UKIP are probably smart to avoid a pact with the Tories

Just a quick post relating to this news that Michael Fabricant MP, a vice chairman of the Conservative party, has called for an electoral pact with UKIP followed rapidly by Nigel Farage saying “No deals...it’s war” on Twitter.

Ignoring the fact that the photo makes him look quite sinister, Mr Fabricant’s proposal is superficially quite logical. UKIP’s threat to the Tories is not that they might win seats themselves but that enough potential Tory voters in marginal constituencies might vote UKIP to deny the Conservative candidate victory.

In 2015 the Conservatives already have a significant hurdle preventing them from winning a majority as the current arrangement of constituencies and voters means that if both main parties have 37% of the vote, Labour would have 309 seats and the Tories 267. To get a tiny, barely workable majority of 6 seats, the Conservatives need to win the election by 7 points while Labour would need a 1 point win.

The proposed changes to the boundaries, to make this situation more even, have been vetoed by the Lib Dems and have almost no chance of passing unless David Cameron can buy off every other minor party to pass the changes by a tiny margin.

So it’s not surprising that lots of Conservatives have looked to UKIP as the potential solution to this problem given the purple party’s current position at third in the polls. (Tip for any aspiring Conservative MPs, if you want the media to instantly promote you to “Top Tory” status just call for a pact with UKIP).

However it’s also not surprising that Nigel Farage has reacted the way he did, for three main reasons, excluding the offence taken when David Cameron called UKIP a collection of closet racists:

1. As this chart from the ComRes poll last week shows, although 2010 Conservative voters are the largest single group of new UKIP supporters, they also draw from both the Lib Dems and Labour parties as well as from those who did not vote. Associating themselves directly with the Conservative party would risk putting off the 32% of voters in that chart who did not vote UKIP or Conservative in 2010.
2. As the Lib Dems are finding out now, in coalitions the junior party almost invariably suffers more than the senior party as it loses most of the supporters who voted for it as a protest against the establishment but doesn't have the base that larger parties do to withstand the mid-term unpopularity that governments endure.
3. (This is the big one).  If UKIP’s primary goal is (logically) for the UK to leave the EU then that may be better served by a Labour victory in 2015 than a Tory one.

Daniel Hannan may despair of the lost opportunity of a Conservative/UKIP pact but picture the two possible scenarios:

Some sort of referendum on the UK's EU membership (either a straight remain/withdraw vote or some sort of ratification of a "renegotiated" arrangement where rejection will be taken as a vote to withdraw) is almost certain to be in the Conservatives' 2015 manifesto and will likely be matched by a commitment in the Labour manifesto. Either that or Labour commit first to outflank the Conservatives and David Cameron then has no choice but to commit as well.

If, by whatever parliamentary arithmetic, the Conservative party continue to govern after that election, presumably with David Cameron in Downing St then we'll see a split in the right when that referendum comes.
The "stay in" campaign will have the support of the the Labour party, the government and the establishment voices of the Conservative party while the "leave" campaign will have the right wing of the Conservative party, UKIP and a few right wing newspapers. The government's mid-term unpopularity won't be so much of an issue because the main opposition party will be on side and therefore unwilling to exploit it.

If Labour win, either an outright majority or in coalition with what remains of the Liberal Democrats, then the Conservatives will presumably depose Mr Cameron as their leader and revert to the form they showed after 1997 with the more Eurosceptic candidate becoming leader. Being in government forces moderation upon a party and once freed from that burden, the Conservative party will be able to indulge the Eurosceptic wing even moreso. In this scenario there is still a split in the Conservative party but the right wing is clearly dominant and the opposition, and the Conservative supporting press, is united in favour of withdrawal.

If we accept that an EU referendum is likely to happen no matter which party wins in 2015 then a Eurosceptic vote is more likely under a Labour government (which, given recent economic news, is going to be unpopular) with the Conservative party and the whole centre right united behind one position than under a Conservative or coalition government where the right is split between moderates like David Cameron and the more UKIP inclined members of his party.

