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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » How Scotland and the LD collapse almost completely reverses the bias in the electoral system
As we all know one of the constants in British politics over more than a quarter of a century has been that the electoral system has been “biased” towards Labour. Essentially for a given vote share the red team will have more MPs than the blue one.
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I thought reports from Bedford were of a much superior Labour campaign, with the Conservatives barely visible. Presumably that changed at midnight on the 6th of May?
It has been said, on some days during the campaign, there were more Labour Morley and Outwood activists in Sheffield Hallam than in Morley and Outwood.
OblitusSumMe said:
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Point of order. My understanding was that most developed economies had a small recession around ~2001 following the collapse of the dotcom bubble, and so a deficit at that time could be viewed as successful counter-cyclical spending that prevented the UK from also experiencing a recession.
Thus the error was the failure to return to surplus from a bit later in the decade, 2004 perhaps. It is also worth noting that Brown made many attempts to cut spending in some areas in this period. There was something called the Wanless Review (I think, and perhaps some others), and there was a public sector pay cap of 2%. I think the Treasury forecasts went wrong in being too optimistic on tax revenues - something which has not changed at all with the OBR in the period 2010-2015.
Of course, from a political point of view, none of this matters. Just as it doesn't matter that Cameron and Osborne fully signed up to support the Labour spending plans at the end of your period in around 2005-8. Just as with Labour support of the ERM in 1992, the public have chosen to punish the party in office at the time, and to overlook the political consensus that existed.
DavidL said:
Not really for the UK. This shows quarterly growth over an extended period and does not show any material dip in 2001 or about that time: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/nov/25/gdp-uk-1948-growth-economy
The dotcom boom was largely a financial market phenomenon with remarkably little impact on the "real" economy.
The correct approach for any government of any stripe surely ought to have been that an economy that was growing above trend and throwing off excess taxes should be in surplus and that was the case in the UK for most of the noughties as the financial bubble grew.
Of course net debt was much lower then than it is now. There is an argument that the rational response is that governments should aim for modest surpluses even in trend years so as to reduce the debt/GDP ratio to a safer level as fast as possible.
The spending deficit was too high in the years before the 2008 financial crash, Andy Burnham will say today. In a major speech this morning, the leadership candidate will say that Labour must make this admission in order to regain trust on the economy:
“If we are to win back trust we have to start by admitting that we should not have been running a significant deficit in the years before the crash.”
http://bit.ly/1eChePz
Traditionalists argue that "having a presence" at the polling station is important, even if you're not using the returns, but it's generally felt that people who bother to go to the polling station have nearly all decided how to vote, and having an unknown person with a rosette smile at them isn't going to change it. That may be a bit less true with a very well-known ward councillor, but that's more of an issue at local elections. With dozens of polling stations, the candidates themselves can't be everywhere.
Throughout, stealth was key to the Conservatives’ success. Not only did they know the public polls were wrong, but Tory insiders now admit they deliberately encouraged Labour to build up the myth that Mr Miliband and his union allies had the superior street campaigning machine.
The story ran, to the Tories’ amusement, that Labour had thousands more activists, better trained and motivated, saturating target seats with Labour leaflets and election messages. “But there was never any evidence of them,” one senior Conservative said. “Labour must have been moving imaginary soldiers around or something.”
The Tories, however, built a formidable army of their own. Driven on by Grant Shapps, the party’s co-chairman during the campaign, 100,000 organised volunteers joined the Tories’ “Team 2015” campaign, and were sent around the country in buses to key seats.
http://bit.ly/1Ac8eu6
http://bit.ly/1KC8G8L
I've got some sensational advice for Labour coming up this weekend, which may set the cats amongst the pigeons.
PS - Is it raining bats and frogs in your neck of the woods?
There are arguments for leaving the EU, but to make them properly you in your case have to explain why being dragged along unwillingly outside the EU would be any different.
BTW -- I do understand how difficult it is to make complex points in a few lines. I think this is going to bedevil discussion on here even more than normal over the next few weeks months years.
