CentreRight

Do parties' ratings reliably track leaders' ratings?

If there is one belief that crosses all party lines, it's the notion that most voters are very responsive to the personalities of party leaders. From the obvious starting point that few voters take a detailed interest in policy, it is taken to follow that they will therefore be interested instead in matters of personality politics that direct impact upon almost no one. If the party leader is someone they would enjoy a beer with (or whatever the preferred metaphor may be) he's their man. The academic evidence for this notion is in fact extremely sparse - and it's interesting that two opinion polls in the last week would suggest the same.

YouGov's poll for the Sunday Times saw an increase of 17% on last month in David Cameron's personal approval rating. On Tuesday, MORI found Cameron's personal lead over Brown up 13% on last April, the previous time it asked the question. And yet ... the Conservative Party's ratings have not risen with the leader's ratings. YouGov puts the Conservatives on 41%, the same as last month. MORI puts the party on 42% - down 1% on last April.

Why wouldn't a party be dramatically more popular when its leader becomes dramatically more popular? Could it be that a leader's influence on his party's poll rating is more down to what he says and does on the real issues than the cynics like to think?

Re: Tim's "PS I promise no more BBC-sceptic posts for at least a week!"

So says Tim.  For my part, I make no such promise, despite our Party's new-found enthusiasm for the Beeb and the TV Tax.  After all, there's such fruitful ground for criticism.  For example, the Today Show interviewed the Estate Agents' Ombudsman this week - perhaps you heard it.  The presenter ramped up the piece with an intro pointing out that sales have fallen 60% but complaints only 3% - which (wahey!  ho ho!) shows we all hate estate agents!  And then the Ombudsman, in his first sentence, said (I paraphrase) - "well, the complaints I deal with are the outcome of a process that takes about six months, so the ones I'm now dealing with come from before the crash."

Which, in all intellectual honesty, was the end of the Beeb's "story".  And yet it dragged on for another three excruciatingly embarrassing minutes.

Anyway - with such "reporting" I view it as most unwise to offer as a hostage to fortune a promise not to criticise the BBC for a whole week, no matter how well-intentioned the maker of said promise.

The BBC's idea of an apology

Tom Gross writes on his essential website:

Tom has further interesting revelations about the BBC and CNN on his full ‘Middle East dispatch'.

PS I promise no more BBC-sceptic posts for at least a week!

Fundamental questions need to be answered

The front pages quite rightly today detail the desperate case of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. The Guardian lists some of the failings.

I doubt there is a clinician alive in the NHS today who has not seen how targets have distorted clinical priorities. Are we shocked by this story? No. Because we have seen these distortions for years and have we complained? Yes. And what has been the outcome? Put-downs by managers who have been put in the invidious position of enforce or be punished by this Labour Government. Clinical need and quality of care have been trumped by clockwatching and fear.

Reviews have been launched into quality of care and A&E but there are fundamental procedural questions to be answered.

1. Why on earth didn't Monitor, the independent regulator of foundation trusts know that the HealthCare Commission had serious concerns about the Trust?
2. Why is there no red alert system when there is a rising number of deaths?
3. And why are the Trust's minutes so inadequate? 

I might have an answer to the last one - because the Trust I used to work in had a chairman who edited the minutes for anything she didn't want to be recorded including for meetings where she wasn't present.

If this can happen, then records of complaints from staff, clinicians and family can all be altered / changed / lost too can't they? Most people whether managers or clinicians or ancillary staff go into the NHS to care and to serve. What has happened to us when external pressures drive out this noble aim and integrity is thrown out with the hospital waste?

At Calais I met the Afghans, Iranians and Egyptians queueing to reach Britain's 'El Dorado'

I could not believe the comments of Immigration Minister Phil Woolas MP on GMTV yesterday morning. People can’t break into Britain he told us. I found his complacency breathtaking. And I know what he said to be untrue from what I saw for myself in Calais last week. And then, in an astonishing U-turn, later on he said it is all a terrible problem after all and that they are going to do (what looks like a very odd) deal with the French. The confusion and incompetence of the Government in managing the security of our borders is scandalous. They're not asking questions of the French on the whole business and on how young children caught up at Calais are treated is profoundly worrying.

