Category: Politics

Fannie and Freddie’s moral hazards

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been taken into ‘conservatorship’. I’m no expert, but the issuing of new, common stock to the federal government and the drop in value of existing stock means that, effectively, Fannie and Freddie have been nationalised, albeit on a temporary basis. The Congressional Budget Office has apparently said that the potential cost is on the order of US$25bn. The about guaranteed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is US$5.3tn or, put another way, twice the size of the entire UK economy. I wonder if this is the largest nationalisation ever.

Bailouts like this always raise the spectre of moral hazard. The implication was always there as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were set up as Government-Sponsored Enterprises; indeed, Ginnie Mae, which was hived off from Fannie Mae in 1968, actually has federal guarantees. In short, if an organisation knows that it will not be allowed to fail, it will take greater risks than it might otherwise do.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said, according to Guardian Daily, that the two institutions are “so big and so interwoven in the financial system that a failure of either of them would affect the whole world economy”. The result is that there is moral hazard by the very existence of players that have such an overwhelming position in a given market; the implication is that, should everything go west, the state will have to intervene.

I do wonder if the same applies when everyone in a given market is heavily involved in a given part of that market, particularly when the market as a whole is important. If everyone in banking became heavily involved in, say, arbitrage. If a problem were to emerge with the arbitrage market, the state might be forced to intervene because of the effective monoculture. There is a moral hazard in the existence of that monoculture. You would hope that individual banks (or whatever) would avoid such a position or, at least, advertise to their investors that they are engaging in a risky affair. If everyone’s doing it, groupthink will dimish the perception of risk and, because the system cannot be allowed to catastrophically fail, take advantage of the moral hazard.

xD.

In answer to Chris Dillow

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics.

1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average unskilled worker? I mean, both got a bare subsistence living and neither had political rights. But slaves had more job security. So how bad was slavery compared to free labour?

I know the passage from Africa was horrific, and there are examples of terrible mistreatment of both slaves and workers. But I’m asking about averages. Anecdotes aren’t enough. And don’t give me any nonsensical effort to empathise from today’s perspective.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence – the pictures of beaten slaves and of (free) children pulling heavy carts through narrow mineshafts – that life for most people in the 1700s was not pleasant. That, however, doesn’t answer Chris’s question. To do that, we’d need detailed breakdowns of the socioeconomic situation of the various types and classes of people at the time. They are not, so far as I know, available.

However, slavery was not just an economic condition. It is very much tied in to race and religion; the question of whether non-whites even had souls was prevalent. While the economics of the situation are worth studying, the moral justifications that were deployed and the attempt to keep slavery out of sight and out of mind are worth studying too; after all, “one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.”1

In any case, the eighteenth century was one of great change that saw the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions and the move from the countryside to the city. I would add that, although villeinage had disappeared in England by 1700, villeins existed in Scotland until 1799.

2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?

Actually, NGS doesn’t want to do that or, at least, if they do they haven’t told anyone. I telephoned the NGS’s contact for the Sutherland purchase and they have not announced how they propose to fund it. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they want to take it out of general taxation.

Using QALYs would, in time, almost by definition suggest that the spending is justified. It is a one-off purchase of two paintings that will also secure a long-term loan on a further fourteen pieces of art. If we say that, on a scale of one to zero, one is perfect health while zero is dead, we can give a figure to the change in QALYs from the expenditure.
I quote from the entry on NICE’s website on QALYs:

Patient x has a serious, life-threatening condition.

If he continues receiving standard treatment he will live for 1 year and his quality of life will be 0.4 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If he receives the new drug he will live for 1 year 3 months (1.25 years), with a quality of life of 0.6.

The new treatment is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: 1 (year’s extra life) x 0.4 = 0.4 QALY

New treatment: 1.25 (1 year, 3 months extra life) x 0.6 = 0.75 QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to 0.35 additional QALYs (that is: 0.75 –0.4 QALY = 0.35 QALYs).

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £10,000, standard treatment costs £3000.

The difference in treatment costs (£7000) is divided by the QALYs gained (0.35) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £20,000 per QALY.

Let me substitute a little.

Person y has a serious, life-threatening condition; they are alive and therefore will die in n years.

