I'm sorry there haven't been any posts recently. Life has been busy and then I was out of town for a bit. So below are some random thoughts and events from the past few days.
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First on the British election, boy howdy did everyone screw that up! Talk about your Shy Tory effect in the polling. When the BBC exit poll came out showing the Conservatives gaining seats, I like everyone else was convinced it was completely wrong since it flew in the face of all of the final polling. But as I sat there watching the results coming in and it looked like they were right I just couldn't believe it. And even the Beeb's prediction that there was still going to be a hung parliament turned out to be wrong.
There are a lot of pollsters in the UK with egg on their faces still. It will be interesting to read the most mortems on that subject over the next few weeks. Polling is not an exact science but for so many operations to miss by that much is stunning.
At any rate I would like to offer my condolences on the next five years to my friends in the UK. Chins up, guys. It will get better eventually.
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One of the reasons I hadn't posted is that I took a long weekend and went to visit friends in the Bay Area. I needed a change of scene and I needed to be in a real city. So I went and hung out with my friend Elaine in Oakland and we had a chill weekend playing games. We went into San Francisco do some shopping. She wanted some new lingerie for a trip this week and I was there to offer my advice. I know, it's a dirty job but someone has to do it.
We stopped in at an independent bookstore (yes, there are still a few left) and I bought myself a copy of The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. On the long drive back into Oakland (traffic was worse than usual for SF) Elaine asked me to explain who HPL was and after explaining that he was the father of modern horror I came to the realization that it is really hard to explain the attraction of his work to the non-fan. Between his hyper-materialist worldview, his racism and anti-semitism and his incredibly verbose style of writing he doesn't sound all that appealing to the non-fan. I need to work on a better explanation.
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On Sunday, after leaving Oakland I stopped in Sacramento to have lunch with my friend Jen and her fiance, Matt. This was something like the first time in 20 years I had seen her and it was so nice to catch up with her. It was even more nice to see that not only had we both grown up over the past two decades but also that we were both still the very same twisted people underneath.
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Lastly I'm going to sign off with a few Hugo related links. Consider yourself duly warned.
The first is a post from John Scalzi on just why the Hugos are not actually being destroyed. Basically Scalzi echos my argument that they found a flaw and exploited it but now that it's been exposed it can be fixed. There may be a couple years of pain in the mean time but in the end the Hugos will come out stronger. Of course since Scalzi is an excellent writer he says it better and with more wit than I could ever muster.
The second is a post from Jim C. Hines about how the Sad Puppy campaigns have broken a recent trend towards gender balance in Hugo nominations and that calls into question the whole puppy premise of promoting "good stories" rather than defending a white, male preserve. As someone who is a statistician I think the Ns are too small to draw a really effective conclusion but he makes a good argument on the face of it.
Showing posts with label United Kingdom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United Kingdom. Show all posts
Monday, May 11, 2015
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
On the British general election
Tomorrow there is going to be a general election in the United Kingdom. I am almost as big of a British politics junky as I am an American politics one.
This year the outcome is going to be very interesting. There has been some very good analysis on Fivethirtyeight.com regarding it from a couple of British political scientists. It looks like the Conservative party is going to get the most seats with around 280 or so, and Labour will get about 265-270. British parliamentary elections are generally harder to predict than an American presidential election. Instead of figuring out which way 50 states are going to vote, you've got to predict 650 individual constituencies and there is usually a dearth constituency level polling data to work with. History is often a good guide but not always.
Also in Britain third parties have far more influence than in the US. Though again it often shakes itself out at the constituency level. So while national polling in the UK may show that the truly loathsome right-wing UK Independence Party may be in third place nationally, the bigots who support them are spread fairly evenly across the country so it looks they will only get one or two seats in the next Parliament. On the other hand the Liberal Democrats who in the old Parliament had 52 seats and were coalition partners with the Conservatives are now polling in fourth place they are still going to come out of tomorrow's voting with around 25 seats because there are parts of the country (the largely rural constituencies along the edges of the country) where they have always had strong support.
All of this brings us around to the Scottish National Party. You need 326 seats to form a majority government in the British Parliament and if the predicted numbers I cite above hold out that means neither the Tories or Labour will have that majority and they will need a coalition partner. The LibDems are a spent force for the near future since they basically went back on everything they promised when they became the Conservatives' junior partner last time out. But everyone agrees that the SNP is going to pretty much sweep Scotland (all but four or five seats) this time out and have about 50 seats thus putting themselves in the position of kingmaker in deciding which party will be running the UK for the next five years.
