The Conservative Party | The Parallax Brief

55% the Road to Lib Dem Serfdom

May 13th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Amid his quiet savaging of the Government’s plan to introduce a 55% threshold for votes of no confidence, Tom Harris, the Labour MP, asks the question,

“But why 55 per cent, you may well ask? Why not 51, or 54 or 58 or 65…? Why not lower than the current threshold? After all, the new government has a majority of about 70. The answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t be changed at all. Voters understand what’s fair and what’s not, and they know that if, in any vote in the Commons, one side gets more support than the other – even if only by one vote – then that’s the side that wins.”

That’s true, but the Parallax Brief is pretty certain it’s not the answer to the question. The answer is, of course, a simple case of maths. There are now 344 non-Conservative MPs sitting in Parliament, or 52%. Becoming clear yet? Requiring votes of no confidence to have 55% ayes to carry does what democracy didn’t: gives the Tories a majority on the important votes. Which gets us back to Mr. Harris’s point, that for all the campaign promises of returning freedoms and rolling back state encroachment on liberty, the Conservatives hope one of their very first acts of government will be to pass a law which is frighteningly undemocratic. And the maths exposes the naked expediency of the move: there is no reasoning behind this other than to set the figure just high enough to give the Tories exactly what they need right now.

It’s shabby opportunism like this that makes the Parallax Brief reconsider against his instinctive scepticism the case for a written constitution.

The British system works on goodwill and trust, and in such a system tyranny is never too far away. Especially with the an attitude like this. Voters didn’t give you what you wanted? Fine, just get it anyway through the legislative process. Worry not that this then actually becomes the constitution. Carpe Diem.

Terrifying!

To be fair, the right wing press and blogosphere have cast aside loyalties to attack the proposal. They’re not as incandescent with Hayekian righteousness as they’d have been if this had been proposed by Gordon Brown, but they’ve been swift into battle, and for that should be applauded.

But one group which seems strangely unaware of the affect this will have on it is the Lib Dems. Don’t they see that this vote would allow the Conservatives to render them impotent in the most crucial votes?

Let’s say the Liberal Democrats simply can’t support a George Osborne budget. Perhaps it savages spending on public services and whacks up VAT while cutting inheritance tax and setting aside GBP50 billion or so for Trident. Under the current system, the Lib Dems could bring down the budget and follow it by bringing down the government and letting the People break the deadlock. But with the 55% rule they simply couldn’t. They would need 357 votes, when all they could muster, with Labour, the Nats, and the others combined, is 344.

Checkmate.

Has the Parallax Brief missed something, or is Nick Clegg a rare case of a frog that can’t tell he’s being boiled even when the water is heated incredibly quickly?

Tags [ Britain, Conservatives, Freedom, Lib Dems, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, The Conservative Party, Tory ]

Categories [ UK Politics ]

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The Last Temptation of Clegg

May 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

What an extraordinary, alien, indecorous and absolutely thrilling few days of British politics. But what if it wasn’t real? What if it was just the parting masterstroke of a dying government?

The Parallax Brief wonders.

Gordon Brown’s first resignation of recent days, the one in which he removed himself as the main road block preventing negotiations between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, was certainly audacious. But the Parallax Brief certainly doesn’t buy the received history already created by the talking-heads consensus that it was nothing but a desperate Labour attempt to cling onto power scuppered only by a truculent Balls here and a cozy Clegg-Cameron relationship there.

Consider the evidence.

Labour-connected hack Polly Toynbee wrote that Labour MPs are secretly relieved to be out of power. This surely makes sense. They must know they’ve given the Tories the mother of all hospital passes; pushed the poison pill so far down the throat of the Treasury that whichever party has to swallow the spending cuts and tax hikes is bound to suffer appallingly.

Further, Labour also knows that it’s going to have to select a new leader. In the end Mr Brown was as unpopular in the Parliamentary Labour Party as he was with the country. Even in victory, it’s unlikely he would have survived a full term. Far easier to hold a leadership election from the Opposition benches.