If they continue receiving standard treatment they will live for n years and his quality of life will be m, where 0? m ? 1 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If they receive the new drug they will live for n years (assuming that art doesn’t affect length of life), with a quality of life of m + b, where b is the benefit in terms of quality of life derived from viewing the art

The new treatment, art, is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: n x m = nm QALY

New treatment: n x (m+b) = nm+nb QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to nb additional QALYs

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £50,000,000, inaction costs £0.

The difference in treatment costs (£50,000,000) is divided by the QALYs gained (nb) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £50,000,000/nb per QALY.

Let us say that a nice trip to the gallery to see the picture is equal to a positive change of one one-thousandth, or 0.001. We very quickly see that the cost, given that n is constant, per QALY is an astronomical number: 50000000000. That, however, is for one person. To bring it down to the £30,000 limit suggested by the NHS, 1,666,667 people would have to see the paintings. That’s not per year; that’s in total ever. NGS tell me that one and a half million people visit the National Galleries of Scotland per year, a million of which go to the National Gallery of Scotland where the Titian is.

It may be that my assumption of one one-thousandth of a QALY is too high. It wouldn’t matter; you’d have to wait longer to derive the benefit, but it would happen. It is also, of course, possible that it is too low. Not everyone who sees the paintings (the total is fourteen) is going to be someone off the street. Some will be schoolchildren on guided tours who may have a lifelong interest sparked in art; I’m sure you can think of other, equally unquantifiable examples.

You could also add into the calculation the benefit of the continuation of these major works of art to the local economy, including the increased publicity they will receive from the coverage of the possible purchase.

I wonder if Chris has been reading Bentham; the QALY method is the descendant of the felicific calculus and I’m sure that he would like to think he’s had an impact. The reason, I suspect, that this form of CBA is only applied to medical treatments for two reasons. Firstly, medical types tend to have a decent grasp of statistics and so are more likely to come up with ways of quantifying abstracts like ‘quality of life’. Doing the same thing for, say, Trident would be a lot harder as you have to make unprovable, untestable assumptions about the effect of having nuclear weapons. You could say that having a bell on a stick would prevent us from being nuked and it would be just as hard to prove. It is also hard to test the effect, if any, of things like prestige. I suspect, though, that the main reason is that the budgets for the NHS in general and medicines in particular are so large that they cannot be ignored and that, as the Government wanted to move responsibility away from itself, both to avoid the demands of political exigence and thereby to give a fairer result, NICE was set up and went about things in the best way it could.

3. How can academics be so quick to close down free speech? Surely, any proper teacher must know that the solution to mistaken beliefs is to correct them through discussion – that’s what teaching means. Academics must therefore support free speech, by definition. Does this episode merely corroborate my prejudice, that a close interest in the Israel-Palestine question is dangerous for one’s mental health?

Unfortunately, there are plenty of academics who don’t sign up to the scientific method; I point to many of the people involved in promoting creationism or intelligent design and, for some excellent rebuttal, Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel.

Mistaken beliefs should, in theory, be correctable by teaching so long as the belief is honestly held on a misappreciation of facts or misapplication of argument. Often, the aim is not to find any sort of ‘truth’ or answer but to ensure that your side wins; the fervour behind that aim, whether religious or secular, is such that any methods are justified leading to a lack of understanding in why what can be broadly termed the scientific method is important. That leads to lazy citation and research and quoting David Duke.

In answer to the final point, yes. I agree with much of Dave Osler’s thinking about the problems around discussing the area at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean.

4. Companies are moving their head offices to Ireland or Luxembourg to save tax. So, is there something to be said for a cut in corporation tax, financed by higher top income tax rates? The idea here is that companies’ head offices are more mobile than individual high-earners, and it doesn’t matter much anyway if a few of these leave or retire anyway. So we protect tax revenues without increasing inequality. What’s wrong with this?

In a unitary state, not much. However, in a country like the USA, where a slight rise in corporation tax could allow for a reduction in income tax in a given state, making people move to a state next to the state where they work. Indeed, it could make sense for a state to try to ride the Laffer curve if they have a nearby headquarters. Ultimately, it depends on whether the costs of moving justify the rewards of lower taxes for a given high-earner.

As to what might be wrong with this, we well know that the majority of the press will not report such subtleties other than as ‘tax rise’ or an attack on anything resembling progressive taxation.

