Underestimating Swing in the Marginal Seats

January 27th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief was unwell over the weekend, but one piece of polling data particularly caught his eye, and could have a tremendous effect on the outcome of the election. The consistent gold mine that is the UK Polling Report blog has the goods:

The News of the World has a new ICM poll of marginal seats in tomorrow’s paper. ICM’s sample covered the 97 seats where Labour are in first place and the Conservatives in second place, and where the Conservatives need a swing between 4% and 10%

[…]

The topline voting intention figures in these seats, with changes from the last electon, are CON 40%(+9.2), LAB 37%(-7.4), LDEM 14%(-3.8) – so a swing of 8.3% from Labour to the Conservatives. In contrast the last ICM national poll showed a national swing of 6.5%, so once again we find a slightly larger swing towards the Conservatives in the Con-Lab marginal seats they need to win. This has been pretty consistent in all polls of marginal seats in the last couple of years.

Reading this, the Parallax Brief had one of those head-slapping “of course!” moments.

A safe Labour seat is bound to have a larger number of voters which are immovable than would have a marginal. While large swings can occur in safe seats without the change in MP that would give the swing publicity (gone from a super safe seat to a really safe seat isn’t a headline), it is still necessarily the case that safe seats have a greater percentage of voters who will only ever vote one way irrespective of circumstances.

Therefore, as one moves along the constituency list, from safest to most marginal, one moves further and further away from one’s heartland, and moves into constituencies that have a higher portion of voters who may have recently, or could in the future, swing one way or the other.

Of course, all things are not equal, and local issues can matter, but in general, it follows that marginal seats are not just vulnerable because they only have a small buffer zone, but because they also have a greater volume of swing voters.

And the Parallax Brief suspects that with an unpopular, and long standing government, this may make the marginals more vulnerable than the current national polling might suggest.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Banning the Burqa Would be an Affront to our Heritage

January 26th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Burqa_EnglandA six month-long French Parliamentary report concluded that Muslim dress should be banned schools, hospitals, public transport and government offices.

From the Jakarta Globe:

“The wearing of the full veil is a challenge to our republic. This is unacceptable,” the report said. “We must condemn this excess.” The commission however stopped short of proposing broader legislation to outlaw the burqa in the streets, shopping centres and other public venues after raising doubts about its constitutionality.

…the commission called on parliament to adopt a resolution stating that the burqa was “contrary to the values of the republic” and proclaiming that “all of France is saying ‘no’ to the full veil.” The National Assembly resolution paves the way for legislation making it illegal for anyone to appear with their face covered at state-run institutions and in public transport for reasons of security.

[...]

Women who turn up at the post office or any government building wearing the full veil should be denied services such as a work visa, residency papers or French citizenship, the report recommended. Critics of the “burqa debate” have warned the measures risk stigmatising France’s six million Muslims who are already bristling at the government’s launching of a national identity debate that has exposed fears about Islam.

The Parallax Brief may not know enough about the “values of the Republic” to argue whether the burqa is contrary to them or not, but he does know that the authors of the report have produced a conclusion that is contrary to the values of western-style liberal democracy.

Western democracies are founded on a tiny clutch of magnificently simple and irreducible values, perhaps the primary of which is that a private individual has the right to do just about whatever he pleases as long as he is not infringing on the rights of others. Obviously, that’s something that is permitted to differing levels in different democracies, and which can have a variety of interpretations, but it is a belief which is integral to our way of life.

This belief even extends to activities which we view as damaging or immoral. Having unprotected sex with a great many partners is both dangerous and, many would argue, immoral, but we don’t pass a law to make illegal the activities of the nation’s lotharios.

An example more pertinent to France’s burqa debate is that we allow fascist parties to exist, despite the fact they stand against much of what we believe, and, if they ever gained power, would likely abrogate many of our freedoms: They may stand against our liberal beliefs, but our liberal beliefs lead us to conclude that we must tolerate their existence.