There really aren't any compelling reasons for Nigel Farage to accept any offer from the Conservative party.

Off Topic: The "CraigNotBond" site still exists!

As the description says, this blog is supposed to be largely about politics and polling but occasionally there's interesting or funny news on a different topic. This is most definitely the latter.

This site still exists. Seriously!

A bit of background, back in 2005 when Daniel Craig was first announced as replacing Pierce Brosnan as James Bond there were some die hard fans who didn't like the idea, saying Craig was unsuitable for a number of reasons, most of them focusing on him being a bit too blond.

They picked on him for all sorts of tiny issues like having big ears or wearing a life jacket for the publicity stunt announcing him as Bond (despite the fact that a worse headline surely would have been "Foolhardy Craig drowns in Thames after declining life jacket") but the craziest was a site called CraigNotBond.com.

This site not only listed reasons why they thought Craig was a bad choice but actually had reviews and ratings of every other Bond just to prove the point as well as calling for a boycott of Casino Royale.

And then this happened, all the criticism disappeared and Craig suddenly became the best Bond since Connery.

I assumed that the CraigNotBond.com guy would give up in embarrassment at being proven so clearly wrong but here we are, two films later and he's still at it. Most of the links don't work but it's still being updated with rants about Skyfall and everything. The site is now a little collecting point for those people who are bravely resisting Daniel Craig's charms.

The best bit though is that they have their own little self-selecting polls section asking (what else?) who visitors think the best Bond is. First place is Sean Connery with 36% but in close second with 35% is the man a user of the site describes as "look[ing] just like that marionette that was the star of Thunderbirds Are Go."

Would 56% of the UK really vote to leave the EU?

So the main finding of this week's Opinium/Observer poll is that if presented with a hypothetical in/out referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union, most people would vote to leave.

The Observer have presented this very nicely as always with a patriotic looking Nigel Farage standing in front of a union flag but there are always a couple of caveats about polls involving referendums, Europe and particularly those involving both.

The first, from Anthony Wells, is that when a polls asks if people want a referendum on any topic the answer tends to be "yes". This is because even if people have a modicum of respect for their own local MP, they are distrustful of MPs in the aggregate and will always choose to have their own say rather than delegate authority to politicians. However, as we saw with the AV referendum and more recently with the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, wanting more direct democracy in the abstract doesn't necessarily translate into a willingness to take part if a vote actually happens.
For this reason we didn't think it was worth while even asking whether there was widespread public demand for a referendum on EU membership as the numbers would have come back as expected and in any case public demand rarely features in the decision to hold a referendum or not.

The second is from Mike Smithson which is that in the two UK wide referendums to have been held (on EEC membership in 1975 and AV in 2011) the vote for maintaining the status quo has been twice as large as the vote for change, 67% to 33% in 1975 and 68% to 32% in 2011. The implication here is that the UK tends to vote for the status quo with the campaign often focusing more on the cost of making the change (as was certainly the case with AV) than the pros and cons of the current arrangement. If a referendum had been held on whether to join the EEC before the Heath government did so then I have always thought that the public's answer would have been 'no'.

Although I have no doubt that the Opinium/Observer poll is an accurate representation of how the public would respond to such a question if asked now, it's important to remember that any actual vote would come at the end of a long and, no doubt impassioned, campaign of voter education.

When we ran the question we did discuss the possibility of giving respondents some background to help them make an informed choice as we do with work for clients when the questions are on a topic that people may have limited knowledge of. However we decided against it not only because we couldn't possibly hope to include all of the information required but also because we have no idea how the campaign would turn out and what information voters would ultimately be responding to.

With the standard voting intention question it's understood that people are responding to the current state of events and that the numbers are a reflection of how each party is doing at the moment, something which could change during an actual election campaign but where most voters can be said to be receiving a reasonably balanced mix of news praising and criticising the government.