It might not be much better being dragged along outside, hence my reluctance to consider BOO - I don't know that we would be better off. But it's the difference, to borrow and amend from The Thick of It a bit, between being punched in the face and punching ourselves in the face. Either way, we're getting punched and that will make us angry, but at least we'd not be as much of an active participant in the punch, as they cried in defence 'You're doing the punching too, so no complaints'.
I take your point about making complex points in a few lines, and my flippant summary may not seem to help with that, but I'm reaching a breaking point on the EU and it really it not actually that complex when we get down to it, I think the Eureaucrats have it right that far at least. Do we want to be an active member actively pursuing ever closer Union and the useless bureaucratic interference that for some reason they insist must come along with the good that may come from that closer integration? No I don't, but the contempt of the EU toward those who want to reform - sorry, I just have no faith in the sincerity of its leaders who say otherwise, their actions speak loudly on that - or change the direction of travel in any meaningful way, means we are unlikely to get something which retains the positives of the EU without the negatives ever expanding.
I've been assuming I'd vote Yes in the end for years, I voted LD in the 2014 Euros for crying out loud, and like most people I don't like much about the EU, but would it really make things better to be outside of it? For one we could not keep an eye on or influence things as much. But I'm just sick and tired of it, and it will just go on and on for decades, and I no longer feel I can handle that.
They keep telling us, directly or indirectly, to put up or shut up, and in this I think they are right. And if they force that binary choice, to leave or stop complaining, even the fear of negative consequences loses its sting somewhat.
How to win back one set of voters without repelling the other?
The only way is to completely separate Scottish Labour from a Labour party of England and Wales, then the new Labour leader can concentrate on appealing to English voters in the towns and villages that have eluded all of their leaders apart from Blair.
The actual bias in the system is the unfair constituency boundaries, which systematically give voters in Labour strongholds (expecially Wales and the North East) more MPs per voter than average. Clearly no one who is even vaguely intellectually honest can defend this, and it remains a stain on the reputation of both Labour and the LibDems that they actively conspired to prevent the anomaly being corrected.
The second effect relates to the geographical distribution of support. This is the larger of the two effects, and as Mike says it used to favour Labour but didn't in 2015, mainly because of the SNP tsunami. All the same, since the SNP say they would only support a Labour government, the net effect of the geographic distribution still favours a Labour-led government, though not a Labour majority government.
My suspicion is that if the votes had indeed been level, as indicated by the polls, significant numbers of Tory marginals would have fallen to Labour improving their efficiency and reducing that of the Tories. In Broxtowe, as an example, there would have been a significant wasted Tory vote rather than a substantial wasted Labour vote.
There is no question that the Tory campaign was very successful in the marginals where they outperformed the UNS but they did so by a relatively modest amount, under 10 seats I think. They won because they were 7 percent ahead.
Of course if the Lib Dems do not recover then the 20 odd seats taken from them by the Tories will be a permanent improvement in their efficiency.
I'm not sure whether to hail a gondola or a taxi to take me to the ground.
That tends to pull the heart strings, but they return to the normal rest position very quickly. The facts, evidence and competence that the Tory party managed to own entirely from the coalition (LibDems shouldn't have opposed and complained so much for so long) had a much longer lasting effect on the view of the floating voters.
And the Ed factor / Ed Stone / 'Edless chicken effect didn't help Labour.
'Living in London aided self-deception. Immigration and the extortionate cost of housing is pushing its population leftwards, as is London’s arrogance. The capital is strong and self-confident; it makes the mistake of thinking that everywhere else thinks as London thinks.'
And as a result, they concluded (rightly) that the country would hate the Liberal Democrats (1 seat in London?) and love Labour (whoops...)
Wasting effort in Sheffield Hallam while forfeiting what should have been a very safe seat in Morley (let's face it, for anyone other than Ed Balls it would have been a 10,000 majority) was just silly.
I agree with you about tellers by the way. Interesting historical anomaly, really not much to do with modern electioneering where those knocking up are directed by phone banks. Gives the less able something to do and a feeling of involvement which is fair enough.
https://twitter.com/LibDems/status/604006779207294976
Imagine the Tory screams: Vote rUK Labour, get Macavity controlled by the Jocks under Miller ...