I do not write these words lightly. I write them from the perspective of what I have seen with my own eyes. In Dover, where I am the Conservative Parliamentary candidate, there has been much concern about the current situation. So last week I went to Calais to see things for myself and to assess the seriousness of the current refugee situation at first hand. I would urge Mr Woolas to get out and see what’s happening rather than lolling around on the GMTV sofa, awash in a sea of complacency one moment and panicking the next.

Here is what I found. Few I spoke to in the Calais camps had been there for very long, for more then a few months, and no one was planning on heading back to their homeland. So, whatever Mr Woolas might like to think, people are getting in, and it doesn’t take too many weeks or months to do so either. At Calais the Afghans and Iraqis I spoke to told me that it took them about three months on average to get through. Try enough lorries or whatever and eventually you get lucky.

I saw men and young boys only. There were no women. I was given to understand more immediate passage is arranged for women and girls. I spoke to Dominic Fitch, an aid worker, who told me that they see Britain as “El Dorado”, the legendary city of gold. I spoke to Afghans, Iranians and Egyptians who told me “Britain good! Britain good! We go there. We get work.”

And there are a lot of people. Right now, there are now over 1,000 and more arrive daily.

The French Government is clearly not doing a lot to help these arrivals settle in France. The living conditions are shocking – really shocking. I went to where food was handed out and there were hundreds of people waiting patiently for soup in the food queue. I saw how they live in a wood called “The Jungle”, in shacks made of cardboard and covered by blankets.

I do not understand why the French stand by while children as young as eight years old live in conditions worse than we would treat dogs in the UK. Kids who try, every night, at great risk, to jump on the back of lorries and break into Britain. We would never allow children to live like this in the UK and I deeply regret that the French do.

Britain's broken society: Suffolk rapist aged eight

Suffolk police have revealed that an eight-year old boy in a rural area of Suffolk raped a girl aged under 10. They also recorded the case of another eight-year old boy who sexually assaulted a girl under 13. Both were among 24 very young children that Suffolk Police were unable to prosecute because they were below the age of criminal responsibility.

When such serious sexual offences are committed by very young children in one of the most rural and socially unspoilt areas of Britain we should ask ourselves some serious questions about quite how broken some parts of our society have become. Unfortunately, at the moment we have a prime minister in Gordon Brown who, whenever the issue is raised, simply insists that society 'isn't broken'.

Rebuilding Britain's broken society will be as important a task for a future Conservative government as rebuilding an economy was for the last Conservative government at a time when many believed it to be in terminal decline. A key feature of rebuilding our broken society will be the need to sensitively address the premature sexualisation of children, whether by the advertising industry, or even some of the government's own policies. Many of us seriously question whether the government, in the form of what has been renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families, should be seeking to impose its writ specifically on children and families. However, if there is any value at all in having a government department for children - then it surely must be to protect childhood.

Stop overseas aid going through the EU

I've been reading Chris Mullin's diaries. He says of Clare Short, when she was International Development Secretary: "She was very critical of the EU, through which we are obliged to spend a third of our aid budget. 'very inefficient. Even when committed the money can't be spent and much of what is spent goes on political gestures rather than help to the poorest.' "

The last Conservative election manifesto declared that: "We believe that British aid programmes are among the best in the world so we will negotiate to increase British national control over our international aid spending." But we don't seem to be repeating the policy at the moment. Yet I suspect the case is as strong as ever.

Arguments against nationalisation

A left-leaning Christian Democrat colleague has just fired over an interesting link to an blog post by Paul Krugman, a Keynesian economist who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, outlining the various anti-nationalization arguments abounding on centre-right blogs across the globe.

It's well worth a look.

Among the arguments Krugman outlines (and then promptly disagrees with), I find the following response to a blog post by Alan Blinder particularly interesting:

"...why can’t a bank just split itself, giving the bad stuff to one piece and the good stuff to the other? Because it has to divvy up the liabilities as well as the assets. And if it gives the bad bank (which isn’t solvent) a bunch of the liabilities, this amounts to defaulting on its debts — and the bondholders will sue. So the good bank-bad bank thing seems to implicitly carry the assumption that someone, namely you and me in our capacity as taxpayers, guarantees the bad bank’s liabilities"

While human beings are naturally hesitant to leave their comfort zones, Krugman's 'Conscience of a Liberal' blog is well worth the occasional browse.

