Some general election thoughts

So the election is over and the polling industry had a bit of a nightmare. We'll get to that in a few days time as we pore over spreadsheets and come up with explanations and solutions. Our initial statement is here and we'll be putting up a more detailed breakdown later this week..

So here are some more general observations that came into my head as I powered myself through election night and the day after with eye watering quantities of coffee and red bull.


Read more »

Despite the hung parliament, who wins the election matters

Another one from "the other place" so, again, apologies about charts not quite fitting. This is about the potential legitimacy crisis that we're heading for if the party that 'loses' the election forms the government. In practice, I suspect that Conservative supporting newspapers will support any arrangement that puts the Conservatives back in office as just and proper while any arrangement that puts Labour in will be a stitch-up or a coup. Similarly for the Labour supporting papers.

Here's the actual post and I've added a few more comments at the end.

Most sensible predictions for the election are that, barring a late swing one way or the other, Britain will elect another hung parliament in May. Whether the Conservatives or Labour are the largest party varies between forecasts but, either way, on May 8th David Cameron and Ed Miliband will be scrambling around trying to put together a deal with the other parties to form a majority in the House of Commons.

In 2010 the fact that the parliamentary arithmetic so favoured a Conservative-Lib Dem deal meant that we didn’t face the issue of the party that ‘won’ the election not forming the government. That is much more of a possibility in 2015 and any government that emerges could face a crisis of legitimacy, regardless of what is constitutionally proper.

Read more »

Has George Osborne single-handedly kept Britain in the EU?

Before David Cameron's game-changing-but-not-really-game-changing speech (details here) I put a couple of Tweets out:

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 1: it won't be enough for Philip Hollobone or Peter Bone and the rest of the Tory 'outers'

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 2: Labour will either say it was their idea or (shamefully) that it doesn't go far enough

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 3: It will keep immigration at the top of the agenda which benefits nobody but Nigel Farage

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

Things we know about Cameron's migration speech 4: some scandal will happen before May forcing Cameron to make more concessions to the right

— Adam Drummond (@AGKD123) November 28, 2014

I'll check in with these predictions later on but to focus on the speech, the major news is that it's going to be about cutting in-work benefits rather than anything more restrictive (and illegal under EU law) like imposing an absolute cap or any sort of points system that would have been impossible to implement without the UK leaving the European Union.

It's not really a game-changer but it does set down a bit more clearly what form the 'renegotiation' will take and will no doubt calm the nerves of pro-Europeans (and businesses) who were afraid that Mr Cameron would be forced by backbench pressure to demand utterly unrealistic fundamental changes and then be forced to campaign for an exit when he failed to achieve them.

The problem Mr Cameron has always faced is that the gap between the minimum that the Conservative backbench 'awkward squad' will accept and the maximum that other EU states will give is unbridgeable. He was always going to have to make a choice between pragmatism and keeping the 'outists' happy and it looks like he's finally chosen the former.

Reports are that the Chancellor, George Osborne, is the one who spiked the possibility of an emergency brake or arbitrary cap on the number of EU migrants who can come to the UK in favour of a the cap on in-work benefits. As the master strategist, Mr Osborne has no doubt noticed that a central part of Labour's appeal to business is that EU membership would be safe under a Labour government but at risk under a Tory one. Today's speech, while obviously aimed at pacifying Tory backbenchers and appealing to Tory-UKIP defectors, will also be aimed at neutralising that advantage.

The Conservative leadership's hope was that this speech would dislodge immigration as an issue enough to be able to talk about the economy and make that the focus of their 2015 campaign. It remains to be seen whether this will be the case but, as my predictions show, I wouldn't count on it.

David Cameron has proved Radek Sikorski completely right

If you followed the Jean-Claude Juncker battle David Cameron has been waging with other EU leaders (my thoughts on the whole thing are here) then you'll have seen that the Polish foreign minister had some less than savory words about the prime minister's strategy when it comes to EU affairs.

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister, said that Cameron's approach to the Juncker debate had displayed "a kind of incompetence in EU affairs" and accused him of listening too much to the 'stupid propaganda' of Eurosceptic backbenchers. He also said that Cameron had 'fucked up' several earlier encounters including his much noted veto of an EU fiscal union treaty back in 2011.

Read more »

Just put Juncker in and do it better next time

A lot of the arguments we hear about the 'Spitzenkandidaten' process have focused on how 9 out of 10 people can't name the person who apparently won it. In Britain his name was scarcely mentioned until after the elections when David Cameron moved to block him as European Commission president.

They talk about how he's a figure from the 1980s when Europe needs change and reform, they talk about how he's too much of a Brussels politician, he's not dynamic enough, he's too "federalist" (which, ironically in this context means he favours centralising power in Brussels).

All of this is true but it also misses the point entirely.


Read more »

A two tiered debate in 2015 looks more and more possible

I don't remember where I first read it but the most interesting solution to the "Farage" question when it comes to party leader debates in 2015 is to have two tiers or debates like they do in Germany and other countries with multi-party systems.

You take the two candidates most likely to be prime minister, in 2015 this will be David Cameron and Ed Miliband, and put them in a debate on their own and then take the leaders of all the other smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats and UKIP, potentially the SNP or Plaid depending on where it's being broadcast, and maybe the Greens and put them in another debate by themselves. This gives everyone exposure but doesn't create the sort of trainwreck that we saw with the Republican debates in the US in 2012 where you had one, maybe two, serious candidates and several others who were there to get exposure or sell books.

Obviously Nigel Farage would prefer a four-man (and it is men, how strange that 25 years after Thatcher resigned we'd still only have male leaders) debate with the leaders of the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems and UKIP while Nick Clegg may want this or the same set-up as 2010. But it's hard to see David Cameron agreeing to it given his apparent regrets over the 2010 debates.

Having a separate Cameron vs. Miliband debate would no doubt work best for Cameron and the broadcasters would probably come around as well. The only sticking point would likely have been Miliband.

Until now.

In our polling for the Clegg-Farage debate last night we asked about whether voters would support or oppose this (it's near the bottom, just before we traumatised hundreds of people by forcing them to choose between Clegg and Farage for prime minister). The results were a bit mixed which suggests that people didn't really read it too carefully but as we get closer to 2015, the German option seems more and more like the only real debate compromise we'll get.

There's a hole in the floor because David Cameron dropped the ball so hard

The news is full of coverage of David Cameron's humiliating defeat in the Commons vote on whether to take military action in Syria. And with good reason, it's a huge event politically and constitutionally. I'm going to deal with the first in this post and the second in another so watch this space. I'll also deal with the actual merits or demerits of intervening in Syria later on as well.

We seem to have arrived, accidentally, at a situation where the leadership of both the Labour and Conservative parties are open to taking part in punitive action against Syria and, where a majority of MPs are likely open to this as well, yet the House of Commons has rejected the very principle of military action outright.

It's hard to decide whether to blame David Cameron or Ed Miliband more for this situation but the title of this post should give an idea of where I fall on that scale. There are two reasons for this (after the jump).

Read more »