Edit: IIRC it often didn't make any immediate difference if Scotland is present or not to whether Labour wins an election, though the extra few dozen SLAB MPs were useful when managing votes in the House.
http://www.labourhame.com/can-a-supporter-of-scottish-independence-be-a-member-of-scottish-labour/
ydoethur.
Perhaps the key quote from that Cohen article was this one:
'Living in London aided self-deception. Immigration and the extortionate cost of housing is pushing its population leftwards, as is London’s arrogance. The capital is strong and self-confident; it makes the mistake of thinking that everywhere else thinks as London thinks.'
And as a result, they concluded (rightly) that the country would hate the Liberal Democrats (1 seat in London?) and love Labour (whoops...)
Wasting effort in Sheffield Hallam while forfeiting what should have been a very safe seat in Morley (let's face it, for anyone other than Ed Balls it would have been a 10,000 majority) was just silly.
Cohen's point about Miliband's hose of lego 35% strategy is bang on the money. However, this idea about it all being different in London is turning into a bit of a myth. A lot of the London results were as disappointing as elsewhere. It's simply that they didn't perform as catastrophically in the capital, and they made a few gains, though where they were up against the tories as opposed to the LDs, those few gains came with extremely narrow majorities.
I know we fed in countless thousands of polling card numbers/postcodes throughout the day. By 7 pm we had a very good idea of how the vote was shaping up.
The biggest effect on Labour was the presence or absence of an alternative, which showed in a variety of ways. This was most dramatic in Scotland, but UKIP as an alternative helped the Tories gain Plymouth Turfmoor, plus a few in Essex, and the Greens prevented gains elsewhere. Labour took Chester in part because there was no Green candidate.
Labour could regain electoral advantage by regaining the third party vote. Indeed that is how the Tories did so well - by regaining votes off the traditional third party.
Remember: when the LDs do well, so do Labour, and vice versa.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-32913899
I can't help but feel - as I argued before the election under my previous nom de plume - this is too much of a statisitician's way of looking at things.
It asks, "assuming my party get x votes, where should they be?" - like one might ask, "if I earn x pounds this week, how should I spend it?". But unlike a household budget, you can't move votes between seats, at least not very efficiently.
Rather if we say, "in seat x, would I rather have more votes or fewer votes", the answer will always be "more". Even if that seat is safe. The piling up of votes is always a bonus. What should happen is that your polling reflects that. So you go from 35/35 to 36/34, even though you will win no more seats.
On the new boundaries it is:
Con 271; Lab 255; LD 7; SNP 49
Allowing for natural random variation and superior targetting under either system by either party brings me to the conclusion that if Labour manage to get as many votes as the Conservatives they will have a more or less Evens chance of forming the next Gov't.
That seems quite fair to me.
One of the things I find hard about contemplating a No vote is that I would quite like a properly Democratic Federal Europe, but that isn't remotely on offer, and so voting Yes for that reason would be an exercise in self-deception.
The other main thing that gives me pause is that I like Britain being an open outward-looking country, and I wouldn't want to boost the haul up the drawbridge mentality that UKIP represents. However, that isn't really the choice that's on the ballot paper, as we could be an outward-looking country that wasn't a member of the EU.
I've been thinking of writing "I trust the rest of the country to decide on my behalf" on the ballot paper, but I know that would be a cop-out to avoid making my own choice.
https://twitter.com/BLACKCAPS/status/604214876752347136/photo/1
Even in London, Labour faced the problem of piling up huge votes in safe seats, while falling short in Conservative held marginals.
The ideal Labour seat was one with lots of students, university workers, Muslims, public sector professionals, and people working in occupations like arts, fashion etc.
But, there aren't many of those seats.
Indeed, this is a point I tried to make to all my lefty friends in the Smoke last year when they were shrieking about how well they did in EU and council elections in London. There were very few seats Labour could realistically hope to take from the Tories in London, so doing well there was basically a distraction. Outside London and Scotland, they were coming a poor third to the Tories and UKIP. That's a pattern you can see quite easily on the map on the previous thread.
