UK Politics

I’m grateful to commenters Lemuel Pitkin and Bill Gardner, who pointed me towards Rodrik’s trilemma the other day. In his latest Project Syndicate piece, Rodrik represents the trilemma thus:

bq. economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible with national sovereignty only if we restrict globalization. If we push for globalization while retaining the nation-state, we must jettison democracy. And if we want democracy along with globalization, we must shove the nation-state aside and strive for greater international governance.

Possibly for pedantic reasons, I’m not all that happy with this formulation. After all, national sovereignty is pre-eminently a legal concept and democracy might be defined merely in procedural terms, and it isn’t at all obvious why regular elections, legal sovereignty and globalization would be incompatible in the way Rodrik suggests. However, there’s a more careful version in his 2000 paper “How far will international economic integration go?” (J. Econ Perspectives 14:1) where the trilemma is expressed as being between international economic integration, the nation state, and “mass politics”, where the latter refers to

bq. political systems where: a) the franchise is unrestricted; b) there is a high degree of political mobilization; and c) political institutions are responsive to moblized groups. (p.180)

In the 2000 article, Rodrik discusses Friedman’s “Golden Straitjacket” where “mass politics” is the disappearing bit:

bq. the shrinkage of politics would get reflected in the insulation of economic policy-making bodies (central banks, fiscal authorities, and so on) from political participation and debate …. (p. 183)

Cue Stephanie Flanders on the UK’s new Office for Budget Responsibility.

So how will the new Tory-Lib Dem coalition work out? Here’s my prediction. The Tories are supremely political, and they will be looking for an opportunity to go to the country again and secure an overall majority for themselves before they have to implement voting reform. Easier said than done, of course, if you are in the middle of implementing unpopular spending cuts. But Europe could provide an issue: pick a fight with Brussels over “British sovereignty” and force the Lib Dems to take a pro-European stand and bring the coalition down. Then have the election on the single issue of Britain versus Europe. Result. The Lib Dem vote collapses as those who oppose the coalition’s record vote Labour and (Labour supporters, burned by Clegg this time, refuse to vote tactically again).

Some of the British papers are giving publicity to an analysis by the Electoral Reform Society purporting to show that the Alternative Vote system (which Labour is offering to the Lib Dems now, and the Tories are offering a referendum on) would have made little difference. Specifically, the claim is that actual result of 307/258/57/28 (C/L/LD/Oth) would translate as 281/262/79/28 (with STV giving you 246/207/162/35). But this is a completely static analysis, since it presupposes that matters like candidate selection would stay the same under both systems. This is surely wrong: under AV, the main parties would have an incentive to select candidates who would appeal as the second choice of the eliminated parties. This would often mean a convergence to the centre (on the assumption that the Lib Dems stay third, which they might not) but it might mean the selection of Tory candidates who would get the votes of eliminated UKIPers.

And, apparently, Labour enters talks with the Lib Dems. Telling that his resignation takes effect only on the election of a new leader, and not immediately. Presumably, no caretaker was forthcoming. So much for Alan Johnson having no ambition.

Comment away!

I spent part of yesterday at the local May Fair where, in addition to the stalls selling plants, vegetables, antiques, books, etc, there were representatives of all three of the main political parties and the Greens. I was struck by my own emotional reaction to the various politicos: loathing towards the Tories and indifference towards the Greens and Lib Dems. I felt at home talking to the Labour people even when telling them that their candidate’s main pledge (not to support an increase in student fees) made no sense at a time when my university is shedding jobs, unless they were also planning an increase in funding from general taxation – which they aren’t. So I felt they were my people, still, after years of NuLab, Mandelson, Iraq, and so on. Then there’s Gordon Brown. Plainly a disaster as a politician: either stiff and technocratic or, when he tries the human touch, an embarrassment. I’m still glad he was PM when the banking crisis struck, though, and not George Osborne David Cameron.

But here’s the decisive thing for me. We all know that the next few years in the UK are going to be tough and that the volume of cuts that each party would make are about the same. Where there is a difference is in the distribution of the pain. If the Tories are in power it will fall on the very poorest and most vulnerable. The Lib Dems will be better than that, but they too will appease their middle-class base. A Labour government will still hurt the most vulnerable but less so. Labour aren’t going to win, but it would be very very bad if they came third. Their base, again, composed disproportionately of the worst-off, would become still more marginalized. So share of the vote counts too, even in a first-past-the-post system. I’m voting Labour.

