Into the rose garden
The UK has finally become a normal European country.
That must be the unavoidable conclusion from the fact that we’re now ruled by a real coalition government, bringing together liberals and conservatives.
I welcome it.
It’s not that I’m fond of the Tories at all. However, it was clear that Labour were very, very tired and in need of some time in opposition to regain their strength.
I was also very worried about what a majority Tory government would do, in particular whether they would ruin our relationship with Europe beyond repair.
I would have loved to see a pure LibDem government, but it was never realistic for the party to jump from about 60 seats to more than 325.
So I think the Lib-Con coalition is the least bad option. As I wrote back in October:
Of course, it’s unlikely that the LibDems will get a majority, but it’s not at all impossible that the Tories will need their votes to gain power, which would be a great outcome: The LibDems could prevent the Tories from doing anything really stupid in Europe, and the two parties could probably agree on a feasible economic recovery plan.
I don’t agree with those LibDem supporters who think the party had to team up with Labour. If you can only work with one party, why don’t you join them instead? Also, I’m sure teaming up with a tired party would simply have lead to a Tory landslide shortly after the savage cuts (that unfortunately are necessary) had been implemented.
I also don’t agree with those who think the LibDems should have remained pure and refused to govern. If you get a chance to implement a large part of your manifesto, is that not better than seeing other parties’ manifestos implemented instead?
Politics is the art of the possible (to quote Bismarck), and if you just want to be idealistic and not see how sausages are made, you should probably put your efforts into charity, not politics.
The Times has found an appropriate poem, Burnt Norton by T. S. Eliot:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.
They then conclude that “David Cameron and Nick Clegg dared to open the door into the rose garden.”
I wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic about it, but I think this government is a better outcome of this election than I had dared hope.
Second-guessing as a feature of FPTP
Although the LibDems advanced by about 1% in votes, they lost a few seats.
I presume it’s because Cleggmania made the LibDem focus their resources on seats that would be winnable on a 5% swing to them instead of pouring time and money into their existing seats.
It’s a huge problem with FPTP that unless you have unlimited resources, you have to guess which seats you might feasible win or lose, and then concentrate on those. If you get it wrong, it might cost you dearly.
The same applies in a different way to voters:
Nobody likes to waste their vote (apart from my father-in-law), and that means people are likely to vote tactically.
However, voting tactically means guessing which parties that the contest is really going to be between and then vote for one of them, which again means that getting it wrong will mean you’ve wasted your vote.
I really hope the LibDems will manage to use this hung parliament to achieve electoral reform!
Respect for votes
It often appears to me that votes are not really respected in the UK.
For instance, many overseas voters got their ballot papers too late to vote, but nothing is done about it.
Also, there are often issues with postal voting fraud, but very little is done about it.
Finally, the BBC were just now reporting that many voters were turned away at some polling stations after queuing for more than half an hour because they didn’t have the resources to let them vote before 10pm.
Phyllis suggested that this attitude might be due to first-past-the-post normally delivering such clear results (as well as disenfranchising half the electorate) that a few missing votes wouldn’t really change the picture.
I’m appalled.
All votes should be respected, even if it means delaying the count!
Con 298, LD 108, Lab 212
Filed under: Cons, England, Lab, Lib, SNP, Scotland, election, psephology
Most of the last polls before tomorrow’s election are now out, and they seem to point to a result along the lines of Con 33-37, LD 26-29, Lab 24-28.
There’s also a Scottish poll predicting Con 17, LD 22, Lab 37, SNP 21.
If I put the average of the figures into the Electoral Calculus Regional Predictor and shift LibDem support slightly towards the north of England, I end up with a seat prediction of Con 288, LD 98, Lab 232.
The Tories seem to be doing better in Lab-Con marginals, but this is to some extent cancelled out by the LibDems doing better in Con-Lib marginals.
Let’s therefore assume that Labour lose another 20 seats to the Conservatives, and that the LibDems win another 10 seats from the Tories, and we end up with my final prediction for tomorrow: Con 298, LD 108, Lab 212.
In many ways this would be an excellent result: The Tories would probably end up in power, but without being able to do whatever they fancy. Labour would have to find a new leader, and the LibDems would have demonstrated how bad the electoral system is if they got more votes but fewer seats than Labour.
The LibDem victory in 2014/2015
FiveThirtyEight has an article about how the LibDems normally need two elections to win a seat:
[T]hey tend to win seats not in a single election cycle, but after first reaching a critical threshold of support an election before. While still losing to the major party in the constituency, this baseline of support provides the “plausibility” factor that can turn tactical and ideological voters to the party.
[...]
In 2005, seats that the Lib Dem picked up showed a particular voting trend from 1997 to 2005. In nearly every case, the 2001 election saw a swing to the Lib Dems, usually pulling votes from both Labour and the Tories. And, the stronger that swing was in 2001, the bigger the swing they experienced in 2005. Similarly, many of the seats in which they made progress but did not win in 2005 are now key pickup opportunities for the Lib Dems in 2010.
