It's not a conspiracy, Donald Trump really is losing

Speaking as a marketing and market research professional, I could get offended by this sort of stuff:

It is not "wishful thinking" to distrust the polls. Nor is there a "natural tightening up" of the polls as election day approaches. The entire polling industry is an exercise in attempted manipulation of public opinion. That's why there is so much media attention focused on it.

Yes folks this is the "the polls are fixed" line we see from Corbynistas in the UK. Unsurprisingly this is from the World of Trump, a strange place filled with paranoia about the actions, motives and capabilities of anyone who questions - let alone presents evidence contradicting - the weird-haired one's march to supreme power.

The truth - there's no getting away from it - is that Donald Trump is crashing and burning. OK so there are glints and glimmers of hope as the odd poll shows Trump within the margin of error - this is like the Brexit polling but not in the way The Donald's fans want to believe. Polling in the run up to the EU Referendum didn't show a lead, let alone a big lead, to Remain but rather that it was 'too close to call' or a narrow lead for Leave. What Trump enthusiasts are doing is the same as Remain - believing their own propaganda.

So no, the polls ain't fixed. The voting machines ain't fixed. The 'mainstream media' isn't in secret cahoots with the Pentagon. The problem is that Donald Trump - the classic 'Republican in Name Only' - is an absolutely appalling candidate only made remotely credible by the happenstance of Hillary Clinton being an almost equally appalling candidate. What is sad here is that the fall out from Trump's candidacy will be the crippling of America's conservatives - embracing a warmed over, pig-ignorant version of 'know-nothing' nativism and mixing it with the gung-ho stupidity of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives closes off any chance at all of Republicans ever getting back any support among the urban middle-class let alone the Hispanic Americans so carefully cultivated by Reagan and Bush father and son.

There's no winning, however, with this sort of viewpoint:

The Podesta email doesn’t merely prove that the poll-doubters are right to be dubious about their credibility, but demonstrates, once more, that the conspiracy theory of history is the only one that can properly account for historical events.

For the record, I'm a firm and dedicated supporter of the 'Cock-up Theory of History':

Brazilian economist Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira suggests that the relevant variable in this case is incompetence. Incompetence is an independent explanatory variable; it cannot be explained in rational or historical terms.

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Politics is broken...

Finer defined politics as the means whereby dispute is resolved. As such it encompasses all the decisions that happen outside circumstances of exchange (i.e. within the market). And there have, across time, been many means employed to undertake political decision-making - from 'my axe is sharper than yours do as I say or I'll split your head' through consensual (and sometimes less than consensual) family decisions to the ever more byzantine machinations of the democratic process.

On one level politics is about how much lies within the market and how much is retained (or captured) by those with the biggest club. Partly this debate is about whether the process of exchange is 'fair' - the concept of market failure - and partly the debate concerns who is in charge, who exercises the decision-making powers. Of course, the more we delegate executive power to individuals (presidents, prime ministers, mayors and so forth) the more important the question of 'who' becomes compared to the question of 'what'.

The truth of this is revealed in Damian McBride's memoir. This is not to indulge in a kind of tribal schadenfreude but to observe that, given the nature of power in the Labour party and the winner takes all system of representative democracy, who was the boss mattered more than what the boss did. We may also observe that this principle - the triumph of person over policy - is indulged every day by the media, by opinion polling and by the political parties.

The reason 'In the thick of it' hit the spot for so many wasn't simply that it was well-written and contained a lot of swearing but that it described the shallow pettiness of politics. We see a swarm of vicious courtiers buzzing round the grand figures of politics - party leaders, pundits and pretenders. These courtiers are served by purveyors of tittle-tattle - the newspaper diarists, bloggers and columnists who report on who said what to who, dishing up lurid tales of sex, drugs and character assassination while purporting to serve some high purpose of transparency or open government.

This is not a healthy political system but one crippled by the gout of self-importance and sycophancy. But each of these courtiers' acts - their tales, their spin, their manipulation - results in a flurry of measurement. Opinion polls arrive daily, not just with answers to the 'who would you vote for' question but with an ever more personalised analysis of the 'leaders' - are they too posh, in touch or out of touch, competent or incompetent. Each 'policy' announcement is aimed at these polls rather than at making the right choice - want to 'defend' the welfare state then you must toss red meat about immigration into the pot to appease those who see people on welfare as scroungers.