After avoiding the electoral massacre many feared (remember the horror stories of late last year of Labour people panicked about returning fewer than 200 seats?) it would surely be surprising Labour wasn’t far happier to hand over power and take the time to reshape their party, chose a new leader, replenish their empty coffers and attack the Conservatives, who will make a deliciously inviting target as they savage public spending to right the ship of state.

But if the Parallax Brief is correct in assuming this, why didn’t Labour sit in the background and try to appear magnanimous while allowing the Lib Dems to lift the Tories over the threshold into coalition government?

Realpolitik, that’s why.

Those on the right of the Conservative Party, the ones none too pleased with Cameron anyway, and even less pleased with his Big Society election pitch, have barely concealed their contempt at his immediate offer to open negotiations with the Liberal Democrats – the Leftish, pro-Europe, unilateralist, tree-hugging, beardy-weirdy Liberal Democrats. Norman Tebbit outright said it was wrong; Frazer Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, and wired into the Conservatives as much as any journalist, said at first that Spectator couldn’t support it. Iain Martin, editor of the Wall Street Jorunal Europe, wrote a series of increasingly testy blogs about the negotiations. And although we didn’t hear from them, the Parallax Brief would be willing to bet the ranch that a sizable portion of the Conservative Party felt likewise.

By tempting the Liberal Democrats into negotiations, Labour gave this hornets nest a good shake. The usually cool Malcolm Rifkind appeared incandescent on the 24 hour news stump when news of the secret negotiations broke. The Spectator and Telegraph spoke of Clegg’s perfidy. Meantime, once Labour had out bid the Tories, Mr Cameron would have looked very foolish before his party indeed – and more important for a Tory, weak – if he offered compromise and good will, only to be outflanked at the end. Labour forced him to up his offer, and up it he did, offering a electoral reform referendum on switching from FPTP to AV. This will have made the internal strains within his party even worse.

But wait, there’s more!

By tempting the Liberal Democrats into secret negotiations, Labour made Nick Clegg look as brazenly self serving as the rest.

The Parallax Brief is open to the possibility that Lord Mandleson and Alastair Campbell, apparently the main driving forces behind the offer, were desperate to cling to power. Certainly, these publicity loving, war-addicted souls will find life lonely outside government without the compensation of sitting on the Opposition benches in the Commons to keep them in the fray. It’s also possible that both cooked up the ruse as a convenient way to extrude Mr. Brown from the leadership.

But that aside, Labour has, in the space of not much more than 24 hours, sullied the pristine Lib Dem image, catalyzed the already festering resentment in the press (and no doubt the party), and, by forcing the Conservative negotiation team to cede more and more, planted the seeds of resentment that can open into full blown rebellion further down the line.

Is it too much to think that the Dark Lord of Spin suffered Clegg to hunger and then fed him with manna*? Once Clegg took the bait, the trap was sprung and Mandelson was in a no lose situation: either back in government, or despoiling his replacements.

*Deuteronomy, since you ask

Tags [ David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour, Lib Dems, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Peter Mandleson, The Conservative Party, The Labour Party, Tory ]

Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Attacking on Defence Will Do Tories No Good This Time

March 11th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Iain Martin writes in his superb Wall Street Journal blog that David Cameron has blown “up what’s left of the consensus on defence”, and that the Conservatives may well be able to make political capital by attacking Labour’s record on defence — an area in which the Tories have traditionally held the upper hand.

A win for the under fire Tory leader at PMQs in the Commons this week.

[…]

Labour MPs looked incredulous at such a direct attack on ground they have long thought a political no man’s land: defence. This is an issue Labour long ago thought closed down. The government might be accused of being too gung-ho since 9/11, but the old charge of the 1980s of any weakness on defence hasn’t really been applicable. Now, the allegation that the fighting of two wars was underfunded reopens the argument.

It’s often forgotten, but defence – as much as tax and nationalisation – was the issue the Labour modernisers had to neutralise after the party went mad on the subject after the 1979 election. The party had a generation of robust Atlanticists – George Robertson being the most notable – to help it make the shift back and Ernest Bevin’s noble tradition of muscular patriotism to draw on.