I did some quick calculations to see how much this matters.
At the moment, the LibDems notionally hold 76 seats and are in second place in another 194 seats.
If there is a uniform 5% swing from Labour to LibDem, the latter will get 118 seats, but they will suddenly be in second place in 332 seats!
In other words, although a LibDem vote can seem wasted in many constituencies, it might just prepare the ground for a LibDem landslide in 2014 or 2015.
The third debate, King, and the secret hopes of the Tories
Most pollsters agree that Cameron won the third debate and that Brown lost it.
However, swing voters seemed to think Clegg did best.
FiveThirtyEight have published a post-debate analysis of seats, and for the scenario where the Tories advance a tiny bit while the LibDems take many votes away from Labour (Con 36, LD 31, Lab 24), they predict Con 335, LD 144, Lab 140.
In other news yesterday, Mervyn King (the governor of the Bank of England) was reported to have said that “whoever wins this election will be out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be.”
I was very disappointed that nobody confronted them with this quote in yesterday’s debate, but it makes me wonder whether the Tories are making a huge mistake by trying to win this election.
Just imagine the next general election in 2014 if the Conservatives have had a very small majority of 335 (out of 650) while the LibDems have been the official opposition…
If King and the IFS are right, and if the Greek crisis starts affecting the UK, the country would have seen four extremely painful years, full of strikes, unemployment and bankruptcies, and it would all be blamed on the Tories.
Meanwhile, Clegg and Cable would have been pointing out all their errors every week at the despatch box.
I can’t help thinking the Tories would secretly prefer a hung parliament that would allow them to share the blame.
Con 276, LD 123, Lab 218
FiveThirtyEight, an American election web site that was the place to visit for predictions about US elections (their coverage of the last presidential election was awesome) have started to make predictions about the UK election.
They are working on a different model than most British forecasters, and in general they’re forecasting a worse result for Labour, and a better one for the LibDems.
However, as far as I can tell, at the moment they’re just playing around with the model, so they’re just showing the outcomes of various scenarios.
In particular, I’m concerned they don’t seem to have any empirical basis for estimating voter movements between the parties – they just seem to make up numbers that add up to the current poll figures.
They’ve promised further blog postings in the near future, though, so hopefully there’ll be some really good forecasts soon.
Update (29/4): They have now updated their prediction to 299/120/199.
Con 291, LD 94, Lab 233
PoliticsHome and YouGov have investigated where the LibDem surge is concentrated (hattip: UK Polling Report).
The brilliant thing about their table is that it feeds directly into the regional predictor on Electoral Calculus.
The predicted election result is Con 291 (+83), LD 94 (+27), Lab 233 (-113), Nat 11 (+3).
One to watch on election night is Oliver Letwin, who is here predicted to lose his seats to the LibDems.
This is of course not an exact science – UK Polling Report is predicting Con 262, LD 111, Lab 245 based on the same data.
Hopefully the LibDems will manage to get the electoral system changed if they hold the keys to Number 10, as seems likely based on this.
Why are the Tories so keen on FPTP?
In the UK, the LibDems want to introduce STV (which they argue is the best form of proportional representation – I’d prefer the Danish system), and Labour have recently decided to support AV; however, the Tories remain committed to FPTP (although they want to reduce the number of constituencies by 10%, which they probably think will help them).
I’m a bit puzzled, though.
The current system is helping Labour at the expense of both the Tories and the LibDems (although it hurts the latter much more, of course).
In other words, the current system is making it almost impossible for the Tories to get a decent majority.
Is it just because they remember the 1980s so fondly that they can’t imagine never getting a decade of unrestricted power again?
Realistically, the rise of the three-party system means that’s very unlikely.
If they really think single-party majority government is so superior, shouldn’t they aim to introduce an electoral system that gives 350 seats to the largest party, 250 to the second-largest one, 50 to the third one, and none to any other parties, even if their share of the vote were 33%, 32% and 31%, respectively? 
Back to reality: If the Tories agreed to proper proportional representation, it’s likely that a coalition of centre-right parties would get a majority in parliament quite often, probably more often than the number of times they can expect to get a workable majority under FPTP.
So it really won’t be that painful, and wouldn’t it be nice never to see a Labour majority in Westminster again?
Con 25, LD 548, Lab 41
YouGov asked an interesting question recently: “How would you vote on May 6 if you thought the Liberal Democrats had a significant chance of winning the election?”
The result is astounding. YouGov’s Peter Kellner writes: “The responses: Lib Dem 49%, Conservative 25%, Labour 19%. On the – admittedly unrealistic – assumption of uniform national swing, there would be 548 Lib Dem MPs, 41 Labour MPs and just 25 Tories.”
Of course many people are going to vote for their sitting MP, and others will assume the Libdems can’t win in their constituency, so they won’t win this big.
Still, it is a very important result. It shows the Libdems are only the third party because of the electoral system, and they can become the main political party of the UK soon.