The debate about why the opinion polls got the election so spectacularly wrong has begun. This piece by Leighton Vaughan Williams makes an interesting point:

Interestingly, those who invested their own money in forecasting the outcome performed a lot better in predicting what would happen than did the pollsters. The betting markets had the Conservatives well ahead in the number of seats they would win right through the campaign and were unmoved in this belief throughout. Polls went up, polls went down, but the betting markets had made their mind up. The Tories, they were convinced, were going to win significantly more seats than Labour.

I have interrogated huge data sets of polls and betting markets over many, many elections stretching back years and this is part of a well-established pattern. Basically, when the polls tell you one thing, and the betting markets tell you another, follow the money. Even if the markets do not get it spot on every time, they will usually get it a lot closer than the polls.

So now you know what to do next time.

From the Economist:

The SNP vote was part of a widespread rejection of Westminster politics. The solution for that involves fixing Britain’s broken electoral system. The SNP won about 5% of the popular vote in Britain and more than 50 seats. The UK Independence Party won about 10% of the vote but seemed likely to end up with one or two seats. With the relationship between votes and MPs in the Commons now almost random, the first-past-the-post method of allocating seats has clearly failed.

The case for topping up this creaking system with proportional representation, something this newspaper has long supported, has now become overwhelming. Tory backbenchers will object, but Mr Cameron might get enough support from others to override them—and would transform British politics for the better. For a weak government, that would be an impressive achievement.

It would. But they won’t do it.

Nice essay by Stephen Moss. Concludes thus:

It is fashionable to decry politicians as venal, self-interested, ineffectual, but on election night – as the smoke on the battlefield clears – we see them at their best. Most of us went to bed last night knowing we would have the same job and the same life the next morning. Politicians don’t have that comfort. Their nearest equivalent is sports people, for whom every game is win or lose, make or break, life or death. Many were broken last night, and mostly they responded with courage and dignity. Not lions in the political jungle, but not hyenas either. Just people, finding something in themselves that allowed them to rise above the bitterness of seeing everything they had spent their life working for extinguished.

Yep.

In no particular order…

• The BBC exit poll, which predicted that the Tories would get 316 seats — and which I did not believe, was closer to the mark than I thought. As the results trickled in, however, it was interesting to see that while the two big parties attracted roughly the same percentage of the vote, the numbers of seats accruing from that were sharply divergent. That’s the FPTP (first past the post) system for you.

• The opinion polls got it wrong. Period. I wonder if that’s because they are intrinsically too bound up with share of the vote (which they got right) and not with seats. They must surely adjust for the non-linearities of FPTP? Mustn’t they?

• My first thought when I woke at 5.50am this morning and saw how it was going was that it will be 1992 all over again. The Tories will, at best, have a tiny majority. They will again tear themselves apart over Europe — as they did in John Major’s wretched administration. Journalists will spend all their time listening to the rabid opinions of obscure Tory backbench xenophobes, etc.

• Allied to that, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a fall in the value of sterling. After all, markets famously hate uncertainty. The arrival of a Tory minority (or bare-majority) government means that the in-out referendum on Europe will be held. And — as the Irish government knows only too well — referenda can go badly wrong, which in this case would mean a popular vote to leave the EU. And that would lead to a stampede by many big companies to Ireland or elsewhere, because these outfits definitely do want to remain inside the Community.

• And allied to that, there is also the prospect of a Scottish exit from the UK in the event of a ‘UK’ decision to leave the EC.

• The Labour party was deservedly destroyed in Scotland. It was a corrupt, complacent, Tammany Hall type operation in most constituencies. And allied to that, it was the party that opposed independence in the Scottish referendum.

• For Labour generally, it’s a catastrophic result, but not surprising because the party has essentially lost its bearings and it has run out of ideas. Its old industrial base has essentially evaporated. Its trusty, corrupt Scottish base has finally been destroyed. And the boundary revision which the Lib Dems delayed when in the Coalition, will now go ahead, with the result that they will lose their inbuilt majorities in about 20 seats.

• Britain needs a progressive centre-left political party. (Actually, every liberal democracy needs one.) Tony Blair could have created one on the back of his landslide victory in 1997. he had, after all, begun the job of remodelling the Labour party by jettisoning Clause Four etc. But he didn’t finish the job. Miliband also had an opportunity to re-imagine the party when he decided to break the fundraising link with the trade unions. He could have embarked on a reforming path to use the Net not only for fundraising but also for re-energising the party at grassroots level. But he didn’t. And now he has paid the price.

• In the you-win-some-you-lose-some category, I’m sorry that Vince Cable lost his seat, but delighted that Ed Balls was also unhorsed.

• As to what this result really means, two thoughts:

1. George Osborne will be free to get on with his pet neoliberal project, namely shrinking the state
2. The most chilling thing I heard this morning was something the Home Secretary (aka Minister of the Interior) said when asked what she would now be able to do that she couldn’t do in Coalition. The first thing she would do, she replied, was to re-introduce the Communications Data Bill (the so-called “snoopers’ charter”) that the Lib Dems had stopped. The National Security State is alive and well and living in Britain.

Interesting letter sent by a Cambridge property agent to its (landlord) clients. Excerpt:

“As a letting agent, we are not interested in promoting any particular political party, but do feel that it is important to alert you, as a valued client, to the potentially damaging outcomes of Labour’s proposed policies. These are policies that will be extremely detrimental to you.”

The message goes on to outline possible outcomes of Labour’s plan to abolish fees for tenants.

“Whilst at first glance this might sound as if it is a good thing for tenants, I can assure you that it will have the opposite effect. Should tenant fees be abolished these costs will be passed to the landlord and if this happens there is a very strong possibility that many landlords will either increase rents to recoup their costs or they will withdraw from the market and sell their properties.”

And:

“There is a very strong possibility that you, and thousands of other tenants, could lose your homes and find it almost impossible to source another rental property because the supply of good quality accommodation will dry up”.

Note the opening assurance about not promoting any particular political party.

Interesting also that the ‘advice’ didn’t work. The Labour candidate was elected!

Memo to self: Avoid Belvoir.

From this morning’s New York Times:

PARIS — At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give the authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.

The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January. Those attacks, which included the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery, left 17 people dead.

As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who travel to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad, often lured over the Internet, the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.

The powers being sought would

allow the intelligence services to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet companies to comply with requests to allow the government to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications. Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.

The intelligence services could also request the right to put hidden microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers, or to place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.

This is interesting in all kinds of ways, but mainly because it shows that surveillance isn;t just an American or a British problem. It’s a ubiquitous problem, and it’s always justified by the same rationale — states of exception