So I think there is evidence of a disconnection between London and the rest of the country. Mind you, that's hardly new. That was true under John Major and even Stanley Baldwin as well!
Not an attractive choice at all.
This sort of behaviour and language, however, really really grates. Patronising, sneering, condescending, arrogant, antidemocratic nonsense.
It's the first time I can see a BOO win as anything other than a pipe dream. If European leaders and other bureaucrats persist in this sort of language, and persist in treating the British elecorate like children, it's going to allow national pride (and a measure of jingoism) to swell. Brexit becomes a much more likely outcome.
I feel as we go along that the self-harm indulged in by the Eurocrats isn't something I want anything to do with without very serious reform. I'd say I'm slipping from Reluctant Inner to Persuadable Outer quite rapidly.
I'm pretty much on the fence, but it's becoming clearer by the day that there is no Status Quo option - it's either into the inward-looking Superstate or we get the hell out of there and make our own place in the world. The latter is seemingly the better option right now.
But I just can't decide if I want to ally with the "Pull up the drawbridge" brigade. I have relatively little problem with immigration, or a certain level of common goods standards and t pivot to the rest of the world means more of both (at least gross).
Here's to hoping that the 100/1 shot of Cameron's renegociation actually works...
My great fear is the debate will boil down to the in side saying if we leave the EU we'll become an economic leper (ignoring the fact they said the same if we didn't join the Euro) vs an out movement saying if we vote to remain a member of the EU we're giving 5 billion people the right to move to the UK and that they'll all give us aids.
Odd, that’s not the conclusion I came to - do we even know what the changes will be?
O/T - Blimey, the heavens have just opened above Salisbury – Has Blatter just been crucified?
Hopefully it will be a short campaign, I have had enough of neverendums that resolve nothing.
It seems to me that the overriding principle in the response of the powerful in Europe to Cameron is that Britain Should Not Become Too Successful.
The don;t want to give us associate membership or see us leave for one reason. These might work.
Many in Europe are already unnerved by our relative economic success, and they probably feel the status quo is a restraining factor on us.
In Torbay, I'm told we delivered close to a million leaflets in the six months running up to election day. Now THAT is a ground game.
We should recognise this for what it is, merely a divergence of interests, and not some terrible, awful conspiracy.
Realistically, what should be sought is a sort-of EFTA-plus position for all those EU members who do not with to go down the "ever closer union" path. However, I think it is unlikely that the EU can come up with a satisfactory method for protecting the interests of non-Eurozone countries.
Miss Plato, and culture. Tolkien, CS Lewis, James Bond, Harry Potter are all global titans. Not to mention Shakespeare.
I think the current question is very badly worded, and could well lead to real problems down the road.
If we vote out, the European Union will not be too bothered by losing a a bunch of trouble.
I suspect the campaign to rejoin would probably take a couple of years to get going though.
However, unless Labour improve their organisation to match the Tories you would expect that the Tories would be able campaign on any new boundaries as well as on the old ones, and so the calculators would be somewhat out.
NZ team are still in their hotel!
And the many billions in net contributions that trouble contributes every year.
The UK leaving the EU wouldn't just mean it's somewhat smaller, it'd be a huge change, for both sides [the EU more than the UK].
http://www.euractiv.com/sections/eu-priorities-2020/sigmar-gabriel-europe-may-have-move-different-speeds-314948
Cameron needs to leave Merkel and Hollande and the other EU leaders in no doubt: if we vote No, we are gone. Too late then to start to engage. It would be political suicide. Until we get engagement on the areas where the EU is broken, a No vote is a very real proposition. The status quo is about as appealing as electing Sett Blatter as EU life President.
Not to mention a dangerous precedent.
a) It will make it very hard to sell, as there will be different voices giving different pictures of a post-EU Britain. Most importantly, I think there are a lot of businesses that would be happy to campaign for "No", if it was on the basis of Britain moving to a EFTA/EEA relationship. But I think that number shrinks dramatically in the event of us moving to "something else".
or
b) You get a "No" vote, and then some people are going to be enormously disappointed. Either people who thought they were going to see an end to freedom of labour are going to cry foul, or businesses who thought we would remain part of the EEA will.