With the European Union, there is effectively no "yes" campaign. At the moment the news that the public receives about the EU is almost entirely negative with virulent criticism from the most popular newspapers (save only the Guardian, Independent and Daily Mirror) along with news of impending financial apocalypse and of Greeks and Spaniards rioting.


Until recently I would have expected an in/out referendum on the UK's EU membership to produce a status quo result similar to the other UK wide referendums as the costs of leaving the EU became apparent and the 'leave' campaign had to sell the public on benefits which necessarily remain hypothetical. The business community would make the point about potential tariffs and the effect on exports while the basic unfairness of having to abide by EU rules but having no say in how they are made would ultimately lead more people to stick with the devil they know.

However, the seemingly never ending crisis in the Euro-zone and the possibility of dramatic changes in the institutional makeup of the EU mean that the "status quo" may no longer be the safe and benign "devil you know" and be morphing into something that fundementally changes Britain's relationship with the EU. If that happens then the structural advantage enjoyed by the status quo in any referendum starts to disappear and factors like the majority of the popular press having a very clear agenda on one side start to make a difference.

Have the Tories just created yet another way for voters to kick the government?

I'm not really sure what the turnout will be for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections but I'd be surprised if it's much above the 23% for the 1999 European Parliament elections which was the record low for a national election.

I'm also ambivalent about the upsides and downsides of elected police commissioners in general as it seems like one of those things that works in theory but runs into difficulties in practice.

Pros:

• In theory being elected by their local areas will make the police more responsive to local concerns which may be different from priorities set at a national level
• ...and that seems to be it.

There's the possibility that making individual police forces more autonomous will lead to creater experimentation in policy and thus the free market of ideas will make commissioners eager to be re-elected copy the policies of those that are seen to work and therefore the effectiveness and quality of policing across the country will gradually rise in a form of benign competition.

But this seems unrealistic given the tendency of local elections to become simply referendums on the performance of the national government and for non-national elections  to be dominated by partisans who are generally more likely to vote than those without much attachment to a particular party.

I'd expect these elections to be no different with Labour doing well in Labour areas, the Conservatives doing well in more Tory areas and the opposition tending to benefit from the unpopularity of the government. While the Conservatives in government Labour will continue to do better, as the opposition tends to do in local elections, and if Labour return to government nationally then the situation would be reversed.

So what the government seems to have done is simply create a new way for voters to kick them and their successors during the mid-term blues with another set of local elections set to be dominated by the established party machines.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing because it should, in theory, neutralise some of the cons of elected police commissioners.

Cons:

• The police do much more than just catching and locking up bad guys but this is the only metric by which the commissioners will be judged, leading to the pursuit and prioritisation of tabloid-friendly policies to the exclusion of everything else that the police do

This may or may not be a con depending on your political persuasion but can anyone seriously imagine the candidate who promises that criminals will be hauled off in chains being defeated by the candidate who argues that Community Support Officers should be helping local teenagers organise football games to keep them from idling in the street and getting into trouble?

At least if the elections are dominated by the party machines then there is an extent to which this tendency will be moderated and policy will be at least partly formed by the larger party network of whoever gets elected. There is still the risk of low turnout and preferential voting causing someone less than mainstream to be elected but hopefully eccentricity and fringe behaviour will be no more common than they are for local councils.

It is possible for the Police and Crime Commissioners to grow into what supporters hope they will be, the London Mayor is far more powerful and prominent than was originally intended and Tony Blair once compared the Scottish Parliament to a parish council when Alex Salmond now dominates Scottish politics. But I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that most of England's media is based in London and that the only area of the UK where the media isn't totally dominated by London is Scotland?

A couple of quick takeaways from the US election

So in the end it wasn’t even close. Barack Obama held onto almost all of the states he won in 2008 and, although Florida is still outstanding, would still have a huge margin in the electoral college even if Mitt Romney won that state.