What makes this worse is that because politics has been torn to shreds by the soap opera of leadership, we have delegated decision-making to people who are not elected. In local government it is - in all but a few places - the powerful chief executive who decides. And nationally, we have set up a well-paid mandarinate to which we have handed all the decisions that really affect most people going about their regular daily lives. Politicians have given up control over so many decisions to a self-serving cabal of professionals and lawyers - unaccountable, unchallenged and convinced that removing politics from political decisions is the right thing.

Nothing will change. Or at least the change will not be a consequence of us voting, electing and cheering on our team in the political game. If there is change it will be because people choose exchange as the means rather than politics. Instead of waiting on some benign bureaucrat to hand a script to the latest political leader to read out, people will simply set up ways to share and exchange, to provide the things they need (and want) unencumbered by the need to engage in a political bidding war.

Bureaucrats - and the politicians and commentators they promote - will resist the development of exchange as a means of choice-making. It does not serve their interests - for some politicians the results will be false markets, the outsourcing of services, while for others it will be to say 'everything within the state and nothing without the state'. I hope that the power of choice will defeat these people and that the ghastly, selfish and bullying world of politics becomes an ever more irrelevant sideshow as people make their own decisions about their own lives and their own families.

I hope. Because politics is broken.

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Where is this anti-state rhetoric that Tim Montgomerie fears so much? I don't hear it.

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Tim Montgomerie from his Conservative Home pulpit lays into the 'libertarians'. Not on the basis of a considered, reasoned set of arguments but on the basis of an opinion poll. Dear old Tim shows that most folk prefer this 'vision of society':

"A society where government plays a limited role in society, providing services and a safety net in hard times but where we largely rely on families, education and job creators to create a good society".

I would like to point out to Tim that this 'vision' is wholly compatible with a minarchist libertarian viewpoint. Indeed, it is a pretty good description of what most thoughtful libertarians think. So why does Tim say this?

Conservatives need to drop the anti-State rhetoric. Ensuring comfortable retirements for pensioners, benefits for the sick and assistance for genuine jobseekers shouldn’t be afterthoughts for Conservatives but central to their electoral pitch. Conservatives shouldn’t see these things as a necessary evil but as a privilege for a decent society to provide and for a decent party to enhance. When Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are as serious about blue-collar wages as the deficit and as serious about cutting taxes on the low-paid as on the propertied class, they will start winning elections again. But not until then.

I just don't get it. The debate isn't about whether we should go for some sort of Randian anarcho-capitalism - or whatever it is that Tim thinks is libertarianism. The debate is about whether the we emphasise "where government plays a limited role in society" or creating "a good society". Since I've been a member of the Conservative Party for almost as long as Tim Montgomerie has been alive, I guess I'm just about qualified to say that this debate - between small government and the desire to advance Disraeli's mission of improving the condition of the people - has always been at the heart of the Party. Once it was 'wets' versus 'dries', now it's a conversation between the standard bearers of the Thatcherite gospel, assorted sorts of libertarians and a  Macmillan (or maybe Heseltine) style activist, interventionist party.

In the end we are - and always will be - a coalition. Today the balance of that coalition has shifted. Where once the party was filled with broad-bottomed, patricians who knew better the needs and cares of the workers, today it is increasingly a place for people who reject 'know better', who dislike government by opinon poll and who believe that wanting a small state is a moral imperative. The same moral imperative that led us to vote Tory in 1979, the same moral imperative that supported council house sales and privatised utlities. The same imperative that cries out for lower taxes.

Tim talks of 'demand for government' without fully explaining what he means. Is there a demand for floors filled with policy officers? Do the public cry out for teams of equalities officers and diversity co-ordinators? Has the mob taken to the street calling for an endless production line of similar - and similarly dumb - special advisors to ministers? Has the angry man of Tunbridge Wells written to complain of how the limited supply of climate change advisors is destroying England?

We didn't demand these things. What Tim Montgomerie has done is to build a lovely libertarian straw man - based on a pretty lousy opinion poll - to enable him to argue for some sort of Tory paternalism. Or worse a version of Blairite government by opinion poll and focus group.

Every single obstacle laid by Tim before us liberals can be pushed aside by reasoned argument, by creative and different approaches to meeting needs. In the end government is the guarantor of freedom - that's what we believe in. And yes, government must concern itself with security but as was famously said many years ago:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I'm not a libertarian, Tim. I'm a Tory. And that means freedom - free speech, free enterprise, free trade, free choice and above all the chance to live free.

