PB Balance of Money Index: CON Majority 32 seats
December 9th, 2008
Why are gamblers lagging behind the polls?
This evening “spreads” from the two main UK spread-betting firms suggest a Conservative majority of 32 seats at the general election. Their prices are based on how much is being wagered by gamblers who are buying and selling seats in the three main parties. The PB Index is a way of reflecting market opinion in one single number.
It is worked out by looking at the “mid-points” - the difference between the BUY and SELL levels and averaging them between the two firms.
Tonight’s numbers are surprising given the last two opinion polls - from Populus and ComRes - which both point to the Tories winning fewer seats than Labour and well below the 300 level.
As a player in these markets my reaction on seeing last night’s Populus findings was to sell the Tories and I expected that that would be the trend. Well the spreads have moved by four seats but are nowhere near what the polling is pointing to.
It’s quite odd. When the Tories had poll leads of 20% plus punters were cautious and the highest mid-point was 353 seats. Today’s spreads are just twelve seats down on that.
I’m expecting quite a large number of polls in the next week and there needs to be some very good news for the Tories to sustain the numbers at these levels.
Mike Smithson
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Maybe punters go with their gut eather than data sets that may be skewed.
…sorry that should be ‘rather’….
Are you expecting any polls tonight Mike?
1. Alternatively, they get the equivalent of frequent personal mini polls in everyday conversation.
The populus poll was two days after a 1% cut in interest rates and the comres on the day of the PBR. Perhaps punters are looking for polls which do not have such favourable timing for labour to base their bets on.
still feel it’s because the polls have an odd feel to them. the two recent ones seem skewed by massive heartland votes - i’m a big tory seats buyer and not overly concerned if labour are polling 50% in scotland. plus brown is hopeless, and at the mercy of events. imagine a huge slew of redundancies or terrible unemployment figures coming out in the final weeks of a campaign
or how about this for a theory:
Serious betters need to be intelligent, disciplined and have some money - so they are much less likely to be natural Labour voters. Ouch!
“It’s quite odd. When the Tories had poll leads of 20% plus punters were cautious and the highest mid-point was 353 seats. Today’s spreads are just twelve seats down on that.”
Mike, it might simple be that over the summer as the recession loomed, punters expected Labour’s position to improve on the back of the cling to nurse philosophy, and the fact that the government can be seen to be acting where oppositions cannot?
We have now had the PBR and the fiscal stimulus, could be that neither impressed, and that the hard grind of recession is expected even sooner on the back of that, which is not good for Brown or the government?
I would have thought that Christmas time polling would not be a great guide anyway, could we see more movement after this period, with the polling coming up in January-March time being regarded as more of an indicator?
7 - Ha.
Alternatively Carphone Warehouse shares have been accepted as security.
Easy, the large tory leads were not sustainable and down to short term antipathy from some labour core voters and this was factored in to the numbers, the smaller leads are in a period of (as someone said on the last thread) phoney war and punters are looking further ahead than your average high street shopper so the short term government boost is also factored in.
We should recall the headless chickens reacting to across the pond when US polls were moving around rapidly; this looks like the opposite, people who are not overexcited by every poll and short term strategy.
You cannot look ahead and find a rosy picture for the government, it is just not credible to think they will benefit from more than a short term phoney war hit given how seriously screwed the economy is and how it will remain.
6.”if labour are polling 50% in scotland”
That’s just it, I am not buying this kind of polling figure for Labour in Scotland. Not surprised they have improved a lot there, especially in their heartlands, but not that much.
And as always with Labour, they might be building up a strong vote in area’s they do not need it, and that come election day, actual turnout will show the polls flattered them.
I think the Tories will win but……
It seems increasingly clear that Cameron’s instincts are very right wing. I think he knows what he needs to do to win but he’s gradually lost a lot of the liberal support he gained 3 years ago.
10. I think that’s probably correct. I also think that *where* the recession is hitting hardest, up the M4, M1, and M25 corridors will hit the government hard.
10.”You cannot look ahead and find a rosy picture for the government, it is just not credible to think they will benefit from more than a short term phoney war hit given how seriously screwed the economy is and how it will remain.”
That was me, and yes, its been the phoney war period, made all the more confused by the smoke and mirrors economic tinkering so beloved by Brown. Add in lashings of over hyped spin like the mortgage relief headline, what happens when it doesn’t deliver?
It’s interesting to compare these with the latest BetFair odds of 1.88 (Con. majority), 3.2 (NOM), 6.4 (Lab Majority).
Those correspond to implied probabilities of 53%, 31%, 16%
In other words, the BetFair market is implying there is a 47% chance of the Conservatives getting less than 325 seats, that is to say roughly evens that the spreads are overstating the Conservatives by 16 seats at the mid-point.
Punters, something’s got to give. These can’t both be right, unless you assume the probability distribution is very highly skewed.
10. O/T Chickens and political reasoning… did you see this?
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/12/chickens_and_us.html
12.Frank, even liberals become more practical in a recession.
9 Obviously I’m biased because I think we have the shittiest government we’ve pretty much ever had right now.
But Mike has a serious point. It’s easy for us political anoraks to get too excited by polls - especially over short time scales. As we saw so very clearly on 538.com, it is the gradual evolution of polling averages over time that tells us where outcomes are going. Sometimes it is a source of value to step back from polls and just ask yourself intuitively if Labour can really win a majority. If it seems a disconnect (like some recent polls) then you may find an opportunity by betting against it. Warren Buffet thinks like this for financial gain - it’s sometimes good to go against the flow.
Leading Article “I’m expecting quite a large number of polls in the next week and there needs to be some very good news for the Tories to sustain the numbers at these levels.”
Very interesting. So when is the first of these polls due to be published - does anyone know?
6. Labour will not get 50% in Scotland, they have a temporary boost but the chickens will come home to roost before long.
I think that we maybe heading for a hung parliament if the polls are anywhere near to be true, which would be terrible news for the country in the middle of a downturn. What the polls don’t allow for is certain changes in seats- Stamford and Grantham is almost certain to change from Labour to Conservative due to Davies’ defection in this term.
11 - they never have and never will get 50% of the Scottish vote. For those with long memories they almost did get 49% in 1966 but then it was mostly a 2 or 3 party fight in most seats. THe SNP contested 23 seats then, the Liberals one more at 24 out of 71.
Now Spreadfair has gone it is very difficult to make short-term raids on the Spreads, even given the huge volatility.
Nonetheless I am amazed particularly that IG still go 338-344 Tory and that Sporting go 238-244 Labour.
It could be that more long-term thinking goes into Spread Betting with the punters who use the two firms.
I am more than 80% a short-term punter and it is ironic that both my long term sticking out positions are notional losers because everything else is either money in the bank or money due to be banked.
Here are my two sticking out positions and they dwarf the rest of my action.Of course they are offsetting.Of course !
I have a Sell of the Tories at 334.0 and a healthy five figure loss if LAB gain an Overall.So essentially my worst results are LAB with 326 Seats or a massive Tory landslide.
Unusually,this has been ‘moving day’ on Betfair with quite a few changes.I suspect these are mainly the work of pb.com. (laughing face)
The polls are oddly divergent, still. The spectrum of outcomes based on them varies from a hung Parliament (with the authoritarian worms gaining most seats) to a strong Tory victory.
re 19. The answer is that I don’t know the timing because the pollsters are very keen to do their fieldwork before everybody goes on holiday. So maybe the next week could see ICM, YouGov, ComRes and MORI.
MIKE DID YOU GET MY E MAIL?
25 - Don’t forget that private schools are on holiday from Friday (and probably some are already).
The politico.com article on Blagojevich continues the bizarre elaboration of a scenario in which the Illinois governor stated particular bribes he would accept in return for appointing Obama’s choice to the Senate, followed by the governor’s expletive-laden anger at such bribe offers not being accepted by Obama. However, there is no suggestion that Obama was ever asked, much less declined, to offer a bribe/payoff. So is Blagojevich schizophrenic and engaged in this entire series of events with an imaginary friend named Obama, or did Obama or someone in his staff discuss the matter with Blagojevich? This story should get a lot more interesting, if the media decide to do their jobs.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16348.html
The betting market clearly has inbuilt inertia. I guess money has mass.
28- Stars and Stripes
It seems quite clear (reading the affidavit) that some people in the transition team were contacted.
The whole document is incredibly depressing…
28, the media will conclude the Anointed One’s name is not tainted by the work of Beelzejevich.
I like Obama, and would’ve voted for him, but the media coverage is as neutral and informative as a teenage girl’s letter to a boyband idol.
29, inbuilt inertia is present in many places. Such as the role of the Speaker.
30- I don’t wish to jump to conclusions before the facts are fleshed out but I do have to ask the question which the news articles don’t seem to be addressing yet. I will read the affidavit post haste.
As if labour will win. They screwed up big time and we’re all being dumped right in the shit.the news is still getting worse week by week, stress levels are rising and jobs are going all over the place. Its carnage out there. Awful awful right now. How can labour possibly benefit - everyone i speak to mocks brown the saviour line pushed in the press- hes ridiculed now.
21. Forecasts and spreads almost certainly take that into account, i.e. Grantham is still a notional Tory seat from an electoral point of view.
Actually, as I’ve pointed out before, it’s Labour that is probably underestimated at the margins.
2 SDLP and 2 minor parties may well end up in the Labour column.
31- Morris Dancer
Some of the media have already changed their tone, especially big liberal newspapers (NY Times, Wash Post, LA Times).
They’re certainly not agressive, but they begin to question some of his decisions (and, God forbid, even mock him in some columns, something that never happened during the campaign)
32. I like what I heard from david Starkey on This Week. He’s always struck me as a fairly traditionalist historian, but if he’s calling for a directly elected PM and separation of powers a la USofA, something must be up. Of course, I would go one step further and abolish the monarchy with a US style President instead.
37, well, leaving aside your treasonous comments (I half-jest, I’m a staunch monarchist) I concur Starkey has some interesting things to say. Some years ago on This Week he said that a big shake up could be to return to real local democracy, with village halls given far greater power.
36, mocking Obama makes baby Jesus cry.
37
Hmmm interesting! Starkey is of course a staunch monarchist, in fact he’s an old Queen himself.
Is Starkey a nutter? How can you have a directly elected PM in a parliamentary system? That’s only possible in a full presidential system is it not?
28. My they do have fun up there, don’t they? One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned yet - who blew the whistle?
40. Presumably it would be a President in all but name with the Monarchy kept on for ceremonial purposes. The current shambles can’t go on much longer.
42. Just to add that that is pretty much what happened by stealth under Blair. But it would be nice to be able to vote for a President.
43, yeah. Either Parliament needs to be beefed up, or the inherent government dominance of the body meant to hold the government to account needs to be removed.
the 50% in scotland was not what i think will happen, by the way. my personal opinion is that labour will be wiped out, and i’ve £100 a seat at various 340s on the tories, so it bl00dy better happen!
43. Just goes to show how dangerous a presidential system might be.
45, blimey. Good luck. I hope (for both your wallet and the nation’s sake) you enjoy election night.
43 why?
41- I’m still reading the complaint, but it states early on that the government has been investigating Blagojevich since 2003. That’s the year he became governor! But on your question, there was a name mentioned of a particular individual who went to the government and agreed to act as informant (but I haven’t seen that name mentioned in today’s articles).
