Generalising

One of the more delightful moments, any time the government releases a new tranche of spending data, is watching people try to find nuggets of Terrifyingly Embarrassing Information in it. Normally, this is silly contracted “team-building exercises”, or purchases of potted plants, and so on, but this non-story is particularly creative:

The Cabinet Office has denied claims of conflict of interest after it emerged that the law firm where the deputy prime minster’s wife works has a long-standing contract with the government department.
(…)
The Cabinet Office insisted that Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, signs off the department’s contracts, not Clegg. Durántez is not believed to be involved in the compliance monitoring work that DLA Piper carries out for the department.

DLA Piper, in fact, are contracted by four government departments (mostly for more money than this), which is somewhat to be expected, given they are also one of the largest law firms in the country. Still, there are critics:

Tom Watson, a former Cabinet Office minister, criticised the deal. He told the Daily Mail: “Apart from the potential conflict of interest between the husband and wife here, I think the contract should be reviewed, not least because they have not been doing a very good job, with the vanity staff appointments over the last six weeks.”

Okay, I guess, if you look hard, there is a germ of a story there. I mean, you can sort of see there’s a possible COI given she’s a partner and thus stands to (indirectly) benefit, and they’ve been hiring people oddly recently, and so on. So what’s the details of the contract?

A [Cabinet Office] spokesman said: “The contract was subject to full competitive tendering. It started in April 2008 and runs for four years with two annual options to extend. The two payments relate to monitoring of compliance by government departments with civil service recruitment procedures.”

Oh. 2008. All things considered, in 2008, had you asked someone at the Cabinet Office if they were concerned about awarding a contract which might conceivably pose a conflict of interest it it later happened that the leader of the Lib Dems were to be involved… well, I suspect it’d not have been taken very seriously.

So, to recap: Tom Watson, former Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office, thinks the government should renegotiate a contract which was allocated by his department during his time in office, because – in an unexpected chain of events – someone in the receiving company is now related to someone in the government, though neither are actually responsible for approving or performing the contract.

All of which, it need not be said by this point, was tendered, selected, and contracted for legitimately, as arms-length from Durántez as can be imagined – unless we are going to argue that whilst in opposition, Clegg had somehow subverted a minister to rig a contract on behalf of his wife. And if we do, then we should focus on bigger problems, because the responsible minister in the Cabinet Office at the time, who this theory would have as his partner in conspiracy, was one Ed Miliband.

As an example of dubious business practices, I suspect this one falls down on almost every count imaginable. Perhaps I am naive, but looking at the papers this week, I thought we had bigger issues to focus on than this sort of spurious silliness. The Coalition is making no end of decisions people can actually challenge for real reasons – why waste time waving around something that is patently above-board when there’s so much else out there?

From the Guardian yesterday, a letter from Kettering:

As chair of Kettering’s Muslim Association and incumbent of the largest Anglican parish in the town centre, we were struck by the irony of our MP’s plans to refuse to meet any of his constituents who wear a veil. Such a form of dress is not, to our knowledge, worn by anyone in the local community. Not a single Muslim female has visited Mr Hollobone, veiled or unveiled, since he was elected. Our town has its share of social challenges, but it is plain to us that none of them relate to problems that can be linked to any religious issues. In the past Mr Hollobone has expended great energy on issues that genuinely affect his constituents. It is our hope that he might refocus his priorities to the benefit of those whom he has been elected to serve.

Dominic Barrington Priest-in-charge, Ss Peter & Paul, Kettering
Inam Khan Chair, Muslim Community Association, Kettering

This article in the Guardian, on Obama’s firing of McChrystal in Afghanistan, mentions past firings of military officials by US presidents, including MacArthur in 1951. That case was a pretty close match to this one – a field commander had publicly criticised the political direction of an ongoing war. and after a bit of back-and-forth he eventually got sacked.

It seems a good moment to drag out one of my favourite comments by Truman, his retrospective summary of that situation:

I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

(Incidentally, the comment at the bottom of the page is interesting – one of Truman’s last acts as President was to destroy embarrassing material in Eisenhower’s personnel file. Would you get that now, you wonder?)

