Hedge funds shorting the referendum? The thing it's short on is fact

On the face of it, the Bloomberg article is a bombshell. It's not so much that it names Nigel Farage but more that it points the finger at the market research industry:

Hedge funds aiming to win big from trades that day had hired YouGov and at least five other polling companies, including Farage's favorite pollster. Their services, on the day and in the days leading up to the vote, varied, but pollsters sold hedge funds critical, advance information, including data that would have been illegal for them to give the public. Some hedge funds gained confidence, through private exit polls, that most Britons had voted to leave the EU, or that the vote was far closer than the public believed—knowledge pollsters provided while voting was still underway and hours ahead of official tallies. These hedge funds were in the perfect position to earn fortunes by short selling the British pound. Others learned the likely outcome of public, potentially market-moving polls before they were published, offering surefire trades.

The article mentions two polling companies by name - YouGov and Survation - and suggests that they conducted "private exit polls" that were shared with hedge fund businesses as a means of 'shorting' the Pound during the evening. The article also hints that the polls running up to the referendum were foxed in some manner. First let's get the exit poll thing cleared up:

An election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. Unlike an opinion poll, which asks for whom the voter plans to vote, or some similar formulation, an exit poll asks for whom the voter actually voted.

It was widely reported in the run up to the referendum that there wouldn't be any exit polling (although there were suggestions that private polls were being commissioned) because of the methodological difficulties - with no past voting behaviour getting a balanced sample would be very difficult:

The problem they face is the same as that faced by the broadcasters: without a baseline it is hard – and expensive – to construct a sample of polling stations that is representative of the country as a whole. And they won’t know if they are right until the actual results start to flow in from about 12.30am on Friday.

The YouGov poll reported by Sky News at 10.02pm wasn't an exit poll but, as the Bloomberg article makes clear, an opinion poll conducted on the same basis and with the same sampling as similar polls in the run up to the referendum (a YouGov poll reported 51/49 Remain/Leave on 22 June and Survation reported Remain leads in two slightly earlier polls). The poll result announced (I think mistakenly as if it were an exit poll) by Sky News was pretty much in line with overall polling over the previous week. It is worth noting that eight of the ten polls prior to the murder of Jo Cox MP showed a Leave majority whereas only two of the ten polls after her death did so. If the money men commissioned any polling it probably won't have been exit polls because of the sampling problem - it will have been phone or online (most likely online).

There had been a slight improvement in exchange rates in the days prior to the referendum, something that was entirely in line with the increased expectation that Remain would win the referendum - speaking personally, I switched the TV on that evening expecting to see a reasonably comfortable win for the pro-EU campaign. There's a legitimate question as to why the polls were so wrong (although pollsters will point out that the difference between 52/48 and 48/52 really isn't large in statistical terms) but the Bloomberg allegation (and the hint at the end of the article) is very serious as it suggests polling companies are colluding with investors to game election results.

For all the shock horror nature of the report, I'm inclined to the view that nobody has fixed anything - some private polling will have given different answers (perhaps more in line with earlier polling) but that's all. The hedge fund folk no more knew the result than did any of the rest of us, including the people at Sky TV and Leave.EU.

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Is anyone paying attention....

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Over the years I've remarked often that most people, most of the time, simply aren't remotely interested in politics. More to the point those people not only aren't interested, they aren't paying attention. Yes we can grab their attention by putting a big headline in front of their eyes - to which they'll respond with an "oh yes, terrible" sort of remark and then return to chatting about the football or the latest celebrity divorce. Or more likely, what their children are doing at school and the latest gossip about colleagues at work.

It may pain us political types but all that effort to 'dominate the media narrative' or other such tommy-rot of the spinners world is just that, tommy-rot. People aren't paying attention. Here's Populus' weekly poll that asks people what stories they've noticed:

Only the NHS story among these is relevant to UK politics and just 8% 'noticed'. People really aren't paying attention to the news (even where they're watching the news programmes, I suspect this flitters through people's lives like background noise).