This surprising jump for the SNP, who presently have six seats, has less to do with Scottish separatism than straight right versus left politics. Last year's defeat of the Scottish independence referendum shows that many Scots aren't that keen independence that is still the heart of the SNP platform but they are very much in favor economic equality and fairness. Ever since Tony Blair and New Labour took control of the Labour party they are no longer the socialists or even social democrats of old. Their policies are really only slightly to the left of the Conservatives. But the Scottish Nationalist Party's policies are old school European left and with the state of the British economy up north ever since the Great Recession that has a lot of appeal. In fact if the SNP had run candidates in northern England I would be surprised if they picked up seats there as well.
All of this mean's that the outcome of the election is going to be riding on who is willing to do a deal with the SNP and for how much. If the Tories come out with the most seats, as seems likely, they get first crack at forming a government. And while I can see a certain advantage in the SNP joining up with the Conservatives, mainly to make them hold to David Cameron's promises after the independence referendum, in the end I think this unlikely. The SNP doesn't want to be put in the position the LibDems are in now as essentially a fig leaf to cover the worst of Conservative policies with left wing respectability. So it all comes down to doing a deal with Labour, especially as there are still plenty of old Labour types that would like their help pulling the party back left. Where I am having a hard time deciding is if they will formally enter the government as coalition partner with seats in the Cabinet or if they will unofficially support a minority Labour government. I am tending towards the latter because that gives them more power to withhold votes on key pieces of legislation if they don't like the way things are going and thus create a no confidence vote to force an early election.
This year the outcome is going to be very interesting. There has been some very good analysis on Fivethirtyeight.com regarding it from a couple of British political scientists. It looks like the Conservative party is going to get the most seats with around 280 or so, and Labour will get about 265-270. British parliamentary elections are generally harder to predict than an American presidential election. Instead of figuring out which way 50 states are going to vote, you've got to predict 650 individual constituencies and there is usually a dearth constituency level polling data to work with. History is often a good guide but not always.
Also in Britain third parties have far more influence than in the US. Though again it often shakes itself out at the constituency level. So while national polling in the UK may show that the truly loathsome right-wing UK Independence Party may be in third place nationally, the bigots who support them are spread fairly evenly across the country so it looks they will only get one or two seats in the next Parliament. On the other hand the Liberal Democrats who in the old Parliament had 52 seats and were coalition partners with the Conservatives are now polling in fourth place they are still going to come out of tomorrow's voting with around 25 seats because there are parts of the country (the largely rural constituencies along the edges of the country) where they have always had strong support.
All of this brings us around to the Scottish National Party. You need 326 seats to form a majority government in the British Parliament and if the predicted numbers I cite above hold out that means neither the Tories or Labour will have that majority and they will need a coalition partner. The LibDems are a spent force for the near future since they basically went back on everything they promised when they became the Conservatives' junior partner last time out. But everyone agrees that the SNP is going to pretty much sweep Scotland (all but four or five seats) this time out and have about 50 seats thus putting themselves in the position of kingmaker in deciding which party will be running the UK for the next five years.
This surprising jump for the SNP, who presently have six seats, has less to do with Scottish separatism than straight right versus left politics. Last year's defeat of the Scottish independence referendum shows that many Scots aren't that keen independence that is still the heart of the SNP platform but they are very much in favor economic equality and fairness. Ever since Tony Blair and New Labour took control of the Labour party they are no longer the socialists or even social democrats of old. Their policies are really only slightly to the left of the Conservatives. But the Scottish Nationalist Party's policies are old school European left and with the state of the British economy up north ever since the Great Recession that has a lot of appeal. In fact if the SNP had run candidates in northern England I would be surprised if they picked up seats there as well.
All of this mean's that the outcome of the election is going to be riding on who is willing to do a deal with the SNP and for how much. If the Tories come out with the most seats, as seems likely, they get first crack at forming a government. And while I can see a certain advantage in the SNP joining up with the Conservatives, mainly to make them hold to David Cameron's promises after the independence referendum, in the end I think this unlikely. The SNP doesn't want to be put in the position the LibDems are in now as essentially a fig leaf to cover the worst of Conservative policies with left wing respectability. So it all comes down to doing a deal with Labour, especially as there are still plenty of old Labour types that would like their help pulling the party back left. Where I am having a hard time deciding is if they will formally enter the government as coalition partner with seats in the Cabinet or if they will unofficially support a minority Labour government. I am tending towards the latter because that gives them more power to withhold votes on key pieces of legislation if they don't like the way things are going and thus create a no confidence vote to force an early election.
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