Since the mid-1990s, post-Cold War, this has framed Labour policy. And it’s tended to trap the Tories, removing any natural advantage…

But at PMQs Cameron was signalling in clear terms he thinks that the issue of Brown and defence funding in the last decade is so serious… When you consider the public response around the Help for Heroes campaign etc and concern over casualties it could be that Cameron’s on to something.

Or not, as the case probably is.

It is true that the Conservatives have a traditional advantage on defence: on this point, history has proved them right and British (more…)

Tags [ Afghanistan, British Armed Forces, British Army, Conservatives, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, The Conservative Party, The Labour Party, Tory ]

Categories [ Defence, UK Politics ]

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Foreign Policy and Opposition

January 16th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Bagehot, the Economist’s British politics columnist, believes that it is largely futile to build a foreign policy in opposition:

FOREIGN policy is a strange challenge for an opposition leader. It’s very important that he (in this case) shows that he is informed, sober in judgment and reasonably well-connected. The “3 am” question is an inevitable one, especially for a politician with no real executive experience. And yet, at the same time, there is only a limited point in having a highly evolved foreign-policy philosophy in opposition. Many of the most important diplomatic decisions that a prime minister takes in government arise in circumstances that it is almost impossible to pre-judge. Temperament and judgment matter, but “-isms” may not help much.

That’s a compelling argument. Afterall, it’s practicably impossible to predict accurately beyond the very short term the course of global events. And it’s probably no coincidence that the many of the more celebrated ‘intellects’ in political history have been those politicians who have specialised in foreign affairs (Cardinal Richelieu, Lord Salisbury, Otto von Bismarck, Henry Kissinger, et al): it’s an infinitely complex, ephemeral and subtle game. Bagehot is therefore correct to argue that it is useless for an opposition to put in place a detailed foreign policy in the same way it might an economic policy.

However, the Parallax Brief believes that is only half the story. The foreign policy a nation pursues is often dictated by the framework that nation’s leaders use to make it’s key foreign policy decisions. In very simple terms, three of the aforementioned statesmen, Bismarck, Salisbury, and Kissinger, all attempted to achieve a global balance of power in which no Great Power would be able to achieve an ascendency that could threaten all the others. Decisions weren’t made based on right and wrong, but on national self interest, which led to spheres of influence. Woodrow Wilson, the US President, believed that international relations should be based on the rule of law, and sought the creation of international law and institutions which would enforce it and arbitrate disputes. The neo-conservatives believed that the free world would be safer, and the world better, if the strong liberal democracies used their military power to topple dictators and spread liberal democracy, and that the international institutions which Wilson had set in motion had become wholly ineffective in dealing with international disputes and the furthering of democratic ideals.

While it may be impossible to pre-judge circumstances, it’s is absolutely possible to build a framework of understanding upon which foreign policy decisions will be made once in power.

And it would be instructive to know more about where David Cameron and William Hague stand.

Tags [ David Cameron, Foreign Policy, The Conservative Party, William Hague ]

Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

Comments [ 1 ]

Make Your Own Airbrushed David Cameron Poster

January 14th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

David Cameron Airbrushed Ad

Via former Labour Party head of campaigns, Hopi Sen, the Parallax Brief has found a brilliantly immature website, My David Cameron.

Building on the the schoolyard giggles generated by the Conservative Party’s decision to give David Cameron a Cosmopolitan-cover style airbrushing for their most recent outdoor ad, mydavidcameron.com allows visitors to construct their own version.

Can you do better than the ones pictured above?

Tags [ Airbrushed, David Cameron, The Conservative Party ]

Categories [ Miscellaneous Titbits, UK Politics ]

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The Department of What If…? The Brown Bounce.

January 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Remember the Brown Bounce? An increasingly unpopular Prime Minister replaced with his trusty, respected right hand man. A blizzard of new policy ideas. Invitations to opposition party members to join a more collegial cabinet of all talents. Flattering media coverage.

Remember that? With Gordon Brown now deeply unpopular both with voters and his parliamentary party, and all but certain to find himself out of office shortly after he dissolves parliament, it’s worth wondering how things might have been had he acted decisively and gone to the polls before the Labour Party conference in Autumn 2007. For Iain Martin, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, the appearance of Peter Watt’s already infamous new book gives fresh opportunity to consider and blog about the “election that never was in the autumn of 2007.”