47, i have faith in the great british public…probably misplaced…but i have faith
48. I mean being able to vote for a President rather than having a de facto President as we do at the moment.
42 .You miss the point. If we elected, say, Cameron as President but Labour held the majority of seats in parliament then who would decide what gets done? In the presidential system the incoming president brings along an army of executive appointments, cabinet ministers, etc. In a parliamentary system these come from the MPs - or are delivered by (at least in theory) politically neutral civil servants. In a parliamentary system the executive positions are filled from the ranks of the legislature. That concentrates power in the governing party and makes a PM an ‘elected dictator’. Taking away the executive roles from MPs would require a president to staff the executive independently.
51 Understood. a presidential system here would be a disaster. We are close enough to it as it is. Power in the centre needs to be reined back.
re 26. Yes I got your email and I’m just trying to work out what to do with it. I’m going to talk to Marf.
It’s brilliant.
49. Thanks. 5 years. Then there must be something very suspicious from before he was Gov, so far as the police are concerned. Unless there was something dodgy about the way he became Gov. Feel quite deprived, we have corrupt practices too, particularly with funding, but nobody ever gets prosecuted.
53. Well something has to be done anyway. As Starkey said, the current system is broken.
53 MTF Actually a president is politically alot weaker than a PM sitting on a strong majority (as Clinton once joked with Blair). Anything serious a president wants to do needs to be passed by Congress. The presidential and congress electoral cycles are out not fully in sync. Presidents often have hostile congress majorities to deal with. They can veto congressional items. This drives a tendency towards government paralysis and half measures - just as the founding fathers intended. It is the untramelled power of a PM with a majority that is to be feared.
Someone called Maggie Thatcher Fan claiming that power in the centre should be reined back.
How odd.
A non-executive president (as in Ireland and Germany) might just about be acceptable (although I’d prefer not). An executive president (as in the USA and France, but without their traditions) would be catastrophic - might as well go back to before 1688.
54 Mike MTF
Well now we’re all agog wondering what the brilliant email was. Your post is a bit like Fermat saying he has a lovely solution to the problem and then dying before telling anyone. Pray share with the hoi polloi.
57 I was thinking along the lines of the PM having the title president, which IMHO would be disastrous. I understand your point completely. That said a Govt with a massive majority is as equally bad news, whoever is in power.
However in this instance come 2009/10 I hope DC has a HUGE majority as so much needs to be done to repair the nation. I have enough faith in DC that he will not abuse it, tough decisions that they may be.
56
It is only broken because it has been corrupted by the power of the patyies through the whips. Remove that power and have MPs decide matters on free votes where the government has to win though force of argument rather than by blackmail as they currently do and you will have something approaching true Parliamentary democracy. Individual MPs representing the best interests of their constituents rather than of their party.
It will also mean that there is a far greater inertia in government (since that seems to be the catchword today) with far fewer laws being passed. Which can only be a good thing.
56 Frank
What is broken is the assumed natural checks of decency and respect for Parliament. I would think, reluctantly, that a written constution is now needed to prevent a repeat of the abuse of power Labour have indulged themselves in.
55- Well, this is pretty big even by American political corruption standards. All of the Illinois-based political analysts I’ve seen commenting on this are going ballistic. The complaint mentions early on that the activities upon which the indictment are based actually go back to 2000 or 2001, when he was first considering running for a statewide office (he was in the U.S. House back then).
For those interested in reading the parts of the complaint pertaining to selling the U.S. Senate seat, start reading at page 54 (the complaint totals 76 pages):
http://www.chicagotribune.com/media/acrobat/2008-12/43789434.pdf
61 MTF
One good option would be for Cameron to repeal the Parliament Act and thereby allow the Lords to block shitty legislation - rather than merely delay it as now.
62. Yes we need to do something about the whips. And institute a primary system - no more safe seats. They’re little (very little) better than the old rotten boroughs.
58 Dont misunderstand the tag. its something I chse when I joined PB.com. Its significance did not occur to me at the time. I loathe this authoritarian Govt, I loathe the way the individual is supressed and has been forced into cowtowing to state dictat.
I met someone yesterday carrying a copy of the Daily Express , I know he is not a Conservative (or at least highly unlikely to be so),. When he saw the item about taxing tree houses, he suggested to me (in amongst a number of expletives) that it was time for an Oliver Cromwell solution.
You can push people so far…..
and then you get voted out by a landslide.
67
I think I would prefer a Guy Fawkes solution
65 woudnt work IMHO, Whoever was in power would just enoble enough people to ensure a majority/pension off oppostion members.,.
67.
Could be worse.
You could’ve picked “Maggie Thatchers Son”
Now theres a name that makes you think of wire taps
69.We need to either bring back the hereditaries (which I doubt would be popular) or institute an elected senate,maybe with 6 year terms and staggered elections. We need to do it soon, because that place is a joke.
66
Written constitution
Independent speaker
Repeal Parliament Act
Primaries for parliamentary candidates
No whips
Fixed electoral cycle (government could not choose timing)
Allow constituencies to deselect their MP at any time (with a majority petition of voters in constituency)
That should do it!
70 Tim so dim , nothing to say, go away.
69 MTF
Not if the power of enoblement was also severely curtailed.
64- The consensus seems to be that the infamous Candidate 5 is likely outgoing Illinois Senate President Emil Jones.
42 - The only measure I would use is whether having a President instead of a PM would strengthen or weaken the executive.
Theoretically, a President would weaken the Executive, by separating it from the Legislature (and this model of tripartite separation of powers is something that the EU is seeking to harmonise, for those who worry about such things).
In reality, I suspect that it would relegate Parliament yet further, especially if the party governing was of the same party as the Presidency.
I have no faith in wholesale constitutional changes - in fact, I can’t think of a single one that has been sensible in my lifetime. Better the system we know, as far as I’m concerned.
71 Actually the Lords is about the only bit of Parliament that seems to work well. Many peers seem to lose their tribal hats and start behaving for the common good. I’d leave well alone.
72. I agree with all of that, except perhaps the fixed terms. I’m not so bothered about that, and I like the idea a vote of no confidence can bring a government down and just add a bit more flexibility.
74 Yes its difficult, you elect a Govt , but you have no idea whats going to happen in 5 years, Personally I would reduce the term of a Parliament to 4 yrs and bar anyone from standing as PM for more than two parliaments sort of as in America. Whether the PM would become a lame duck in the second term is open to conjecture..
Those international pupil attainment comparisons are interesting. I see the children of the Tory-voting English are 5th in the world for science, behind only the supergeeks of Singapore and Taiwan.
Meanwhile, the kids of those Labour-voting fried-Mars-bar-eating pasty-faced socialist Scots, are way back in 22nd.
Tory kids = smart.
Labour kids = dribbling retards.
Is anyone surprised?
66
Looks like a good list to start with. The important point would be ensuring the right people wrote the constitution so that it accurately relected the intent of the Bill of Rights and the other constitutional laws.
Could you imagine the nightmare scenario of a written constitution constructed by a megalomaniac sociopath like Brown?
Given the discussion is the effectiveness of Parliament, surely the ‘Elephant in the Room’ is the EU. Whatever one thinks of the EU it is hard to deny that ever since it came into existence our Parliament has become more and more trivial.
The way to beef up Parliament is to take policy back from Brussels!
True, restricting the whip would also help as would introducing standards for the selection of potential MP’s - e.g closed/open primaries) but until the Brussels Dictat is halted it ain’t going to get much better.
77. They rolled over on Lisbon, and we have no comeback. How many of them are taking EU money? We don’t know, we have no control over that chamber.
82
I agree (of course). As long as the EU can emplace laws into Britain without proper Westminster Parliamentary scrutiny our whole system is failing a basic democratic test.
75- Jones has some answering to do then…
The political class will never surrender their powers. It will have to be taken from them.
69: Not if we bring back the hereditary peers and abolish life peerages.
How about a fully elected second chamber with full powers to block legislation. The trick here would be to allocate seats on a party list system but based on an inverse proportion to the seats won in the commons, that is to say it would be impossible for a party to have a majority in both houses. Then do away with statutary instruments and other legislaive short-cuts and only allow parliament to sit for, say, 120 days a year. With a bit of luck very little legislation would ever get enacted, so saving the country from many horrors, and ministers would have time to concentrate on delivering an efficient administration.
81. I agree it would be a nightmare but what would be worse is that every session there would another raft of changes to it (just as there have been 25 criminal justice bills in 11 years)
81
Gives me shivers to think what Brown would come up with. No doubt he would go down the EU route and write a whole bunch of policy into the constitution. The US constiution fits onto 2 or 3 sheets of A4. The Lisbon monster is like War & Peace. All we’d really need to do is codify the existing unwritten constitution - how does what, what theirs powers are / aren’t and how they get elected and kicked out, nothing more.
82
Too true. Written constiution should confirm EU membership by Treaty and therefore able to be withdrawn at any time by Parliament. We go along with whatever EU laws may be in place if Parliament gives temporary ratification.
41- Here’s the answer to your question, b:
“In October, the Tribune disclosed that John Wyma, the governor’s longtime friend, former congressional chief of staff and major state lobbyist, was named in a subpoena over his work for a hospital client.
On Friday, the Tribune disclosed Wyma was cooperating with federal authorities and his cooperation led to investigators recording the governor.”
http://www.wsiltv.com/p/news_details.php?newsID=6274&type=top
Ronald Mcdonald now more highly rated than Gordon Brown..
http://www.order-order.com/2008/12/ronald-mcdonald-higher-rated-than.html
90. Ah, a bit of arm-twisting on a target of opportunity, then. Still, it does seem logical that if the law enforcement lot wanted an informer close to the Gov, there must have been existing suspicions that he was a baddun - unless they do it to all the Governors, of course. Now there’s a thought…
89 The only way to ensure a constitution wouldn’t get amended or destroyed by Labour in future would be to force referrendum’s on constitutional matters, and to back that up with the parliament act. So if Labour did then enoble countless peers and took the vote away from the public they would pretty much be destined to take an electoral hit come the next election. It would be ironic if Brown and Blair’s authoritarian madness ended up forcing Cameron to create a well thought out constitution with the aim of stopping future totalitarian Labour looneys(think ed balls etc). If not then Starkey is right we need a complete break and something like the American system.
93
Indeed. I also (FWIW) think we need some sort of legislative control on economic policy. Maybe the Lords blocking an insane budget like the one just recently would do. Maybe there should be enshrined in law some golden rules to prevent tax and spend idiocy beyond a certain degree (we would have to allow future Labour governments discretion to push the balance in their direction otherwise the result would be a Tory stitch up - equally unacceptable to me).
92. Oops, sorry, misread the dates, thought he’d ben ‘recruited’ further back. So he traded - sell your pal for a lesser sentence and throw in the inevitable disgrace to the party into the bargain. He’ll be popular.
90 - S&S - forgive my ignorance, but the Governor of Illinois is talking about wanting a job that pays $250-300k, and using the Senate seat to get it, right?
Illinois is a state of about 13m people, with America’s 2nd/3rd largest centre of commerce, and huge corporations.
Could a two term Governor who has the private phone line to the White House (having sponsored the new, sitting POTUS) not get a job paying $500k a year without difficulty?
Why sell the seat?
94. You mean something like an Office of Budget Responsibility? A statutory body that caps the public deficit. What a concept
93. Have a look at the Swiss Constitution. Very, very interesting. The politicians can’t do anything (even at local level) that the populace don’t agree with. Yet nobody could claim that Switzerland is suffering from political paralysis.