I ended up staying up until about 7am which was when Barack Obama finally finished his victory speech (just me or was this a very deliberate reprise of his 2004 convention speech that first made him famous?) and, as I recover from the caffeine necessary to stay up that long, that there were a few takeaways that I had while watching:

David Cameron and the Conservatives are going to take one main lesson away from this for 2015

The circumstances are certainly similar: an incumbent of middling popularity in a slow and stalled economic recovery who still gets slightly higher personal ratings than the challenger succeeds by going on offence early in the game and is re-elected. In terms of campaign tactics and strategy this was a brilliantly executed campaign from team Obama, they went after Romney hard and early in the game, carpet bombing the swing states with brutally negative adverts (one effectively accusing Romney’s company of killing a man’s wife!) to disqualify the challenger before he was able to properly define himself. Whatever you think of the fairness or unfairness of this (and Romney's side gave back as good as they got), the electoral map tells you that it got the intended result.

We already know that part of the Conservatives’ strategy for the next general election involve focusing on attacking Ed Miliband personally so expect the 2015 Conservative campaign to take away a very clear lesson from the 2012 Obama campaign. Go negative early and cut your opponent off at the knees before he’s able to properly project a positive image of himself.

Obama’s bailout and restructuring of the US car industry was a huge factor

In 2009 the Obama administration effectively bailed out the American car industry, providing it with a lifeline of cash in return for structural changes to the business. It was politically risky at the time given how the public had reacted to the government bailing out struggling financial institutions but was ultimately a policy success and kept the “Big Three” US car makers (Ford, Chrysler and General Motors) in business and all three recovered strongly in the years since.

However, the political benefits have been even bigger than the actual policy benefits. The Auto-bailout became something of a symbol for how Obama wanted to use the power of government to protect American jobs and had an enormous effect in Ohio, the traditional swing state which ultimately tipped Obama over the top on election night. What was interesting was that a policy decision made in the early months of the president’s term, particularly one that was relatively unpopular at the time, came to be such a huge positive for the president in the campaign.

At the same time, Romney took a huge amount of heat for an editorial he published at the time called “Let Detroit go Bankrupt”. He was pandering to his party at the time to help him secure the nomination and it’s interesting that, like so many other things he did to pander to Republicans, it came back to hurt him in the general election against Obama.

Polling was spookily accurate

The standard mantra when your side is losing an election is “oh the polls are wrong” and there has been plenty of that on the Republican side. 

Particular abuse was been focused on Nate Silver whose FiveThirtyEight blog was the website to go to for election predictions. Silver correctly called 49 out of 50 states in 2008 and, if Obama wins Florida, will have nailed all 50 this time. Silver’s model uses state polls as well as national polls and always had Obama projected to win even after he fell behind in the national polls.

What’s interesting is that at the last minute the national polls ticked up for the president and converged with the state polls and both appear to have hit the final result perfectly.

Mitt Romney has basically wasted 6+ years of his life

Just like with John McCain four years earlier, if the Romney who gave the concession speech had been the candidate then this election might have been closer. Even though he ran the most cynical political campaign I’ve ever seen it’s hard not to feel sorry for Mitt Romney given that he’s wasted 6 years of his life running for a job he’ll never have.

He ran for senate in 1994 and lost, ran for Governor of Massachusetts and won but declined to run for re-election so that he could focus on running for president in 2008. He twisted his views on everything to become more right wing for the Republican primaries in 2008 but was crushed by John McCain despite spending huge amounts of his own money.

He then spend 2009, 2010 and 2011 campaigning against everything Obama did and in 2012 he won the nomination almost by default, again disavowing his previous views (including his single greatest achievement - the Massachusetts healthcare law) and was defeated in the general election.

6 years of running for president all for nothing. His defeat can’t even be said, like Barry Goldwater’s or George McGovern’s, to have left any lasting beneficial effect on his party.