From the Telegraph:

Britain’s biggest building society issued a veiled warning to the coalition government that its plans to raise capital gains tax (CGT) may put the partial recovery in house prices at risk.

Buy to let and other landlords now own more than one in seven British homes or 15 per cent of the property in the private sector, according to Nationwide. Government plans to double the CGT landlords pay from its current fixed rate of 18 per cent to “closer” to 40 per cent, could cause many to sell and force prices down.

You know, in a more sensible world we’d be reading that as a two-for-one bonus, not as a terrible death-knell side effect. Buy-to-let speculative investment is distorting the housing market; anything which calms it down is all to the good.

We don’t expect government policies to make the price of used cars depreciate less drastically. We don’t expect government intervention to stabilise the antiques market, or tax policies carefully tailored to make unit trusts continue to burgeon. We are happy to see industrial or commercial property firms humbled by the shifting economic vagaries of the market. But put your money in residential property, and it seems the safety of your investment is the concern of every economist in the country.

There’s something a bit weird there.

When quizzed on a range of local issues before the election, our candidates – well, most of them, at least – were strongly in favour of the idea that “food recycling should be rolled out to the whole of Oxford as soon as possible”.

I say “most”. The candidates for the Socialist Equality Party and the Conservative Party, perhaps accepting that their campaigns weren’t going to get very far anyway, didn’t reply. (The former’s grasp of local issues was, in any case, made a little more difficult by living in London). The candidate for the Equal Parenting Alliance was a little vague on the topic:

I’m not sure what food recycling is – sounds pretty dubious. If it means waste food going to animals or to help others, I’m all for it.

whilst the UKIP candidate disagreed on principle:

I don’t throw food away. Only people who manage their household badly do so. You should buy and cook only what you need.

I think that was cribbed from the financial section of their manifesto, come to think of it.

Anyway, the Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates were all for it. We duly returned one of them on Thursday. And, as I was leaving for work on Monday, the council came around distributing food recycling bins.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this. Either a) Andrew Smith is an astonishingly influential local MP, whose word is law one working day after being returned to office, or b) …none of them had realised it was already planned to be rolled out across the city by the end of the year.

(I have to say: on the basis of one day’s use so far, I’m all for the system. Let’s see how well it works out in the long run.)

Following on from yesterday’s post on whether or not the presence of UKIP had cost the Conservative party a number of seats…

cim has done some analysis suggesting that a UKIP candidate produces a net increase in turnout of about 2.5% – 1,000 votes. However, the average UKIP candidate took around 1,600 votes, suggesting that they’re only taking around 40% of their votes from other candidates and the remainder from potential abstainees. If about half of that 40% would have voted Conservative, and the remainder voted for another minor party if one was present, then we can find the seats where the Conservative candidate was less than 20% of the UKIP vote away from beating their opponent.

There’s six of them – albeit one by a mere four votes, so we can perhaps call Dudley North a 50-50 chance.

If we raise the defection rate to 30%, we still have the same six seats under the threshold; if it’s raised to 40% – indicating that all defectors to UKIP came from the Conservatives – they would recover a seventh seat, Great Grimsby, from Labour.

Six seats is not enough to produce a definite majority, of course – but it’s certainly a non-trivial number, especially since they would come directly from the opposition. Had they taken these six seats, we’d be looking at 311 for the Conservatives versus 301 for an opposing Lib Dem-Labour coalition; it would become substantially harder for a reasonably robust coalition to form against the Conservatives, and so they would have a better chance at gambling on a minority government.

Historically speaking, it’s a plausible number. The Referendum Party (remember them?) in 1997 took 2.6% of the votes, and are estimated to have cost the Tories about four seats. UKIP took 3.1% of the vote this time around, so six seats is well within the bounds of plausibility.

I was curious to see how this election would have played out under a proportional representation system. We can’t easily guess what an STV result would have looked like, since it would involve very different voting dynamics – but we can make a rough guess at what would happen if we had used multi-member regional seats, similar to the regional section of the system in Scotland.

