.5 from 1.8, but many internal studies put it at nearer 1.3, which, if accurate, is bound to produce a major structural distortion in the population pyramid. The economic consequences – for the whole planet – are also bound to be significant, as “Nobody” points out:

Meanwhile, given the general propensity of China to rapid economic growth and no less dramatic deceleration of its population growth (the workforce will stop growing pretty soon actually), the next superpower is about to transform itself into a huge vacuum machine sucking off labor surpluses from around the globe. Inside China labor shortages will develop and wages shoot up pushing labor intensive industries out of China and generating demand for these products from outside China. In short, after a decade or something, the global economy, and even more so the economies of the third world, may get a friendly push forward from the world’s next superpower, and a very massive one on that occasion.

What China’s demographic deficit has in store for all of us a decade or so from now is actually far from clear, but one thing is certain, it will be a roller coaster ride. Get ready to fasten your seatbelts.

Update

Quite coincidentally, a new blog was born yesterday – the anarchist banker – written by a young Portuguese economist who is a unabashed fan of Fernando Pessoa. His first post reviews a paper – The End of Chimerica – written by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick.

For the better part of the past decade, the world economy has been dominated by a world economic order that combined Chinese export-led development with US overconsumption. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 likely marks the beginning of the end of the Chimerican relationship. In this paper we look at this era as economic historians, trying to set events in a longer-term perspective. In some ways China’s economic model in the decade 1998-2007 was similar to the one adopted by West Germany and Japan after World War II. Trade surpluses with the U.S. played a major role in propelling growth. But there were two key differences. First, the scale of Chinese currency intervention was without precedent, as were the resulting distortions of the world economy. Second, the Chinese have so far resisted the kind of currency appreciation to which West Germany and Japan consented. We conclude that Chimerica cannot persist for much longer in its present form. As in the 1970s, sizeable changes in exchange rates are needed to rebalance the world economy. A continuation of Chimerica at a time of dollar devaluation would give rise to new and dangerous distortions in the global economy.

I would just note in passing that the China-United States nexus was not the only export-lead/excess consumption duet we just left behind, there was the Sweden-Baltics/Ukraine one, the Germany-Southern Europe one, and the Japan-RoW one (rest of the world). As we wave bye-bye to one era, it is just worth noting than we don’t seem to have a very clear idea of what the one which lies ahead may look like.

Anyway, thanks to the anarchist banker blogger for drawing this all to our attention. As the author himself admits, posting may be infrequent (anarchic?), but they should always be worth the read.

The new Tory party: desert for everybody

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It’s taken me a few days to get around to it, but here’s my take on David Cameron’s equality speech (The Big Society: Hugo Young Lecture, 10 Nov 2009).

Cameron name checks Wilkinson and Pickett and says that they “have shown that among the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator”.

He then sets himself this rhetorical objective: how can you square an admission that less equal societies do worse than more equal societies with a long-standing Tory view on personal wealth: that is, the wealth of an individual is a reflection of the choices they have made. Since choice is good, material gains that aren’t explicitly judged unlawful must also be good. Here is an example of this kind of thinking in a 1977 speech by Margaret Thatcher:

The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. … Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

And of course this view was taken up almost wholesale by New Labour, so it’s a view that still has currency in a very large part of Britain’s polity. The problem for advocates of choice simpliciter is that choice is compatible with inequality. And it’s hard to be an advocate of inequality: at least, it’s hard to do it in a way that’s going to make you popular. Cameron’s way out suggests sleight of hand: he switches from talking about inequality measured across the whole of society to talking about inequality between those in the middle and the least well off:

We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it. That doesn’t mean we should be fixated only on a mechanistic objective like reducing the Gini co-efficient, the traditional financial measure of inequality or on closing the gap between the top and the bottom. Instead, we should focus on the causes of poverty as well as the symptoms because that is the best way to reduce it in the long term. And we should focus on closing the gap between the bottom and the middle, not because that is the easy thing to do, but because focusing on those who do not have the chance of a good life is the most important thing to do.

And if our attention can be shifted towards the category of the least well off and away from the category of the wealthy, then perhaps we might just stop worrying about the wealthy. If this is Cameron’s purpose, he’s only following in the footsteps of New Labour’s Peter Mandelson, the man who told us he was ‘intensely relaxed’ about personal wealth.

But let’s say we take Cameron seriously: let’s say we agree that alleviating extreme poverty is the goal that matters and restrict our political aim to that. How can we reach that goal while (implicitly) either maintaining taxes at current levels or even reducing them? After all, in the same speech, Cameron tells us the increase in government spending since 1997 can’t be sustained. More than that, he argues: ‘large government’ has come to cause inequality:

But, quite apart from the fact that it turns out much of this has been paid for on account, creating debts that will have to be paid back by future generations; a more complete assessment of the evidence shows something different – that as the state continued to expand under Labour, our society became more, not less unfair.

Cameron’s answer, it seems, is to reduce state spending and curtail the role of government and instead go work on the way people think: children should get “better education” and adults should get better attitudes: “responsible behaviour” should be incentivised. Now this may make you think of New Labour, but forget them: to my mind, at least, the stall Cameron is setting out looks as ugly as anything yet brought forth by American conservatives. This is workfare advocacy. And the failure of this approach, of course, is just what people like Wilkinson and Pickett have been working hard to demonstrate.

