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.

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Waiting for the inevitable Conservative split

The universe does not want David Cameron to lead a united Conservative party.

To an extent, I think what we're seeing here is party sorting whereby politicians (and "civilians") held together in uneasy coalitions within parties start to rearrange themselves into structures that fit their views better. Namely, someone like Mark Reckless moving from the Conservatives to UKIP because of his views on immigration and the EU.

Despite them being personally very close (along with Daniel Hannan), Reckless is quite different to Douglas Carswell, the first UKIP defector (with apologies to Bob Spink). The article I linked to there mentioned that for Carswell, his Euroscepticism stems from his convictions about direct democracy and legitimacy while for Reckless, his belief in referendums comes from his desire for one on EU membership where he believes people will vote to leave. In this way, Reckless seems a more appropriate fit for UKIP than Carswell who seems closer to a Whig than a Ukipper. In a fascinating interview with the Guardian just after his re-election there is clearly a thought out and coherent philosophy to Mr Carswell's beliefs but the overwhelming question you are left with is "why did this man join UKIP?!"

Mark Reckless is closer to what the media think of as a typical UKIP defector. Not withstanding the compelling evidence that most UKIP support since 2010 has come from working class voters, Mr Reckless is a typical small state Thatcherite and it appears that it's his views on immigration and the EU that have caused his defection. UKIP itself is starting to see the contradiction between its Thatcherite origins and the more left wing views of many of the voters who have joined it in the last year or two as the attempted defenstration of former Express journalist Patrick O'Flynn demonstrates.

All of which draws attention to the ongoing civil war taking place within the Conservative party which has been simmering away since Margaret Thatcher's resignation. The tensions between the various factions that make up the Tory tribe are becoming harder to contain and more than one columnist is talking about the benefits of the 'UKIP' faction leaving for the benefit of the remaining party.

The Conservatives have always been a combination of "patriotism" (stressing the importance of state institutions and 'traditional values' like the family and church) and what we'll call "economism" (pro-business, resistant to new protections for workers or new forms of state spending). In other words, between social conservatism and what the Americans refer to as fiscal conservatism. Traditionally the interests of those groups have aligned, or at least not directly conflicted. The last time they conflicted was when the Tories split over free trade and the corn laws in the 1850s. There are starting to conflict again now, most clearly over Europe and immigration.

Whatever the complaints about over-burdensome regulation, the free trade and pro-business side is firmly pro-immigration and is happy to take the rough with the smooth of EU membership as long as it retains access to the single market.

In the other corner is the "patriotism" side, concerned about being told what to do by foreigners and the disruptive effect of immigration. Despite the economic benefits of immigration they dislike it on a cultural and emotional level which trumps any perceived benefit. Nigel Farage indeed once said he'd be happy for the country to be a little poorer if it meant less immigration while Jose Manuel Barroso's criticism of the current Conservative line on Europe is that it is a betrayal of the Thatcher era when the economism side was firmly in control but, more accurately, when the conflicts between the economism and patriotism sides weren't sufficient to affect the party system.

Even if the Conservatives don't win a majority in 2015, holding a referendum on EU membership will be a deal-breaker for any coalition agreement with another party, particularly since David Cameron has promised to give Tory MPs a vote beforehand. The pro and anti EU sides will split and become viceral enemies and, as Scotland has shown, divisions are hard to heal after taking a different side in a high-stakes referendum.

If UKIP is here to stay then the potential is there for a much more significant realignment than has taken place so far with Nigel Farage's party becoming a primarily socially conservative party.

All parties are coalitions based on the compromises of members and voters between competing values. Wealthier voters for whom social liberalism was more important than potentially higher tax rates voted Labour. Socially conservative working class voters went with the Conservatives. What's happening now is that there is a new party which, unlike almost any other, social conservatives are more influential than social liberals.

Labour, having absorbed much of the social democratic faction of the Liberal Democrats (in many ways reversing the original split from 1981),  is finding splits between wine and beer drinkers pitting socially conservative working class voters against the 'metropolitan elites' epitomised by Ed Miliband. It's not hard to imagine a large chunk of the beer drinking faction who value social conservatism over economic interests, moving to UKIP.

There's a line in one of the later, more forgettable, series of the West Wing where someone says "if this were Europe the Republican party would be three parties" and there are a few interesting models for how British parties could divide if we had a more proportionate, continental style electoral system.

Tim Montgomrie, the conservative commentator who had a fascinating debate with Matthew Parris a few weeks ago on this subject, wishes there were a "National party" of the kind in this split and the Economist has another inspired by the excellent Danish series Borgen. In both cases, there's a party containing Nigel Farage and prominent Tory right-wingers (Norman Tebbit or Liam Fox).

It's hard to believe that David Cameron wouldn't prefer to be in a party with Kenneth Clarke than with either of those two.

The two UKIPs and the 'racist party' question

A few weeks ago I finished reading Revolt on the Right by Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford. In his review Vernon Bogdanor called it "one of the most important books on British politics to have appeared for many years" and it's hard to disagree.