I have wondered what would happen if we scrapped all taxes except income tax, adjusting the total take accordingly; I suspect, though, that whatever we did companies and other states would play the system to their advantage.

5. Merrill Lynch has lost a quarter of the profits it made in 36 years in just 18 months. Does this show that the profits to investment banking are a reward for taking black swan risk? You make decent profits, on average, in exchange for massive losses on rare occasions? Were Merrill’s profits (and those of other investment bankers) in good times merely a reward for taking this obscure risk? Did they – and their rivals – really fully understand what they were doing, or were they just lucky punters? What would count as persuasive evidence here?

Persuasive evidence here would be pretty hard to come by as we are only looking, for the most part, at the actions rather than the rationale. The turnover in staff may also mean that people came in without sufficient time to analyse the situation and those that did thought that the expectation of the low probability event given a short time at that company was low enough to take the risk. I would add that Merrill Lynch and others may have actually had a role in causing and worsening the crunch that has led to their losses.

Are there interesting, non-trivial answers here that are well-founded in evidence? Or is it that there’s a lot we don’t know?

Both, I’d say.

xD.

1 – cited from a judgement of 1569 by counsel for Somersett, a slave, in Somersett’s Case (R. v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett) of 1772 which “held that slavery was unlawful in England (but not other parts of the British Empire”

Secret inquests, revisited

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I wrote on the first of April of this year about provisions in the Counter-Terrorism Bill for restricting the openness of inquests. It seems that it wasn’t just me who was concerned about some of the proposals; the Guardian reports that section 64 is under fire1:

A cross-party committee of peers, including a former lord chief justice and two former attorney-generals, has told the government that any decision to hold an inquest without a jury must be taken by a judge and not a minister.

I cannot help but think that this would be a good thing. The bill is not necessary – as I said on the original post, things can be heard in camera if necessary – and, while I don’t think the Government would abuse the powers, this is handing a power to obfuscate government actions resulting in deaths to every future government. I don’t trust future governments, their members as yet unborn, sight unseen.

xD.

1 – the article says 63, but I think they mean 64.

Show us a better way

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Via Tom Watson, I’ve found out about the Show Us a Better Way project. The idea is very simple; I quote from their website:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated

I have three entries.

Entry the first: Free our bills! The wonderful MySociety.org people who brought us TheyWorkForYou.com are spearheading this campaign; I encourage you to read the why and wherefore at theyworkforyou.com/freeourbills. More generally, better use of RSS across government is needed. For instance, I’ve been tracking the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill. It would be really nice to be have an easier way of tracking all the documents, like amendments, as they come through. The same could apply to the GLA, Senedd, Holyrood, Stormont and local councils. A central website to keep track of them all would be nice as well.

Entry the second: Following on from that, it would be good to be able to find out what’s going on in your area or that would be of general interest. To that end, anything be done by any arm of government could be tagged with an area of interest and the postcodes it would affect. You might only be interested in recycling in your immediate area, and so might ask for anything that matched ‘recycling’ and ‘SW1A 0AA’ to be emailed to you while for transport, you might want to look a bit further afield and would have ‘transport’ and ‘SW1, EC1, EC2’ or somesuch.

Entry the third: The Consolidated Fund is the Government’s bank account. It’d be nice to have a website that shows the state of the Consolidated Fund and where money comes from and goes to; simple pie charts, updated relatively often, would do the trick. The same thing – again – could be done for different levels of government, ideally down to the ward level.

I think entry the second is the best of my ideas. I might work it into a proper proposal.

xD.

Unintended consequences

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Nadine Dorries MP (Conservative, Mid Beds) complains about the ‘deluge of liberalising amendments’ proposed by various MPs.

Unfortunately, Ms Dorries is continuing in her wilful ignorance of, er, reality.

Let’s clear up a minor point. Dorries says

against the backdrop of statistics which show that we now have children aborting

That is a misleading sentence. The key word is ‘now’; this is nothing new. I showed (using clever sums and everything!) that there is no statistically significant rise in the number of abortions by people under sixteen. To say that ‘we now have children aborting’ suggests a recent change or, at any rate, a change. There is no evidence for that.

