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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » YouGov had a biggish LAB conference bounce – Populus online and now ComRes phone don’t
Tonight’s ComRes phone poll for the Independent has the Tories up 2% closing the gap with LAB to just 4%. This is near the two Populus polls on Friday and today which had 3% margins. The only other pollster to have reported since EdM’s big speech, YouGov, had LAB on 42% a full 11% ahead of the Tories.
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This does of course have implications should Scotland go independent. Presumably they would just move their registration to London. But it misses the point of why on earth it's still registered in Edinburgh anyway.
So it is nice to see some sort of order being restored. With the leader's speech (I think Dave still gets that title ahead of George) still to come the question is whether the tories can do even better. It won't mean anything for more than a few days of course but bets have been placed...
There was a similar big, short-lived YouGov lead after the Syria vote, so maybe there really are a few % of Labour-curious voters out there with really, really short attention spans.
As sustainable improvements in disposable income can only be delivered from economic growth, it does make you question the wisdom of the ComRes's poll respondents.
F1: Jean Todt, former boss at Ferrari, is presently the FIA president. You'd be forgiven for not knowing this as, contrary to extra-curricular activities enthusiast Max Mosley, Todt has kept a low profile (he's practically been invisible).
Now he faces a challenger for election, some chap called Ward. Interestingly, Ward's now making noises that could suggest (if he wins) that Bahrain might not be considered 'suitable' for F1 anymore:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/24334276
Could be wrong, but I have vague memories of the Bahrainis having a significant stake in McLaren and maybe some other teams too. The track is rubbish, but there might be some repercussions if it parted ways with the calendar.
It will bring tears of 80s nostalgia to his eyes and a quick buck to his bank account.
Given that the shares were over subscribed by the Institutions before they were offered to the general public a premium, at least in the short term, must be all but assured. In the medium term this is one of the most strike prone organisations in Britain and I will certainly be selling out quickly but if you want a quick turn it seems the best bet to a non specialist.
I still retain some residual positivity on Cameron, and find the lack of progress more sad than anything else, so I'd amend that to:
Or perhaps Cammie is incompetent, keeps getting slapped by his own backbenchers because he has an inept whips office and no clue what his own backbenchers think?
Seems pretty airtight now.
This was UK Number One 30 years ago this week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmcA9LIIXWw
Rich people should pay more taxes to fund vital public services.
Rich people being anyone who earns more money than the individual in question, and vital public services being those the person in question uses.
Legal niceties and administrative efficiencies being less important than safguarding Labour votes in Scotland generally and Edinburgh in particular.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=e2eQPzTyApY
I maybe talking Ballochs, but IIRC the reason Lloyds had to be registered in Scotland was because they were taking over The Bank of Scotland, and thus the rights to print Scottish banknotes, the ultimate parent company has to be based in Scotland.
The risks of pricing too high are that the issue is undersubscribed, a more costly alternative to selling at a small discount.
Governments tend to be extra cautious with pricing as they not only risk financial and reputational losses but are additionally exposed to a devaluation of their political capital.
'Ed Miliband's energy pledge looked like a clever tactical wheeze that would haunt him strategically'
According to YouGov only 30% of voters believe Ed.
'Labour could improve the NHS (31%), freeze gas and electricity prices for two years (30%) or build 200,000 new houses a year by 2020 (25%)'
As did home ownership.
A different world.
That doesn't mean people will like it though. I think those many of the slightly older may hate the idea of socialism, and the younger generation seem less inclined to leaning that far left as far as I can see (will probably still vote Labour though, it's what your expected to do as a youngster - even with all that conservative Generation Y stuff some Tories are hoping will come their way), so it might eventually backfire if there is more in the same vein, but to go even more anecdotal here, I've not heard a bad word about the energy policy yet, even from a relative who calls Ed M 'Ed Milipede' and who has displayed some worryingly racist opinions about him.
To quote someone else, during the Fiscal cliff, they're playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun.
It's no way to run what is still a fairly serious country.
Although I might think that because of the hilarious approach of Brown and co in 2010 with their message of basically 'If things are bad, the last thing you want is inexperienced people in charge, so don't change government; and if things are good, you don't need to change government', so I think fearmongering lost its impact for me on that particular score, so maybe it is still effective.