97
Yes that would do. Anything that prevents a future government from ruining us on ideological grounds will get my vote.
96- Morus
because he was damaged goods already. Everybody knew he was under investigation and I’m not sure many people would have taken the risk to hire him
re 60 Sorry. MTF has bought one of Marf’s creations and in the process she produced a special Christmas card drawing solely for him.
MTF sent it to me - it’s all about PB - and I hope to feature it on the site.
101 Mike
Thanks - at least we now know what it was you were being so cryptic about. Shall look forward to seeing the Marf cartoon - as ever.
96- One might think so, Morus, but who am I to question his motives (sarcasm)?
People also still legitimately wonder why it was that Nixon felt a need to involve himself in the coverup of a snooping operation at the DNC leading up to an election he would have won by a landslide regardless. Maybe Blagojevich was just so convinced that he had to receive SOMETHING of value that even a guaranteed job of some kind would be enough to justify the deal. Perhaps he could have done just as well through his own personal connections, which seems reasonable, but it may also be that he had become so toxic that he felt he couldn’t be sure of much of anything once his term in office ended.
It seems that a job was just one of his possible payoffs. He was looking at other angles, too, but all seemed to involve channelling cash into his pockets. He also indicated he was in a bad financial situation so he certainly had a motive to find dollars where he could.
Frankly, he also seems a bit delusional (so perhaps you shouldn’t be trying to look at things so sensibly). One of his ideas was to try to engineer some kind of political success in 2016 (presidential bid?), which seems preposterous given his background, even if he hadn’t been indicted.
98. Switzerland is a fine example. It has repeatedly voted against the EU despite what its politicians want. It’s evidence for what the EU really is, a gravy train for politicians and a place for them to gain power without answering to the voters.
101/2
It’s personal to me, but nevertheless as Mike says Marf’s cartoon is brilliant. Will explain more when and if it gets an airing.
104. Just so. But even at local level the Council would have to justify a proposal for, say, the siting of a roundabout and the locals get a binding vote on it. I like it.
104 If Labour get in again I am off to Switzerland.
107. The electorate also decide who should be allowed citizenship, so be nice to them.
Instead of a directly elected PM, as Dr Starkey is bizarrely suggesting, might not a more measured and British way be to remove most of the PM’s de facto royal perogative powers?
If the PM’s power to exercise Her Majesty’s power of patronage were transferred to Parliament, as well as the ability to dissolve parliament were removed in favour of fixed terms + motions of confidence, the Presidential nature of the modern PM would be greatly undermined, and we’d see a large swing back to cabinet government, and the PM as first among equals, accountable to Parliament.
All this thinking about a better constitution and how to ensure we escape the socialist loonies in future - it’s too hard and 99.999% won’t happen anyway. So…
With immediate effect I am declaring myself Lord High Protector.
Haven’t settled my cabinet positions yet but I’m tending towards Sean T for Witchfinder General and MTF for Hangman.
Only because I wanted to know!
From Wiki
Politics of Switzerland takes place in the framework of a multi-party federal parliamentary democratic republic, whereby the Federal Council of Switzerland is the head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government and the federal administration. Federal legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of the Federal Assembly of Switzerland. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. For any change in the constitution, a referendum is mandatory; for any change in a law, a referendum can be requested. Through referendums, citizens may challenge any law voted by federal parliament and through initiatives introduce amendments to the federal constitution, making Switzerland the closest state in the world to a direct democracy.
@110:
Can I be Secretary of State for Summary Justice?
93. I agree with your comments but would go further. Not only should constitutional matters be decided by referendum but also all matters relating to our political system and the constitution should be taken out of the hands of the political parties and should be safeguarded by a separate non political independent elected body.
I had considered the House Of Lords (or a proportion of it) in a reformed form could take that role reporting directly to the Monarch. In that way NO political party could undermine our democracy and our constitution.
96- The Dems are so afraid that Blagojevich will go ahead and appoint a replacement that they are now coalescing behind the idea of changing Illinois law immediately so a special election can be designated as the method of replacement rather than gubernatorial appointment:
http://www.sacbee.com/830/story/1460709.html
This surprises me a bit since I would have thought Blagojevich would either soon resign without making an appointment or he would soon be impeached and removed from office. Durbin’s call for an immediate special election indicates to me that the Illinois Dems have no faith that Blagojevich will be ousted before making the appointment (since, if he were, the lieutenant governor could make the appointment).
A special election would be very risky for the Dems since, in my opinion, the GOP has a much better chance of winning a special election in, say, February, than they would have of winning a general election (possibly against an incumbent) in 2010. In February (or thereabouts), the Illinois Democratic Party will still be grappling with this scandal (in ways that can’t be predicted today) and turnout will be down since it would be a special election. Just as in Georgia and Louisiana, this would present a golden opportunity to the Republicans.
110. I think you need some interrogators too. I’m very good with thumbscrews!
;o)
112
Only if you promise to use something involving hot pitch, feathers and black cats for the current cabinet.
98 etc
I agree. I’ve resisted a written Constitution all my life, but it seems we’re going to get one anyway whether we like it or not: i.e. the Lisbon Consti *cough* Treaty. Thanks to the euroliars for that.
So if we’ve gotta have one: let’s write our own. Let’s have a wholly elected Federal Upper Chamber, elected by AV. Perhaps binding in Wales and Scotland and Ulster but removing their MPs from the Commons, which becomes an English parliament.
Let’s have proper open parliamentary scrutiny of European legislation, and some way of halting it - perhaps by referendums. We need more referendums all round: we need to reverse the democratic deficit.
We need elected mayors in all major cities, we need elected police chiefs, elected everything. Let people vote by internet.
And of course our constitution must be supreme - with a supreme court enforcing it. Supreme also over Europe, if we choose to leave. Civil liberties must be enshrined. And so on and so forth.
Labour have botched all of this, horribly. There is an opportunity for a great reforming rightwing government to do what should have been done by Blair.
116. Are you sure that some of the current cabinet wouldn’t enjoy that?
I have long been of the impression that what the UK needs is a full constitutional convention.
Our constitution has become too much a patchwork of convention and precedent, much of its origins lost in the mists of time, or of questionable relevance.
Only by convening a full constitutional convention, drawn with power to consider every aspect of the constitution (yes, even The Crown) can we start to answer the questions about who we are as a country and what we be.
The one thing I can be fairly certain of, is that the answer won’t be “exactly what we’ve got now”.
110 Hangman.. Count me out. I don’t agree with capital punishment.
117. Why do we need to mess with the voting system? It will not improve the quality of our politicians.
119
…and whatever might emerge to be approved in a referendum, incl any subsequent changes thereto…
@MTF:
Oh don’t worry, this won’t be for criminals, so no jurisprudential concerns.
Political prisoners only.
@122:
The point of a Constitutional Convention will be to draft a new constitution. I think, legally, for a new constitution to be adopted, it would only have to be approved by Parliament.
What you *could* do, however, would be to have a codicil on the new constitution that it must be approved in a referendum before it could have effect.
That way, once Parliament approved the new constitution, a referendum would then be mandatory *under the terms of the new constitution*.
123 Now I am interested
120. Best sort of hangman to have - “More in sorrow than in anger - and this hurts me more than it hurts you.” Just the sort of compassionate sympathy a scummy, hypocritical, lying, corrupt, self-serving cabinet minister would appreciate just before he gets turned off.
121. Cause it is arguably unfair.
I would keep FPTP for the Commons - because it produces decisive outcomes and maintains the constituency-MP link - but use AV for the weaker, but still important Federal Chamber: the Lords.
Judging by the remarks on here tonight there might be a consensus on the right for major constitutional reform, in the next Tory government. No doubt that’s a product of the legal and constitutional horrowshow we have been treated to these last ten years, with all the referendum betrayals, and the illegal wars, and the ongoing vandalisation of our liberties.
Sigh…
I still think that before we do any of that we should use the Guy Fawkes method of deselecting politicians. Otherwise they will just ruin it for everyone else.
Please, please, please, pretty please?
124. What if you can’t get agreement? For example, I am fully in favour of a consitution and tying the hands of politicians but as soon as they start introducing convuluted voting systems (as per SeanT’s post) it turns me cold. I would then vote it down purely on one issue.
@127:
Do we need an elected House at all? If we want to be seriously democratic, shouldn’t we be seriously considering Sortition and turning the Commons into a whip-immune, fully representative House?
While we are all waxing lyrical about Switzerland, I seem to recall our very own Nick Palmer Esq has some connections with Switzerland ( if the is not true and just my over active imagination, then I apologize ) but the does seem to be a certain irony in him voting for repressive laws in this country and enjoying the liberties afforded by Switzerland .
130
Reminds me of a very good Asimov story about a future election in the US where there is a single voter who represents Joe Average and who is questioned for a whole day by a supercomputer who then uses the responses to devise the policies for the next 4 years.
You see. Sci Fi always has the answers.
126
Now, now children - we shouldn’t advocate execution for their crimes.
I am of the opinion that the correct punishment for Brown’s crimes will be a month of tar and feathers, ducking stools, pillories and rotten fruit throwing, then 10 rounds of pro-celebrity boxing with Mike Tyson - all live on TV - and then 25 years banishment to a fish processing line in Grimsby.
127. Why is it unfair?
Why would we want a second weaker chamber? The chambers should be design to be of equal power. Otherwise over a period of time the stronger chamber will undermine the weaker and we will be back where we are now.
128. Ok Richard, seeing as you said please. You can burn a few MPs outside the HoC while the legislation is being debated.
133. You’re no fun! Can we start allocating cells in the Bloody Tower though?
;0)
135
Ta muchly. Goes off whistling happily a la Bluebottle.
130 I remember Jim Hacker and the episode about real democacy, cant remember what it was called, but it was about town democracy with 500 voter blocks who elected their leaders. A classic in its own right.
130 Martin, that would give the likes of Gabble, Darmstatdium and Roger the chance to be ‘decision makers’. No thanks!
131. Nick “the bucket” Palmer does indee3d bang on about the Swiss system of referendums and participatory democracy - and how he was so happy living there, wearing leather shorts and poking holes in cheese and all that.
And that is, as you say, rather ironic given his absurd lies and contortions about the European referendum. First voting against it on principle, then wanting one on principle, then denying he’d ever wanted one on principle, then voting against one on principle, then lying about how lied about
Cont page 76.
If we’re seriously considering a new Constitution, I think it’s time we seriously considered identifying and fixing the innate flaws the representative Democracy brings.
No voting system, however you choose and however passionately argued for, can or will fix those flaws.
136
I’m not sure Brown would survive 10 rounds with Tyson.
138 MTF http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_cx7g0BiLmw ‘A Victory For Democracy’; I watched it last night!
@139:
Yeah, but they’d have no more chance than the other 40 million or so adults. The chances would be negligible.
129. Personally I prefer the idea of a system along the lines of the counties, copying the US system, with a couple of Senators for each county. (Perhaps a few smaller counties would be combined, that sort of thing could be thought through). Then you keep the local link while also allowing more personality based politics. That would be beneficial because, for example, if I vote for Ken Clarke I know his stance should euro-crap come up without him having to give me a manifesto commitment and without trying to see 6 years into the future.