Moving on, the deluge is somewhat misleading. Below the fold you can find, by MP and date, all the amendments proposed by Evan Harris, John Bercow and Nadine Dorries to the HF&E Bill. Of the three MPs, Evan Harris has submitted the great bulk of the amendments. Very many of them deal with relatively technical details and the like; almost all deal with developments in fertilisation and embryology. No great surprise, there, as we are talking about the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill.

Ms Dorries has no comeback when people wish to amend the Bill to liberalise abortion; it was she who took the Bill beyond its original purposes with her amendments to restrict abortion.

I think the amendments tabled by both men amount to a form of legislative abuse of women. They display no care or attention to the effects of abortion on women and a complete disregard towards any moral direction of our young people.

I could, of course, say that the amendments tabled by Ms Dorries (her sex being largely irrelevant) amount to a form of legislative abuse of women by stripping them of rights over their own bodies. When Dorries talks about a lack of care and attention, I presume she is moving forward to this passage in her post:

His [Bercow’s] amendment seeks to criminalise any doctor of conscience who provides counselling or guidance to any woman seeking an abortion, with two years imprisonment.

Fortunately, it is such an outrageous amendment which would almost certainly result in the imprisonment of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu GPs everywhere, that the Speaker is very unlikely to accept it.

I read it differently. I think it says that doctors should be doctors, not proselytisers. If (say) a Jehovah’s Witness were to become a surgeon, would we allow them to refuse to administer blood transfusions? If a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were to become a psychiatrist, would we allow them to Talk Like a Pirate on September 19th? As I and Unity have said before, Dorries’ arguments about absolute religious objections to abortion are weak.

If we are allowed a debate on restricting abortion, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have one on liberalising abortion. I’d add that liberalising abortion doesn’t necessarily mean raising the twenty-four week limit; it can mean making it easier to have an abortion up to (say) fourteen weeks.

xD.
Continue reading “Unintended consequences” →

Two cheers for Tom Watson

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East and Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office, has released a code of conduct for blogging civil servants. It reads:

1. Be credible
Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.

2. Be consistent
Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.

3. Be responsive
When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.

4. Be integrated
Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.

5. Be a civil servant
Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

There are a couple of particular points that I want to flag – reasons why Tom deserves a cheer – and one big omission from the code.

First cheer

Tom attracted some controversy, and quite a lot of blog-inches were given over to the subject, when he talked about a Code of Conduct for civil servants who want to blog in March of this year. The early version read:

1. Write as yourself
2. Own your own content
3. Be nice
4. Keep secrets
5. No anonymous comments
6. Remember the civil service code
7. Got a problem? Talk to your boss
8. Stop it if we say so
9. Be the authority in your specialist field – provide worthwhile information
10. Think about consequences
11. Media interest? Tell your boss
12. Correct your own mistakes

That is the reason for the first cheer. While the thrust and many of the specific ideas remained, there are clear changes. He asked the experts (and I’m well aware of the irony of calling bloggers experts), listened to the debate and came up with a very sensible policy. I hope people take note – it is possible to have a pretty good debate on a policy in the online world. While I’m sure that the Civil Service had a great deal of input, as is only right and proper, I think we can see the effect of the informal, online consultation as well.

This isn’t just bloggers getting terribly excited at the merest sniff of actual politics (well, it is, but not only). The method of consultation seems to have worked rather well and is novel; rather than just a consultation where you submit responses and they’re collated, people were able to engage in a discussion about the policy.

Second cheer

Greville Janner’s Complete Speechmaker has a wealth of stories and anecdotes at the back. One of my favourite is on brevity:

“We have lost the ability to be brief. The Lord’s Prayer consists of seventy words; the Ten Commandments, three hundred and thirty five word. The EU Directive on the Importation of Caramel – 26,211”

If for no other reason that that the Civil Service Blogger Code is, in total, seventy-nine words, Tom Watson deserves recognition.

However, it is not just the appeal of the style that merits a cheer. As Matt Wardman points out, it encapsulates principles rather than individual rules. That will give it greater longevity and covers some of the problems with the original draft – client confidentiality, for instance, is covered under ‘5’. I know that the civil service code would still apply and that this acts as an addendum to it, but it’s easy to see how someone could, ahem, get confused.

But why no third cheer?