Now some of the politically-obsessed will now be heard muttering about 'apathy' and 'engagement', even 'participation'. These anoraks miss the point - the point is that wealth and comfort makes politics less and less relevant to people. And this is a good thing, it represents a little more withering away of government - another step towards us not actually needing government at all.

Now I appreciate that, right now, we have the most intrusive government since we decided that the king wasn't a god and didn't own all the stuff as of right. But this covers over the fact that most people's connection with government comes through one or all of health, education, welfare or having the bin emptied. And so long as they're not actively annoyed or upset by one of these, they have few problems with government.

The shift here is from government being something that is actively done to us to us being consumers of government. It really doesn't matter whether we pay directly or through taxes, we perceive ourselves as customers rather than subjects. And the debate around politics is about us exercising our consumption role rather than choosing someone to "run the country". Elections are the point at which we can choose different strategies for managing those services - it may not be the best way to do this but it's the way, for now, we've chosen. So when the Conservatives were rambling on about financial sovereignty and other such grand matters, Tony Blair talked about 'schools and hospitals' and won the election.

For me the importance of this change from subject to customer is that it suggests that government is not necessary - at least not on its current scale - to the delivery of what we currently (and wrongly) see as 'public goods'. There is a reducing need for us to provide, for example, healthcare or education through the medium of government, it is a choice that we make because it seems to us better, fairer or more effective.

The big winners in this sort of politics are those who - as Blair did - focus on what, when I was a student activist, called "soft loo-paper politics". Rather than endeavouring to change the world (or even Hull University) the successful political leader focuses on getting better services - health, education, filling in potholes. And the politician - the MP or councillor - bends his efforts to dealing with these issues, to be someone who badgers away at the minutiae of constituency problems. The old sort of MP - a grand fella who lives grandly in London and descends on the constituency for the AGM, the annual dinner and a couple of (reluctant) weeks at election time - no longer fits the bill however valuable the contribution of those men might have been.

A good few years ago I wrote in praise of 'idiots'  - those people who didn't engage, weren't involved and only (at best) reluctantly turned out to cast a vote in elections:

Round here they’re probably in their thirties or forties, employed at a middle management level in business and industry. They worry about how well their kids do at school, they concern themselves with making their family safe, they grumble a bit about paying taxes but have enough cash afterwards for it not to really matter. Such folk are ordinary, hard-working and inherently conservative. But they also see little or no link between the act of voting in a politician from one party or another and the significant things in their lives.

Or to put it another way, these people aren't paying attention. And isn't that wonderful, cheering and independent!

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The public aren't so keen on nannying fussbucketry after all!

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A little glimmer of hope. A small break in the dark New Puritan clouds. It seems that the British public - or a large proportion of it - aren't so very keen on nanny:

There is little support for nannying.  Asked if Government should provide advice on what foods to eat and how much to drink, 48 per cent disagree and only 22 per cent agree.

I'm guess that the fussbuckets will carry on - after all they know so much better. Shame then that that British public rather doubts that they do:

Asked if politicians and civil servants are well-equipped to make personal decisions on their behalf, nearly two out of three Britons (65 per cent) disagree, versus only 9 per cent who agree.

Perhaps, in the light of these findings the Church of Public Health will back off a little especially given that the good old British public things their latest wheeze, plain packs for fags, won't work and is an imposition.

Just a quarter of people in the UK (28 per cent) think that selling cigarettes in plain packaging would discourage younger people from taking up smoking, the stance that health organisations are currently taking to push the law in this territory. Only 25 per cent of smokers agree that plain packs would put children off trying cigarettes.

And all the evidence suggests that the British public have got it right.

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What a surprise....

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It seems that Labour councillors don't like Eric Pickles!

More than half of all councillors think communities secretary, Eric Pickles, is doing a bad job, according to a new poll by Total Politics magazine.

The poll revealed that 52% think he is doing a bad job, while 33% think Mr Pickles has done a very or fairly good job since taking office last May.

But while all of the Labour councillors surveyed thought the communities secretary had done a bad job, 61% of Tories thought he had done a good job.

This perhaps qualifies for stupid poll of the week!

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