I’m expressing the views above on the general election in a purely personal capacity, of course.

Chris Brooke is on a roll again. Responding to fears that Cameron will demand the PMship if there is a hung parliament in which the Tories have the largest number of seats, and force Brown’s, or the Queen’s, hand:

People are making analogies with the presidential election in the United States in 2000 — but what was striking then was far more the spinelessness of the Dems rather than the unscrupulousness of the Repugs. The bottom line is that politics is about power, and if the Tories are the only ones willing to play hardball, then – bluntly – good for them. If the Queen discredits herself along the way by being pressured into being openly partisan, then that’s a good thing, as it’ll work to hasten the end of this stupid monarchy. And if voters disapprove of what the Tories are doing, then they’ll punish them when they get the chance. That’s democracy.

This reminded me, for no particular reason, of what happened immediately after Labour’s unexpected victory of 1945. Morrison (appalling grandfather of the magnificent Mandelson) tried to involve Bevin in staging a coup against Attlee. Bevin forewarned Attlee (to whom he was intensely loyal) and in the end Attlee just sat through Morrison’s demands to be given a shot at becoming PM. Bevin was stunned by Attlee’s relaxed attitude. When Morrison was done, Attlee just said something to the effect of “Well, I’m driving to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen will invite me to form a government” (not exactly — he didn’t drive, his wife did — she was, apparently, a crazed driver, and his colleagues would occasionally try to stop him allowing her to drive him — while he did the crossword).

I doubt that whoever goes to the palace on Friday will be driven by a wife, or will be doing a crossword puzzle.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

“Hendrik Hertzberg”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/04/debate-british-style.html on the Brown-Cameron-Clegg faceoff yesterday.

bq. Mainly, though, I was struck by how superior this event was to its typical American counterpart, in a number of ways:

* The crispness and clarity of the debaters.

* The businesslike, non-preening moderator, David Dimbleby—the Brits, it seems, still have a Cronkite.

* The audience, which listened attentively and respected what I assume was a request to refrain from applauding or hooting or otherwise behaving like a mob or a claque.

* The fact that neither Cameron nor Clegg went medieval on Brown for his ridiculous “bigot” gaffe—not that doing so would have benefitted them, given British manners.

* The near-total lack of obviously rehearsed zingers. (Emphasis on obviously.)

* The fact that none of the candidates appeared to be a sociopath, a delusionary, a demagogue, or a serious neurotic. They all seem to be relatively decent people.

“Patrick Dunleavy”:http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/election/?p=1882

bq. The dominant feeling was just how bad the House of Commons is as a preparation for government leadership. Parliament teaches MPs to emote, not to reason very well, not to argue, but just to have feelings and find ways of projecting this to others – in short to emote. The acme of a good Commons performance is to emit the maximum number of units of emotion (let’s call them emoticons for short) in any given time period. In the final Prime Ministerial debate David Cameron solely concentrated, and Nick Clegg mainly concentrated, on maximizing the number of emoticons they emitted. You kind of lost count of the number of time they said “What I think is that…”, with a kind of verbal double-bold, large font sign around the I. It doesn’t really matter in the Commons if you are apparently solipsistic, you see – a level of self-absorption that might look a bit mental in other occupations is par for the course amongst top politicians. Nor does it matter what on earth the basis of your emotion or feeling is, just to underscore that you really do feel it. David Cameron’s advocacy of ‘Time for an (unspecific) change’ made the overall vagueness and lack of any intellectual or factual or evidential grounding to what he said really rather starkly apparent. David, it seems, wants what we all want, only he really wants it. When Brown or Clegg pressed him for anything detailed by way of an answer, a kind of ‘disbelief face’ crept over him – his expression said that he just could not believe that a responsible politician could behave in such a bad taste way in public.