But even if your stall is unattractive, you can set it out in an honest way. You might simply say: we believe that benefit claimants should do more to justify our support. Cameron goes beyond this. For one, his suggestion that the increase in state spending since 1997 (when New Labour took office) has caused inequality is really reaching. A history of UK wealth distribution shows that most of the post-war rise in inequality took place from the late 1970s to the early 1990s: all Tory years. This is well known. Even worse, Cameron conflates ‘size of government’ with ‘amount of state spending’. These are clearly not the same thing: you can have a small government that spends a lot, or you can have millions of bureaucrats who are needlessly penny-pinching. The complaint that many have made about New Labour is that they have promoted the second. It’s a reasonable complaint, yet it says nothing about the proper role of government: what its aims should be; what makes it legitimate.

Is there anything more going on in Cameron’s speech? Is there a broader ethical point? Is there anything new? I can’t see it. And an old idea which is not getting any Conservative Party air time, but which needs to, is this: an individual’s lawful choices may have bad consequences for others. If our lives go badly, we might have a share in the blame, but we don’t carry all of the blame. Where lives are blighted, adjudicated redress – where those who adjudicate are under democratic oversight – is justified. Taxes can be fair.

Immediately. Without Delay.

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From the assembled press, someone shouts a question, “Effective immediately?”
“I have been informed that such an announcement was prepared today, you should already have a copy. According to my understanding, that is immediately. Without delay.”

Twenty years ago this evening, Günter Schabowski gave an unrehearsed answer at a press conference, and thousands of East Berliners — and soon, many more thousands of East Germans — did not delay. The Berlin Wall was open.

Welcome to the Lisbon Era

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Czech President Vaclav Klaus, after much hemming and hawing, signed the Treaty of Lisbon this afternoon. It is expected to enter into force on 1 December 2009. This success is undoubtedly the highlight of the Swedish Presidency, which made concluding ratification a top priority.

Prominent changes include more qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers, increased involvement of the European Parliament in the legislative process through extended codecision with the Council of Ministers, eliminating the pillar system and the creation of a President of the European Council with a term of two and half years and a High Representative for Foreign Affairs to present a united position on EU policies. The Treaty of Lisbon will also make the Union’s human rights charter, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, legally binding.

Now that that’s done, is everyone ready for the next round of enlargement?

Rory the Tory?

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File under “Who knew?” The Guardian reports that Rory Stewart has been selected as a candidate for the UK’s parliament from a safe (10,000 majority) Conservative seat. In one of those moves that makes me think that parliamentary systems are odd sometimes, one of his first actions will be to move so that he actually lives in the district he will represent. “I will be straight on to the estate agent in the morning,” the Guardian quotes him as saying. “I’m very much looking forward to living in the constituency and getting to know everybody.”

(Stewart’s been a soldier, a diplomat, a wanderer, a provincial governor in Iraq, a professor at Harvard and is currently a director of a significant charity helping part of Afghanistan, yet the Guardian web edition’s headline writer chooses to identify him as “Former royal tutor Rory Stewart.” What does that say about Britain? Or the Guardian? Or perhaps the Guardian’s perceptions of its audience?)

I would not have pegged the author of The Places In Between as a Tory, though on closer consideration I think he’s too much of a loose cannon an independent thinker to be much of a back-bencher at all. Anyone who drops everything to walk across Asia and spends the winter of 2001 walking across central Afghanistan is not likely to be fazed by a party whip. I haven’t yet read The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, which probably gives a better sense of how he’ll do in constituent service. Maybe he’ll turn out splendidly. Still, he’s had a decade of changing jobs every year or two, is he likely to settle down to work in Westminster? (On the other hand, I asked the same question about Bobby Jindal, with whom I have a passing acquaintance, and he’s still on the job.)

Fall of the European Left, revisited

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Parties of the left are out of power in three of the Big Four now, and everyone expects Labour to lose the next General Election in Britain. Going down the list to the Next-Biggest Four, we have Spain (Zapatero’s center-left government hanging in there), Poland (center-right), Romania (grand coalition of the two largest parties; can’t exactly say left-right, because Romanian politics always don’t map well on that axis) and the Netherlands (bizarre Grand Coalition of Christian Democrats and Labour, with Labour far down in the polls and expected to be kicked out soon). It’s not unreasonable to expect that by next summer, Spain might be the only large country in Europe with a left-of-center government.

There’s a recent post over at Crooked Timber deploring this, and suggesting that it’s because

[We’re seeing] the end of the electoral strategy which began with Bill Clinton and which (arguably) is still being kept alive by Kevin Rudd in Australia. Basically, it’s the view that you can keep a balloon flying by constantly chucking out left-wing ballast. Which worked very well in the 1990s and early 2000s, but it does have a limited lifespan built into it. After a while, you run out of ballast to throw out and you find that the hot-air burners aren’t working any more; the traditional left-wing base of your party has switched off, the unions can’t provide blocks of support and you’re left as a more or less identikit technocrat party, largely indistinguishable from your opponents and trying to compete on the basis of more efficient provision of “public services”.

Well… maybe. I submit that this model works tolerably well for Britain (though I have some reservations); somewhat less well for Germany; and hardly at all for France. (Italian and Spanish politics I leave to those who are better informed.) Continue reading →