Ideally, we’d have a chamber with minimal party links. We had that. Labour f*cked it up the a*se in the name of the foxes or something, so we’re stuck with party politics. ugh.
Hooray! I just sold the US audio rights to The Genesis Secret. Decent four figure sum.
I highly recommend writing a thriller. It’s like having a hard-working young Latvian wife who you can send out on the game. All you have to do is sit at home, drinking pinot noir, and the money keeps rolling in.
No modern state has ever tried pure Democracy. They don’t like it, and they fear it.
That’s because they’re all run by politicians, who can sense the power of true democracy to undermine their power.
It’s instructive here that we’re all such hacks, not one of us is seriously discussing a way to liberate democracy from the politicians.
Sean T is basically right. This Labour government is the first to explore the extent to which abuse of power is really possible under the existing arrangements. The arrangements have been tested to destruction. We need a written constitution and one that fixes the basic problems and restores the power, dignity and rights of the people. That will take years, broad consensus and alot of soul searching to get right and to implement.
@SeanT:
Writing action’s too much like hard work for me. I’d want to do pompous speculative fiction or nowt. Mainly nowt, cos I’m a lazy f*cker. I don’t have the discipline to write a novel.
That’s why I do computers and shit.
i think the last thing we need right now is a load of naval gazing about constitutions and the like. we need a government with vision to lead us out of an economic hole. that’s all.
“Gordon, play your crisis card: call an election”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article5315163.ece
@150:
I think that’s what’s known as a false dichotomy.
Have a biscuit.
147
True full democracy also has it’s flaws. Firstly you’d get people voting for low tax and high spend - so we’d go broke PDQ. Second you’d end up with a permanent tyranny by the majority. Yes we’d get out of the EU, etc but we’d also start to see anti-Muslim witchhunts, and all that mob rule brings with it. The civilising answer is a system and constitution that prevents wild abuse and keeps the highest powers with the electorate.
147. But as mentioned in 111, Switzerland is the closest to a direct democracy - and I can’t think of a single Swiss politician who’s strutted his ego on the European or world stage. They stay at home, only doing what they’re allowed to do.
The Blagojevich/Obama plot thickens:
“Asked what contact he’d had with the governor’s office about his replacement in the Senate, President-elect Obama today said “I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening.”
But on November 23, 2008, his senior adviser David Axelrod appeared on Fox News Chicago and said something quite different.
While insisting that the President-elect had not expressed a favorite to replace him, and his inclination was to avoid being a “kingmaker,” Axelrod said, “I know he’s talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them.”"
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/12/questions-arise.html
146.
Congratulations on your sale.
Is Phil Collins the lead singer in the plot?
146. Actually, I’m trying that at the moment.
@153:
Which is basically my point. Politicians such as you or I Do Not Want democracy, because we think the people are dribbling retards.
Right, so why are we pretending to start from the assumption that we want more democracy, if people are useless piles of barely sentient reactionary meat?
So we pretend to want more democracy, but will inevitably stitch the process up to forbid it, because we’ve decided in advance that the people are Stupid and Cannot Be Trusted.
149. Well you could try both…
I used to write literary fiction (indeed I’ve recently finished a *posh* novel - no idea if it’s any good) - and I got some splendid reviews, and some terrible ones, and generally very poor sales.
Writing genre is very different, in so many ways. The money’s better, of course, but (in a surprising way) I’ve discovered that genre is more open to wild speculative ideas.
e.g. the Genesis Secret is full of totally outrageous speculations about the Bible, the origins of man, the sacrificial urge, etc etc, stuff that you simply wouldn’t be “allowed” in sensible literary fiction.
Likewise I have some totally over-the-top characters in the thriller: a dapper white-suited sharp-shooting Turkish detective, a mad racist aristo English asexual with a penchant for flaying; they are lurid in a Dickensian way - in a way that, again, might not be “allowed” in literary fiction.
So, to my surprise, I’ve found writing thrillers a lot of fun, because you have these important and unexpected freedoms…
The trouble is you ain’t ever gonna win the Booker. Or indeed the Nobel. But f*** em. When it comes to posterity, I’d rather be H Rider Haggard than C P Snow.
How about no fixed Parliament term but annual elections on a set date each year when 20% comes up for re-election on a rotational basis, the same for all local aurhorities. The buggers would take notice of public opinnion then. Also an agreed number of signatures would guarantee a referendum on the annual poling day.
158 Martin
Good point. Is there a perfect system? Don’t know.
I’m going home now to have some breakfast.
Three’s no group I’d trust to write a politically neutral constitution, and I strongly doubt that it’s even possible to write a constitution that isn’t full of loopholes. To block all possible abuses, the framers would first have to anticipate all of them, every last underhand scheme and foolish endeavour of every single future politician for so long as the nation should last, but that is an impossible task. There’ll always be something the framers didn’t think of. Further, the constitution cannot yet be self-enforcing. People have to interpret it, and they are prone to do so flexibly.
Similar strictures apply to amending constitutions. The intention is usually good, but the difficulty of devising actual workable improvements is immense. For that reason, I’d much rather keep constitutional change to the minimum.
Still, there are things that need doing, such as House of Lords reform. it needs to be independent, and non-partisan.
For a more radical possibility, there’s no real reason to have simultaneous nationwide elections. Stagger them - three constituency elections every week, except for Christmas and Easter - and let the government’s majority ebb and flow with the changing popular mood. It’d certainly keep the politicians’ minds focused. The betting opportunities would be a bonus.
Conclusive proof, SeanT, that literary fiction is for boring twats, Observer readers, and people called Tarquin. Don’t touch the stuff myself.
Could somebody remind me where the Tories were in the polls eighteen months before the 1997 election?
Malcolm
160. The problem with that is you would get continual sound byte government. No consideration of the medium/ long term. It would be like having Brown as Prime Minister perpetually (God Forbid)
164- I think about 20-30% behind in the majority of the polls Malcs my old chum. But polling methodologies have been made more accurate since then according to Smithson- in the three elections when the Tories have won far fewer seats that Michael Foot.
159
Funnily enough Sean I am in a similar position. I started writing ‘proper’ literature but foun that I quickly migrated into ghost stories. After loads of heart ache over the ‘proper’ literature I am now having quite a bit of success with the gost stories and find myself in the strange position of being chased by my publisher to get more stuff written. Makes a refreshing change from having to go on bended knee to them.
Re the constitutional debate.
The main problem is not the lack of formal rules which prevent any one person (except the Queen) getting overly powerful, it’s the party system and media culture which allows it.
Theoretically, a PM is checked by parliament and cabinet. In reality, a party leader not under serious pressure has overwhelming power because the cabinet no longer meets meaningfully, never mind debates or votes on policy. Members of it owe their position primarily to the PM’s patronage without the independent powerbase.
Much of that goes to the way in which a party machine can control the nomination process for MPs. Both main parties now have extraordirarily centralised systems for selecting candidates; both therefore end up with political clones: middle-class, erudite and presentable but often lacking the breadth of experience individually and even more so when taken collectively.
The reason for the centralisation is relatively simple: parties are terrified not just of splits but of perceived splits - even at the cost of half-baked policies being presented. It’s why neither cabinet nor parliament debates properly and why the government demands such massive control over the parliamentary agenda.
The answer? I’ve been opposed to PR for a long time but I’m coming to the conclusion that there’s no viable alternative to STV for the Commons if we’re to have a genuine parliament.
The upper house has to have equal or near-equal powers to act as a check. Personally, I’ve said before I favour a random selection of voters, as with a jury: 100 people chosen for ten years to serve alongside another 100 elected on a long, limited but renewable term. If that’s too bizarre, a federal FPTP would do: two elected from large regions of about 2-3m voters every three years for a nine year term.
Here we go again. BBC1 leading with news that benefits will be lost if people refuse to try to get work.
Wait for it …. people will lose one week’s benefits. What a farce.
And how many times have we heard this since 1997? What are the odds one single person will lose one single day of benefits before the next GE? 1,000-1?
158 I suspect we are discussing it because the boundaries favour Labour and the incumbent Govt hold all the cards in chosing the date of the election and when to offer tax bribes/spend more. If Parliaments were only 4 years, voters would be less susceptible to tax bribes??
lol ! Did you just see Nick Robinson on the Ten?? with the weird insect man in the neon blue suit?
Tastic.
Cameron led the BBC1 6pm news. Looks like no mention of him at all on the 10pm. Instead the total non-story re benefits.
Tyson
Wow! I guess that makes Brownstuff a hot favourite next time around. I loved Michael Foot as leader. He came to my town when I was a Labour councillor and was mobbed by a huge crowd; he looked very pleased and slightly nervous.
Nobody else has ever been there, although Rev Jesse Jackson paid a visit a few days ago. He was well-received.
Malcolm
@David Herdson:
The Conservative party has a completely decentralised process for candidate selection. The final choice is down to the association and the association alone.
And the “A List” exercise, which provided recommended Dave-approved candidates for winnable seats was treated with such disdain by the associations, I can’t imagine it ever being tried again. In many associations, having been rejected by the A List is a serious requirement for even being considered by the association.
@172:
It’s not a non-story to Labour’s most loyal voting base: the feckless.
164 - There were a few polls putting Labour 40 points ahead on 60 per cent I seem to remember.
168. David the same question to you as to SeanT. How does changing the voting system improve the quality of candidates. From what I can see all that STV allows is that you can choose a party drone of a different colour with your second vote?
167. Indeed. And congrats. And yet, if I’m honest, a vain silly adolescent part of me still yearns for that approbation from the posh people, the wonderful review in the Sunday Times, the Whitbread shortlisting, the serious analyses by academics and literary journals, etc
And this is despite the fact I know it’s a load of bollocks. 98% of literary fiction is mediocre; much of it is unreadably bad. Hatching a good plot is probably HARDER than writing elegant and refined prose. Etc.
It’s the power of the peer group, I suppose.
Anyway I just need to win one Booker Prize then I can say “Told you I could do it!” - then I can write thrillers for the rest of my life, quite happily.
I was wrong - Cameron does get on the BBC1 10pm news.
@SeanT:
F*ck them all right in the ear, the entire soi disant ‘literary establishment’. You’ll have more money, more fun and more women than you can shake a shitty stick at writing the kind of genre fiction that people Actually Want To Read.
Another roll of the dice maybe ? Whatever next?
Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) — Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is considering whether to extend credit guarantees to households and companies as a way to spur bank lending in the U.K., a person familiar with the plan said.
Darling is looking at range of options including whether to expand a 250 billion pound ($370 billion) Treasury program to support loans between U.K. banks so that it covers mortgages and other loans, according to the person.
The measures would mark an unprecedented step by the U.K. government to underwrite commercial loans after a rescue program to take stakes in HBOS Plc, Lloyds TSB Group Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Plc failed to restart bank lending. The economy is sinking into its first recession since 1991.
What a surprise - BBC1 show graphic showing Brown more trusted to run the Economy by 40% to 31%. No mention of fact Conservatives lead in voting intention.
176- I loved the polls in in the late summer after TB had been elected when there wasn’t a single Tory in view. They had all escaped or turned red.
A typically dumbed-down BBC piece. They managed in their whole “Labour get tough on benefits claimants” segment to not go into any detail about what this will actually entail.
The whole 5 minutes must have been made at Labour HQ’s editing suite.
Robinson got what he deserved at the end for being spun by Labour so extravagantly.