The BBC buries good news...

...from Iraq.

This survey - part-funded by the BBC - found that...

"Violence and insecurity are no longer the main concern of most Iraqis, for the first time since the 2003 US-led invasion, an opinion poll suggests. It says Iraqis are much more hopeful about the future and are increasingly pre-occupied with more conventional worries like the economy and jobs."

If it had had a different message you can be sure we would have heard a lot more about it on Radio 4.

Hat tip to one Alastair Campbell.

Licence fee: Andy Burnham's worrying response

I read the ConHome post on love bombing with interest. Hopefully David Cameron's strong line on both the licence fee freeze, the Ross/Brand affair and Mark Thompson's salary indicates that however often he meets the BBC hierarchy (and as Leader of the Opposition it is surely right that he does) he never pulls his punches when he wants to raise an issue.

It is, however, Andy Burnham's reaction to yesterday's licence fee announcement that should worry us the most. He said it was a matter for the BBC Trust and not politicians. Really? Even the BBC's own fact sheets say “the Government sets the level of the licence fee.”

The idea that the BBC Trust should set the level of the licence fee would mean the corporation writing a blank cheque to itself. Andy Burnham has confused editorial independence at the BBC, which is essential, and financial accountability.

When it comes to the editorial independence, we would actually like to see it strengthened not weakened, which is why we have proposed that the body that regulates the BBC should be accountable to parliament and not to ministers. As for financial accountability - speaking up for licence fee payers - isn't that precisely what politicians should do? And not just when it comes to the level of the licence fee either. I would like to see more accountability in three specific areas:

1. A detailed breakdown of how licence fee money is spent on the back of every licence fee, as council tax bills now do
2. Transparency over celebrity salaries paid by the BBC, which are currently kept confidential
3. Full and unfettered access by the National Audit Office to the BBC accounts.

The Union Flag belongs to all of us

Kevin Maquire & Friends ends a diatribe against David Cameron with these words:

"its worth noting that the podium he used was decorated with a Union Jack and clouds logo that looked like something from the far-right BNP's website."

Two things:

One: James Lyons' blog is missing an apostrophe in "its".

Two: The two logos are very different. The Union Jack belongs to all of us. Are Mirror journalists so stupid to believe that the BNP should be allowed a monopoly on its use?

5pm: Dizzy has a good follow up blog on this.

What does the FSA know about the right level of mortgage lending?

News today that the Financial Services Authority has discovered a precisely correct and safe level of mortgage lending for everyone - up to 3 times annual salary - struck me as pretty absurd. Why not 3.21 or 2.95 or 4.0319?

Sadly, during this recession, there may be lots of people going into negative equity. But it's only when people lose their jobs combined with massive hikes in interest rates that the mortgage stops being paid. When this last happened in 1991, the repossession rate was only 0.77% - horrible for those concerned, but the mortgage books of lenders continued overall to be profitable. I just don't agree that mortgage lending fuelled the housing boom as much as is commonly portrayed because to use the jargon, unlike sub-prime lending in the United States, almost all of the UK's mortgage book is performing debt and will remain so. In other words, in Britain, there may have been some excess lending, but not much and thanks to a few burnt fingers, you really don't need government intervention to stop it happening again.

Meanwhile, there are lots of long term measures a government could implement to help the housing market to supply the homes Britons actually want. Most notably, much less interference in deciding where (I doubt that many people want to live in the Thames Gateway), how many (the Barker Review), at what level of urban density (most people just don't aspire to live in flats, but houses with gardens) and for whom (social housing, key workers, all subsidised) homes should be built. 

But for the FSA to seriously consider straitjacketing the country into a one-size fits all safe lending limit is deeply mistaken.

