Foreign Policy and Opposition

January 16th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Bagehot, the Economist’s British politics columnist, believes that it is largely futile to build a foreign policy in opposition:

FOREIGN policy is a strange challenge for an opposition leader. It’s very important that he (in this case) shows that he is informed, sober in judgment and reasonably well-connected. The “3 am” question is an inevitable one, especially for a politician with no real executive experience. And yet, at the same time, there is only a limited point in having a highly evolved foreign-policy philosophy in opposition. Many of the most important diplomatic decisions that a prime minister takes in government arise in circumstances that it is almost impossible to pre-judge. Temperament and judgment matter, but “-isms” may not help much.

That’s a compelling argument. Afterall, it’s practicably  impossible to predict accurately beyond the very short term the course of global events. And it’s probably no coincidence that the many of the more celebrated ‘intellects’ in political history have been those politicians who have specialised in foreign affairs (Cardinal Richelieu, Lord Salisbury, Otto von Bismarck, Henry Kissinger, et al): it’s an infinitely complex, ephemeral and subtle game. Bagehot is therefore correct to argue that it is useless for an opposition to put in place a detailed foreign policy in the same way it might an economic policy.

However, the Parallax Brief believes that is only half the story. The foreign policy a nation pursues is often dictated by the framework that nation’s leaders use to make it’s key foreign policy decisions. In very simple terms, three of the aforementioned statesmen, Bismarck, Salisbury, and Kissinger, all attempted to achieve a global balance of power in which no Great Power would be able to achieve an ascendency that could threaten all the others. Decisions weren’t made based on right and wrong, but on national self interest, which led to spheres of influence. Woodrow Wilson, the US President, believed that international relations should be based on the rule of law, and sought the creation of international law and institutions which would enforce it and arbitrate disputes. The neo-conservatives believed that the free world would be safer, and the world better, if the strong liberal democracies used their military power to topple dictators and spread liberal democracy, and that the international institutions which Wilson had set in motion had become wholly ineffective in dealing with international disputes and the furthering of democratic ideals.

While it may be impossible to pre-judge circumstances, it’s is absolutely possible to build a framework of understanding upon which foreign policy decisions will be made once in power.

And it would be instructive to know more about where David Cameron and William Hague stand.

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Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

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Make Your Own Airbrushed David Cameron Poster

January 14th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

David Cameron Airbrushed Ad

Via former Labour Party head of campaigns, Hopi Sen, the Parallax Brief has found a brilliantly immature website, My David Cameron.

Building on the the schoolyard giggles generated by the Conservative Party’s decision to give David Cameron a Cosmopolitan-cover style airbrushing for their most recent outdoor ad, mydavidcameron.com allows visitors to construct their own version.

Can you do better than the ones pictured above?

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Categories [ Miscellaneous Titbits, UK Politics ]

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The Department of What If…? The Brown Bounce.

January 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Remember the Brown Bounce? An increasingly unpopular Prime Minister replaced with his trusty, respected right hand man. A blizzard of new policy ideas. Invitations to opposition party members to join a more collegial cabinet of all talents. Flattering media coverage.

Remember that? With Gordon Brown now deeply unpopular both with voters and his parliamentary party, and all but certain to find himself out of office shortly after he dissolves parliament, it’s worth wondering how things might have been had he acted decisively and gone to the polls before the Labour Party conference in Autumn 2007. For Iain Martin, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, the appearance of Peter Watt’s already infamous new book gives fresh opportunity to consider and blog about the “election that never was in the autumn of 2007.”

“It really was the most bizarre and fascinating period. However, events unfolded at such speed and with so much intensity that it has all become shrouded in myth-making.

Watt recounts his role in organizing the basis of a campaign with Douglas Alexander (Labour’s election co-ordinator). Leaflets were printed, candidates readied and limos ordered to ferry about the cabinet.

But while it is true that many believed right up until the moment that Brown called it off after Tory conference (in a humiliating interview with Andrew Marr in Number 10) that an early election would happen, it was already way too late by that point. In allowing the Tories to begin their Blackpool conference he had blown it.

What would have worked in terms of timing would have been for Brown to turn up on the first day of Labour conference having come straight from seeing the Queen (followed by the media circus) to say that he had asked for a dissolution. He could then have kicked off an election campaign from the podium, telling his troops to leave the hall and go out and fight for a fourth term etc. The Tories would have been blind-sided and all the momentum would have been with Labour.”

The Parallax Brief genuinely believes Mr. Brown would have taken Labour to an election win. The momentum was already with him, and a series of polls from ICM, YouGov, Ipsos-MORI, Populus and BPIX between September 16 and September 29 indicated as much, putting Labour 8, 6, 6, 8, 11, 13, 10, 11, 7 and 7 points ahead.

But alas…

“Instead, Brown waited, let the speculation build, delivered a stinker of a conference speech and then gave the Tories a chance to mount their fightback in Blackpool. The polls reversed and Brown pulled out in a panic on the Friday (only going public on Saturday).”