I commented on Tom’s original post to point out the big thing missing from his draft – protection for bloggers. Unfortunately, there are many instances of bloggers being fired from their employment for blogging. The creation of the Code of Conduct emphasises that the medium is new; people don’t know how it works and don’t know what their rights and responsibilities are. This Code of Conduct was an opportunity to establish, in principle, that ‘a right to blog’ is a subset of ‘the right to speak freely’. I’m afraid that, for missing that opportunity, Tom only gets two cheers.

(But they’re quite loud, Tom).

xD.

The BNP, Hizb ut-Tahrir and no-platform

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Sunny Hundal asks a couple of interesting questions over at Pickled Politics; should a no-platform policy with regards to the BNP be continued and should that it be extended to groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir?

By way of a background, I understand a no-platform policy (in the instance of the BNP) to mean that no-one from an organisation with that policy would share a speaking platform of any description with a representative of the BNP and that the BNP should not be invited to speak at said organisation. I don’t consider this to impinge on freedom of speech. Firstly, there is no obligation, for the most part, on anyone holding an event to invite people of all political persuasions. Secondly, there are no restrictions placed as a result of the policy on the BNP’s ability to inform others and on others to inform themselves about the BNP as there is plenty of information out there, not least on their website; nor does it prevent their arguments being dealt with as it is not necessary for someone to be present to be able to take on board their argument.

The point of the no-platform policy is to prevent a serially mendacious party from being able to claim any form of recognition or acceptance from civil society because they will twist ‘appearing on platform x’ into an endorsement of their existence and precisely because they crave that acceptance. The evidence for that is the dropping of the boot-boy image for suits and the attempt to cover up their racist and violent tendencies for the image of a legitimate political party.

Sunny asserts that the ‘BNP has been successfully de-legitimised’. I’m afraid that this is not universally true; in parts of East London, they are very much legitimate to some parts of the community. It is true that there was not much of an increase in the vote for the BNP but it put them above the five per cent threshold to give them an Assembly seat; we cannot deny and must not ignore the benefits that the BNP will seeks to extract from this position. There are many things that can be done and, in fairness, are being done. However, abandoning a policy of delegitimisation just as the BNP achieve an electoral success would simply allow them to say that their ‘growth’ means that the mainstream parties now see them as a legitimate part of the political sphere.

A good reminder of the illegitimacy of the BNP comes from the Tory Troll, who reports that an internal challenge to the leadership of Nick Griffin has been met by that organisation’s elections officer, one Eddy Butler, telling members not to sign any nomination papers and for ‘zero publicity’ to be given to the challenger.

Hizb ut-Tahrir are a different kettle of fish altogether. Yes, they are unpleasant and, yes, they have traits in common with the BNP but it would be wrong to see Hizb ut-Tahrir as simply an Islamic version of the BNP. For one thing, they are in different situations and they have different political ends; that alone is grounds to consider different tactics for opposing these groups differently.

The BNP, as I see it, wish to appeal to all whites. Their tactics are dependent upon a broad appeal and, because of the level of their support, they cannot nurture individuals. Their aim is to represent what they would consider the ‘true’ inhabitants of the UK; a broad take-up of the no-platform policy makes it harder for them to claim that representation as the mainstream not only disagree with them but see them as beyond the pale. That might sound a little counter-intuitive, but they are not just going after the alienated but after people who feel they are abandoned by the major parties; the difference there is important.

Hizb ut-Tahrir are not targeting all Muslims; rather, they are going after Muslims they might consider susceptible to their influence. They seek to capitalise on alienation and would be able to capitalise on the exalted position of difference if no-platform were broadly implemented towards them; for those who might feel removed from the British polis (to the extent that it exists), this would highlight Hizb ut-Tahrir as a standard around which to rally.

I would echo a point made by Sunny:

“The other problem is that most of the people who choose to take on HuT don’t know much about them, which provides them an opportunity to play the victim card and pretend they’re just lovely people.”

“[T]he truth will set you free” (John 8:321) or knowledge is power2; whichever way you prefer it, providing honest information and background to both these groups is a decent part of defeating them. The question of no-platform is essentially a question of the best way of delivering the message and countering the threats they pose in a manner which at least does nothing to strengthen their position and at best weakens it. Given that, as I have said, I have no philosophical objection to no-platform, it becomes a tactical issue. Going back to the original questions, I would say that we should continue the no-platform policy against the BNP but that we should not extend it to Hizb ut-Tahrir at this juncture.

xD.

1 – Disclaimer – the truth will set you free, but you might not like it.