Even though he had the most radically conservative platform in decades, the Republican party still viewed him as a moderate and will inevitably blame his defeat on “not being conservative enough”. Surely it would have been better for both Mitt and his party for them to have run someone like Rick Perry with unimpeachable conservative credentials so that when that candidate got blown out of the water by Obama it would help purge this extremism and cause them to run a more moderate candidate who might actually win next time?

The classic example is Labour in 1983 running an extremely left wing campaign and being utterly blown out, a result that strengthened the hand of the modernisers and centrists who began to move the party away from the fringes and closer to the middle. The Republicans just had two elections where a candidate they viewed as "moderate" lost and their conclusion is unlikely to be that extremism costs you votes.

Brits prefer Obama to Romney - that's not surprising

I've got a quick piece on the Opinium blog on a poll we ran showing that people in the UK think a Barack Obama win would be better than a Mitt Romney win in the US election:

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Although polls in the US predict that Barack Obama will be re-elected, albeit by a smaller margin than in 2008, if those of us in the UK were able to vote then the result would be an overwhelming Obama landslide.

Our latest Opinium/Observer poll showed that 59% of GB adults thought that an Obama victory would be best for Britain compared with just 6% choosing Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

This isn’t really that surprising though as people in Britain (and the rest of the world) have preferred the Democratic Party’s candidate to the Republican Party’s candidate for the past two elections.

In 2008 a Guardian/ICM poll showed that 53% of British respondents would choose Barack Obama and just 11% would choose Republican John McCain (36% had no opinion). A BBC World Service poll of 22,500 people in 22 countries showed that 49% preferred then-Senator Obama to just 12% who preferred McCain. Interestingly the margin in the UK was similar to the 2012 Opinium poll with 59% of Britons favouring Obama and just 9% choosing McCain

In 2004 when Republican George W. Bush ran for re-election against Senator John Kerry, a poll conducted by 10 of the world’s leading newspapers found that 50% of Brits backed John Kerry and just 22% would back George Bush.

The implication would seem to be that Brits (and the world generally) prefer Democratic Party candidates to Republican Party candidates as they have done for this election and the two before it.

However, it’s much more difficult to find comparable polls in the 2000 Bush vs. Al Gore election or any before that (if anyone has examples do let us know) which makes it hard to work out whether Brits just happen to like Obama and dislike Bush or whether there is a more general preference for the Democratic party over the Republican party.

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On that last point, the key bit of data that would help this would be if we had any polls for the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

I have little doubt that polls in 1996 would have shown a preference for Bill Clinton as he was a popular president abroad generally (and remains so) and also incumbent presidents will have far higher name recognition outside the US than any challenger (people I know still refer to him as Mick Romney). But the 2000 election should balance these factors. Al Gore was not the most charismatic man (he's loosened up since then) and Bush, though he later became toxically unpopular, was seen as broadly harmless. Polls on the UK's view of that election should have been a bit more balanced than in the years mentioned above.

My suspicion (though I don't have data to support this) is that Democrats are generally more popular outside the US than Republicans and there are three main reasons for this:

• The centre of gravity in US politics is further to the right than the UK and much further than most major European countries. Therefore the mainstream left in America is further right than the mainstream right wing in Europe. (This is a little simplistic and there are other dimensions but I'm keeping this short)
• A variation of the first point is that the policy positions that Brits and Europeans find strange about the US (very high religious involvement, lack of gun control, no state healthcare provision etc) are generally held and advocated more by Republicans than Democrats and are certainly more publicised. Millions of Democrats probably hold extreme views but only those of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are given much attention
• In foreign policy Republicans tend to sound more bellicose and aggressive than Democrats and, as with the more extreme domestic policies, these are areas where the rest of the world tends to resent America generally. Obama has escalated the "drone war" in Pakistan but is seen as the peaceful antidote to Bush because he doesn't go around saying things like "Bring 'em on" or "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists"

It's just a theory though and I'd be open to any data that helps prove or disprove this and of course that illusive 2000 election poll if there is one.