The key message is that, far from being just disgruntled Conservative voters, UKIP's surge in support comes from what Ford and Goodwin call "the left behind". Since Tony Blair, the focus of the main three political parties has been almost exclusively on the affluent middle classes, supporting globalisation, the liberalisation of labour markets, multiculturalism and immigration, all of which benefit the middle class more than the working class. Working class voters were previously attracted to Margaret Thatcher because of her social conservatism and voted for Tony Blair because Labour would provide material gains. But over the years they gradually found themselves being offered little materially by Labour while David Cameron's steps to embrace a more liberal social policy removed one of the main attractions of the Conservative party.
Rather than switching between two parties that offered them nothing, many dropped out of the electoral system altogether and it's striking that turnout in the 2010 general election was still lower than 1997 despite the result being much less certain (the traditional driver for turnout).


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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.

AV must look pretty good in hindsight for the Tories

Full disclosure: I voted "yes" in the Alternative Vote referendum in 2011. Not only did I vote "yes" but I volunteered for the "yes" campaign, making phone calls to random sections of the London electoral roll, wearing a little purple "Yes!" badge and defacing any misleading NO2AV ads I saw in free newspapers on trains.

And we got absolutely crushed. Seriously. The final result was more than 2:1 in favour of the status quo (an example of the 'Smithson rule' for referendums in the UK favouring the status quo), the image at the end of this (after the jump) shows the areas which voted "yes" vs. those that voted "no" and it's entirely red.

The reason why I bring this up though is because the recent UKIP surge has got some Conservative commentators talking about how the right will be divided in 2015 and Nigel Farage's success will probably cost the Conservatives some seats. Even if, as seems likely, the surge peters out as we draw closer to the 2015 election, they only need to win around 6% to cause decisive damage to David Cameron.

If only there was a voting system that would save them from this?

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Follow up: more UKIP points

Two things to add to the earlier post I made on UKIP:

1. Something I forgot to include but is an interesting trend is that if UKIP are the 2010's version of the Lib Dems during the mid 2000's then one of the things they are definitely replicating is an ability to overcome the regional limitations of the big two parties. Namely the fact that the Conservative party is toxically unpopular in the north of England while Labour suffers from "Southern discomfort".
In a fascinating Economist feature on the north / south divide in England, it was striking how influential geography is on voting behaviour suggesting that the Labour north and Tory south are due to cultural differences as much as economic and ideological factors. In particular one thing that stuck with me was that well-off people in the north were more likely to vote Labour than poorer people in the south.
The Lib Dems in the south of England function in many ways as an outlet for people who have left wing views but live in areas where Labour have no chance of winning. UKIP's strong performances in by-elections in Rotherham and South Shields makes me think that the reverse may be happening in the north with UKIP becoming an outlet for people with conservative (albeit more socially than fiscally)  views in areas where the Conservatives could never do well. There are right wing people in the north just as there are left wing people in the south but the traditional Labour / Conservative two-party structure does not serve them, particularly when cultural entrenchment matters as much as more traditional economic factors. So other parties, without that cultural baggage, spring up to fill these gaps in the market.

2. Peter Kellner has a great post running through the possible scenarios for an EU referendum and concludes that if Labour match David Cameron's referendum offer then those who want to leave the EU are more likely to achieve it by putting Ed Miliband in Number 10 while those who want to stay should support David Cameron. He calls it the "EU referendum paradox" and makes me wish I'd thought of a catchy name for it when I pointed it out in November.

UKIP are riding a perfect storm

Since UKIP's success in the local elections the news has been a nice reminder that the next 12 months are going to be filled with various Tory backbenchers offering unsolicited advice on how David Cameron can win back the UKIP vote.

But first it would be useful to know where that vote comes from and I'd say it's caused by four factors:

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About that UKIP number (continued)

Earlier this week I put a quick article on the Opinium website just explaining why we think our UKIP number is frequently higher than others. The link is here but the basic idea was that it's down to the fact that we don't do any sort of political weighting beyond whether people are likely to vote.

Just to explain, weighing means counting some people in a survey as slightly more or slightly less than one so that the overall demographics (i.e. the proportion of men vs. women or the percentage of the sample coming from each region) match up with those of the country as a whole.

Opinium figures are weighted to national demographics (that we use in all our commercial polling work as well) and then filtered to those who said they would be likely to vote and told us which party they would vote for.

Filtering to those likely to vote is our way of making sure that we aren't giving prominence to the views of people who aren't going to vote anyway but most other companies also apply a form of political weighting to make sure of this. This either takes the form of asking people how they voted in 2010 and making sure it matches the proportions of that election or giving more or less weight to peoples' answers depending on whether they voted before or not.