Similarly, in Britain, we believe that people are free to wear what they want, and free to practice their religion, and just because the burqa is a physical manifestation of a culture that is neither western nor liberal, doesn’t mean that we should ban it. Indeed, despite the fact that the Parallax Brief sides with the standard feminist view that forcing the burqa on women — or bringing up girls so they ‘want’ to wear such a thing, whichever way you want to phrase it — is absolutely against western liberal values, he also knows that our western liberal values demand we permit it. There’s no right not to be offended by clothing. A woman has the right to wear what she wants, whether that be a tiny miniskirt and top which covers barely more flesh than a bikini, or a burqa at the other end of the spectrum.

Our culture is not defined by a specific set of clothes, but by the freedom to wear virtually whichever clothes one wants. Within this context, wearing the burqa in a land with a Judeo-Christian heritage is as much a part of Western culture as kids dressed like Sid Vicious.

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Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

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Esther Rantzen In Four-Way Marginal Race?

January 22nd, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

In his ten predictions for 2010, the Parallax Brief stuck his neck on the line and backed Esther Rantzen to become MP for Luton South. He felt that while it has been notoriously difficult for independents to win seats in modern day elections, the expenses scandal and the increasingly narrow dividing lines between the main parties might offer independents an opportunity to capture a mood of public protest. Further, Ms. Rantzen has an oven-ready high profile, and an unimpeachable background in charity work and public advocacy, which, combined with her centrist “floating-voter” politics, will enable her to take votes from both sides of the political spectrum.

Mike Smithson, of the brilliant Political Betting website, notes that Ms. Rantzen is already gaining extraordinarily positive publicity, and will likely continue to do so, which, combined with a unique political and demographic situation in the constituency, could turn it into a four-way marginal:

Looking at the 2005 notionals [for the Luton South constituency] LAB 42.8: CON 28.1: LD 22.5 this should fall easily to the Cameron juggernaut even though the incumbent Labour MP who figures so much inn the expenses affair is not standing.

Yet hugely complicating factors are the candidature of Esther Rantzen – the former “That’s Life” presenter and what happens to the very large Muslim vote at a time when Chilcott is putting the Iraq war on the agenda again.

Esther, who has always been a publicity magnet, has been getting some remarkable coverage and the chances are that this will continue until polling day.

The Parallax Brief believes this should be right. With a high profile independent entering the race, a big political defection taking voters from the first to the third placed party, and a swing away from Labour mitigated by the resignation of the tarnished incumbent, the race should be as open as any seat within the country.

Ms. Rantzen last year participated in one of Think Politics’ Twitterviews — interviews on Twitter where the questions and answers must be completed in a single tweet. If you’d like to read a transcript of that, click here.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Thank God for the British Electorate

January 20th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

The big political news overnight from Stateside was that Republican candidate Scott Brown defeated his Democrat competitor Martha Coakley in the traditionally left wing state of Massachusetts to take the late Ted Kennedy’s old seat in the US Senate. The result is a devastating blow to the Democrat party: psychologically, the best British analogy might be if a Labour candidate had taken Kensington and Chelsea ahead of Michael Portillo after the death of Alan Clarke, and legislatively it means the Democrats no longer have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which will allow the GOP to block healthcare legislation.

The Parallax Brief has wondered for a while how the Republican Party has gotten away with the manner in which has conducted itself in the aftermath of its crushing election defeat to Barack Obama in 2008. The lies, perfidy, demagoguery, scaremongering, and hypocrisy from the right wing media, and the congressional party itself, has been breathtaking. Worse, the electorate is obviously falling for it.

Andrew Sullivan, the libertarian-conservative commentator is not, and he explains on his blog for the Atlantic (more…)

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Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

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The Importance of Knowing Dick

December 3rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Former Vice President Richard Cheney has been lambasted since he left office for his strident criticism of the Obama administration. Leading members of an administration are expected maintain decorum and hold back on criticism of their successors for at least a year. Daniel Drezner, the largely conservative foreign policy expert, usually defends Cheney for doing so on the principle that Cheney feels strongly enough about Obama’s policy to speak out. But even Drezner seems to have reached the limit with Cheney’s brazenly self-serving, propagandizing and lies.

So I’m inclined to cut Cheney some slack for his decision to speak out. On the other hand, when we read the Politico interview, Cheney’s actual sins come out:

“Cheney rejected any suggestion that Obama had to decide on a new strategy for Afghanistan because the one employed by the previous administration failed.