The folly of this is impossible to overestimate. Of course, Labour would likely have been returned with a reduced majority, and it is quite possible, even probable, that Mr. Brown’s personal weaknesses would have still risen to the surface to make him as unpopular with his party and the public as he is now. However, Labour would have been in power, and would have had another two and a half years from now to ride out the Great Recession, get the economy growing again, shed itself of the unpopular Brown, and give a new leader time to establish a new policy platform before what would have been a summer 2012 election. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Labour could have been returned for a fifth term.

It might not be overstating the case to say that the Prime Minister’s decision not to call an election in the Autumn of 2007 was the most important and influential political moment of this generation.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Did Socialism Win After All?

January 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

While Ms. Parallax Brief was watching Lost DVDs yesterday evening, the Parallax Brief settled down to catch up on some of the political writing he had missed, but archived, over his New Year vacation, and read two paradigm-shifting Peter Hitchens essays, linked at the bottom of this blog.

The Parallax Brief had always assumed, as he assumes most sensible observers assume, that a combination of the Thatcher and Reagan years, and the collapse of, and exposure as fraudulent, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, had utterly destroyed socialism as a force (1) that had any traction in British politics and (2) to which anyone, from the general voting public through to public policy wonks, paid any heed.

Within this context, the Parallax Brief had always been puzzled, and, he is ashamed now to admit, slightly amused, by the sometimes hysterical assertions of the few hard, traditional conservatives at the Mail and the Telegraph, that Britain had become a socialist nation. But something Mr. Hitchens wrote in the first of his blog essays changed the Parallax Brief’s mind:

The goals which revolutionary Marxists of my generation sought — a radical reordering of the relations between the sexes, a weakening of the married family, a general moral, cultural and social revolution, the destruction of the taboos against abortion, illegitimacy and divorce, egalitarian education, the abolition of frontiers and of nation states, the end of restrictions on immigration and the withering away of national borders, the sociological approach to crime as opposed to the belief that wrongdoing was an act of free will that deserved punishment, the infiltration of the media, the schools and universities by radical and revolutionary ideas about history and society, the dismantling of the canon of literature and of conservative attitudes towards history, the general denigration of the British Empire, the demolition of the idea that education was a passing on of accepted knowledge, and so of the idea that teachers are figures of authority — are now the policies of the establishment and so the policies of the Modern Conservative party…

The penny finally drops. It is now perfectly clear what Mr. Hitchens and his Daily Telegraph counterpart, Simon Heffer, object to.

And Hitchens is right — to an extent.

Most people associate socialism most with its economic branch: controlling the the economy’s commanding (more…)

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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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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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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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Comrade Portillo: Spending Cuts “Impossible”; Tories Should Raise Taxes

November 23rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Peter Hoskin on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog has an interesting take from Michael Portillo, who the Parallax Brief last remembers in Government as the uber-Thatcherite Dark Prince of the Right.

Ever the contrarian, Michael Portillo makes a case that you don’t hear from many on the right in his interview with Andrew Neil on Straight Talk this weekend. George Osborne has given “a fair amout of detail” about the Tories’ debt-reduction plans, he says, but that could be the wrong approach:

“I wouldn’t seek probably to give very much more detail …. You know, I was with Margaret Thatcher when she came in to Government in 1979, we faced a big public spending problem. It was terrible. It was a hard slog but she didn’t cut public spending. I was Chief Secretary between ’92 and ’94 – big public spending problem – I was trying to cut public spending; I did not succeed in cutting public spending. I don’t think the Tories will succeed in cutting public spending. Now this is what they won’t want to tell you. The reason they’re not telling you the cuts is that I think the cuts are almost impossible to make and what will happen, whoever wins the next election, is not so much that there’ll be public spending cuts, there will be restraint, but that there will be tax rises.”

The Parallax Brief has argued for a long time that the Right are going to be sorely disappointed if they think that an incoming Conservative government will be able to stabilize Britain’s desperate and exigent public finances through spending cuts alone. But he also believes, as does the Spectator, that the scale of the problem suggests that tax hikes alone cannot solve the problem either — public expenditure will have to be cut after the economy starts to right itself.

It’s interesting to see key figures on the right, such as the Spectator and Portillo, now supporting this view. The Parallax Brief wonders if they are paving the way for a more gentle approach to spending from the Conservative Party than many on the Right had hoped, and in the media had assumed?

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Categories [ Economics and Finance, UK Politics ]

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Too Early to Plan for a Hung Parliament Despite Poll Swing to Labour

November 23rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

MORI Poll Labour Lead over Conservatives

A MORI poll conducted for the Observer shows the Labour Party gaining five points, narrowing the Conservative Party’s lead to six points. The shock results have offered succour to the Labour Party and its supporters, and has even prompted political pundits to pen columns outlining the implications of a hung parliament.

This is understandable. Any shift as large as MORI’s is likely to cause a stir among the political wonks and talkingheads, and it comes hot on the heels of the ICM data for the Guardian which also showed Labour gaining (albeit by only 2 points), suggesting a trend.