Changing of the guard

For reasons I think the Editor will explain in a ToryDiary soon, this will be my last posting on CentreRight qua CentreRight blogger Andrew Lilico.  I've been blogging on ConservativeHome for about two years now, first as a Platform contributor, then in the more elevated role of weekly Columnist, then for the past year more humbly as a CentreRight contributor.  I have benefitted from your sharp criticisms, found reassurance in your kind remarks, and been amused by your outrageous insults.  I hope to have made some small contribution to debate in the Conservative Party, and I am continually impressed by what the Editor and his team have achieved in making ConservativeHome the pre-eminent right-wing political website in Europe.

Fare thee well.

A suggestion for government

In a new Conservative Government, before approving any project costing (say) over ten million pounds, the relevant minister should sign off on a front sheet attached to it, detailing some definitions:

• This project will have failed if (i) it takes longer than X to complete; (ii) it costs more than X
• The person responsible for this project is [name].

If this sounds familiar, perhaps it's because the source is known to you.

The BBC licence fee should be frozen in these tough economic times

By Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Earlier today David Cameron announced that we will be opposing the 2% increase in the BBC licence fee due to come into effect this April. Every little helps, and when times are tough for families up and down the country the BBC should show leadership and voluntary decline the increase which amounts to £3 for every household with a colour TV.

The current licence fee settlement took effect in 2007 – when economic circumstances were quite different. They were considered generous at the time. Now, with nearly every commercial broadcaster cutting its programme budget, it cannot be argued that the BBC needs the rise to stay ahead in the market. In fact this year, for the first time ever, the licence fee income could be a whopping £1 billion more than the entire advertising-funded TV sector put together.

Nor should the BBC be facing anything like the cost increases previously predicted. Production companies are hardly going to be jacking up their prices, and organisations like the BBC should be taking this opportunity to root out unnecessary expenditure, whether on the £14m taxi bill, the £3m spent on public affairs or the 50 executives paid more than the Prime Minister.

We support the BBC. But the BBC, in turn, exists because of public support for the licence fee system. Declining to take up this year’s increase would be the best possible way to maintain that support in tough times.

Won't Barroso's "regret" over the Tories' exit from the EPP be a badge of honour for Tory eurosceptics?

So, the European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, "regrets" that the Conservatives are leaving the EPP.

Several things strike me:

1. What's it got to do with him?
2. How many members of the British public care for the opinions of the EC President, let alone when they relate to the internal machinations of the Conservative Party?
3. Won't any self-respecting Tory eurosceptic wear actually Barroso's "regret" as a badge of honour and take it as an additional sign that it is completely the right thing to be doing?

Hate Education in the Palestinian territories since Annapolis

Today the TaxPayers’ Alliance has released a new study looking into British aid spending in the Palestinian territories and what that money supports.  We’ll be launching the report, along with versions in German, French, Italian, Swedish and Slovakian, in Brussels later this week as a lot of the aid goes through the European Union, as this is taxpayers’ money and it is time this issue moved up the policy agenda.

In November 2007, at the Annapolis conference, both sides pledged to seek a two state solution to the conflict.  Since then we’ve had the conflict in Gaza.  It should be very clear that negotiations are not the only critical step in obtaining peace in the region, as they are often made out to be.

Even the best treaty will quickly be rendered worthless if the populations of Israel and the Palestinian territories don’t reject the cries of those who attack any peace deal as an unnecessary compromise.  Particularly important are the 42 per cent of the Palestinian population who are under 15.  That huge young generation’s attitudes will be critical to whether or not a stable peace can be achieved.

There are obviously plenty of reasons for Israelis and Palestinians to hate each other.  The same is true of the populations involved in most protracted conflicts.  However, it is vital that everything possible is done to minimise that hatred.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and Gaza do nothing of the sort.  On television and radio, in newspapers and even in school books the Palestinians are encouraged to see an ongoing violent struggle as preferable to a peaceful compromise.

Kids, money and alcohol

News of a minimum price for alcohol broke last week and it's still the subject of many column inches today although timesonline is now reporting that Gordon Brown has rejected the idea. The Conservative's ideas of targeted rises on both loss-leader promotions and high-alcohol drinks is laudable, but it's not enough in isolation.