Cheney was asked if he thinks the Bush administration bears any responsibility for the disintegration of Afghanistan because of the attention and resources that were diverted to Iraq. “I basically don’t,” he replied without elaborating (emphasis added).”

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I dare any Cheney supporter to make the argument that Afghanistan was hunky-dory until January 20, 2009, at which point things went to hell in a handbasket.

For the rest of us on the Planet Earth, there’s no way to read that passage and not come to one of two possible conclusions:

—Richard B. Cheney is a liar;

—Richard B. Cheney is so unconnected from reality that it is impossible to trust anything he says.

I don’t mind that Cheney speaks up for what he thinks is right — I mind that he’s a liar.

This matter raises two points — one of which is not that Dick Cheney is a liar, which is incontestable fact.

The first is that the problems Britain and America face now are as a direct consequence of the Bush administration’s decision to divert men and materiel from Afghanistan to Iraq. It’s worth remembering why we are in Afghanistan, because the official line on this matter has shifted so many times that that it has become the most nebulous of concepts. NATO went into Afghanistan because its government was providing shelter to those who perpetrated a horrifying terrorist attack on a NATO member. It wasn’t to nation build, improve women’s rights, or reduce the supply of heroin to the west (noble causes as they are). But, just as the job was almost done, and with Bin Laden and the Taleban and Al Qaeda leadership in within grasping distance, the Bush administration and their supine British partners decided fighting a largely unrelated war against Iraq was more important. The criminals of the century escaped; the Taleban could regroup and start an insurgency campaign against a strategically drifting and materially starved military coalition in the country.

It also, however, highlights the second problem, which is that Obama back home faces an opposition that has completely abandoned the notion of “Loyal Opposition” and will literally do or say anything to attack the President.

That isn’t to say that Obama is faultless. The Parallax Brief sees all kinds of gaps and contradictions in the President’s decision on Afghanistan, but key to understanding how we reached this point is to understand the problems created by what Cheney represents: the Obama administration faces a fantastically expensive (politically, economically, emotionally) COIN war (which are almost invariably lost by advanced western democracies) without a particularly compelling mission against a political backdrop where a hysterical opposition is willing to stoop to outright lies and rabble rousing.

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Categories [ Defence, International Affairs ]

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Why a Hung Parliament Might Savage the Economy

November 30th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Benedict Brogan, on his blog on the Telegraph’s website, today highlights a point that was lost when the political hacks and talkingheads released a week or so ago their flurry of opinion editorials about the potential consequences of a hung parliament.

“Morgan Stanley Research Europe has just put out a note assessing the UK’s future prospects, and its findings are a timely addition to the hung parliament debate…”UK becomes the first of the G10 to have a major fiscal crisis as elections lead to a hung parliament. The context is an ugly fiscal picture, relatively weak economic recovery, aggressive monetary stimulus and political uncertainty”"

The easiest way to think about this point is to consider the criteria for loaning money to someone. Whether or not you loan a person money, and the interest you want for doing so, is based on your view of that person’s likelihood of paying that money back. The more likely you think it is that they will be able to pay your money back, the less interest you would want to loan them money, because the risk of not getting back the money would be reduced.

The bond market is the same. When investors buy government bonds, they set the interest rate, or yield, the government pays on those bonds. This rate is essentially a function of what the investor thinks inflation will be (because as inflation increases the investor needs a higher interest rate on the bond to cover the portion of the investment eaten by that inflation), and his view on how able the government will be to pay that money back, known as “default risk” in the trade.

Right now, the UK has high — but not catastrophically high — debt that’s fast rising because tax receipts have fallen in the face of the crisis while obligations have remained the same, or, in some cases like social security, risen. One might imagine that this would push interest rates up. But as things stand, the interest rates on government bonds in the UK are still low. Some might argue this has something to do with the Bank of England’s quantitative easing program, and there are certainly several, complex reasons for this, but it’s essentially because the UK still has enough of what’s known as “fiscal credibility”: in layman’s terms, the bond market still believes that Britain can, one way or the other, pay back it’s debt.

Paying back all that debt, though, won’t be pleasant. It will involve either tax hikes or painful public spending cuts, and more than likely both at the same time. In short, it will involve actions which will be both unpopular with the electorate and difficult to pass through parliament.