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The Smoking Ban Problem - polls, libraries and predicting future behaviour

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Many experts on polling question the effectiveness of the “what if” question:

“If politician X was leader of Party Y why would you be more or less likely to vote for them”

There are too many chances to be wrong for this to make much sense as a question – Politician X isn’t leader, you many already have a 100% likelihood of voting for Party Y, the election is in the future. In essence this type of question expects people to make a prediction of their own behaviour following a given change – a we are not especially good predictors of our own future behaviour under such circumstances. Indeed, these questions are really just a variation on “who would you prefer to be leader” or “which policy would you prefer”.

Which brings us to the way in which these questions are used to justify policy decisions. By way of benign example, let’s talk about libraries. Most of the population are not members of a public library and have at best a very occasional engagement with the library service. This isn’t to say we don’t want libraries – we’ll fight hard to protect these vital local services even though they are not services we (or anyone we know) makes use of.

Faced with this problem – declining library membership – the local council undertakes a review part of which involves surveying the public. But first the council thinks of lots of exciting things to do with or put it its libraries – computers, coffee machines, self-service issuing of books, book clubs, kids parties - you name it. And in the survey the council asks whether these things will make non-users more or less likely to use the library.

Now let’s assume that library non-users (or a majority of them) say that some or all of the changes will make them more likely to use the library. Seizing on this, the council rushes through the changes – despite that fact that current library users have said they don’t want these changes. Ah, says the Council, the policy will attract loads of new users to the library and we’ll be in clover!

So what happens? Well the current users of the library don’t like the changes (noisy kids, impersonal service, coffee stains all over the table and so on) and some decide to get their reading material from Oxfam or Waterstones. And those non-users who said they would be “more likely” to use the library? Not a sign of them. Result of the policy changes? Probably further library closures, reductions in the book fund and another review.

This is precisely what happened with banning smoking in pubs – non-users said they didn’t like pubs because of the smoke. And that they would be “more likely” to use the pub is smoking was banned. Existing regular pub users – overwhelmingly – opposed the ban preferring good extraction, separate smoking rooms and other measures. But no – banning smoking would make pubs more popular. Those non-users said so, didn’t they?

In truth those non-users said nothing of the sort – they didn’t go to pubs because they didn’t like pubs. And the smoking was just one factor – mostly they didn’t see the pleasure in sitting a drinking away from their comfortable homes. Nothing to do with smoking, nothing at all. And, following the ban, these non-pubgoers have not started going to the pub while at the same time loads of previous pubgoers now stop at home where they can smoke. With fewer regulars, the remaining hardy folk began to drift away and the local was left with three customers at 10pm on a Friday night.

The result? The pub closes. The community loses a local facility. Ordinary, harmless folk have nowhere to go for a pint and a fag – other than at home of course. Some of that much vaunted social capital is lost. The football team folds – it was a PUB team after all. The gardening club slowly declines. Other groups become ever more cliquey. Why? Because a ban brought in to satisfy folk who never used pubs resulted in those pubs closing.

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Why are we surprised that private sector workers don't back Labour?

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In one respect this is just another opinion poll:

"Members of the far-left Unite union behind the British Airways strike want their bosses to stop giving money to the Labour Party. In a stunning affront to the hard-liners running the union, a poll has revealed that grass-roots members would also prefer David Cameron to Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. "

In another respect it is a reminder to the Conservative Party about where they should be targeting campaigning efforts. The current strategy appears - with historical justification - to have been directed towards AB voters. However, this poll confirms that the new bedrock of support for the Conservatives will be the ordinary workers employed in the private sector and the self-employed.

And - as I said here - there's other polling evidence to support this assertion. Evidence that this Unite poll confirms. And this is what I said about those voters:

"These are the people who were most damaging by the smoking ban, who are irritated by the endless nannying lectures on drinking, eating and, seemingly, everything else they enjoy. These are the people who are roundly cynical about global warming, who want to use cheap flights to warm places once or twice a year. These are the people who’ve seen labour rob their pensions, let them down on education and want to tax them to the hilt for the horrible crime of using their cars.

And let me close by saying this: if Anthony Wells analysis is right then David Cameron has his strategy wrong. Sucking up to middle-class Lib Dem voting public sector professionals and labour-voting social workers by coming across all green simply isn’t delivering – in fact, if we carry on like this, we’ll just alienate those hard-working people who hate labour more than they love the Tories"