“It really was the most bizarre and fascinating period. However, events unfolded at such speed and with so much intensity that it has all become shrouded in myth-making.

Watt recounts his role in organizing the basis of a campaign with Douglas Alexander (Labour’s election co-ordinator). Leaflets were printed, candidates readied and limos ordered to ferry about the cabinet.

But while it is true that many believed right up until the moment that Brown called it off after Tory conference (in a humiliating interview with Andrew Marr in Number 10) that an early election would happen, it was already way too late by that point. In allowing the Tories to begin their Blackpool conference he had blown it.

What would have worked in terms of timing would have been for Brown to turn up on the first day of Labour conference having come straight from seeing the Queen (followed by the media circus) to say that he had asked for a dissolution. He could then have kicked off an election campaign from the podium, telling his troops to leave the hall and go out and fight for a fourth term etc. The Tories would have been blind-sided and all the momentum would have been with Labour.”

The Parallax Brief genuinely believes Mr. Brown would have taken Labour to an election win. The momentum was already with him, and a series of polls from ICM, YouGov, Ipsos-MORI, Populus and BPIX between September 16 and September 29 indicated as much, putting Labour 8, 6, 6, 8, 11, 13, 10, 11, 7 and 7 points ahead.

But alas…

“Instead, Brown waited, let the speculation build, delivered a stinker of a conference speech and then gave the Tories a chance to mount their fightback in Blackpool. The polls reversed and Brown pulled out in a panic on the Friday (only going public on Saturday).”

The folly of this is impossible to overestimate. Of course, Labour would likely have been returned with a reduced majority, and it is quite possible, even probable, that Mr. Brown’s personal weaknesses would have still risen to the surface to make him as unpopular with his party and the public as he is now. However, Labour would have been in power, and would have had another two and a half years from now to ride out the Great Recession, get the economy growing again, shed itself of the unpopular Brown, and give a new leader time to establish a new policy platform before what would have been a summer 2012 election. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Labour could have been returned for a fifth term.

It might not be overstating the case to say that the Prime Minister’s decision not to call an election in the Autumn of 2007 was the most important and influential political moment of this generation.

Tags [ Election, Gordon Brown, The Brown Bounce, The Conservative Party, The Labour Party ]

Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Did Socialism Win After All?

January 12th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

While Ms. Parallax Brief was watching Lost DVDs yesterday evening, the Parallax Brief settled down to catch up on some of the political writing he had missed, but archived, over his New Year vacation, and read two paradigm-shifting Peter Hitchens essays, linked at the bottom of this blog.

The Parallax Brief had always assumed, as he assumes most sensible observers assume, that a combination of the Thatcher and Reagan years, and the collapse of, and exposure as fraudulent, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, had utterly destroyed socialism as a force (1) that had any traction in British politics and (2) to which anyone, from the general voting public through to public policy wonks, paid any heed.

Within this context, the Parallax Brief had always been puzzled, and, he is ashamed now to admit, slightly amused, by the sometimes hysterical assertions of the few hard, traditional conservatives at the Mail and the Telegraph, that Britain had become a socialist nation. But something Mr. Hitchens wrote in the first of his blog essays changed the Parallax Brief’s mind:

The goals which revolutionary Marxists of my generation sought — a radical reordering of the relations between the sexes, a weakening of the married family, a general moral, cultural and social revolution, the destruction of the taboos against abortion, illegitimacy and divorce, egalitarian education, the abolition of frontiers and of nation states, the end of restrictions on immigration and the withering away of national borders, the sociological approach to crime as opposed to the belief that wrongdoing was an act of free will that deserved punishment, the infiltration of the media, the schools and universities by radical and revolutionary ideas about history and society, the dismantling of the canon of literature and of conservative attitudes towards history, the general denigration of the British Empire, the demolition of the idea that education was a passing on of accepted knowledge, and so of the idea that teachers are figures of authority — are now the policies of the establishment and so the policies of the Modern Conservative party…

The penny finally drops. It is now perfectly clear what Mr. Hitchens and his Daily Telegraph counterpart, Simon Heffer, object to.