2 – And, given that I’m quoting a lot and that both the BNP and Hizb ut-Tahrir have their own variations on truth, ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’.

Reflections on the London elections

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Mayor Johnson

The headline news is, of course, the victory of Boris Johnson. It is no secret (at least if you’ve been reading this blog!) that I was and remain a strong supporter of Ken Livingstone and that I have very grave doubts about the Johnson mayoralty. I have tried to draw a comparison between relations between the GLA and the boroughs on transport and on housing. On housing, there is no doubt that some boroughs – particularly Tory boroughs, and particularly Wandsworth (11%) and Westminster (10%) – are doing very little in terms of affordable housing. The figures in brackets refer to the amount of newly-built affordable housing as a fraction of total new build in the boroughs; the requirement is for fifty per cent. Despite the protestations of ‘New Boris’, many Conservatives in the capital will resent interference and instructions from on high and simply do not see affordable housing as a priority. I believe the same problems will occur when it comes to the Freedom Pass and other aspects of transport, such as bus routing. Without co-ordination and, indeed, compulsion from the centre, the boroughs will do what they perceive as best for their patch, rather than what is best for the totality of London. It represents a step back from strategic governance of London.

Staying with transport, Johnson has a pretty good starting point: the Bill authorising Crossrail is working its way through Parliament; London Overground has come on-stream and work to improve it is taking place; the East London line is being extended and plugged into London Overground. There are many challenges, not least of which is Crossrail. Johnson will, likely as not, try to make good on his pledge to scrap or, at least, redeploy the bendy buses in London. This, combined with his rather creaky mathematics on a new Routemaster, could end up in a lot of money being spent in rather inefficient and unproductive ways. If we take as a single example the 507 route that connects Waterloo and Victoria stations, we see the advantages of the bendy buses for some routes; few people are travelling without paying as most have travelcards and the ease and speed of ingress and egress is important on a route that is carrying full busloads of commuters at peak times. I understand that Mr Johnson wants to develop river services. While it sounds like a nice idea, the tidal nature of the Thames means that times will never be the same from day to day. At best, it will remain a minor part of London’s transport mix.

My concern is that much of the good work of the last eight years will be either lost or not used to best effect. Livingstone had a vision for London and a vision for London’s transport that encompassed a variety of modes, saw cycling and walking as part of the mix, and put being able to move about, even if you’re poor, as a high priority. For this reason we saw, for instance, London Overground to facilitate circular (day-to-day living) rather than just radial (in-and-out journeys for work in the centre) journeys and the driving through of the Tube to one of the poorest boroughs, Hackney, that did not have a tube station to call its own. Equally, the ambitious plans for further trams and the Greenwich Riverside Transit bus scheme and the like must lie under a cloud.

There is a particularly dark cloud over the Freedom Pass. Shortly before the election, Mr Johnson announced Brian Cooke, chair of London Travelwatch, as one of his supporters. I wrote about it at some length here, but with an advisor who has panned the Freedom Pass and a light-touch attitude towards making the boroughs fund the Pass, I am doubtful that it will be extended in any meaningful way and concerned for its future as a whole.

Beyond that, I fear that the environment and congestion will worsen in London as Johnson is at best lukewarm about the c-charge and opposed outright to the £25 charge for the most polluting cars. I also remain concerned at the effect of Boris shooting his mouth off at the wrong time.

Lib Dems

The Liberal Democrats fell apart. Brian Paddick was not the man to lead them to a bright new dawn in London. It would appear that Boris Johnson’s victory is due to Lib Dems and UKIPpers supporting Johnson, with their shares of the mayoral vote dropping 5.2 and 5.1% respectively with the Tories’ rising by 14.3%. To be honest, there’s not much more to say than that a resurgent Tory party can take votes from Lib Dems and some former ‘dissatisfied Tories’, which bodes not well for Labour in the next general election.

The Lib Dems on the Assembly now hold the balance of power. There are eleven Tories; the eight Labour AMs and two Green AMs mean that, no matter which way the BNP go, the Lib Dems must choose between red and blue. It will be interesting to see which way they generally go and whether they articulate a coherent vision for London.