Enough to make one envious of Sean dining on Crete.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4203/tory_ukip_pact_we_re_very_different_parties
Amusingly, in 2006, the then govt pased the HBOS reorganisation bill, which didn't foresee any problems for HBOS going forward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBOS_Group_Reorganisation_Act_2006
Richly comic etc.
Maybe not, although she looks cracking value at 12/1.
DYOR.
And I am not ignoring your post on executive pay. I have a relatively considered response in the pipeline.
If I hadn't been battling 'flu you would have had it already.
Thank goodness we have George and a stable Coalition giving adult governance in this country.
They'd at least be able to find some Conservative councillors to applaud.
Perhaps Scunthorpe would be even better with Normanby Hall and a Conservative council to confound the Guardian and BBC.
He could be the John Sergeant de nos jours
The more I think of the issue its something that the Conservatives should take up.
Thatcher was big on a share owning democracy and breaking up oligarchic cartels so it would be a much needed way for the present Conservative leadership to show that they were on the side of the average person rather than the rich.
A pertinent link as ever, as all I really meant was politicians underestimating how much younger people fear things that are labelled as socialism solely to scare them, whether or not it is anything close to socialism.
I do think the average, fence sitting British voter, terrified of passionate belief in anything, would be afraid if something can be presented as extreme, be it left or right, but that simply referring to something as socialist is not enough to convince people it is extreme. The hysteria over the bedroom tax I think is an example in the other direction, as it just does not seem to be that extreme to people to justify the labels it gets or the fear Labour think people should have of it (hence their making such a big deal of it).
This piece traces the GOP's current problems to Citizen's United, which has allowed individual legislators to raise money directly from sympathetic rich people, so the leadership no longer has any leverage over them.
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2013/09/25/ass-bitten/
£1 invested in June 1999 in the decile portfolio consisted of the lowest incentive pay firms would have produced a cumulative return of 321% by December 2010. The same £1 invested in the portfolio consisted of the highest incentive pay firms would have return returned 82%, which only marginally beats the 50% cumulative return of FTSE All Share Index.
Executive pay is a subject being look at very closely by academics, politicians and investors. And there is a culture change underway. But a major roadblock has been encountered.
The general assumption has been that cash rewards were wrong and that deferred bonuses in the form of share options were better incentives. The problem is that this assumption has been undermined by research and academic analysis. It appears that the relationship between deferred equity incentives and company performance is inverse.
Unsurprisingly there are many competing factors and counter-arguments but there is currently little consensus on this issue.
Note: Quote from "CEO Compensation and Future Shareholder Returns: Evidence from London Stock Exchange"; Nick Balafas and Chris Florackis; University of Liverpool (UK)
1) I agree with you that executive pay in large corporations has become divorced from reality. This is especially true for board members, but has percolated through to higher management as well (and also into the public sector, quangos and charities as well, but that's a separate issue).
2) This is no business of the state; it's up to shareholders to decide how much they pay people to run the company on their behalf. They are the owners, and if they want to waste millions on paying some duffer to run their company, that's their problem. Conversely, if they want to pay millions to keep an MD who is so good at his job that their company becomes worth billions more, then, that's fine; it's no different from a concert promoter paying megabucks to get a big act to play at his concert. The state should keep well out of it - it's literally none of their business.
3) However - and this is the nub of the problem - the critical link between the shareholders, who own the company, and the directors/managers who in theory run it on their behalf, has been broken. The managers have control of the chequebook, the remuneration, the bonus schemes, etc, and have become a bit of a self-perpetuating elite who appoint each other to remuneration committees who tell each other that they're worth zillions, irrespective of whether they're really good, mediocre, or actively bad at their jobs. Shareholders have little real control.
4) Why has this link been broken? See next post...
Twitter
Nick Sutton @suttonnick 29m
Tuesday's Times front page - "Pupils 'being damaged by endless tests set by Gove'" #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/KGyUu6BKe0
You have to bear in mind that rUK is not an aspirant, emerging market small state whose economy is lubricated by corruption.
DYOR.
4) Why has this link been broken? Several reasons:
(a) In the fifties, companies were owned largely by individual shareholders. That is the model which company law assumes, but it's out of date. Nowadays, companies are mostly owned by big funds (pension funds, unit trusts etc). That immediately introduces a second layer between the true, beneficial owners (that's you and me, via our pension funds especially) and the managers. As an individual owning a tiny fraction of a pension fund which owns a couple of percent of a company, you have no effective say in that company, and the pension fund managers (perhaps rightly) don't see it as their job to get involved.