(Scotland, for those unfamiliar, has a mixed system – every person is in an individual constituency, where they cast a normal FPTP vote; they then cast a second vote to elect members from their region, which returns about half a dozen MSPs. Regional votes are counted in a moderately complicated way so as to benefit parties with lower local representation; it actually comes out pretty representative of overall vote-share.)

Let’s say we do away with local seats entirely, and implement simple voting in county-based seats, with as many members from that county as it gets under the current system. Because people only cast a single vote, their preferences are likely to be broadly similar to their preferences under FPTP, and so we can use the existing data from the past two elections… and why counties? Constituencies are already grouped to follow county boundaries, and it provides a reasonably natural way of dividing them up.

What would it look like? A handful of arbitrary examples (2005 results are using 2010 boundaries; seat allocation uses the nice simple D’Hondt method):

Cambridgeshire:

• FPTP 2005 – 6 Con, 1 LD

• PR 2005 – 3 Con, 2 Lab, 2 LD
• FPTP 2010 – 6 Con, 1 LD
• PR 2010 – 4 Con, 1 Lab, 2 LD

Merseyside:

• FPTP 2005 – 1 Con, 13 Lab, 1 LD

• PR 2005 – 3 Con, 9 Lab, 3 LD
• FPTP 2010 – 1 Con, 13 Lab, 1 LD
• PR 2010 – 3 Con, 9 Lab, 3 LD

Oxfordshire:

• FPTP 2005 – 4 Con, 1 Lab, 1 LD

• PR 2005 – 3 Con, 1 Lab, 2 LD
• FPTP 2010 – 5 Con, 1 Lab
• PR 2010 – 3 Con, 1 Lab, 2 LD

Warwickshire:

• FPTP 2005 – 3 Con, 3 Lab

• PR 2005 – 3 Con, 2 Lab, 1 LD
• FPTP 2010 – 6 Con
• PR 2010 – 3 Con, 2 Lab, 1 LD

That last one is perhaps the most interesting – under FPTP it swung wildly from 3-3 to 6-0, but under PR it remained a balanced 3-2-1.

Some open issues with this model, though, frivolous as it is –

a) To what extent are the figures we’re getting from FPTP data representative of tactical voting, not of true preferences? That would drive down the results of third & fourth parties in any given region, and boost the second-placed.

b) What’s the optimal size for a region, and how do we allocate them? My gut feeling is that around half a dozen members is approximately right – big enough to iron out local oddities, small enough not to be too unwieldy – but I’m not sure if this is based on anything in particular. (Seven-member seats mean that each has approximately 700,000 people in it – the same size as the average US congressional district)

c) Shouldn’t we be using STV in these regions anyway? (The answer to that one is: probably yes. But see above.)

Here’s a thought.

The Conservatives need 326 seats for a majority. They took 306; they get another eight from the support of the DUP, putting them on 314 and needing a mere twelve seats to govern. They almost certainly could have counted on the votes of any parties to the right of them which got elected – at least, not too far to the right – which, in practice, means UKIP. UKIP, of course, did not get any MPs.

But how many did they cost the Conservatives? In effect, had UKIP not run, the bulk of their voters could have returned to the Tories – would this have provided Cameron with any extra seats?

The answer, interestingly, is quite a few. There are 22 seats where the Labour MP’s majority is less than the number of votes polled by UKIP, and seven where the Lib Dem MP’s majority is less than the number of votes polled by UKIP. Of those, fifteen of the Labour and and six of the Lib Dem seats were marginals with the Conservatives – potentially, UKIP cost the Conservatives up to twenty-one seats, nine more than the critical number. and enough to govern (just) without needing the DUP.

Now, not all those voters would have returned to the fold. Some would have defected to the BNP – though it did not run in all those constituencies – and those primarily intent on casting an anti-establishment vote would have defected to the other minor parties or stayed at home. Let’s assume that half the UKIP voters defected and the other half cast a mixed ballot of minor parties or abstentions.

In this case, they would have taken three Lib Dem seats and nine Labour seats; enough to either put the Conservatives in power or in a minority position so near to it that a coalition to bring them down would be unworkable.