The Greens

I make no secret of my positive disposition towards the Green party. I think they will be disappointed not to have achieved another seat, but given that all the traffic was towards Johnson and Labour was going hell for leather to make sure that everyone who might vote Labour did vote Labour. As my friend Aled, who ran for the Greens, says in the comments

“Despite the major party Labour-Tory ’squeeze’ which crushed the Lib Dems, we held onto our 3 seats and weren’t that far off 3. Our vote stayed pretty much the same as last time and our constituency votes rose in most places, meaning we saved all deposits except one.

We were also a clear fourth in Mayoral 1st Preferences and came 3rd on 2nd Preferences (however meaningless that is!).”

The BNP

The BNP have a seat on the assembly. Across the capital, 5.33% of voters chose to vote for them. It behoves all of us to watch Richard Barnbrook like a hawk. The only good thing is that the BNP’s share of the vote barely rose, by one-fifth of one per cent, and that they were unable to win a constituency member even in City & East. There, they did poll 9.62%, which is still pretty worrying.

I am not sure what long-term effects the BNP’s victory will have. It is their first win off a local council, but they had been hoping for two seats. They will seek to capitalise on the publicity and the salary and expenses will be useful; however, their previous elected officials have been woefully inadequate, frequently not turned up to meetings and attracted allegations of sleaze pretty quickly. It will hopefully galvanise people to work against the BNP in east London, much as happened in the West Midlands. In the short term, I am very concerned about what will happen; it is all to easy to see an increase in racially-motivated violence, as happened in Tower Hamlets when the BNP gained a councillor.

The Left

The left don’t matter in London. Despite being able to cast a second preference for Ken, only 16,976 gave their first preferences to Lindsey German and the Left List for the mayoralty. By way of comparison, their 0.68% share of first preferences is less than the 0.91% for UKIP, 1.60% for the Christian Choice and represents slightly less than a quarter of the 2.84% who voted for Richard Barnbrook of the BNP.

There is scarcely more comfort for the left on the Assembly. Respect (George Galloway) only ran in one constituency, City & East, and came third behind the Conservatives. The Left List (the SWP part of Respect) did best in the Enfield & Haringey constituency, where they won 3.5% of the vote.

I would go so far as to say that the only thing achieved by the left parties was to stop the BNP getting a second seat on the Assembly.

One London

UKIP/Veritas/One London have disappeared; I cannot say I am particularly surprised or disappointed. Damian Hockney and Peter Hulme Cross were non-entities on the Assembly. Hockney stood down from the mayoral election after protesting that media attention was all on the large parties; given that Sian Berry received quite a lot of coverage and Lindsay German a fair amount, I think the charge doesn’t stand up. Given that Hockney and Hulme Cross stood as UKIP, ditched them for Veritas and then became One London when Kilroy-Silk’s party fell apart, I’d say that it was pretty obvious that they were going to be kicked off the Assembly.

Labour

It’s bad. Of that, there can be no doubt. It’s not quite time to write Labour off for the next election; not yet, anyway. For many people, myself included, this is the first, major setback at elections in our adult life; I was not old enough to vote in 1997 and a period without the executive of London may prove a salutatory experience.

Labour did, in fact, gain one seat on the Assembly and the vote for Ken was slightly up, by seven-tenths of a percent, on last time round. There is still a viable, progressive coalition in London but against a strong opposition, it is not enough on its own unless every ‘core’ Labour supporter turns out to vote. I suspect that the current state of the national party did not help, but the performance of Ken and the London Labour party against a rubbish overall picture was remarkable.

Three final points

The Evening Standard was cheerleading for Johnson and against Livingstone for some time. I may return to this in future, but the unique position of the paper as the only paid-for, London-wide newspaper (if London Lite and thelondonpaper can even be considered newspapers) gives it a powerful position. I am well aware that it is a private newspaper, but the effect is similar to the BBC campaigning for the Tories. It may be time to launch the Morning Courier.

The London Assembly has been a bit anonymous. This is a subject I will definitely return to as individual AMs and the Assembly as a whole need to be more visible.

Beyond London, the lessons are fewer as the demographics of the capital are very different to the rest of the country. The main issues is that voters are leaving the Lib Dems for the Tories and that, at least when there is no European election, UKIP voters are joining them. I don’t know whether this will impact on the timing of the general election.

xD.

Dave Hill’s ten reasons to vote for Ken Livingstone

Posted on by David Landon Cole

You can read them in full, with the logic behind them, on Liberal Conspiracy.