And Hitchens is right — to an extent.

Most people associate socialism most with its economic branch: controlling the the economy’s commanding (more…)

Tags [ Conservative, Liberalsim, Morality, Peter Hitchens, Socialism, The Conservative Party, The Labour Party ]

Categories [ UK Politics ]

Comments [ 2 ]

Why a Hung Parliament Might Savage the Economy

November 30th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Benedict Brogan, on his blog on the Telegraph’s website, today highlights a point that was lost when the political hacks and talkingheads released a week or so ago their flurry of opinion editorials about the potential consequences of a hung parliament.

“Morgan Stanley Research Europe has just put out a note assessing the UK’s future prospects, and its findings are a timely addition to the hung parliament debate…”UK becomes the first of the G10 to have a major fiscal crisis as elections lead to a hung parliament. The context is an ugly fiscal picture, relatively weak economic recovery, aggressive monetary stimulus and political uncertainty”"

The easiest way to think about this point is to consider the criteria for loaning money to someone. Whether or not you loan a person money, and the interest you want for doing so, is based on your view of that person’s likelihood of paying that money back. The more likely you think it is that they will be able to pay your money back, the less interest you would want to loan them money, because the risk of not getting back the money would be reduced.

The bond market is the same. When investors buy government bonds, they set the interest rate, or yield, the government pays on those bonds. This rate is essentially a function of what the investor thinks inflation will be (because as inflation increases the investor needs a higher interest rate on the bond to cover the portion of the investment eaten by that inflation), and his view on how able the government will be to pay that money back, known as “default risk” in the trade.

Right now, the UK has high — but not catastrophically high — debt that’s fast rising because tax receipts have fallen in the face of the crisis while obligations have remained the same, or, in some cases like social security, risen. One might imagine that this would push interest rates up. But as things stand, the interest rates on government bonds in the UK are still low. Some might argue this has something to do with the Bank of England’s quantitative easing program, and there are certainly several, complex reasons for this, but it’s essentially because the UK still has enough of what’s known as “fiscal credibility”: in layman’s terms, the bond market still believes that Britain can, one way or the other, pay back it’s debt.

Paying back all that debt, though, won’t be pleasant. It will involve either tax hikes or painful public spending cuts, and more than likely both at the same time. In short, it will involve actions which will be both unpopular with the electorate and difficult to pass through parliament.

If the Conservatives are elected with a thin majority, or even take control of a minority government, how easy will it be for them to ram through an unpopular budget? Will the right of their own party let them raise taxes? Will the other parties vote for the harsh spending cuts required to get the fiscal house in order?

The bond market will have to assume that Britain’s fiscal credibility had been reduced. Wouldn’t you if it was your money?

The consequences?

The morning after an election had produced a hung parliament, the yield on British bonds would immediately increase — possibly precariously. The pound would fall, likely passing 30-year lows against the Yen, Dollar, and Swiss Franc, as well as all time lows against the Euro. The cost of borring for private businesses would jump immediately. Raising equity for larger businesses would be more difficult, as fewer investors would want to hold assets in pounds. The cost of Government borrowing would also increase, making it more difficult to continue financing the deficit, and making fiscal help for the economy ever more difficult.

The best we could hope for is that any hope of rapid recovery would be nipped in the bud, and a long, turgid slog back — something like the economic stagnation in the late 70s and early 80s — would take its place.

The worst case scenario, albeit a not particularly likely one at this stage, would be an Iceland style monetary crisis in the absence of a quick (and implausibly magnanimous) commitment from all parties to take tough steps and vote for a cross-party budget. Indeed, the effect of this type of hung parliament scenario may well be a some kind of government of national unity to get through the Commons a budget that could stave off a fiscal crisis.

Of course, this isn’t so very likely, but it’s not inconceivable. And it is through this lens that one should view the Labour Party’s decision to increase the top rate of income tax to 50p in the pound. The Parallax Brief believes that this was not to soak the rich in a pique of partisan policy making, but an effort to show the bond market that Britain, and the Labour Party, had the iron will needed to push through unpopular and politically difficult policies to get the country’s fiscal house in order.