And Simon Carr in the Independent illustrates perfectly a significant part of the problem - parental disengagement. I don't know how old his children are, but he expects everyone else to keep them occupied and out of trouble and unashamedly dismisses his own 'guzzling' with the fact that 'role models don't always work'. No they don't always, but often they do. And this includes not just how we drink in the home but how we handle our money. The fact that one in ten admissions to hospital for alcohol abuse is for a minor with no personal income should be shocking us here. Let me ask the obvious - where do most teens get their money from? Answer, their parents. How many parents are teaching their kids how use this money sensibly? Anecdotally I would say the minority. I know many who seem to 'demand supply' their kids with cash. So isn't this ready supply part of the problem?

Teaching your teenagers how to budget on an 'allowance' seems to be out of fashion big time, but it is a crucial parental role. My daughter has had her monthly allowance since she was 12 - she has to cover her phone, pet supplies, stationary, travel, gifts and other specified items. When the money runs out, no more is forthcoming until the 1st of the next month. Hard lessons are learned - but that's the point - they are learned. And where did I get my model from? From my parents.

You can't legislate for this but it is part of the bigger picture of the need for Government to raise the status of parenting. And not only do more confident, more involved parents who nurture and teach their children good habits save the NHS Public and Mental Health budget millions, but they are an investment for the future of civil society.

A Modest Proposal

I'm working my way through some revision today, trying out the exercises in Alan Agresti's excellent 'Categorical Data Analysis', because I've foolishly agreed to give a talk in May at a conference, and supplied an abstract claiming that I'll show X, Y and Z, when in fact I've yet to do A, B or C, and I'm realising that I've forgotten nearly everything I was taught about categorical data all those long, lonely decades ago. So back to square 1.

I'm finding it hard to concentrate though, and I'm loving the solidity of the word 'categorical' more than I'm into the statistical methods deployed to investigate such structures. My mind keeps wandering. I'm rolling 'categorical' around my tongue, and thinking of making a few such assertions. I feel an imperative to do so. Sorry.

It's as much Emily Thornberry's fault, this, as my inability to get to grips with multinomial likelihoods. She's the Labour member for South Islington, quoted in the Sunday Times this morning as saying: The richest have done best out of the good times. Now times are difficult, that needs to be shared. And who could argue with that? Ms Thornberry's idea is that 'the rich' should pay a higher proportion in tax now, to show they're feeling our pain. But who, exactly, is rich?

According to the Office for National Statistics, who released Labour Market statistics just last month, median public sector pay rose by 4% in 2008, while the private sector equivalent was 3.1%. This isn't a blip: it has been the trend since Labour came to power. Average pay in the private sector is now less well remunerated than in the public sector. These figures were the latest I could find on the ONS website, and so they don't take account of the news of those, such as the brave-minded men and women at companies like LDV, who are cutting their hours and their pay in an effort to stave off unemployment. To be  specific: the weekly median level of full-time earnings in the public sector was £523 per week in April 2008. In the private sector the figure was £460 per week. These figures are gross, i.e. before tax.

What Gordon Brown should apologise for

Gordon Brown has said he won't apologise for the recession because it is a world recession. According to the IMF there won't technically be a world recession. This year world output will grow by 0.5%. Furthermore of the major economies that are in recession, Britain is expected to do the worst.

But what specifically should Brown apologise for. It seems to me at least three things.

Firstly, presiding over the explosion of state borrowing.

Secondly, for moving bank regulation from the Bank of England to the Financial Services Authority.

Obama less popular than Bush

Pollsters Douglas E. Schoen and Scott Rasmussen have a ground-breaking reassessment of Obama's perceived popularity in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

Their polling data shows that Obama's current approval rating of 56 percent is below that of President Bush during the analagous period in 2001. His current net presidential approval rating is just six points.

"Overall, Rasmussen Reports shows a 56%-43% approval, with a third strongly disapproving of the president's performance. This is a substantial degree of polarization so early in the administration. Mr. Obama has lost virtually all of his Republican support and a good part of his Independent support, and the trend is decidedly negative.

A detailed examination of presidential popularity after 50 days on the job similarly demonstrates a substantial drop in presidential approval relative to other elected presidents in the 20th and 21st centuries. The reason for this decline most likely has to do with doubts about the administration's policies and their impact on peoples' lives."