The other thing is that, like most companies I think, to see UKIP as an option you have to have said you'd vote for "some other party". In theory surely we'd get the most accurate results by showing the options as they appear on a ballot paper (like Survation do) but the argument against this is that presenting the other parties equally gives them a degree of false prominence given that an actual election will come at the end of a campaign dominated by coverage of the bigger parties. We can't predict what the 2015 campaign will look like exactly but it seems unlikely that UKIP will get as much coverage as they did for the last few weeks of 2012.

Anyway, our approach has worked well in the past and we're confident it's accurate now but we are experimenting with a number of different methods, particularly with forms of political weighting and turnout filtering, to see where we can improve it in the future.

Regional figures don't matter!

On a side note, there was some cheering in UKIP circles at the news that the purple party apparently pulled ahead of the Conservatives in the North West. I haven't checked the exact poll in question but it's worth pointing out that regional splits in national polls are best ignored, particularly for political ones. The sample size is much smaller and the margin of error therefore much higher.
The sample is also designed to match the country's demographics at a national level but may not match those of each region if that makes sense. Put more simply, we make sure that there are the right proportion of, say, 35-54 year olds in the sample but it's perfectly possibly that there will be too many of these in one region and too few in another. The only reason regions are included are because it's standard practise but the figures within them are indicative only and far more prone to being outliers.

UPDATE: I've checked and UKIP and the Conservatives both have 28 people selecting them in the North West. UKIP are on 18% and the Conservatives 17%. This is difference is due to weighting and certainly not significant in any way.

Obligatory "2012 in review" post

So it's that time of year when newspapers and websites fill the gap in actual news over Christmas by reminding us all of what happened in the year we're about to finish.

This is my (mini) attempt at something similar from a political polling perspective and for me 2012 (compared to this time in 2011) has really been about two things:

1. Ed Miliband has gone from being "that guys brother who accidentally became Labour leader" to possibly the most secure of the major party leaders.
While David Cameron and Nick Clegg both have to worry about "kings across the water" in the forms of Boris Johnson and Vince Cable, rumblings about Miliband's leadership have quietened down as his performances at PMQs improve and his lack of close ties with the Murdoch empire saw him immunised against the revelations of the Leveson Inquiry.
As the government (and David Cameron) have seen their ratings decline, Miliband's rise is more a case of looking good by comparison than any consequential achievements on his part. But after setbacks in 2011, Labour have performed the role of opposition effectively with by-election and local election victories as well as Miliband's well received "One Nation Labour" speech and other signs that the party is trying to put together a serious answer to the question "what would you do differently?"
This is also related to the more general point that since the Budget, Labour have opened up a traditional mid-term opposition lead of about 10 points. While Labour people should be a little nervous that their lead is only 10 points in a time of double dip recession and government screw-ups, it is at least an improvement on 2011 when the two main parties were much closer and, in the wake of David Cameron's EU veto in December 2011, the Tories actually pulled ahead briefly.
(There's a useful chart illustrating the change in approval ratings that I'll be adding as soon as I finish compiling it but the voting intention chart is here)

2. The (polling) rise of UKIP.
As the voting intention chart shows, UKIP started 2012 on something like 7% but they end it on just over twice that with 15% in the latest Opinium/Observer poll.

UKIP is an odd one. On the one hand they came in second in the 2009 European Parliament elections (and may come first in the 2014 round) with 16.5% of the vote, beating Labour and the Lib Dems into 3rd and 4th place respectively. Yet in the general election a year later, they were back down to 3% of the vote, no MPs and Nigel Farage failed to win Buckingham despite it being almost tailor made for a UKIP breakthrough.

It's tempting to think of the current UKIP surge as being fuelled by former Conservative voters disillusioned with the government's performance on Europe and other issues. The chart shows some correlation between the drop in the blue line and the rise in the purple one but while 2010 Conservative voters make up a large block of current UKIP supporters, they are not the majority.
Another explanation comes from (Lord) Michael Ashcroft. Say what you will about Lord Ashcroft, he does produce a lot of (sometimes useful) polling data and has conducted another of his super-sized jumbo polls on UKIP's threat to the Conservative party. The results suggest that UKIP considerers, from all parties, are driven by more than just the EU and are more generally dissatisfied with modern Britain in general.
Particular topics that come up tend to be immigration and political correctness as well as Europe with 80% of UKIP "considerers" agreeing with the statement that "UKIP seem to want to take Britain back to a time when things were done more sensibly".
With gay marriage set to become law and the census revealing that Britain is getting less religious and less white, UKIP seem to be turning into the vehicle for resisting these changes and this is probably quite a natural response given that the three main parties are all lead by metropolitan (social) liberals.

We'll have to wait and see whether UKIP have reached a natural peak or whether this surge will continue. With the EU likely to be in the news A LOT in 32013, my money is on the latter.

I tend to be a bit of a grinch when it comes to new year's eve (overcrowded bars and lots of spilt drinks made even worse by the fact that they cost twice as much as usual) so my evening is going to be spent with a can of Fosters and possibly crisps in a bowl if I really want to celebrate.
2012 has been a fairly decent year for me personally so here's hoping 2013 will be pretty decent as well.

Happy new year.

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.