I don’t know which of them is right or wrong (I only watched about 2 minutes of the debate myself, having a paper to write on urgent deadline), but found the dissonance interesting. Also Hertzberg’s suggestion that we would be much better off taking a lesson from a Swedish debate that he once saw, where the leaders had briefers behind them with stacks of paper, whom they could mutter to in order to get information as needs be (a sort of open book exam). Also, “this bit from Charlie Brooker”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/tv-debate-songs-of-praise-charlie-brooker (via Ian McDonald).

bq. According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.

American readers may wish to be informed that the “Hula Hoop” in question isn’t “this”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_hoop but “this”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_Hoops.

Well, its very hard not to feel sorry for Gordon Brown right now, but I seem to be managing it. On the one hand, how unlucky to be caught off-guard like that, after being confronted with such unpleasant and ignorant views. There’s a lovely passage in James Cannon’s The History of American Trotskyism in which, talking about the dog days in the early thirties and describing the cranks and nutters who passed through his group, he says something to the effect of (I’m quoting from memory here) “If, despite my unbelief, there is an afterlife I think I will go to heaven, not because of anything I have done, but because oif everything I have had to listen to”, and I often feel sorry for politicians whose job it is to listen to people like that drivel on, even though I know they chose the job. Still, it seems to me there was only one course of action which would have created a chance, however small, of salvaging the situation, which would have been displaying a little integrity and saying, well, something to the effect of what Cannon said. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but the particular way he’s gone about seems to me like just digging deeper.

A clarifying (for me) piece by Chris Brooke at the Virtual Stoa, comparing Cameron and Blair:

The reason Blair was far more successful as a centrist politician than Cameron is managing to be is that he went out of his way to humiliate the Left of his party in public as a part of his move to the right. He chose to pick fights that he really didn’t have to fight, with the result that it made it all much easier for former Conservative voters to think that it was safe to vote Labour after all.

Cameron, by contrast, has made a lot of centrist noises, and he’s done various things that the Tory headbanger tendency doesn’t much like (stuff on the website about tackling homophobic bullying in schools, running more women candidates or candidates from ethnic minorities in winnable seats, banging on about the environment, usw), but he’s never seriously tried to stage a meaningful fight with the party’s Right, to lure them out into the open, and to slap them down in public.

The headline Tory education policy is introducing Swedish style school vouchers — basically, making it easy for non-profits to set up schools, and funding them strictly on a per-pupil basis (see manifesto p53). I’ve criticized earlier version of this proposal in the past (as an out-of-the-blue email reminded me yesterday — its nice to know that people read 6 year old CT posts). Swift and I (PDF) wrote a piece recently about the latest version of this proposal, not criticizing it, but offering unsought advice about how to implement it in a way that is most likely to produce some benefits for less advantaged children. When we wrote it, it really did seem relevant to something: right now it seems like something written in another age, to me. Still, in case that age ever returns, I thought I’d point to it for people to consider.

Well?

Listening to the BBC and reading the papers I get no sense of the level of panic that it seems to me that the two major parties ought, it seems to me, to be feeling, nor of whether the pollsters have any idea how to model the sudden change in the LibDem popularity. (Fiddling with the BBC site indicates that the LibDems wouldn’t get many more seats even with 30% of the vote — I find it hard to believe that the designers have really thought out their assumptions beyond a 25% or so showing, which itself would be historic). 6 days in, the poll bump seems not to be going away. I’ve no idea whether the polled support for the LibDems will translate into actual votes or gain them more. Is the apparent absence of panic premised on a good understanding that this is all fake? Or is it just impressive acting?

More or less open thread.

Surfing around, listening to Neil Young, and thinking that, perhaps, someone should buy Bryan Caplan some Edith Wharton novels (or, failing that, Terence Davies’s film of The House of Mirth), when I came across J.K. Rowling’s “magnificent piece in today’s Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7096786.ece about what it was like as an impoverished single mother under the last Tory government, how her life changed when she became one of the richest women in Britain, her attitudes not so much:

bq. I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

bq. A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug

Now that we have a British general election called for May 6th, I suppose we should have an open thread on the subject. The Tories are favourites, but by no means certain to get an overall majority. I’m still undecided how to vote, with Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens all possible recipients of my support. Some academic colleagues are even making pro-Tory noises on the grounds that David Willetts “understands what universities are”. Well good luck with that one, in the event. And of course, this may be a good election to lose, so that some other party ends up screwing us all at the behest of Standard and Poors and the bond markets.