EU-presso anyone?

Spot the odd one out: a colossal banking crisis, soaring unemployment, global depression concerns, rising jihadist terrorism, Eastern Europe on the brink and, the quality of coffee at the European Commission.

You would hope that EU Commissioners in Brussels were spending their time and our money on some of the grave problems facing Europe today, but no – instead their spending it on 21 new coffee machines costing £4,400 each (pictured). I doesn’t stop there. Not happy with the quality of coffee that they were getting from the machines, the EU Commission has now also offered training for the staff of each Commissioner on how to make that perfect espresso.

When we’re back in power lets please do something to reform an utterly discredited EU.

The growth of Britain's conservative movement

I'm currently in Ottawa with Matthew Elliott of The TaxPayers' Alliance.  Earlier on Friday, as part of a conference hosted by the Manning Centre,  we gave a joint presentation on the state of conservatism in Britain.  I reproduce two of Matthew's PowerPoint slides below, showing the growth of our country's conservative movement since 1997.  By conservative movement I mean the infrastructure outside of the party that supports small 'c' conservative values.

In 1997:

 

Today:

How the Centre for Social Cohesion ensured a Hezbollah spokesman has been barred from entering the UK

By Douglas Murray, Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion

The Centre for Social Cohesion has today been successful in ensuring that Ibrahim el Moussawi of Hezbollah will be barred from the UK.  The Home Office has now confirmed that they will not be allowing the organisation's media spokesman into the country.

Last week I wrote to the Home Secretary informing her that I was prepared to issue an international arrest warrant if el Moussawi was allowed into the UK to disseminate his organisation's genocidal hatred of Jews.

The CSC had previously revealed that el Moussawi was set to teach part of a course on political Islam to government officials and the police at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. This grotesque charade – in which the participants are expected to pay £2,000 of taxpayers' money to listen to terrorist propagandists and anti-Semites – is still due to go ahead.  Kemal Helbawy (advocate of killing 2-year old Israeli children) is still taking part. But at least Hezbollah will not be flying into the country for the occasion.

It is a sign of how terrible things are that the UK government could ever have considered that a member of a terrorist group – a man who would not be doing his job properly were he not inciting hatred – could be allowed into the UK to teach government officials and police. Coming after the decision to bar Geert Wilders MP from the UK, the contradiction has, as Michael Barone said from the US, seemed "something like national suicide".

While the decision to ban el Moussawi is a welcome development, the Geert Wilders precedent has clearly left the government in a terrible fix. They are trying to equate an elected party leader from a close ally of ours with a terrorist spokesman.

The ludicrousness of the Wilders ban has been exposed quicker than anyone could have imagined.  But Government is now in a position of constantly having to justify all future arrivals into the UK in the context of the Wilders ban. Home Office policy – which has clearly been made up on the hoof - is in tatters.

Drowning them out

Liam Fox is absolutely right that people should 'drown out' the extremist voices that we heard at the Luton parade this week. 'For once,' he says 'the silent majority needs to get off the sofa and make its voice heard.'

And I'm sure that, in that, he includes all parts of our population. Indeed, wouldn't the Luton parade have been the perfect chance for moderate muslims to have joined their voices with those of the rest of the hundreds of people on the route?

Jonathan Isaby today congratulates Sayeeda Warsi on her 'impressive' performance on Question time last night. On the programme she said that 20,000 leaflets had gone out asking for there to be a protest against the homecoming troops (who sent these leaflets out? who paid for them?) She concluded triumphantly that, as only about twenty turned up, this was proof of how moderate muslim opinion rejected the extremism of a tiny faction and was as proud of our troops as anyone else.

She rather went for Charles Moore, who was daring to suggest that extremism in one form or another was perhaps a little more widespread than perhaps she was allowing. He mentioned the various bodies which are listened to, and get money from, the government. Warsi was having none of it.

But I would ask the Baroness, why were there no Muslim voices in that crowd angrily denouncing the protesters? Why did there appear to be virtually no Muslims amongst the crowds lining the pavement? Why is there no 'Not in Our Name' campaign by moderate Muslims? These are the questions to which we need answers.