However, the Parallax Brief believes it is far too early to start talking of a hung parliament. First, one must account for differences in polling methodology. MORI’s polls are generally liable to produce more violent swings, and there is genuine reason to believe that this particular poll was simply taken from a sample of people more likely to vote Labour.

The excellent UK Polling Report blog has more:

…the big difference between MORI and other pollsters is that MORI do not politically weight their sample. All the pollsters including MORI weight their samples by known demographic figures like age, gender, social class and region. All except MORI also use political weighting, normally weighting by how people claim they voted at the last election.

… people aren’t very good at recalling their 2005 vote. ICM, Populus and ComRes take the view that past recall is pretty stable over time and can be estimated well enough to weight by, MORI take the view that it’s too unstable and should not be used for weighting. The result is that MORI’s samples run the risk of varying politically from month to month more than those of other companies (though MORI would claim the opposite – that other companies risk weighting out genuine public volatility).

MORI’s poll last month which showed a 17 point Tory lead, amongst those who voted in 2005 32% said they voted Conservative, 43% Labour and 16% Liberal Democrat. In this month’s poll which shows a 6 point Tory lead the figures of recalled 2005 vote break down as Conservative 29%, Labour 46% and 16% Liberal Democrat – so a 6 point change in the recalled lead from 2005.

The MORI polling data for the last several years gives an impression of the month-to-month volatility:

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Meantime, Mike Smithson at Political Betting notes that the poll has hardly moved the spread betting lines at all, with sporting index pushing down the Conservative seat spread to 353-357, and Labour up to 208-213. Betfair has seen similarly slight movement (as indicated in the chart below). Those who believe in the efficiency of markets, or the effectiveness of the wisdom of crowds to out-predict the experts, should take note.

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Further, Mr Smithson notes that both the MORI and ICM polls were undertaken shortly after Labour’s Glasgow North East by-election victory, which suggests the party gained from the brief surge of positive publicity which always comes with a by-election victory.

Of course it is true that not all the six point swing can be accounted for by MORI’s methodology, and that irrespective of mitigating factors such as timing, these are two great polls for a beleaguered Labour Party; however, those talking of a hung parliament need to wait to see if the next poll posts numbers that might suggest the beginning of a trend, or at least that public opinion has undergone a correction to a new normal, before talking of a hung parliament.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Congratulations Liz Truss

November 17th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief would like to take this opportunity to offer his heartfelt congratulations to Liz Truss for her victory in her battle against the slobbering puritans of the South West Norfolk Conservative Committe, who had put her through the political ringer of a deselection hearing and vote for no other reason than that she once had an affair with a married man while married herself. She won the vote 137-37.

The SW Norfolk Committe claims it forced the deselection vote because she didn’t reveal in a timely manner that she had had the affair, rather than for the affair itself, but given the fact the affair was common knowledge in political circles, and available knowledge to anyone with the wherewithal to Google “Lyn Truss”, the Parallax Brief has his doubts.

He wonders, for instance, how many of the dribbling prigs adored Alan Clark while piously judging Ms. Truss?

Anyway, it’s time to forget all that and move on.

Ms. Truss will make an excellent MP, adding to the intellectual vigour of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, and if there is a positive for the Conservative Party to draw from this whole farce it’s that she has the toughness necessary to succeed.

Well done her.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Is Closing the Polling Gap Enough For Labour?

November 17th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Labour, for the first time in quite a while, to the Parallax Brief’s knowledge, has closed the Conservative Party’s lead in the opinion polls. In an ICM poll for the Guardian, Labour now scores 29, up two, with the Conservatives down two at 42, and the Liberal Democrats up one at 19.

At face value, this is positive news for Labour and will offer its supporters a glimmer of hope that Labour may yet do what John Major manages in 1992 — bring an unpopular party back to government. But the Guardian focuses more on other questions asked as part of the poll, the answers to which do not augur well for the Labour Party in general and Gordon Brown in particular.

According to the poll, 42% of people would be either pleased or excited if David Cameron won the next election, with 36% angry or disappointed; while 27% would be pleased or excited if Mr. Brown won, as opposed to 53% angry or disappointed.  Further, the poll shows that the public see Mr. Cameron as “tougher, more decisive and more internationally respected” than Mr. Brown.

The Guardian frames this as evidence that the Tories are “closing the deal”, but whether this is the case or not, the Parallax Brief believes it is clear evidence that the Conservative lead in the polls is about more than just anti-Labour sentiment.

Despite this, as Mike Smithson said on the brilliant Political Betting Blog today, “movement is movement”. Ultimately, the Labour Party should be pleased with what is its highest ICM poll since April, and Gordon Brown in particular should feel safer after the double whammy of the Glasgow NE by-election win and this ICM poll showing a glimmer of an upward trend. If, as Mr Smithson predicts, tomorrow’s MORI poll shows something similar, the Labour Party may have hope indeed.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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