When will the BBC re-start reporting the news instead of what they wished was the news??
Bring back John Cole.
174. The choice is only from approved candidates. The A list was an irrelevance - it was just a subset of the approved list - but if you’re not approved you can’t stand.
177. Changing the voting system, especially to STV, would allow other parties and individuals to stand. STV greatly undermines the concept of party, both by reducing the barrier to elections for smaller parties and by allowing people to vote for their preferred sort of candidate within parties. If one faction is being systematically excluded by a party’s leadership, they can split and start up by themselves without it being disastrous to their electoral chances (though it would be unlikely to be that beneficial either).
At the moment, people who don’t fit the political template find it difficult to get selected. It’s a self-selecting club because of the necessary approvals - a system in place to weed out most candidates that might be considered embarrassing. With STV, those people could either stand in their own right, set up their own party, or an existing party could adopt them to develop breadth to their slate - something that would probably become necessary.
Shock News . Malk Ken posts a question he knows the answer to. Tim oh so dim leaps at the opportunity. It has no relevance to today and polling methodology has changed. zzzzzzzzzzzz
181.
I am completely and utterly gobsmacked.
This idiocy must stop.
176. No - they came after the 1997 election.
@185:
Sortition, however, would make Party affiliation completely irrelevant. There would be no ‘candidates’. There’d be no system to game. No whipping operations, no GoTV, no A lists.
If the Govt is so intent on giving one-off stimuli to the economy, why don’t they cancel useless one-off projects to pay for it?
188- halycon days indeed.
188. Actually I think there was one in about 95 that did put Labour on 60%+ with the Tories on 18% and in danger of being passed by the LD’s. It was dug up back in the summer either on here or UK Polling Report as being the poll with the biggest lead for a party. I think it was taken at the height of Major’s back me or sack me moment.
183 - they never dropped below 20%.Enough to motivate Hague to make a very bad error.
186.Keep taking the …..
185. David, I’m not convinced that at a national level that would make any difference. We have seen a fair-number break-away factions over the past 30 years and most of them have come to nothing or are still in the doldrums. I suspect the general view of many is that most of the small parties are little more credible than the Monster Raving Loony Party.
@193:
…piss?
188. I take that back. Labour was about 40% up in some polls around 1995 and hitting the 60% mark.
Of course, as has been said repeatedly on here, they were using dodgy methodology which consistently overstated Labour’s support. The actual result in 1997 was closer than virtually any had predicted in the preceding month.
185. I agree. The one downside about STV is that it slows the whole process down, and in some circumstances we might end up with American-style queues. Last year at the Scottish local elections there were only about seven candidates in my ward, but it still took me ages to remember which order of preference I’d decided on. But the fairness of both the process and the outcome, and the empowerment of the voter, is what counts the most.
4 Jan 1995
Con 18.5 Lab 62
Gallup
194
no Tim oh son dim keeps referring to Mrs Thatcher and taking tablets. He missed off the tablets.(to avoid repetitive posting), Tomorrow itll be keep taking… the next day itll be keep…. and so on and so forth.
David Herdson -”176. No - they came after the 1997 election.”
A few Polls put Labour on 60% or above during that Parliament.
and at least a couple gave them a 40% lead.
By the way, why so much comment about Labour getting 50% in Scotland? Even in this poll they’re only on 46%, and that’s an implausible enough figure. Bear in mind, the margin of error for the small Scottish sub-sample (even if it had been properly weighted, which it hasn’t) would be about 11%. So the true Labour figure could be anything between 35% and 57%, and the true SNP figure could be anything between 18% and 40%.
196. I don’t think anyone could believe that 1997 would actually happen! It’s funny because the BBC’s Election 97 site, with the result predictor is still floating around the internet somewhere. The last time I had a go on it and put in the final overall vote scores and with the maximum amount of tactical voting it could take into accoutn, the Tories still ended up with way over 200 seats which just proves the scale of the “get the barstewards out” effect that year!
Another significant problem with STV, at least in as far as it’s implemented in the UK (Scottish locals and Northern Ireland Assembly) is that it uses fractional redistribution, and therefore realistically requires electronic counting.
Gideon coming up on Newsnight with his cut spending strong currency solution.
All that nostalgia is making me reach for a bucket.
No doubt they will try to revamp ‘All Our Yesterdays’ down the line a couple of years so that they can reminisce. Of course the theme tune for this comeback show will be the prophetic (in today’s terms’, ‘Things can only get better’ and the credits will roll at the end to the dulcet tones of Mary Hopkin singing ‘Those were the days’. All across the North there will be people dabbing their cheeks with little red hankies.
Enough of this - I’m off
Evening all, I see we are still on “silly season” postings which is why I have made little or no appearance for some weeks.
Interesting that the BBC which doesnt do poll reporting has been reporting the ComRes poll in detail all day. Clearly also Lord Foy has instructed them to try and rebuild in the minds of the electorate the idea of Tory slease with the allegations about the Carphone Warehouse chap whom I heard one balanced BBC reporter point out hasn’t committed any offence or done anything remotely connected with politics. Meanwhile another few thousand jobs go today.
Brown can enjoy his moment. The people who are losing their jobs include many who were deluded by Brown’s retail based economic “miracle” and many of them were 1997 switchers. Givn that it only needs a 2% swing to deprive Brown of a majority, the GE is always going to be about Labour losing. The question is by how much.
As for Scotland, Labour hasnt achieved more than 35% of the vote for decades and simply does particularly well because of the large number of small urban seats. Labour will do well if it comes out of the GE with more than 25 seats in Scotland and in my daily dealings with mostly non-Tory voters I detect no love or forgiveness for Labour. Just wait until the personal pension statements start to drop through the letter boxes in February, following hot on the heels of the January credit card bills. The pre-Christmas euphoria will evaporate.
Anyway Im off back to redrawing contracts of employment for the lucky staff I’m not paying off for various clients. Having downsized 3 client companies by more than 10% in the past week, I can see personally just how much damage Gordon Brown has done to “ordinary hard working families”!!
196 ICM had by far the best record - and showed little swing back to the Conservatives in the two years before the election.
It was the Conservative Party’s private pollster, and the Conservatives were telling the truth when they said their private polling was far better than most published polling - but ICM still predicted a landslide.
194. And that will always be the case under FPTP, in which a candidate can only win with very strong local support - usually off the back of a large party.
Given your comments there and at 177, I’m wondering if you’re confusing STV with AV? Alternative Vote (used by the Australians, if you want a practical example), is essentially a single-member STV but isn’t PR at all. That’s where you vote with first, second and third preferences etc. and if no candidate gets over 50%, the lowest ranked drops out and their votes redistributed until someone does score enough.
STV is similar but crucially works in constituencies with more vacancies. I’d suggest five to eight would be ideal. I believe the Scots now use this for their local government elections. It’s essentially a more complex version of a multi-member election (which would be an alterntive, although I think a lesser one). Voters still rank from 1 to whatever, but as there are more vacancies, there’s no obligation for a voter to give 100% of their vote to a party slate if there’s a candidate they dislike, or one or more from another that they do like. Because of that, it’s easier for smaller parties - and minority groupings within larger parties - to get elected. It’s also far harder for the central command within parties to control both their ‘approved list’ and their members in parliament. The only drawback is the publicity, which as with all systems of PR would probably have to be collective - but excessive individualism is just as bad as excessive party control.
201 Look at those poll leads and look what a disaster you have been in government £1trn debt, lying about wars, most authoritarian govt in living memory. so much waste, so much failure. Lets face it spin is the only thing you are actually good at.
205 As opposed to the bankrupt the country policy you favour?
207. “As for Scotland, Labour hasn’t achieved more than 35% of the vote for decades and simply does particularly well because of the large number of small urban seats.”
I wish you were right, Easterross, but in fairness I should point out they got 39% in 2005, and were as high as 46% in 1997. But you’re right in the sense that Labour don’t tend to do have a much higher voting share in Scotland in the way people assume - it tends to be only three or four points ahead of the UK figure, and that would be true of at least the last four general elections.
In fact, they only got 26% in Scotland at the last Euro-elections - it’ll be interesting to see what happens next June.
211 - Just watch Gideon floundering.
“I pray, Lord, that we can overcome the wickedness which has overtaken our politicians, the media, and even in our court systems at the highest level,” Rev. Manning said, “and that this long-legged mack-daddy will not be allowed to take the oath of office on the 20th of January.”
hugely entertaining account of yesterday’s goings-on at the National Press Club, Washington DC, where assorted Obama bloodhounds finally went mainstream…
http://www.americasright.com/
After today’s news from Illinois, who can say they might not just possibly be on to something…
@209:
Depending on one’s definition of ‘proportional’, neither STV nor its degenerate sibling AV are in any reasonable way ‘proportional’.
They are preferential systems, and the nature of preferentiality is that not only do they discriminate for popular candidates, they discriminate against unpopular ones.
Where parties are particularly unpopular, STV and AV can cause massive swings against them *far* in excess of what simple plurality provides.
STV has many pathological cases in which its possible outcomes are almost directly opposite to any kind of proportionality.
osbourne so weak
214 - Nice non sequitur, Rod.
213 Not as much as you have floundered in government. I am not surprised you don’t defend your record it has been a complete disaster, and of course past performance i the best indicator of future performance.
@216:
So what, surely?
215. In practice, though, STV is infinitely more proportional than AV. In fact AV may well be less proportional than FPTP.
186 Hilda
Remember all polls [no matter the methodology] are good news for the Tories, so the ones in late 1996 and early 1997 were especially good for the Corporal and his team.
Just a pity that the present shambles [blame three ways - Hilda the Liar and Brownstuff]is likely to lead to the ineffective Pretty Boy and his men in grey suits running the country.
Can’t wait to get back to Obama’s US in March and away from the silly little boys that play games in the Westminster village.
Malcolm
Gideon is proposing a psychological stimulus
Can we please have this fop on TV 24/7
219 - the next election will come down to the economy, unless he approves or is replaced by someone better the tories will underperform
re 213 who’s Gideon?
215. I’m not terribly fussed about proportionality; I’m more bothered that the elected parliament has a decent mandate and is filled with competent MPs and which is capable of holding the executive to account while also able to pass useful and well written legislation. Actually, the thing that would concern me most about moving from FPTP to STV is the loss of the constituency link.
In any case, the proportionality argument re STV is difficult to make as its hard to compare a system like FPTP where a voter has only one vote against one like STV where they have perhaps thirty. It would be silly only to count first preference and ignore all other preferences but then if that isn’t done, how should the various preferences be weighted?
@220:
The point is, none of them are proportional except across an initial range of carefully prescribed conditions. So if one sets STV up as proportional, one is then liable to be disappointed when it behaves in a way which is anything but.
The only truly proportional systems are the abhorrently undemocratic closed lists we use in European Parliament elections.
224 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Osborne
204. The Irish manage to avoid electronic counting, and people stay glued to the count (sometimes for days.) Twice De Valera tried to switch the system back to FPTP, and twice the people rejected his proposal in referenda.
I guess they like it!
221 Watching channel 4 news tonight, I found myself wondering what is Obama going to do about zimbabwe and other african conflicts. He clearly has a soft spot for Africa (and by all accounts is not remotely fond of Britain) so will he be on the right side against the African despots or will he be like African leaders and tolerate situations such as Zimbabwe. I am genuinely interested to see what he says but more importantly how he acts.