If the Conservatives are elected with a thin majority, or even take control of a minority government, how easy will it be for them to ram through an unpopular budget? Will the right of their own party let them raise taxes? Will the other parties vote for the harsh spending cuts required to get the fiscal house in order?

The bond market will have to assume that Britain’s fiscal credibility had been reduced. Wouldn’t you if it was your money?

The consequences?

The morning after an election had produced a hung parliament, the yield on British bonds would immediately increase — possibly precariously. The pound would fall, likely passing 30-year lows against the Yen, Dollar, and Swiss Franc, as well as all time lows against the Euro. The cost of borring for private businesses would jump immediately. Raising equity for larger businesses would be more difficult, as fewer investors would want to hold assets in pounds. The cost of Government borrowing would also increase, making it more difficult to continue financing the deficit, and making fiscal help for the economy ever more difficult.

The best we could hope for is that any hope of rapid recovery would be nipped in the bud, and a long, turgid slog back — something like the economic stagnation in the late 70s and early 80s — would take its place.

The worst case scenario, albeit a not particularly likely one at this stage, would be an Iceland style monetary crisis in the absence of a quick (and implausibly magnanimous) commitment from all parties to take tough steps and vote for a cross-party budget. Indeed, the effect of this type of hung parliament scenario may well be a some kind of government of national unity to get through the Commons a budget that could stave off a fiscal crisis.

Of course, this isn’t so very likely, but it’s not inconceivable. And it is through this lens that one should view the Labour Party’s decision to increase the top rate of income tax to 50p in the pound. The Parallax Brief believes that this was not to soak the rich in a pique of partisan policy making, but an effort to show the bond market that Britain, and the Labour Party, had the iron will needed to push through unpopular and politically difficult policies to get the country’s fiscal house in order.

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Categories [ Economics and Finance, UK Politics ]

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Drive Time PMQs?

November 26th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Tom Harris, MP (Lab, Glasgow South) took some serious stick on his blog yesterday for complaining about a proposal to switch Prime Minister’s Questions to a Thursday evening to allow more people to watch. “You could always get up early on Friday morning like us mere plebs would have to do,” one commenter scolded, and the rest of the comments generally followed that tone.

The Parallax Brief generally agrees with Mr. Harris on this, though. A late finish would make it very difficult for MPs from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the North and the South West to spend a reasonable amount of time in their home constituencies Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Meantime, with regard to TV, most people are still on their commute at six or six thirty, and whether TV channels would be willing to shelve pre-prime time programming for something like PMQs is questionable.

That said, however, the idea of an evening PMQs on radio is appealing. It strikes the Parallax Brief as perfect Drive Time programming for the non-music stations. Perhaps a compromise could be reached, and PMQs kept on Wednesday but pushed back til 5.45 or 6pm?

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Ralph Miliband’s David is the Wrong Figure

November 26th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Ben Brogan recently passed on via his Telegraph blog an interesting whisper about the Labour leadership. Mr. Brogan reported that he had hitherto assumed that Harriet Harmon was “streets ahead of her colleagues” in the race to become Labour leader after Gordon Brown retired, but a Cabinet Minister had told him that Ms Harmon, “realises that she cannot muster enough support among her colleagues, which is why she has publicly ruled out the leadership. We should, I am assured, take her at her word. By contrast, Mr Miliband has discovered a new appetite and is now hungry for it.”

The Parallax Brief believes this is correct. Turning down the role as EU High Commissioner can only mean that Mr. Miliband has decided finally to aim for the Labour leadership.

But David Miliband the leader would be a poor choice for the Labour Party, in the Parallax Brief’s view. A recent op-ed by Jenni Russell on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site  summed up the point neatly.

What the electorate desperately wants is politicians who can talk clearly about how we might deal with these issues. Miliband, though, is much happier with abstractions. It means that we have no idea what would follow from his beliefs.

There was a classic example of that in September when an interviewer asked what Miliband meant by his “deeply progressive” “empowerment agenda”. Miliband’s reply is worth quoting in full.