(b) Even when you have individual shareholders, they mostly own their shares via nominee accounts in electronic form. If you own shares in an ISA or SIPP, you have no choice in this, and, even if you don't, your stockbroker will have pushed you into a nominee account because it is so much easier and cheaper to administer. It also means your name doesn't appear on the publicly-available share register, which is just as well given the violence and intimidation which some shareholders have suffered, not to mention the aggro of high-pressure salesmen (some of them crooks) using the register as a source of cheap sales leads. But shareholders who hold shares in nominee accounts are disenfranchised; in practice (although there are some exceptions), they have no votes on executive pay or anything else.
(c) Also companies have become huge, the shareholder base international, and the old model of buy-and-hold over years (so that the shareholders felt a long-term proprietorial interest in the company, and would turn up at the AGM to quiz the directors personally) no longer holds.
... more
http://www.oddschecker.com/football/football-specials/tottenham/qualify-for-champions-league
ps aveit...where are you?
The first books I read that got me really interested in economics was by JK Galbraith such as The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State. They made the same points in the 50s and 60s although I didn't catch up until the 1970s.
In short Corporations being run for the benefit of those that work in them rather than those that notionally own them is a very long way from a new phenomenon. It even underlay Gekko's great "Greed is good" speech which was a part of an 80s fightback.
There is nothing new under the sun and this is a lot less new than most things.
Whether it is to the people Boris and Paxo hang around with is a different issue.
What we have is a situation where the top 1% are increasingly divorced from the rest of us but where the top 1% have increasing proportions of the wealth and power and where membership of the top 1% is drawn from an increasingly smaller grouping.
To a lesser extent this applies to the top 10%.
This is no IMO a basis for a stable or happy society.
Which is a bit mean of them seeing as he gave them today's front page.
This is where it gets more difficult. It's probably fair to say that most observers agree with what I've said so far. The solutions are trickier. I don't have a magic bullet to fix this, but here are some thoughts:
The most obvious thing which needs fixing, and which is easy to fix, is the disgraceful disenfranchisement of shareholders who own the shares via nominee accounts. In this modern age of the internet, there is absolutely no excuse for this absurd anomaly. In fairness, the last Labour government tried to do something about it, and got as far as making proposals which went out to consultation. For reasons which I've never understood, they bottled out of implementing these changes. It should be a no-brainer for the Coalition to get on with this. OK, the stockbrokers would need to change their computer systems to make this happen, which would cost money, but, over a suitable transition period of (say) 4 years, this really shouldn't be an insuperable obstacle. At the same time, companies should allow electronic voting and on-line AGMs. This is 2013, for heaven's sake: we don't need to insist on structures designed when all the shareholders lived within walking distance of the City.
There's also a need to change the law, because currently company law clashes with employment law. By the time the shareholders get to agree the director's pay, the employment contract is already in place.
Fixing those points would help a bit, but they are clearly not silver bullets. There would still be the problem that any one shareholder owns such a tiny proportion of the company that it's not worth his or her time getting seriously involved in supervising the managers of the company. There would be a risk that only oddballs, nutters and lefties with political axes to grind would make the effort to get involved.
... which brings me back to the original point, which was another_richard's suggestion that a randomly-selected group of shareholders should be asked to act as the supervisors. An intriguing idea.
Godfrey Bloom as Father Jack?
Now who would be Dougal?
And who would Nigel Farage have to kick up the arse?
In the first instance, it is a matter for the Board of the Company and its Executive Pay Committee operating in compliance with the law and corporate governance codes of conduct.
In the second instance, it is a matter for the shareholders of the company when exercising their statutory rights to vote on Directors' and Senior Executives' remuneration at the AGM. And ultimately when voting on the composition of the Board.
In the case of the state controlled (not 'owned' banks) additional rights may be granted to the Chancellor and Treasury or their nominees as part of the contractual arrangements entered into at the time of the bailout. But even these are limited: note the brouhaha over Osborne 'ordering the dismissal of Hester' from RBoS.
Finally if the controlling shareholders are the government, the public have the right to petition, lobby and protest in order to persuade the government to change its policy or actions, or, as a last resort, to replace the government in a general election.
But the public does not have any direct statutory or contractual right to determine the pay of Directors or Senior Executives in any bank or public company, state controlled or otherwise, unless they hold shares in the organisation.
It is important, in the circumstances, to put them in their proper place.