@228:
The Irish don’t use fractional redistribution, they use the (to my mind superior) agent bundle method.
That’s not how we do it in the UK of course.
Osborne is still a little unconvincing. I hate to say it - he was great on the PBR - but he was slightly weak against Paxman.
e.g. When Paxman asked him “why have the Conservative party sacked 25% of its workers just before Christmas” blah blah - there was an obvious comeback. Screamingly obvious: “just like every company in the country, the Conservatives are facing the hideous problems of a recession created by the idiotic economic policies of this incompetent government” - i.e. he could have turned Paxman’s jab back on him.
Standard verbal judo. Instead he waffled about party debt and sounded vague.
Tut. He may still have to be moved. Davis, Clarke or Grayling would have handled that better. Grayling was very good about welfare on the Six: sharp, precise, crisp, not-posh, believable.
But can they move Osborne without looking defeated?
226. This is a slightly mind-bending subject, but as far I can see STV must be proportional to some extent, given the quota system. As I understand it, if there are three seats in a ward/constituency there would be a 25% quota for each, and so at most only 25% of the electorate would risk having their vote ignored. Is that not a sign of proportionality? (I may be missing something.)
217 Red Meteor that was their share of the turnout but given the large drop in Socttish turnout since 1992 the share of the electorate is small.
It is interesting to read the postings of all the Labour hacks on here who either work in the public sector and therefore have littl or no chance of losing their jobs under G Brown or their gold plated final salary pensions the rest of us have to pick up the tabs for. I look forward to the day the public sector bears the same share of pain as the private sector and then let them all thank their political masters in the Labour party. At least most LibDem and SNP posters on here live in the real world!
222. Confidence is an extremely important factor. GO is correct. http://recruiting.practilutions.com/Newsletters/The%20Psychology%20of%20Recession.pdf
in our case its the fear of future tax rises.
231. Grayling “not-posh”? You have a considerably lower “not-posh” threshold than I do. But I suppose that’s in the nature of being a Tory voter.
233 I should have added the “or” bit which is those like Roger who are so rich ex-public schoolboys like Alistair Darling, Harriet Harman and Ed Balls, that they will never have to worry about their trust funds running out
228. Oooh! That was a major scandal over here Rod! The government paid for electronic voting machines and then, with memories of Florida in 2000 fresh in people’s minds had to scrap plans to introduce them as they didn’t leave a verifiable paper trail! Apparently they’re still sitting in a warehouse somewhere!
@232:
Unpopular parties can and have found that STV massively magnifies swings against them. Rather more so than FPTP.
I suppose the question is, do you consider that proportional, pathological or desirable?
233. Don’t worry, the public sector has got a horrible shock coming. We simply can’t afford all the waste anymore - as both parties now tacitly or overtly accept.
Many public sector workers will be laid off, the pension schemes will be dismantled.
231 - if he’s going to go he needs to go soon. I’d bring in Davis and morph brown - serious times for serious people. Osbourne is floundering at the moment, he makes Darling look good for *#@xs sake
@SeanT: Yes, Ozzie is still failing to convince. I can’t help thinking he’s been painted into a corner by his own inaction. I think Gideon’s time will come soon.
224 - It’s George Osborne’s first name that he hasn’t used since he was 13. Like James ‘Gordon’ Brown. Hilarious isn’t it?
Here’s a great exerpt from a Chicago Tribune editorial:
In a profile of Blagojevich in last February’s Chicago Magazine, writer David Bernstein reported: “Privately, a few people who know the governor describe him as a “sociopath,” and they insist they’re not using hyperbole. State representative Joe Lyons, a fellow Democrat from Chicago, told reporters that Blagojevich was a “madman” and “insane.” That struck me at the time, as over the top. Today it strikes me as brave and prescient.
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2008/12/staggering-allegations-even-by-illinois-standards.html
151 Evening all
The Finkelstein article (link at 151) is very interesting. I think he’s got a very good point:
Because people are loss averse, they are least inclined to take risks when a loss is in prospect. When a loss has already been incurred, they are more willing to take risks in the hope of making a gain. So if you want to run an election campaign arguing that it is no time for a novice, no time to take risks, you want to hold it while losses are still in prospect.
In other words, the suggestion that Gordon Brown should wait until he has “steered” the economy out of a crisis is dead wrong. He needs the crisis. It is his best card.
Short-term Labour buy. Long-term Labour sell.
235. Grayling is not-posh in the way many posh Labour politicians - Darling, Blair etc - manage to be “not-posh”.
It just needs a bit of estuary English, and a certain “ordinariness”. Plus he went to a selective grammar, not Eton or Harrow - which helps.
I admit he’s not Rab C Nesbitt.
re 227 oh I see he’s like Prime Minister James is he. I’m not sure what your infantile repetition of the name he doesn’t use is supposed to mean. Maybe you have some deep psychological flaw in wishing that your parents had called you something else.
232. You’re right in what you say, but:
- With only three seats per ward/constituency, small parties with wide but shallow support will still be underrepresented.
- Again, the smaller the number of seats per electoral unit, the less proportional even between larger parties. In practice, there will be some averaging out, but at 3-seats-per-constituency, nearly all would be a 2-1 or 1-1-1 distribution, the key feature being whether two candidates from one party could gain more than the number of votes for that of any from the third. I’d suggest that 5 is probably as low as STV can reasonably go to get somewhere near proportional.
Yeah, wtf is Gideon??
The shadow chancellor is GEORGE OSBORNE.
Paxo was asking stupid questions in the interview. He was asking GO to come up with individual budgets for each government department, then tried to goad him into saying the Tories would cut NHS spending.
Osborne, rightly, shut up shop.
In fairness to Newsnight, the piece on Cameron’s speech today was pretty fair. At least it got across the central message - Brown and his underhand cronies have used up the nation’s credit card and it’s going take an entire generation to pay it back.
Shame on them.
246 no Tim is just a Tw@t.
243. So what happens now?
@SeanT:
I had my old estuary accent beaten out of me by the selective Grammar School I went to.
Maybe I should take elocution lessons from my parents to get my old Basildonian Scum accent back?
235 - Come on, Grayling isn’t posh, he’s also had some business background (I think) and is clearly competent, whereas the entitled Osborne has magically become a multi millionaire while being a political researcher.
But as a Labour supporter I want Osborne on TV all the time, and when it comes to reshuffling his Cabinet to make himself look less toff drenched,I suspect Letwin Maude et al will be dumped rather than the obvious.
Anecdotal, but my wife commmented this evening as she made an online purchase how good the VAT cut was. I tried to point out that the saving was miniscule, but she seemed to think it showed Labour doing something. Does this explain the opinion polls, since she leans Tory?
“MAIL COMMENT: A new-look Cameron shows his substance”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1093308/MAIL-COMMENT-A-new-look-Cameron-shows-substance.html
Did anyone notice that Osborne had a bottle of special edition “Bottler Brown” ale on his side table during the interview with Paxman?
Actually.
Take your points about George/Gideon .I’ll stop doing that.
The use of the word ‘Gideon’ is the only class war Labour are allowed to conduct in public. Take pity on the poor lambs, they want to nationalise stuff, but the world realised that was shit in the 70s, so they don’t have much left. aaahhhhh
b at 4 probably has the right answer. We know that lots of contributors here - who I assume are typical of punters - simply cannot understand people who vote Labour and people who think Brown is the best choice as PM. When a poll showing a tight race comes out, they’re initially horrified, baffled and inclined to say the electorate must be stupid. But then they think, “Do I know anyone who votes Labour? Hardly. How could they? The poll must be a rogue.” And they stick to their bets.
That, friends, is why you need roger and Gabble and Jonathan and tim and Major Martin and ed and me - we’re your reality check. We might win. We might lose. But we’re still in there swinging, as we were in the depths of the summer, and if you bet 5-figure sums against us winning you’re taking a risk.
98/134: I’m very fond of Switzerland, but it’s a common complaint that the system is permanently gridlocked and change is agonisingly slow (though when you get it, there’s a solid consensus behind it). It’s also not the libertarian right-wing paradise that some of you think: ID cards, an annual tax on wealth (not just income but on your total assets - makes people actually use assets instead of sitting on them), a tax on rubbish collection by individual sorted bags with penalties if you ever put anything in the wrong bag, ferocious one-way system limiting car traffic in the cities and massively subsidised public transport. It all works pretty well IMO.
252. You really think Cameron is going to reshuffle his cabinet because he’s worried it looks too “toff-drenched”???
Earth to planet Champagne Socialist: No one cares how many people in the shadow cabinet went to public school, apart from the salivating inverted snobs of the Guardianista chattering classes.
DC will bring in Clarke to add economic experience.
He will bring in IDS to add weight to the social justice agenda.
He will make Grayling chairman, freeing him up to spend his whole time pulling to pieces Brown’s vapid, election-bribing policies.
243- Great question, and nobody seems to know. If Blagojevich resigns, the lieutenant governor can take over and things can more or less go back to normal (while the explosive prosecution proceeds and more players are drawn into the prosecutor’s snare). If he doesn’t resign (even though everybody in the vicinity is telling him to go), I suppose the legislature proceeds expeditiously with impeachment proceedings and drafts a bill denying Blagojevich the power to appoint an interim senator. If he appoints an interim senator anyway, then the Dems have to deal with trying to refuse to accept the appointed individual. Big, big mess.
252 timmy tool do you ever give up? You’ve been spinning, smearing and droning on about nothing in particular, all day. Do you have a life?
252 How about getting rid of some of the nutjobs from the cabinet Jackboots looks on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Miliband is good at bananas and Brown himself wouldn’t know a true word if it poked him in the eye.
@tim:
I don’t expect Obsorne to be dumped. I just want him to be party chairman. Okay, so the press and Ozzie will view it as a demotion. Tough shit. It’s where Dave should have had him to begin with.
And let’s hope that Dave learns a valuable lesson about not giving top jobs to people just because they’re your mates.
Aww, come on. Even SeanT thinks that Dave has a Toff Problem. And Sean’s hardly one to admit that a filthy leftie is right about something unnecessarily.
160-185
A generation ago we had annual local elections on the first Thursday of May. People were much moee engaged in the poitical process as a result. Before moving down South a lifetime ago we even managed to elect a Conservative majoriy in Salford. (can you believe that Hazle Blears) The system was changed not for the benefit of the people.
258 -
252. “You really think Cameron is going to reshuffle his cabinet because he’s worried it looks too “toff-drenched”???”
Absolutely, and I’ve offered a bet of £100 that there’ll be less public schoolboys in the next one.
But so far no-one has taken me up on it.
Despite their approbium.
@tim:
FEWER public school boys, damn you! Do you lower class oiks know nowt?
tim — I loathed John Wayne’s politics and most of his movies as well, but never resorted to calling him ‘Marion’. Also, do you realise there are Klansmen in Alabama who have less of a problem with gay, Jewish African-Americans than you have with toffs?
“If you want the psychotically envious likes of tim for your neighbour, vote Labour.”
257. I never said Switzerland was a “libertarian paradise” - go check. What I said was: your oft-proclaimed admiration for Switzerland’s participatory democracy is odiously hypocritical, given your pathetic fibs and contortions about our own EU referendum.
And this is undeniable, which is why you never address the issue.