One: Livingstone Has Better Policies

Two: Livingstone Has Made The Best Joke

Three: Brian Paddick & His Partner

Four: Livingstone Is A Better Politician

Five: London Needs To Be Bossed From The CentreSix: Livingstone Is A Better Leader

Seven: The Evening Standard Will Be Gutted If Livingstone Wins

Eight: The Tories Don’t Really Deserve To Win

Nine: Livingstone Knows More Of London And Londoners

Ten: We Can’t Be Sure What A Mayor Johnson Would Do

Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror also has a cut-out-and-keep guide for whatever happens tomorrow.

There is another good reason to vote, whoever you cast your vote for: a higher turnout makes it harder for the BNP to have people elected to the assembly.

xD.

Through a press release, darkly

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Chris Dillow is less than impressed with Jack Straw and Alistair Campbell as he and most people regard them as having negative credibility. I feel that Chris – and given his intellectual firepower, I’m rather worried about saying this – is rather missing the point. He’s not the audience – it just happens that he’s hearing the message. I’ll come back to that later; first, the argument.

Let us assume that Mr Straw’s intentions are genuine and that he doesn’t want the maximum period of detention without trial to be extended to forty-two days.

As it stands, Gordon Brown has two options – to keep going with the policy, or to scrap it. Each option has its pros and cons (which doubtlessly vary depending on your point of view). There will be a few particular things that Mr Brown is considering, not least of which will be his standing in the polls. The predictions for the urns are not good and, to cap it all, Charles Clarke is once again doing the rounds trying to drum opposition to the PM for any reason at all.

If Jack Straw were to vote against the policy, or indicate that he was definitely going to vote against the policy, he would have to leave the Cabinet. That reduces his ability to influence Cabinet colleagues, including the PM, makes him look like an ingrate and (from Jack Straw’s point of view) doesn’t help pay the mortgage. Crucially, it also makes it harder for the PM to scotch the policy by delaying it as the PM would have to show that he was ‘strong’ in the face of internal opposition, particularly as Charles Clarke would probably start touting Straw as a stalking horse for the party leadership.

Equally, merely pushing against the forty-two days doesn’t do much either as it doesn’t change the options available or how palatable they are to the ultimate decision-maker.

Jack Straw’s actions – showing loyalty to the big man and to collective decision-making while making it easier and more permissible for more rank-and-file MPs to express their displeasure and, if necessary vote against the bill – poison one of the two options as the risk of a defeat (a bad result for any government) rises and going down that route is more difficult even if the MP wins. However, it shows that there is at least as much support for the other choice and makes it easier for it to be kicked into touch or lured into a committee and quietly strangled.

Alastair Campbell probably gave all of ten minutes’ thought to that letter. BAA will have their PR agency who will have wanted some – any – good news about T5. Campbell knows full well that many people dislike him (although some have a grudging respect). However, the audience might not be the great unwashed, but Ferrovial, the higher-ups of BAA or anyone else. The publication of Mr Campbell’s letter might, for all I know, be the only positive coverage of T5 in the mainstream press1 but it at least, in the press book, says that there has been some positive coverage.

Now, as promised, why this matters.

All the wonderful, new means of communications we have make it a lot easier to have a public conversation but much harder to have a private conversation between lots of people. There is no effective means of Jack Straw talking to “all MPs” or “all power-brokers” or somesuch as the categories are too large and too porous; an email setting out his position (if I’m right above) would very quickly end up in the public domain. The only alternative is to reduce that risk while still getting your message across and, as it happens, an easy way to reach “power brokers”2 is through the newspapers. Just because something is in the papers doesn’t mean it’s meant for the entire readership3 and so it doesn’t mean that the prima facie interpretation holds.

It can also impoverish communication between large groups unless (and I would say until) there is an acceptance that organisations, particularly political parties, have to be able to debate within themselves and that participants in those debates will include senior, serving politicians. As well as things being misunderstood, they will be deliberately taken out of context which causes people to couch and cage their words, making honest debate harder.

xD.

1.Although people from my company have made a total of eight trips through T5 in the past week without any problems.
2.I can’t think of a better phrase, so please imagine those to be rather large quotation marks. Suggestions on a postcard to the comments box, please!
3.Viz, Guardian Sports