“You can’t stand for empowerment unless you are an egalitarian. That’s the platform we then use to stand up for a strategic role of government, but also stand for decentralisation. We stand up for social mobility, and we see public service reform as critical to that, and welfare reform. We stand up for the diversity of Britain, but we know it has to be founded on strong rights and responsibilities. And, very importantly, although there’s no point in pretending it’s popular, you have to stand up for internationalism, and you have to stand up for the need to share power in Europe, to be influential in the world. That’s basically my pitch.”

Speeches like these have no clarity, no conviction, and communicate nothing except a kind of arrogance in the speaker. That is Miliband’s principal problem. Not only is there no sign that he is thinking deeply about politics, but he isn’t a natural communicator. That, in our multimedia era, is a fatal flaw. We’re no longer just in an era of 24-hour news. We’re living in the era of the 60-second minute, where effective politicians must be comfortable with the instant responses, informality and unguardedness of tweeting, blogging, YouTube and Facebook. The public still want their leaders to have big ideas. But they will warm only to those politicians who are so at ease with what they are and what they think, and so interested in engagement with others, that there is no sense of a barrier between them and the people they are trying to reach.

Miliband is not of this model.

This strikes the Parallax Brief as dead right.

Not much to add to that, beyond saying that a good place for Labour to start, and one which is rarely considered, would be a look at some polls like the ones we often see in American primary races which show how various candidates would match up against the president. Rather than thinking about which leader would be most popular, or best for the party, think about who would match up best with David Cameron — not always the same thing.  Who would contrast with Mr. Cameron in a way that exposed his weaknesses, while being able to present with conviction a cogent, congruent, persuasive message to the public?

Not David, the Parallax Brief believes.

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An Alternative To Straw’s Altertantive Vote

November 25th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Jack Straw, the Secretary of State for Justice, said yesterday that the House of Lords should be elected by proportional representation and the House of Commons should shelve the first-past-the-post system by which its members are currently elected in favour of the Alternative Vote system, according to the Daily Telegraph.

With the Alternative Vote (see chart, below), voters rank their preferences in order. If no candidate wins a clear majority, that is, garners more than 50% of the vote, the last place candidate is eliminated, and the ballots of that candidate are recounted, with their second choices being reallocated to the remaining candidates as full votes. This process continues until one candidate has a clear majority. The Alternative Vote, the Telegraph reports Mr Straw argued in a speech at the Magna Carta Institute, “would enable us to retain the single member constituency link…” but “would also ensure that every MP is elected with the support of over half of the voters in their constituency. In an age of multiparty politics, it could both enhance the legitimacy of MPs and enable the public to express a greater range of preferences.”

The Parallax Believes Mr. Straw is wrong. (more…)

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New Poll Throws Cold Water on Labour Comeback

November 23rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

A new Angus Reid Strategies poll for the Political Betting blog has Labour losing ground to the Conservatives, dropping to a 17 point deficit, only one point ahead of the Liberal Democrat Party. The news will be like political bromide for the Labour Party and its supporters, who had responded ebulliently to a MORI poll on Sunday that suggested Labour could yet close the gap.

The Angus Reid poll has the Conservatives on 39, Labour on 22 and the Liberal Democrats on 21. Of particular interest is yet another high score for “Others”, which scored 18. Is the high scoring from parties outside the big three due to genuine disaffection; the perceived lack of difference between Cameron and New Labour? Or is it indicative of voters who have not yet made up their minds: will these voters switch to Conservative once the election draws of a potential Labour 4th term into sharper focus?

It will be difficult to answer these questions without further data, which is not yet available as the poll was released by Political Betting early; however, it’s something likely to impact on the final election result, because standard models of election forecasting do not necessarily factor in such variables, and 18 points is abnormally high.

Ultimately, though, this poll might be seen as slamming the breaks on the so-called Labour comeback. Of course, it’s a poll for a blog, rather than a MORI, ICM, or YouGov poll for a big paper or TV channel, so it may not get the publicity of other polls, but certainly this early release prevents Labour from having several days to bask in the glory of two consecutive polls showing gains, making it harder for the party to generate positive momentum.

The Parallax Brief feels justified in arguing this morning that it was far too early to start predicting a hung parliament based on the MORI poll. It could, of course, be argued that the mood would change again if another poll was released showing Labour gains; however, as things stand, it looks increasingly likely that the MORI and ICM polls simply reflected the positive publicity garnered by the Glasgow NE by-election victory.

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