On thread. I would offer a few explanations for the reluctance of the Spreads to move much towards Labour. Firstly, I think most punters probably still think that the next General Election will result in a Tory majority. Secondly, the election could realistically occur anytime soon, from March 09 onwards. Thirdly the continued volatility of both the political picture and the polls.
Added together, this means that it is now riskier to take any position for a short term profit than it has been. You could easily get stuck with a very expensive position which is the exact opposite of how you predict the actual election outcome. Having recently “escaped” from a very exposed Labour SELL position on Spreadfair, I am keeping out of the spreads for now and focussing on the timing of the General Election.
232. Where STV departs from proportionality it is due to three factors.
i) deliberate manipulation of boundaries, such as the notorious “Tullymander” in Ireland.
ii) small district magnitudes. e.g. three-seater constituencies will do a worse job of ensuring proportionality than 5 or six seater constituencies [but still a far better job than FPTP which has a district magnitude of just one].
iii) the STV equivalent of tactical voting - “inter-party transfers.” Parties that are transfer-friendly will pick up a modest bonus in determining those seats which are not decided by whole-quotas. The bonus is usually quite modest, and is viewed as a price worth paying, since the pattern of transfers reveals and strengthens coalition preferences.
Martin.
I’m doing it on purpose now.
Agree with your post at 262 - I think Dave was of the opinion that the economy wouldn’t be tough when he put Osborne in that job.
257 Nick, I will have to take your word on Switzerland. It still sounds ok to me coparatively and nobody in the world has the insidious National Identity register that sits behind your lovely iD card scheme. So if you get in next time I might give it a go. I would imagine there will be a massive exodus either way as who wants to pay permanently higher taxes that you have and will force on us and our children and who wants to work until they drop.
@267:
There is, of course, a specific hinting of intent here. Whilst John Wayne didn’t use the name Marion because it was rubbish, the implication is that George Osborne didn’t like the name Gideon because it made him sound Jewish.
Which is to say, by calling him Gideon, one is tacitly suggesting that he is at best embarrassed by his Jewish heritage.
259. If he’s determined to stay and fight, does he have the power to veto such a bill? I know it varies from state to state.
Presumably, if he does stay, it could be difficult for prospective interim senator to accept the nomination from a governor whose reputation is, shall we say, a bit tarnished in this area? Have any of the possibles been distancing themselves from being put into that position?
Mr Palmer, you know full well that the ID cards in Switzerland are nothing like Labour’s proposed scheme. If you’re so fond of the Swiss system you should’ve voted for it instead of sycophantically supporting Labour’s five-billion-pound, 24/7 system of tracking devices — I’d like to see the Swiss approve those in a referendum!
273. He’s Jewish??
265. Okay, so lets compare notes…
Here’s the reshuffle I expect:
Out: Alan Duncan (Business), public school and Oxford
In: Ken Clarke, “direct-grant school” and Cambridge
Out: Chris Grayling (Work & Pensions), state grammar and Cambridge
In: Iain Duncan Smith, Naval training school and Sandhurst
Out: Caroline Spelman (Chairman), comprehensive school and University of London
In: Chris Grayling
Hardly a purging of the Etonians is it now?
269 stjohn - Fair enough, but what about my point at 15: BetFair punters seem to think there’s a 47% chance of there not being a Conservative majority?
271. Howard appointed Osborne Shadow Chancellor.
265. approbium
Ok, I give up. Which word were you aiming for?
It’s your attention to detail I admire so much
tim — I loathed John Wayne’s politics and most of his movies as well, but never resorted to calling him ‘Marion’. Also, do you realise there are Klansmen in Alabama who have less of a problem with gay, Jewish African-Americans than you have with toffs?
For gods sake I haven’t got a problem with toffs, theres been loads of them in the Labour party.I’m just amazed that the Tories were dim enough to have two thirds of the Cabinet drawn from 7% of the population.
Anyway, Dave knows he’s got the problem.
Hence the offing of the toffs in the fop chop, posh cosh of his reshuffle to come.
@SeanT:
Not in any strict matrilinear sense, I believe.
257. If we had a Swiss style of semi-direct democracy here, the Sun and Daily Mail would hijack it, and we’d have legalised public floggings of asylum seekers within a week. Probably televised in reality show format, presented by Dermot O’Leary, and with Craig Revel-Horwood on hand to pass tasteful comments like “that flogging technique was heinous”.
In that sense, we’re even less civilised than our closest neighbours Ireland - they had a referendum vote a few years ago that placed am outright constitutional ban on the death penalty. Even in these more enlightened times, I can’t imagine that happening here.
280 tim - You haven’t explained why it’s OK for Labour to have a disproportionate number of ‘toffs’ in the Cabinet. (Not that anyone except you and Roger cares).
@282:
So what you’re saying is, we can’t have democracy because people are idiots and can’t be trusted?
“For gods sake I haven’t got a problem with toffs…”
AKA, “I’m not racist, but…”
278. Yes. I’d say Betfair punters have it closer than the spreadmarkets. The two positions are reconcilable but it would have to be accepted that there’s a big ‘top-side’ to a possible Tory win - somthing I doubt. After all, the betfair punters rate a Labour win as a fairly reasonable chance, and that’s a huge way off the spread markets, so to counter that, there’d need to be a similar priced shot of a Tory win of well over 100, implying close to 200 gains - a good deal more than even Blair managed in 1997. Mike’s sell of Tory seats looks the right call at the moment.
277 - Time for Maude and Letwin to go.
(Letwin has to go during elections anyway)
279 Sorry Scott spellcheck not on and typing after red wine.
Fancy a bet rather than spelling jousts?
270. Interesting points. Mind you, in Scotland, we only had three or four member wards at last year’s elections, and whatever its imperfections it at least did the job of reducing Labour to outright control of just two out of thirty-two councils. Under FPTP it would have been unthinkable for them to fall below seven or eight.
280 You have got a problem with toffs. the class warfare that Labour practice is analagous to racism. A racist is a person who hates someone for the colour of their skin. The person was born with that skin colour and can do nothing that fact. A toff is hated because he or she were born into wealth, again not much they can do about it. The big problem is Labour spend so much time categorising and hating classes for this thing or the other they are completely useless at governing. Hence your strange obsession with toffs, and your dreadful record in government.
281. Done a bit of Googling: seems a moot point. Come to think of it, Gideon is an odd name. Suspiciously Levantine.
*JOKING!*
277. I jolly well hope Cammo’s cabinet reshuffle is more exciting than that. He simply does need to detoffeinate the Shadow Cabinet - and by a noticeable degree. This will involve bringing back Davis, and possibly moving Oz. And much more, one hopes.
Fresh faces, flatter vowels, people with ovaries. Do it.
Buenas noches.
He just hj
287. No thanks
Not sure what “he just hj” means. How odd.
Certainly time for bed. A demain.
289 - Don’t be silly.
Dave knows he’s got a problem.
Don’t blame me for finding it funny.
And again I notice that no Tories on here really disagree that Daves going to cull.
284. “So what you’re saying is, we can’t have democracy because people are idiots and can’t be trusted?”
No, it’s more that the Sun and Mail editorial staff are idiots and can’t be trusted. But you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion about my opinion - I’d personally like to give the Swiss system a go. I just think we should be prepared for all hell to break loose once we do.
Mind you, perhaps I’ve got too low an opinion of human nature, and the first referendum initiative would be to ban Rupert Murdoch from owning more than one newspaper. That would solve half the problem at a stroke.
Front pages
I know I’m ignorant but - am I missing something here? Why would having the first name Gideon necessarily make someone sound more Jewish?
Gideon is a Christian name as much as it is Jewish, like David; in the bible, Gideon is chosen by God to lead the Israelites away from the worship of idols.
Gideon Bible anyone?
Anyhoo, I’m afraid, SeanT, that if you’re expecting more from the reshuffle you’ll be disappointed.
I’m a big fan of DD and would put him straight back as Home Sec, but unfortunately he’s viewed as too much of a liability.
As for ‘Letters’ (as us old Tory fags call him), he has no shadow cabinet role to speak of anyway, so there’s nothing to remove him from.
221. Malcolm Two Names: Can’t wait to get [...] away from the silly little boys that play games in the Westminster village.
You are under no compulsion to visit politicalbetting.com. You are certainly under no compulsion to post here.
Osborne on Newsnight would not say which departmental budgets are going to be savaged under Tory plans. The public will no doubt be reminded that Cameron, Osborne & Co. stand for huge cuts in schools, hospitals, Sure Start centres, apprenticeship programmes, defence training academies, winter fuel allowance……
278. Richard. Currently it’s 1.81 to back a Tory overall majority on Betfair = 4/5 or 55% chance. 1.9 to lay. The Bookies have a Tory majority at 8/11 or 58%. I would suggest that a 55% chance of a Tory majority would approximate quite well to a Spread midpoint of 341. 50% = 325 so 55% going to be higher. 16 seats may be a touch more than you would expect but it wouldn’t be that far out. Then of course you have to factor in the 6 point margin.
“Shouldn’t people get a vote?”
Great mockery of Yvette Humour-Free Cooper by Eddie Mair
about 7 mins in to listen again (PM)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/pm/
293 As I say you are just a tw@t who has no answers to arguments that make you think outside your comfort zone. Alternatively you are paid Labour drone either way you add nothing to this site.
298. The important question is which of those programmes Gordon will have to cut when he calls the IMF.
301.
If you think I’m wrong,put up your money.
272: “nobody in the world has the insidious National Identity register” - you mean like the Central Person Register that I grew up with in Denmark? - they’ve only had it for 70 years…
268: your lowbrow insults pass me by, since I have the endorsement of that noted author, Sean Thomas, a Eurosceptic of the first water. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about you on this occasion - there are other people here, though you may not have noticed?
298 Oh its Tims playmate, No the Tories are cutting ID cards, advertising budgets Drapers dollys, and surveillance databases, it is Labour who refuse to cut the above who will be forced to cut schools and hospitals.
All these g*mblers here don’t have a clue what’s really going to happen. You seem to have based your g*mbling decision on the basis of partisan hopes rather than having three fingers on the electoral pulse.
302. ScottP: you have a good imagination, i give you that!
305. Oh my Dear voreas, we are a little up tight, tonight
298. Darmy, stop lying.
@297:
“You are under no compulsion to visit politicalbetting.com. You are certainly under no compulsion to post here.”
Oh, how I wish that were true.
225. “Actually, the thing that would concern me most about moving from FPTP to STV is the loss of the constituency link.”
This is more mythic than real under FPTP, and it can be argued that STV actually strengthens the constituency link, via
i) fewer boundary changes
ii) fewer wasted votes
iii) more voters having a representative of their first choice
iv) more diversity of representation, e.g. more than one MP from the same party for electors to go to for help.
v) the ability of MPs to identify their own local powerbase within a multi-member constituency.
238. STV can’t “massively magnify” swings against a party, since that party is *guaranteed* the number of seats indicated by its number of whole-quotas. In fact one of the criticisms of STV is that it is too stable!
308. Who is Darmy? I refer to Osborne or Gideon as some here call him. He is being economical with the truth about Tory intentions. But I am sure the people of this country have already worked him out!
I believe Osborne is being deceitful with the public.