It’s a surprising result, I have to say – but if we end up with a Con-Lib coalition, a government of the Conservatives essentially tied down from doing anything too stupid by being dependent on a more moderate party for support… we might well have Nigel Farage and his friends to thank for the difference between this and a Conservative government ruling unhindered.

[See here for Part II]

It has been a hectic few days. But let’s quickly recap the results:

Labour: Well, they lost, and substantially more so than in the other close election, 1992. Net loss of ninety seats; fifty seats behind the Conservatives and a vote share of under 30%, the worst support from the population since the heyday of electoral suicide notes in 1983.

Conservatives: The Conservatives had a following wind from the media. They had a financial crisis and a corruption scandal denting the reliability of the governing party; they were up against a personally unpopular prime minister; they had a new, charismatic – well, by Tory standards charismatic – leader and a party that had had almost fifteen years to recharge itself in opposition. And they failed to get to a majority, partly because they were still recovering from the utter catastrophe of 1997 and partly because the party simply still isn’t trusted by the country.

Liberal Democrats: competing against two rather inept main parties, they improved vote share by a mere 1%, and actually lost a number of seats – something that hasn’t happened for a long time.

The minor parties had an at best mixed night:

UKIP: 3% vote share, but lost 457 (!) deposits. Failed to gain any MPs, and – let us not forget – came within a whisker of their leader dying on polling day.

BNP: Two percent of the vote, but losing 80% of their deposits, and nowhere near the results needed to get any seats. The absolute number of voters was half that in the 2009 election – suggesting the core of nutters is strongly outweighed by the protest-vote element.

Greens: on the one hand, an MP! On the other hand, they lost 98% of their deposits, and actually polled fewer votes than last year.

SNP: stalled. No improvement on seat numbers; despite the potential benefits of status coming from local incumbency and the (perhaps vindicated) argument they could be key in a hung parliament, they didn’t pick up significant numbers of votes.

Plaid: lost vote share, no gains. I admit I do not know enough about the Welsh background to say more than this – but they lost a substantial share of the vote in the close marginal of Ceredigion, and fell back in Ynys Mon, both seats they must surely have hoped to take.

The one party who unquestioningly did do well was the Alliance in Belfast. Against that, Sinn Fein and the SDLP both lost vote share; the DUP lost one of their strongholds (and their leader!), and the UUP lost their only seat because the incumbent split from the party and ran as an independent.

From the Guardian, musing on the handy symbolism of coalition colours:

It’s maybe worth noting that, in the international nautical code, a striped blue-and-yellow flag means “I require a pilot”; two red and yellow triangles, “man overboard”.

Why stop there? There’s a whole alphabet of symbolism:

• A large blue centre with yellow lurking around the edges: “Keep clear of me; I am manoeuvering with difficulty”.

• Equal blue and red (!): “I am altering my course to starboard”.
• Equal yellow and blue: “I wish to communicate with you.”
• Red cross on yellow: “The way is off my ship” – I am not moving and you may pass safely.
• Red and yellow stripes, closely mingled: “I am dragging my anchor.”

The jokes write themselves, really – especially the first and last ones.

It doesn’t just work for coalitions, either: solid red with a swallowtail indicates “I am taking in, or discharging, or carrying dangerous goods”. There is no solid blue flag – presumably it doesn’t show up well at sea – but the various blue-and-white permutations are rather unfortunate. A blue square on a white field indicates “I am moving backwards”, whilst a white stripe over blue is “I am leaking dangerous cargo” or, indeed, “I am on fire”. White and blue checked is simply “negative”, and a blue cross on white is, appropriately, “Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals”. Red surrounded by blue is, fittingly, “I require medical assistance”.

The Lib Dems come out perhaps the best of a bad bunch – solid yellow indicates that “my vessel is free of disease and I request permission to enter harbour”.

Of course, combinations of flags could mean things as well. A Lab-Lib coalition might reasonably be represented by BO or BR – red dominant over yellow – representing, respectively, “We are going to jump by parachute” and “I require a helicopter urgently”. Maybe it’s a fairer coalition – OR, a bit more evenly split, means “I have struck a mine”… and reversed, it’s “My propeller shaft is broken”.

Perhaps, on the whole, this is something that does not bear looking into too closely.