Tags [ Bond Market, Debt, Economics, Gilts, Hung Parliament, Politics, The Conservative Party, The Labour Party ]

Categories [ Economics and Finance, UK Politics ]

Comments [ 2 ]

New Poll Throws Cold Water on Labour Comeback

November 23rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

A new Angus Reid Strategies poll for the Political Betting blog has Labour losing ground to the Conservatives, dropping to a 17 point deficit, only one point ahead of the Liberal Democrat Party. The news will be like political bromide for the Labour Party and its supporters, who had responded ebulliently to a MORI poll on Sunday that suggested Labour could yet close the gap.

The Angus Reid poll has the Conservatives on 39, Labour on 22 and the Liberal Democrats on 21. Of particular interest is yet another high score for “Others”, which scored 18. Is the high scoring from parties outside the big three due to genuine disaffection; the perceived lack of difference between Cameron and New Labour? Or is it indicative of voters who have not yet made up their minds: will these voters switch to Conservative once the election draws of a potential Labour 4th term into sharper focus?

It will be difficult to answer these questions without further data, which is not yet available as the poll was released by Political Betting early; however, it’s something likely to impact on the final election result, because standard models of election forecasting do not necessarily factor in such variables, and 18 points is abnormally high.

Ultimately, though, this poll might be seen as slamming the breaks on the so-called Labour comeback. Of course, it’s a poll for a blog, rather than a MORI, ICM, or YouGov poll for a big paper or TV channel, so it may not get the publicity of other polls, but certainly this early release prevents Labour from having several days to bask in the glory of two consecutive polls showing gains, making it harder for the party to generate positive momentum.

The Parallax Brief feels justified in arguing this morning that it was far too early to start predicting a hung parliament based on the MORI poll. It could, of course, be argued that the mood would change again if another poll was released showing Labour gains; however, as things stand, it looks increasingly likely that the MORI and ICM polls simply reflected the positive publicity garnered by the Glasgow NE by-election victory.

Tags [ Election, LibDems, Politics, Polling, The Conservative Party, The Labour Party, The Liberal Democrat Party ]

Categories [ UK Politics ]

Comments [ 0 ]

Comrade Portillo: Spending Cuts “Impossible”; Tories Should Raise Taxes

November 23rd, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Peter Hoskin on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog has an interesting take from Michael Portillo, who the Parallax Brief last remembers in Government as the uber-Thatcherite Dark Prince of the Right.

Ever the contrarian, Michael Portillo makes a case that you don’t hear from many on the right in his interview with Andrew Neil on Straight Talk this weekend. George Osborne has given “a fair amout of detail” about the Tories’ debt-reduction plans, he says, but that could be the wrong approach:

“I wouldn’t seek probably to give very much more detail …. You know, I was with Margaret Thatcher when she came in to Government in 1979, we faced a big public spending problem. It was terrible. It was a hard slog but she didn’t cut public spending. I was Chief Secretary between ’92 and ’94 – big public spending problem – I was trying to cut public spending; I did not succeed in cutting public spending. I don’t think the Tories will succeed in cutting public spending. Now this is what they won’t want to tell you. The reason they’re not telling you the cuts is that I think the cuts are almost impossible to make and what will happen, whoever wins the next election, is not so much that there’ll be public spending cuts, there will be restraint, but that there will be tax rises.”

The Parallax Brief has argued for a long time that the Right are going to be sorely disappointed if they think that an incoming Conservative government will be able to stabilize Britain’s desperate and exigent public finances through spending cuts alone. But he also believes, as does the Spectator, that the scale of the problem suggests that tax hikes alone cannot solve the problem either — public expenditure will have to be cut after the economy starts to right itself.

It’s interesting to see key figures on the right, such as the Spectator and Portillo, now supporting this view. The Parallax Brief wonders if they are paving the way for a more gentle approach to spending from the Conservative Party than many on the Right had hoped, and in the media had assumed?

Tags [ British Economy, Budget, Debt, Deficit, Economics, The Conservative Party ]

Categories [ Economics and Finance, UK Politics ]

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