304 the NIR is a database requiring 50+ pieces of information, insecurely stored across whitehall. I have absolutely no idea about the Danish register but I take no2ids word above yours any day of the week http://www.no2id.net/IDSchemes/whyNot.php
“Many western countries that have ID cards do not have a shared register. Mostly ID cards have been limited in use, with strong legal privacy protections. In Germany centralisation is forbidden for historical reasons, and when cards are replaced, the records are not linked. Belgium has made use of modern encryption methods and local storage to protect privacy and prevent data-sharing, an approach opposite to the Home Office’s. The UK scheme is closest to those of some Middle Eastern countries and of the People’s Republic of China—though the latter has largely given up on biometrics”
303 At the moment I think you are a pointless tw@t, try engaging in my arguments about the record of your government or your obsession with class warfare.
So at least there’s something we can all agree on.
We all want George Osborne on our TV’s as often as possible.
314. Indeed we do.
314, 315 You add absolutely nothing, you don’t engage, what is the point of you posting. You just make Labour look arrogant and obnoxious.
316 pot and kettle come to mind.
317 At least I try to engage. It is hardly my fault if I present you with unpleasant unanswerable facts.
Oh, do shut your neck, all of you.
This is playground stuff. So STFU before we all bundle you.
274- Of course Blagojevich could veto any bill taking away his power to appoint a senator, and then both houses of the Illinois legislature would have to override his veto to pass the bill (which they likely would do). If he manages appoint an interim senator, that person would be an albatross for the Dems and they would likely seek to keep him or her from sitting in the Senate, but then again they might decide it’s not worth the trouble and let that person serve until 2010. But they’d certainly rather not deal with that nightmare, hence the effort to quickly take away Blagojevich’s power of appointment.
In other news: when it rains, it pours… The U.S. House committee investigating corruption allegations against Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel has voted to expand its investigation:
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/ethics-committee-expands-rangel-probe-2008-12-09.html
Rangel is a tough and stubborn old bull who has no intention of giving up any of his power unless is is manhandled away from him. Like the Blagojevich story, this one is going to get worse for the Dems before it gets better.
In an ironic historical side note, Rangel was preceeded in office in his Harlem-based seat by one Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first African American to ever serve in the House from New York. He too rose to prominence, as Chairman of the Education and Labor Committee. However, he became so corrupt and self-serving that the Democratic-controlled House voted to throw him entirely out of Congress in 1967. After he won a Supreme Court case that declared his expulsion unconstitutional, he resumed occupancy of his seat in 1969, only to be defeated in the Democratic primary in 1970 by… you guessed it!
“you mean like the Central Person Register that I grew up with in Denmark?”
No, Mr Palmer, because I bet that database isn’t designed to record every single person’s every visit to the bank / chemist / doctor / post office / travel agent (etc.)
voreas, if you check with No2ID, they’ll confirm that Denmark has the Central Person Register (compulsory, universal, linked to tax, employment, educaiton and health data bases) and has done for many years, so your post 272 was mistaken. They don’t have ID cards, though, just the register - but that’s the bit that you were saying was especially scary?
I think, but may be mistaken, that Norway and Sweden have similar systems. Richard Tyndall will know, if he’s around.
319. Coxall, are you a speech writer for the Tory front bench, by any chance?
319 Point taken, I certainly wouldn’t want to be bundled by you Martin, anyway bedtime.
“They don’t have ID cards, though, just the register”
Why is it so important to Labour, and to Britain, that we be forced to have both, and at a cost of at least five billion pounds?
A more substantial reason other than wanting to ape the Communist dictatorship of China?
322 Look Nick kudos for engaging but I know so many arguments against the ID card(be it financial, civil liberty, security of the cards, ease of identity theft and many more) and there is no credible explanation being given for them. Therefore I am left thinking it is all to do with function creep probably in a selling the data on kind of way. If not it is just about control and that is scary. Anyway seriously off to bed.
322
You are being a little disingenuous Nick. The registration system used in the Scandinavian countries is nothing like that you propose for the UK. In fact they are simply more effectively run electoral rolls/Census systems.
The important differences are many. Firstly there is no biometric data involved. There are also no RFD chips as your system proposes. The ID cards are not electronic nor linked directly to any central database.
It is also worth pointing out that no one should hold up Norway as a model to follow. More than one Scandinavian politician has, in amoment of frustration, described Norway as the last communist country in the world. The social engineering endemic in Scandinavia is atrocious and infiltrates almost every aspect of life.
Of course Nick may well like that sort of thing but if he does he should at least be honest about it.
314.Yes please….I know that Brown and Darling have turned the UK economy into one big joke, but they have not even got the charisma between them to actually con us.
328
And for the record I do know a little about this as I unfortunately hold a Norwegian residents permit/ID card.
Doolybots pouring out of the DollyMixture factory at a fair lick today and a lot of them seem to have roosted here. Pity.
But they do demonstrate the nastiness and deceitfulness of their party.
Can’t be bothered. Its not discussion it like an invasion of Roger robots without the charm.
…..did I really say that!!!!
398.”Osborne on Newsnight would not say which departmental budgets are going to be savaged under Tory plans. The public will no doubt be reminded that Cameron, Osborne & Co. stand for huge cuts in schools, hospitals, Sure Start centres, apprenticeship programmes, defence training academies, winter fuel allowance……”
Well Major, tell us where the 35 billion of cuts being dishonestly implemented by this government are going to come from?
331 That’s their aim - to shut out meaningful discussion that’s not favourable towards the Supreme Leader, and the survivability of their own crooked and deceitful party.
311 You know full well who ‘Darmy’ aka ‘darmstadtium’ is, Major Fraud. Your alter ego.
327 Follow the money. Involvement in ID cards and the database will generate a motherlode of cash for the technology companies already contracted, and those bidding for a slice of the action. I’m sure there will be lots of directorships and consultancy jobs for retiring MP’s and others in politics.
Too many trolls tonight, They don’t, they cannot, believe what they post, the thought that they do would make us fear for our collective futures and that’s too bleak to contemplate. They are such a waste of a human being when you realise what many would give to have the comfortable jobs and lives that they have. Seeing as they look down on the little people so much it’s no shame to wish them ill from this recession.
If it takes vigilante action from posters to humiliate them then so be it. When I feel like it, make them think they are safe.
331.”Doolybots pouring out of the DollyMixture factory at a fair lick today and a lot of them seem to have roosted here. Pity.”
You are right, and they are not even entertaining.
Benedict Brogan on “There’s now a policy chasm between the parties”
“David Cameron said on the Today programme that Gordon Brown’s legacy for future generations will be the “public finances of Italy”. As I’ve pointed out before there’s something distinctly continental about a debt to GDP ratio that will soon be stuck at nearly 60pc. For the record, Italian debt is about £1.45 trillion, and its debt to GDP ratio is 104pc and growing.
George Osborne tries another comparison, offering the term ‘McBritain’ to describe how we are seen by the markets. He’s passed around the latest numbers for the cost of insuring British debt compared to McDonald’s. Britain’s risk rating has climbed sharply since Mr Brown started talking about borrowing to pay for a fiscal stimulus and stands at 120 basis points (it says here), whereas the purveyor of fast food is at 77pts. The Tories say that’s bad.
Brown Central is unfazed. They reckon the Tories will suffer as long as they can’t put some numbers on their “fiscal responsibility” policy. If Mr Darling is planning £37 billion less extra spending from 2012, then Mr Cameron has just committed to saving even more, and that’s a lot of money. Labour’s says its focus groups show voters are absorbing the idea that Mr Cameron would “do nothing” about the recession. There is now a policy chasm between the two parties. Most refreshing.”
Labour may gloat that its *focus* groups are absorbing the “do nothing” attacks on the Tories. But, it might be very short lived, if the over hyped fiscal stimulus and abilities of Brown to actually prevent real hardship in the coming months don’t start producing results, instead ever more dreadful headlines and figures.
“If Mr Darling is planning £37 billion less extra spending from 2012″
What the hell does that mean, and where is the figures for the extra taxation which will need to be clawed back?
And yet more worrying news from Guido
337, quoting Brogan: Labour’s says its focus groups show voters are absorbing the idea that Mr Cameron would “do nothing” about the recession.
“the broad masses of a nation [...] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie”.
The dangers of people getting things wrong but sounding as if they know what they’re talking about.
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204. Martin Coxall Another significant problem with STV, at least in as far as it’s implemented in the UK (Scottish locals and Northern Ireland Assembly) is that it uses fractional redistribution, and therefore realistically requires electronic counting.
Not quite. The only STV version in use which requires computerised counting is the “Inclusive Gregory” (I am not familiar with the details) method, which is used for Scottish local elections. Northern Ireland - in European and local elections - uses a version of the Newland-Britton method, which does use fractional transfers, but which is specifically designed to be easy to be done manually and does not require computer counting.
For those of a technical mind, the Newland-Britton method transfer’s a candidate’s surplus from the most recently-received bundle of votes which caused the surplus to arise, i.e. it is in effect (in some cases) the continuation of the transfer or exclusion of a previous candidate. Thus the number of rounds of counting, is no more than the number of candidates, and the number of fractional values of votes is no more than the number of candidates elected.
In other words, a Newland-Britton STV count could easily be completed manually within several hours, or one day (or to days in some cases); whereas an Inclusive-Gregory count would - if done manually - take several days or weeks.
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215. Depending on one’s definition of ‘proportional’, neither STV nor its degenerate sibling AV are in any reasonable way ‘proportional’.
STV is proportional in as far as constituency magnitude allows.
They are preferential systems, and the nature of preferentiality is that not only do they discriminate for popular candidates, they discriminate against unpopular ones.
In other words, “proportionality” is defined in terms of more than just the first preference, in other words, it is more realistic than the artificial list systems which pretend that voters have only one preference.
Where parties are particularly unpopular, STV and AV can cause massive swings against them *far* in excess of what simple plurality provides.
AV can be “far” in excess; STV can only be slightly in excess.
STV has many pathological cases in which its possible outcomes are almost directly opposite to any kind of proportionality.
Only in extreme, highly contrived and artificial cases. In real life (e.g. in the Republic of Ireland) STV is just usually more proportional than AMS with 5% threshold.
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238. Unpopular parties can and have found that STV massively magnifies swings against them. Rather more so than FPTP.
Actually, it is rather less so than FPTP.
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225. David Herdson Actually, the thing that would concern me most about moving from FPTP to STV is the loss of the constituency link.
Compared with FPTP, STV *strengthens* the constituency link.
In any case, the proportionality argument re STV is difficult to make as its hard to compare a system like FPTP where a voter has only one vote against one like STV where they have perhaps thirty. It would be silly only to count first preference and ignore all other preferences but then if that isn’t done, how should the various preferences be weighted?
In STV voters have only one vote, not “perhaps thirty”. That’s what “single” means. That’s what the S stands for. Preferences are, if necessary or appropriate, transferred according to the rules - not “weighted”.
Are the Met going to investigate this leak?
338. I’ve never been able to work out the point of these ‘focus groups’. Surely, they’re on party political lines, anyway. If I was a Tory, why would I join a Labour focus group, or vice versa? Seems to be just sounding boards for their own beliefs. Waste of space or, even, comment.
I am generally in favour of STV, but it can be counterproductive - take the EU elections for Wales next year - A 4 seat constituency - which is guaranteed 1 Lab, 1 PC & 1 Con member. There is really only competetion for 4th seat, but which would need a huge swing to PC or LD to take it from Labour. Hardly worth the effort of voting.
And following on about STV, it is only anaraks like ourselves who care in what order the parties win their seats……..